Allee Willis is a one woman creative think-tank. A multi-disciplinary artist and visionary thinker whose range of imagination and productivity knows no bounds, Willis’ spectacular success exuberantly defies categorization; unique pales as a descriptor. She is a GRAMMY®-winning and Emmy and Tony nominated composer whose hit songs – including Earth, Wind & Fire’s recordings of “September” and  “Boogie Wonderland,” the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance,” Pet Shop Boys with Dusty Springfield's "What Have I Done To Deserve This,” and The Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There For You (Theme From Friends)” – have sold over 50 million records. Her first-ever musical, the Oprah Winfrey-produced The Color Purple, opened in December ’05 and recouped in less than a year, a rare feat for any Broadway show; a national tour launches in Chicago in early ’07 before continuing on to eleven more cities. Recently, in a perhaps even rarer feat, Willis’ songs have also been featured in three of the top grossing year-end films of 2006, Happy Feet, Night At The Museum and Babel. 

Willis is also a seminal cyber-pioneer who conceptualized Internet realms and was an outspoken advocate for them back when “new” media was an unknown to most. She is an impresario of inspired parties and events-as-performance art, most of which take place at her architecturally historic L.A. home, a William Kesling-designed Streamline Moderne gem often called “the house of atomic kitsch” and widely known as “Willis Wonderland.” Beyond that, she’s an internationally shown visual artist whose vibrant paintings, hand-painted ceramics, kinetic motorized sculptures and fanciful furniture are widely collected. Her expansive vision further extends to art direction, set design, and animation. Her latest project, The Soul Of Bubbles & Cheesecake, an album with singing and composing partner Holly Palmer – formerly of Gnarls Barkley – combines all of Allee’s artistic disciplines into one soulful musical brew set for release in 2007.

Looking ahead, Willis’ aim is to continue envisioning projects that integrate the many mediums in which she delves to create veritable symphonies of innovative interactivity. In a feature on Willis, People Magazine once called this artistic overdrive, “a multi-threat creativity that itself seems like a Godzilla out to conquer Lalaland.” With The Color Purple, she’s put her imprint on the Big Apple as well, and its run, along with last year’s Earth, Wind & Fire-themed “jukebox” musical Hot Feet (which included seven of her classic hits for EWF), also helped Willis make Broadway history as the first woman – and only the fifth person ever – to have written music for two shows opening on the Great White Way in the same season. It’s a distinction that puts her in an elite group including Georges Gershwin and Cohan, Irving Berlin and Marvin Hamlisch—all of whom, no doubt, would have been tickled pink to tickle the ivories at one of Willis’ famous house parties.

Allee’s Broadway adventure first began when she started consulting on musical direction for The Color Purple, almost two years before she teamed with fellow songwriters Brenda Russell and Steven Bray to compose music and lyrics for the show (previously, they’d collaborated on scores for Willis' two alternative animated series, Driving While Black and Fat Girl). As reported by the New York Times, the trio “worked in their idiosyncratic style, mixing high-tech tools--Ms. Willis’ 17 networked Macs, which they used for research, and programs that allowed them to digitally record complete orchestrations--and very low-tech instruments like an old manual eggbeater or sandpaper—‘anything that might inspire an idea for a rhythm,’ Ms. Willis said.” The score was Tony-nominated, and the soundtrack GRAMMY-nominated as “Best Musical Show Album” for 2007. In his review of the soundtrack for BarnesAndNoble.com, music journalist Dave Gil de Rubio wrote, “the recasting of this redemptive story as a musical is a feat befitting [Alice] Walker’s original masterpiece.”

Allee’s previous brush with Broadway was in the mid-1970s as a hat check girl at the fabled Manhattan nightspots Catch A Rising Star and Reno Sweeney’s. Willis, who was raised in Detroit where the music of Motown got in her blood, earned a degree in Journalism at the University of Wisconsin before moving to New York in 1969 and landing a copywriting job at Columbia and Epic Records. She soon turned to songwriting herself, and her first ten songs were released in 1974 on Epic Records as Childstar.

            After moving to Los Angeles, Allee landed a publishing deal at A&M in 1977. After being turned down by just about every other publisher in town, “Chuck Kaye heard half a song and said, ‘that’s it, we’re going to sign you,’” remembers Allee. In the first eight weeks, she had eleven covers. By the end of the year, she’d sold ten million records, second only to the Bee Gees – the year of Saturday Night Fever! She has collaborated with Bob Dylan, James Brown, Herbie Hancock and countless other music luminaries. A GRAMMY® winner for soundtrack music for 1985’s Beverly Hills Cop (a #1 album), Willis is one of contemporary music’s most prolific songwriters.

