Belle Plaine’s first full-length album, Notes from a Waitress, is a throwback to the vocal jazz of the 1960s. Think Peggy Lee. Julie London. Smart lyrics paired with a smokin’ band. The theme for Notes from a Waitress originated while Belle Plaine was overseas. Each song reads as a travelogue from different locales, and the listener pockets them one by one, like souvenirs from a globetrotting journey. The title track was written while working as a waitress in Sydney, Australia. It was a dodgy restaurant with cockroaches, overly friendly cooks and the nocturnal visits of rodents. “It’s a mystery anyone ate there, let alone why it was so busy,” she says. The song is a memento of her time in the service industry, and the tempo reflects the hectic pace of the popular haunt. Midway through the album is the atmospheric “Vegas”. After she found an abandoned page of handwritten poetry in the street, Belle worked the few legible lines into a fictitious tour of the famous desert city. The ghostly mood of the song is set by the eerie tones of a vintage Premier vibraphone. The album’s opener “Sweet Tart” is about as catchy they come. “It was supposed to be cheeky. A snarky response to unwanted advances. The irritating irony is that it’s really who I am as a girlfriend: a tarted up version of a 1950s housewife,” she explains. A number of the tracks were brought to life by collaborations with pianist Jeremy Sauer. The co-writing process often found them both at the piano: Belle singin