Palmyra Delran’s love of rock and roll began when she was a kid. She was born in Princeton, but her family moved to Spain when she was very young, before moving back to New Jersey, in Collingswood, where she went to high school.
“We couldn’t do without the Jersey thing,” Delran said.
She had a friend who lived a few doors down and her friend had five older brothers who were big music fans.
“I would go over there and they played the Stones for me and the Kinks,” Delran said. “I got my education from these brothers of my friend. A lot of my friends were into the Osmonds, and I was like, ‘I want the Stones.’ ”
That love of rock and roll never went away. Delran started playing instruments and writing songs. She was a member of the 1990s era band The Friggs, has played in other bands and released her first solo release, a six-song EP “She Digs the Ride,” in 2008. She followed that up in 2013 with the album “You Are What You Absorb.”
Delran will bring her band to Randy Now’s Man Cave, 134 Farnsworth Ave., Bordentown, at 8 p.m. April 14. Tickets are $15. For more information, visit www.mancavenj.com or call 609-424-3766.
The show will feature songs from her first two solo releases, along with some new songs and perhaps some older tunes as well. One possibility is a Friggs song, “I Thought You Said That You Were Gonna Kill Yourself,” which she recently re-recorded for her next album, “Come Spy With Me,” which is scheduled for release in the summer.
“It was my guys that wanted to do it,” Delran said of the new version of her old song. “We’d been playing it for a while and they were like, ‘We have to record this again.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t want to, it’s 20 years old.’ They really wanted to do it, so I love my guys and we did it. It came out great, it’s a different version from the Friggs version, so we’re pretty happy with it. I’m happy now that we did it, but at the beginning I was like, ‘I don’t want to do that, that’s like so old.’ My guys play it so well and it’s very different from the other version. It’s the same song, but with their slant on it.”
Her band includes bass player Michael Lynch; guitarist Richard DevGreene; and drummer Mark Brotter. The lineup is classic garage band and Delran said her concerts are all about rock and roll.
“I look at live shows as a very different thing than writing or recording,” she said. “I can have this really depressing song and it’s fine to write it, and maybe it’s OK to record it. But when you’re doing gigs, you want to entertain people. And in my genre, people just want to rock.”
She said she has written songs she has not recorded, and has recorded songs she would not play live because playing rock and roll is what she wants to play now.
“Who knows what will happen years from now? I might go somewhere with an acoustic guitar and make people bum out,” Delran said. “That’s a possibility. You never know.”
The Rolling Stones were one of the bands that sparked her love of rock and roll, and a song from “You Are What You Absorb” references one of the band’s founding members, Brian Jones, whose drug use led to him being fired from the band in June 1969. Jones was found dead in a swimming pool less than a month later.
Delran said her song “You’re My Brian Jones” is a metaphor and is not really about Brian Jones.
“When somebody is such a difficult human being, another person gets obsessed with that person,” she said of the tune. “And even if they know they shouldn’t be with the person but they’re still obsessed, it’s a difficult situation. A lot of people have told me they’ve been the Brian Jones character and they’ve been the other character, too. I like that it spans the definition of who is who.”
Among Delran’s fans is Steven Van Zandt, longtime guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. In 2008, Van Zandt chose Delran’s song “Baby Should Have Known Better” as his weekly “Coolest Song in the World” for his Underground Garage show on Sirius XM Satellite Radio.
“Oh my God, I couldn’t believe it because I was such a fan of his,” Delran said of the nod from Van Zandt. “I always heard he liked the Friggs, then he came up to me at one of our Friggs reunion shows and he was like, ‘Hey are you guys gonna stay together?’ I was like, ‘No, we’re just doing this reunion.’
“I told him I had a solo record coming and he said, ‘I want it.’ So I gave it to him and he dug it, and I’m grateful he’s been a champion of mine for the past however many years. He’s fantastic, he’s one of the coolest guys I’ve ever known. And not just because I work with him, he’s a fantastic dude.”
Van Zandt has a reputation for supporting young musicians and Delran attests to that.
“His heart is so in the right place,” Delran said. “He sees no difference in big bands, little bands, he gives everybody a chance. I can’t believe somebody this cool is actually doing it; he walks it like he talks it.”
It seems like Delran is walking the walk and talking the talk as well.
“I try to,” she said. “I don’t know how to do it any other way. I’ve had a lot of people say, ‘If you do this, you’ll get really big,’ and it’s like, ‘But I don’t want to do that.’ So I’ll do what I do and whatever happens, happens.”