At the same time that her work was regularly climbing the charts, Willis became a sensation for the performance art events she masterminded at her pop culture-filled residence which, in the late 1930’s, was Warner Bros. Studio’s official party headquarters. Her thematic soirees draw A-list celebrities, art world stars, pop culture icons and notables the world over who would jet in to attend. Always press magnest, Willis sees the parties as vehicles through which she freely expresses all her multi-media talents to serve one fabulous end. Among the most memorable are “The Night of the Living Negligee, 1-3,” a series of all-star, all-girl pajama parties and the “Borscht Belt Birthday Party,” a wry-on-rye affair commemorating Willis being named, “one of the most dangerous subversives living in the U.S.” by the Russian newspaper Pravda because they mistranslated her hit song "Neutron Dance" as a nuclear-themed "Neutron Bomb."

In addition to causing Communist Russia-era angst, that song was a #6 Billboard pop smash for The Pointer Sisters. Willis’ top hits also include: Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” (featured in ’06’s Babel and Night At The Museum) and “Boogie Wonderland” (a set piece in the animated smash Happy Feet), Pet Shop Boys with Dusty Springfield’s “What Have I Done To Deserve This,” and Maxine Nightingale’s “Lead Me On.” The Cold War ended, and Willis later went on to also pen the Emmy-nominated #1 hit and top-selling television theme “I’ll Be There For You” from Friends.
           
            No matter how out-sized her musical success has been, Willis has always seen it as one piece of a broader creative platform. In the ’80s, she first became known as a visual artist for the kinetic sculptures she made, many of them themed to correspond with her songs—beginning with her first piece, "Neutron Dance", in 1985. Other works including "Boogie Wonderland" were part of her first solo exhibition, 1985’s “Wear The Right Clothes Even At Home.” In 1987, Willis also authored a column for Details Magazine, “Some Like It Smog,” in which she introduced her greatest musical discovery, the octogenarian, mini-skirted Del Rubio Triplets, who went on to tour the world and appear on over 20 network television programs. In 1999, Allee’s next major find was Bubbles the artist, whose deliciously naive paintings and ceramics have legions of ardent admirers. The lore surrounding Bubbles’ identity is detailed at bubblestheartist.com, a Willis-designed website embodying Allee’s evaluation that, “I would describe my style as a blend of the highest tech and design and the lowest kitsch.” It has been rumored in The New York Times that Willis actually is Bubbles the artist.

            New media and the interactive realm have been a constant in Allee Willis’ creative process since the beginning of the ’90s—in 1991, a positively Paleolithic age in terms of mainstream computer use, her home was one of the first fully-wired, networked locations in Los Angeles (today, it is one of the first all fiber houses). Until 1997, she and partner Prudence Fenton dove headlong into developing willisville.com, then a radically new approach to interactive content that employed narrative frameworks to navigate the site intuitively, merging multiple technologies and platforms into one story-driven environment. In 1994, willisville’s CEO was seminal World Wide Web and digital realm entrepreneur Marc Cuban. Early on, Fortune Magazine cited it as one of the emerging Internet’s most exciting companies, and its progress was also closely followed by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Willis went on to consult for Intel, Microsoft, AOL and Disney, and created characters, stories and virtual worlds for a variety of other entertainment and technology companies. In September 1997, representing 3,000,000 BMI songwriters, she addressed the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property regarding artist rights in cyberspace. In tandem with Bubbles, Willis’ heralded cyber-artistry conceived the acclaimed site lilytomlin.com in collaboration with Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner. Built with tens of thousands of web pages, it’s a fluid online portal based on Tomlin’s life, characters, and Tony Award-winning play The Search For Signs Of Intelligent Life In The Universe, in which the character Kate is based on Willis. “In fact,” says Allee, “all the photos of that character are made from a photo of me with Lily’s head fused onto mine” (sporting the asymmetrical haircut that’s long been a Willis trademark). 

With her own auspicious Broadway debut, Allee Willis’ signature vision and creative intelligence recently entered a new phase. In imagining things beyond The Color Purple, The Soul Of Bubbles & Cheesecake (www.bubblesandcheesecake.com) and other projects currently in development, she says, “What I really want to do is use all the talents that I have, in one place, for one property.” To understand where Willis is going, “you have to open your mind to a degree of inventiveness,” quipped journalist Anne Stockwell in a recent profile, “that’s frankly a little scary.”  Can a pull-out-all-the-stops party at Willis Wonderland be far behind?

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