San Diego-based performer Danielle LoPresti has won a dedicated following with an edgy, passionate, political musical style. A dedicated activist, she believes that music can do more than entertain — it can enrich and inform the listener. Disillusioned after searching for a contract with a major label and being told she could either copy Sade or Britney Spears or forget it, she decided to put her convictions to the test, starting her own record label and releasing her first full-length CD, Dear Mr. Penis Head.

She then pulled together a talented group of musicians to back her, named after the activist magazine The Masses. A little time, a lot of work and several CD compilations, festivals, and award nominations later, Danielle LoPresti and the Masses have a fast-growing fan base, a community-building showcase called Indie By Design and a new CD, 22 Mountains. They will be playing at Pride for the third year in a row, on the main stage, Sunday at 6:00 p.m.

Gay and Lesbian Times: As an independent musician, what do you think of the local San Diego music scene?

Danielle LoPresti: I think that San Diego is a treasure chest that we have just begun to open to see what’s inside. We have a great opportunity to get it open and start baring ourselves and all of the resources that lie within. The great thing is that this is a big city but it’s got a real community feel to it — it’s a far cry from L.A., for example. There’s a lot you can do with the combination of those two things — a feeling of community and a really large, expansive place. That’s why I released the record down here. I think that people do support independent music, but a lot of people don’t even know what it is.…

There was a time when I wouldn’t think a thing about going to Starbuck’s as opposed to going across the street and visiting Pauline’s. I just didn’t get it. But now if I have the choice I’ll go to Pauline’s in a second because it excites me that I’ve got three bucks in my pocket and I can either support an independently owned business or I can support a monolithic corporation.

GLT: Did your music evolve from your activism, your activism from your music, or did they both evolve together?

DLP: The very, very beginning of me doing music — and I’m talking about as a teenager — came out of an intoxication with expression of sound through my body and just falling in love with singers I saw surrender themselves to their songs. That’s really an exciting thing to experience, and that’s why I started singing.

When I started writing I was just exploring the exercise of actually creating a song for the first time. It was kind of on the level of someone who just wants to feel what’s it’s like to ride a bike. But then once I got on the bike and started riding it I realized I could go wherever I wanted to go, and that’s when I thought, “Wow. I care about all these things; why don’t I write songs about them? That took a while for me to do because when I first started writing music I was writing for other artists and for TV and film. So when the time came that I actually said, “Let me write some songs that I want to write, that actually move me,” that was around ’94. That was when I decided I know what I’m doing, [why not] go ahead and write about what I want to write about. So those deep-rooted issues for me, like racism and inequality and the patriarchal domination of our ideals and how society is run, now I had a place to put them.

“Call Me Sister” is about the first time I saw Roots, when I was about eight years old. I’ll never forget how appalled I was. I was shocked…. I’ll never forget the feeling in my brain of almost feeling betrayed, of thinking, “How can adults tell us how to behave when this unspeakable evil is actually the truth? This is our history.” That had a profound impact on me.

GLT: I’m guessing your activist tendencies had a lot to do with why you ended up starting your own record label.

DLP: I never thought of it that way, but I guess it’s kind of true. I’ve always felt this really impassioned fight for the underdog — and that includes when I’m the underdog. When these labels were saying to me, “Why are you so angry?… We can’t sell those tunes,” I found that absolutely preposterous. We can only have one Alanis Morrisette a decade? Only boys can get mad? Eminem is talking about murdering his wife and he’s now on the cover of Rolling Stone as a genius? What is this double standard? I’m going to be angry when I talk about racism. I’m going to be angry when I talk about a hate crime. I’m not going to write a love song about a hate crime.

To the whole idea of being in those offices and those guys looking at me and saying, “We can’t make money if you are going to express your anger,” I say bullshit. Absolute bullshit. You can sell records about truth and human emotions and human passion in all its forms….

GLT: You seem to have a very family-oriented aspect to all that you do. Was that the way you grew up?

DLP: We’re a Sicilian family. We fight out loud and we love out loud. We’ve definitely had our ups and downs.… It’s definitely not a Brady Bunch at all, but I will say this for my family, we’ve always been supportive of the things that each individual wanted to do. We really, really love each other.… Our parents have often said, “Why are you choosing such hard careers? You guys are all smart, why don’t you become doctors or lawyers? This is so painful seeing you struggle to do art.” Gina’s dance company (Eveoke Theatre) is a nonprofit and they’re kicking ass, but they’re paying in blood for every inch of it. It’s really hard to make a nonprofit successful. And she does highly political art, highly feminist art. My little brother Tony has a nonprofit too….

[Our parents] may not always agree with what we do but they always support us.

GLT: So how did the family react the first time you brought a girlfriend home?

DLP: My mom had a feeling that I was seeing Erica, because moms intuit things like that, but she was pretty shocked because I’d never been with a woman before. So she was kind of like, “I knew it, but wow! No shit?” She was tripping, but not in a bad way because she’s a really liberal woman. She’s a really sexy, passionate, fiery woman, so she’s not closed-minded. She knows that I came from her. She knows who she is and knows she passed those things on to me. And she knows that I’m going to fall in love with a human being and not with the exterior or what that human being is….

My dad definitely was shocked and confused and all those things that you don’t want to have to deal with when you tell your parents about your choices. But again, the running undercurrent in our family is a lot of love, and that always wins over the other stuff….

My sister and my brother love it. They were like, “Yeah, sis!”

GLT: Tell me a little bit about Indie by Design.

DLP: We have a one-sentence definition of it. It’s an ongoing showcase of independent musicians who are doing music on their Own Terms. And we capitalize Own and Terms. There are two primary goals. The first goal is to introduce people to independent music…. Like I said, I think people like to rally around a cause. If someone goes to a concert and sees a couple of bands and they find out that these bands are doing everything on their own — their records, their promotion, etc. — and they know that by buying their CD or buying two of their CDs and passing one on to a friend and spreading the word that they’re doing a huge service for this struggling band, I think people get excited about that.

We noticed a problem. When you go to a showcase you see one band in an hour and a half or two bands in two hours. People are really busy, so what we decided to was put together a showcase where everybody gets a 20-minute set and we all share the backline, which means for instance, my band provides the drums, the bass amp and the guitar amp, and it’s a two- to four-minute turnover between bands. So in the same one and a half or two hours you get to experience four or five bands. It’s cool for someone who doesn’t have a lot of time and it gives you a taste of all these things….