Chappaqua singer releases debut album
Steven P. Marsh, For The Journal News/lohud.com 10:22 a.m. EST November 26, 2014
Frank Shiner returned to the stage to honor a request from his wife, suffering from cancer, and jumpstarts a second career.
Frank Shiner is recording albums with Tom Waits and Steely Dan’s producer. Shiner is photographed with his dog, Baker at his office in Valhalla on Nov. 12, 2014.(Photo: , Carucha L. Meuse/The Journal News)
Loyalty to family prompted Frank Shiner to give up his dream of singing and acting two decades ago.
But, in a poignant twist, that loyalty has pulled the Chappaqua man back into the limelight.
This year, he released his first album, “The Real Me,” a collection of 12 lesser-know pop gems by well-kwn songwriters such as Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Randy Newman, and Jimmy Webb, produced by industry legend Gary Katz. And on Saturday he returns to the stage at 54 Below, one of Manhattan’s premier cabaret venues, for the second time this year.
It’s something that Shiner never expected to happen so many years after becoming a businessman.
Shiner dove into singing and acting in New York City, where he moved upon graduating in 1982 with an acting degree from King’s College in his native Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
“I started working, I was working a lot,” he tells The Journal News/lohud.com. “Things were going very well. But, you know, you’re living hand to mouth still.”
By 1991, he was earning $145 a week in a “Broadway-bound” musical being staged in Framingham, Massachusetts.
It wasn’t enough to support his wife, Suzanne, and their son, Matthew, plus a mortgage on an apartment in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.
Then came the news that Suzanne was pregnant again.
“My strongest trait, I think, is loyalty,” Shiner says. “My family had to come first. And I knew that I was being selfish and irresponsible if I took another step in the direction of that career….
“I walked away from it and I never looked back and I thought it was over,” he adds. “I truly thought it was over and had no regrets.”
So Shiner took a sales job upon the birth of his second son, Jeremy.
The family grew again with the birth of daughter Lindsay 15 years ago. And Shiner eventually started his own business, a Valhalla-based payment and management-service company.
Things got challenging five years ago, when Suzanne was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer.
“We were just reeling” from the diagnosis, Shiner says. “They say God only gives you what you can handle. And I was thinking, ‘God, do you have to go right to the line? Could you give me only half of what I can handle?'”
Suzanne survived 12 “major operations,” plus chemotherapy, radiation, hair loss and more, he says. But through it all, she never stopped being his motivation.
“Everything I do is because of Suzanne,” he explains. “She’s kept me motivated. She sparks it.”
That came into play 2½ years ago, when the couple stopped in for a meal at the now-closed 353 Restaurant on Bedford Road in Mount Kisco.
“They were having an open mike jazz night,” Shiner recalls. “And my wife put my name on the list and said, ‘Get up and sing me a song.'”
He resisted.
“I’m stubborn as a mule. So I said no. And she literally pulled her wig back, and she showed her bald head, and she welled up, so she was serious. And she said, ‘I’ve been through this, I’ve been through that.’
“I teased her, I said, you pulled the cancer card on me. So she made me get up and sing.”
Shiner’s reservations quickly evaporated.
“I sang one song, I sang two songs, I sang three songs. Then I was running out of lyrics. So I said good night and the bandleader followed me out into the parking lot. He said, ‘Come, sing with my orchestra.’ I said ‘no.'”
Shiner eventually relented and started singing regularly at the restaurant, where he met manager Mitchell Cohen. Cohen introduced him to Katz, a producer best known for working with Steely Dan in the band’s heyday, and has also worked with Bobby Darin, Diana Ross, and other major stars.
Shiner sees his life’s second act as a “love song” to his wife, and hopes it does reveal “the real Frank Shiner” and encourages others to find themselves, too.
“When I started this thing with my wife’s encouragement it was so meaningful. She said, ‘Life’s too short. I could be gone tomorrow. You could be gone tomorrow. Why would we not do what we love?'”
So as Frank Shiner heads to the spotlight, here are 10 things you might like to know about him.
- He’s the proud son of a baker. He calls his record label Bakerson, and his year-old male golden doodle Baker in honor of his father, Francis, who ran a Lebanese bakery in back of the family home in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
- He’s the youngest of four children and the only boy.
- He celebrated his first Thanksgiving in New York after college along with a pack of turkey hot dogs heated in a hot pot instead of with family in Pennsylvania. He didn’t want his parents to know he “couldn’t afford the Martz Trailways bus fare” to be with them.
- He was billed as “Matthew Shiner” in his early career, using his middle name on advice of an agent who said Frank was too “ethnic.”
- Tom Cruise sought inspiration for his role in 1988’s “Cocktail” by seeking out Shiner, who worked as a bottle-flipping bartender at the Visage nightclub in Manhattan. But when Cruise came looking for him, Shiner was on his honeymoon. Shiner says Cruise got it “all wrong” in the flick.
- Country singer Garth Brooks’ success derailed Shiner’s hope of making it to Broadway. Shiner says he was in the cast of a “Broadway-bound” musical Brooks was working on. But when Brooks won the 1990 Country Music Association Horizon Award for best new artist, he left the show to focus on his solo career.
- He wears his father’s wedding ring when he performs to remember his “best friend,” who died in October 2010.
- He’s not superstitious. He and his wife closed on their Chappaqua house on 9/11 in 2003. “Nobody wanted that date because they were still superstitious about it,” he says.
- He hates what Auto-Tune has done to pop music. “It’s just such a treat to do whatever little part I can to bring melody and meaning to music. It’s really been stripped away in a lot of ways with the electronic altering of voices,” he says.
- Shiner and his wife have restored two 100-year-old houses. Their first was in New Rochelle, which they sold and used the proceeds to buy their current house in Chappaqua. They are involved with the historical society.
If You Go
What: Frank Shiner — The Real Me Live tour
When: Performances March 21 2015
Where: The Cutting Room NYC