In the midst of non-stop touring, on their way to play multiple SXSW appearances in 2020, everything changed for Nashville-based trio The Accidentals. Thrown into the abyss of pandemic uncertainty, they didn’t consign to the nightmare of that initial moment when all forms of normalcy rapidly disappeared. Faced with chaos and turmoil, the trio turned to the art of songwriting, taking their grief and turning it into a beautiful and memorable collection of melodies with a lyrical focus on Americana storytelling. Learning how to navigate not only the trying times, but their own craft as musicians, the band self-produced their EP Time Out (Session 1), released May 7th.
Time Out marks the first opportunity the band has had during their whirlwind career to collaborate with some of their long-time songwriting heroes. Savannah (Sav) Buist and Katie Larson met in their Michigan high school’s orchestra class; when they both volunteered to perform in a club meeting, they knew they’d met their musical matches. As a duo, they released their debut Tangled Red and Blue in 2012, followed by Bittersweet just a year later. But the addition of percussionist Micheal Dause in 2014 brought more vibrancy to The Accidentals’ sound, as heard on 2016’s Parking Lot EP and 2017 LP Odyssey.
The Accidentals had recently relocated to Nashville and were in the midst of co-writing and session work on their next record, Vessel, co-produced by John Congleton and Tucker Martine. Shaken by the sudden onset of lockdown, the group shelved their touring plans and preparations for Vessel. They narrate the unforeseen halt on “Wildfire” with lush, harmonic vocals: “In late September, we’d just moved into town/We were on a mission lost and broke/Just as all the pieces started falling into place/All our plans went up in smoke/Who knew we were drunk on borrowed time?/Waiting on a wildfire.”
Having the rug abruptly pulled out from under them, the group questioned their next steps moving forward and reevaluated ways to sustain their music careers. “It was like starting anew in some ways,” Buist says. “Luckily we had the resources to try and start figuring out live streaming, so that was a huge element of what we did right after the pandemic started.” The group quickly threw together what digital skills and resources they had and put them to use, creating virtual tutorials and workshops with respect to the use of OBS and Streamyard. Swiftly gaining attention from venues such as Club Passim and Bluebird Cafe, Larson and Buist were subsequently connected to a handful of well-respected song-writers, including Kim Richey and Dar Williams.
Club Passim connected the Accidentals with Kim Richey, and “Wildfire” was born out of that first co-writing session. “Once we wrote ‘Wildfire’ we were like, ‘Oh, these are timely songs – maybe we need to keep the collaboration going forward because there’s something really joyful about working for other people, even in an isolated space,’” Buist remembers thinking. From there, the group connected with other artists, such as Maia Sharp (“Might As Well Be Gold”) and Tom Paxton (“Anyway”). In just a few co-writing sessions, an EP began to take shape. Heavily impacted by the weight of 2020, the group focused on those emotions and set aside Vessel. The EP came to represent “a culmination of the different stages of grief that everybody went through over this time,” as Larson describes.
Each track warrants its place on the EP, walking listeners down the emotional path so many experienced during the pandemic. Dar Williams co-write “Night Train” takes a long, hard look at our broken country while poetically searching for ways to fix it. “Anyway” essentially pertains to the struggles with mental health some experienced upon realizing this frightening and anxiety-ridden reality would likely last longer than expected. The hushed lyrics, braided with tranquil harmonies, a weeping violin and folk-style plucking of the guitar, offer an intimate reminder to keep going: “We’re at a point we’ve never been/I can’t say we’ll be okay/Just have to take it day by day.” “Might As Well Be Gold,” inspired by the group’s move to Nashville prior to the pandemic, tries to reframe negative thoughts with a positive outlook, and takes stock of what’s important in times of crisis.
“All Shall Be Well” closes the EP on a lighter note, giving listeners a sense of hope in the midst of the hardship. “That was one of the easiest co-writes we’ve ever done,” says Buist. “It was right before Christmas, before the election, and everybody was so tense. It was just four women ready to take a deep breath.” In collaboration with Mary Gauthier and Jaimee Harris, the songwriters hashed out their thoughts in a stream of consciousness flow. “We were just saying stuff that we were all feeling in the moment,” Buist recalls. “[We were] acknowledging that it’s not a perfect world and that we’ve been through a lot this year. This song is like a bookend to a very long year, saying it’s time to look forward and all is going to be well.”
