Received an email the other day from a music publicist for a singer from Ridgewood: Danielle “Majorette” Salomon. She’s putting out a new song that caught my ear, about suffering an existential crisis involving meat. But it was hitting play that really did it. The blog For The Rabbits is calling her a local “twee-extraordinaire,” and I’d rate her voice something like Zooey Deschanel, if Zooey grew up on those early Panic! at the Disco records; charming, theatrical, and a little off-kilter. The song from Majorette is called “steaks” and Salomon is self-releasing it on July 15th.

That night, Salomon will also be debuting a new music clip during a show at The Slipper Room, over in the Lower East Side, in which she will double as an overly bold magician and her more demure, afraid assistant. The show will include a full set from Majorette’s band too, a screening of her new video, and further variety acts, including the magic show, as well as a ventriloquist performance. “It feels like it would be wrong not to,” she told me about including the magic act in the show. “Since the video is about two sides of the self, I thought it would be fun to show that through a magician and the assistant. One side is overly confident, and one side is scared.”

She reports that her song and video were inspired by a moment she encountered inside her landlord’s freezer, over in Ridgewood. “The landlord lived downstairs and I knew it was their meat that was in the freezer, and I knew I had to return it. But it took me way too long, and I could not talk to them,” she says. “When I was talking to a friend, I used it as a metaphor for being in a freeze mode, where you can’t do a small task and shut down for some reason. It seemed like a funny way to represent that, and it kind of inspired the whole song.” She shot the video at Union Pool, back in January.

“We only had five hours to do it,” she says. “We do everything practically, all the magic tricks are real, not edited. We made a real table with a hole in it to put my head in with a cage on top, instead of just editing out my body.”

Martin Parsekian was the cinematographer of the clip and Paul DeSilva was named as director. Mike Culhane built the sets and produced it and Elizabeth Chaney was hired for sets and props, including handling the knife board.

“We made a real table with a hole in it to put my head in with a cage on top, instead of just editing out my body, ” says Salomon. “We figured that out together, which was very fun. That is how they would’ve done it at the time.”

“I’m interested in performance, and wearing a costume is acknowledging that this is a performance. Even though the songs are very personal, now you’re presenting them to an audience. Wearing a costume says: “I’m performing this for you, this isn’t necessarily real life.”

Salomon had come to the name Majorette out of that same thinking. “It was sort of this moment where I realized where the intersection of my aesthetic inspirations was, being a magician’s assistant, figure skater costumes, and Western nudie suits. Majorette combines all those things together, and I thought, whoa, that has to be the name of the band.”

Majorette started as a solo project during the early days of the pandemic. “I had been writing songs for a while, but I was studying opera, so I was focused on that,” she says. “Right when I finished grad school [at NYU], COVID hit. So I was forced to do a solo project. I wanted to put my creative energy into something I could do.” Jim Hill, an artist she met while working in Ridgewood, produced some early songs with her during that time. “That pushed me to write more songs and put them out there and form this project,” she says.

The band has since evolved into a five-piece. “It kind of has been for the last couple years,” she says. “Recently, Athena Matsil [from local act awksymoron] joined the band. She comes up with really amazing harmonies and she plays the violin, sings, and plays guitar.” Salomon herself sings and plays synth in the group.

“I’m a big fan of Roger Miller and classic 60s country music that has a strong story-driven conversational tone a lot of the time, like Skeeter Davis,” she says. “That’s definitely probably an inspiration. Also my background in opera, where the story kind of drives it. My most successful songs are ones that have a story, and that comes from that.”

She moved to New York from Claremont, California about eight years ago to study music at NYU. “I lived in Bushwick first, and it’ll be eight years this summer,” she says. “Sometimes there’s writeups about the band that say it’s Queens-based, and I feel bad because I’m not from here.”

Much of her artistic circle came from the service industry. “I was working at a café in Ridgewood, and in the service industry, there are always people who are musicians and artists.” It was through that job that she met Hill. Someone else she met there was Eli Recht-Appel of Diamond Grinder, who now plays guitar in Majorette. “He was just a regular at the café,” she says.

Other longtime collaborators include Beck Zegans of Goo, who also helped make the video at Union Pool. “She became a really good friend too,” she says. One of her closest college friends, Natalie Field, now books shows at the local cocktail bar-turned-indie club Cassette. She will be making balloons for the release party. “We had a band together and Cassette has become a great place to play and go to shows. She used to be a balloon artist.”

The show next week has been difficult to book around. “It’s such an unusual show,” she says. “I stumbled upon The Noisy, they put out a silent film-themed music video too. We’re living parallel lives in different cities.”

Majorette plays the The Slipper Room on July 15th. Tickets are $25.63. Get them here.