Big voice, splendid songs land Elona on a local CD

So long as you keep Erika Elona in pizza, she’s one happy singer-songwriter.

Elona was joking with manager-promoter Brandon Apeles on a recent Saturday morning in Kaneohe at the Soul Sound Hawaii studio, where local indie artists recorded the just-released "Alternative HI" compilation.

The diminutive 23-year-old with the outsize pipes is one of the standouts featured on the album being distributed by Mountain Apple Co., best known for its contemporary Hawaiian music catalog.

The album should get a large marketing boost both here and elsewhere thanks to the reach of Mountain Apple, and Apeles has been doing his part by booking showcases for the artists around town.

His regular "Acoustic Nights" gig at Apartment3, on the last Tuesday of every month, will feature Elona this week, along with veteran musician and radio deejay Kevin Jones and pop trio Saving Cadence.

Elona, a Moanalua High School graduate, performed in the statewide "Brown Bags to Stardom" student competition when she was a teenager as well as in coffee shops and bars. It was at the Chinatown home of the Laughtrack Theater Company where Apeles first saw Elona perform last April.

"She’s friends with the comics, and she was playing between stand-up sets," he said. "After seeing some of her videos on YouTube, a couple of weeks later I asked her to do ‘Acoustic Nights.’ I love the natural singing voice she has, and her songwriting’s great."

Two examples are "Easier," available on iTunes, and "Smoke Signals," on the compilation, both recorded at Soul Sound Hawaii, which is owned by Shawn Livingston Moseley.

"‘Smoke Signals’ is actually one of my oldest songs," Elona said. "I wrote it while I was a freshman at UH. But it became a new song to me, thanks to Moseley’s playing piano on it and his arrangement. With his help, it made me remember why I wrote it in the first place, which was, naturally, over a bad breakup."

Elona said, "My songs are so intimate to me. I thought they didn’t really work in a group setting, so I was shy in sharing them and working with others. But people like Brandon and Moseley relate to my music, and bringing it to them was much cooler than I originally thought."

Elona is a self-taught musician. She remembers as a child seeing the guitar her mother bought for her father just hanging on the wall, unused.

"So when I was 10, my dad gave it to me, as well as Xerox copies of ’70s folk songs by artists like America, Bread, Elton John and Don McLean. I thought back then that, gee, these are pretty songs."

Those "pretty" songs helped shape her songcraft when she started writing five years later. "I try to write listenable songs, songs that are not too trendy."

She just started preparing for her first proper album under the guidance of the production team of Apeles and Moseley, who between them have more than 20 years in the music business.

According to Moseley, artists like Elona can only help the local music scene.

"We can’t build a scene by itself. We need a new community to help build it. … Because of the Internet, artists here don’t need to travel elsewhere to build their careers. They can stay in Hawaii, and the nature of the music here is so powerful because of the diversity of cultures."

And Apeles and Moseley make it a point to work with talent who can keep their egos in check.

Well, sort of.

"She is a diva," said Apeles. "She’s annoying to work with."

"Just buy me pizza when I want it," Elona teased back. "It’s in my contract, right?"