In retrospect, music served as an important component of coping for the group, noting that their strong friendship pulled everyone through the tough times. “I think being able to create with each other was really therapeutic, and it really helped us hone in on a lot of different skills that we had all been beginning to learn,” Dause says. That included building a makeshift studio in Buist’s house by stacking CD boxes and thumb-tacking blankets to the ceiling; in this little cocoon, the Accidentals self-produced Time Out, and finished up their work on Vessel, intended for release this fall.
The band hopes that the soothing nature of Time Out will help fans heal from this collective trauma and emphasize the idea that no human is alone. “I think one of the best things is just being able to acknowledge that we had this shared experience,” Larson says. “I hope that people can really heal through the music and find at least one song that resonates with where they’re at in the moment. We’re all coming out of this process so differently. We want people to walk away with some aspect of healing.”
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Back in 2019, as their sophomore record was starting to take shape, Steph Stewart and Mario Arnez, the core members of North Carolina-based country act Blue Cactus, questioned how the record was coming together. “I remember talking about this after we knew what songs we wanted to put on the record; we were hanging out by the pond where we used to live, and I was like, I don’t know how these songs that we’re writing right now are connecting,” remembers Stewart. It was a tumultuous time for the two of them; they had both ended long-term relationships and were settling into a relationship together after years of touring and playing music as friends. Though their thoughts, emotions, and the resulting songs seemed scattered at the time, Stranger Again, the album they released last week via Sleepy Cat Records, would come to be a meditation on preserving relationships as both musicians took stock of the shortcomings and strengths that had gotten them to that point.
“We did not sit down and say ‘we want to write a relationship album’ or anything, but I think it was a by-product of what was going on for us personally. That’s how we were living and what we wrote about – we were realizing how important our relationship was and wanting to make sure that we were actively participating in it so we didn’t repeat mistakes from past relationships,” Stewart says. “It was almost like we had to get out of our immediate lives and look at it from above.”
“We definitely couldn’t see it in the moment,” adds Arnez, “but after seeing all the songs laid out in a list of what we were excited about having on the album, it became pretty clear that there was a thread running through them for sure.”
In particular, the title track became a thematic touchstone. “It’s about having to put in work to keep things fresh and new regardless of the circumstances,” Arnez explains. “I think, in a way, that is creative work in itself, right? You’re living your life and you’re going through your day to day and you gotta keep things fresh and exciting regardless of what’s going on.”
That didn’t just apply to settling into romantic partnership – it applied to their creative partnership as well, translating to a major expansion of their sound into an amalgamation of rock, folk, and Americana they think of as “cosmic” country. It’s quite the departure from the over-the-top, carefully studied Country & Western twang of their 2017 self-titled debut, which made liberal use of tongue-in-cheek song titles – like “I Can’t Remember (To Forget You)” and “So Right (You Got Left)” – that would hardly be out of place in a honky-tonk jukebox alongside ’70s classics.
“Our approach to songwriting was really different on the first record. The parenthetical titles were very much a starting point for a lot of the songs, and that was a new way of writing for us; I had a little notebook of just song titles that we were spit-balling,” Stewart says, citing George Jones’ 1974 LP The Grand Tour as a major influence. “Even though we had various things going on in our personal lives that maybe played in to the type of songs we were writing, we were trying to do the country thing.”
“The self-titled album was us geeking out on different country music elements really, and having a lot of fun playing with each other and with writing,” Arnez says, though he notes that constructing punch lines ultimately began to feel too predictable. “After getting an album’s worth of material out, and a little bit extra I’d say, I think we sort of were feeling we wanted to step away from playing with tropes.”
“This record’s very different – these songs were from a very emotional place. Introspective. I wasn’t really thinking about the song title until it was done. A lot of them wrote themselves, I think for both of us,” Stewart says. “We were looking at all the tracks and [‘Stranger Again’] seemed like it spoke to the overall theme that we had realized was running through these songs, and also really showed that shift in our sound.”
The duo learned some things along the way – mainly that their collaborative songwriting process could benefit from solitude during its initial stages. To that end, they’ve built occasional creative retreats into their schedules. They also began collecting band members who have had significant impact on the Blue Cactus sound, like bassist Alex Bingham. “Alex co-produced the album with us, and loves trying new things with the songs, so even if we come to him with what we feel is like a complete version, he brings some interesting ideas to try that I think Mario and I wouldn’t always come up with on our own,” says Stewart.
One such example was “Worried Man,” originally a bluegrass track that got an impromptu revamped groove at the time of the recording. “Working with Alex, that song shifted into this really cool seventies country disco kind of beat that just happened right in the moment of recording it,” remembers Stewart. “It felt so jarringly different than what I was used to that I actually did not like it at the time.”
“We were deep into the session at this point so there wasn’t any time to back up at all,” Arnez adds. “That was probably the second or third time we had actually played that groove on the recording. The whole thing still feels really exciting to me because that energy is there, where we don’t know what’s gonna happen. We’re all flying by the seat of our pants in a pretty fun way.”
“In the moment, it wasn’t really something that I thought I liked, but I stepped away from it and revisited it,” Stewart admits. “The song is about appreciating the things about someone when they’re gone that you didn’t at the time when they were alive – it really celebrates that in a different way with the new vibe and groove that Alex suggested us trying out. I really love Whit Wright’s pedal steel on it, the way it kicks off right at the top with him playing that lick. HC McEntire did the high harmony on it, and I really love the blend of all three of us singing the chorus.”
“In general I think we have a process of finding answers quickly for certain things creatively, seeing the simplest answer to a certain kind of song we wanna write, and then figuring out different ways to subvert it along the way, do something that’s musically satisfying but less predictable,” explain Arnez.
Equally as important has been the support – on multiple levels – from Blue Cactus drummer Gabe Anderson. “He’s also the co-founder of Sleepy Cat Records which is putting this album out, so he’s really this essential backbone, and such a good friend, and he just naturally knows what his role is in these songs,” Stewart says. “It’s pretty incredible.”
In fact, North Carolina’s Research Triangle – Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, where the band lives – has been an altogether supportive scene since the earliest iterations of Blue Cactus. Stewart grew up nearby, singing Patsy Cline and The Cranberries at Golden Palace karaoke every Wednesday with her family, while Arnez goofed around with tape recorders and mini Casio keyboards in Southwestern Florida, where his mom was a media specialist at his school. One of Arnez’s college friends, Omar Ruiz-Lopez, had moved to Chapel Hill and happened to be playing in a string band with Stewart; once he convinced Arnez to move, Arnez made Steph Stewart & the Boyfriends a four-piece, and they’d all sing around the same mic. Their bandmates’ priorities shifted to raising families and leaving the Triangle, but the musical magic they made as a duo couldn’t be ignored – and Blue Cactus formed, sticking close to the scene that nurtured them.
That magic is still at the root of this latest batch of songs, because everything Arnez and Stewart write has to pass a litmus test of sorts. “We start the song as a duo, before it goes to a band, essentially. From the natural process of making sure we can deliver it as a duo, I feel like that’s sort of the proving ground in a way, from a performance and arrangement perspective,” Arnez details. “Feeling like our vocals and two guitars can make it feel complete, it always feels like a pretty easy, natural process to add a whole band on top of it from there.” He cites iconic duos like The Everly Brothers and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings as a jumping off point, but from there, Blue Cactus wrangle an astonishing variety of sounds, from the nostalgic sway of “Rodeo Queen” to the rollicking stomp of “Rebel” to the cinematic crackle of “Radioman” to the subtle sensuality of “Stranger Again.”
In early 2020, Blue Cactus released a few singles, fully intending to put out Stranger Again soon after. But as the pandemic tightened its grip on the music industry, the time never felt right; they decided to hold the album and as lockdown wore on and civil unrest rocked American cities, the songs, too, became strange to the people that made them.
“[It] was pretty weird sitting on this album. Music had been our full-time commitment,” Arnez says. “Obviously [with] no way to do it the way we had been doing it, we started feeling estranged from music in a way. It felt hard to even be creative for months.” The couple got part-time jobs at a local co-op grocery and began, in some ways, to re-evaluate their priorities as musicians.
“Before the pandemic we felt like we had to take every opportunity that presented itself, and play a bunch of gigs – not really be very critical of what we were doing, just work very, very hard. And I think that can work for people and it could work for us potentially, but it just doesn’t feel like an authentic existence,” says Stewart. “We’re going to play shows when it’s safe, but we’re not just gonna play a bunch of loud bars, and honestly, we were doing that quite a bit on tour before. We can be a little more choosy in the shows we’re playing and not just sort of go everywhere all the time.”
“It’s fun to drive up to New York and [play a gig], but… that was about as far as some of the planning went, you know? A show gets booked and then you drive all the way to go do it, and not much else happens other than burning a lot of gas,” adds Arnez.
As Blue Cactus returned to the Stranger Again tracks that sat on the shelf for so long, many of them began to take on new meanings, too. “I Can’t Touch You,” once about falling short of expectation, took on a very literal meaning as social distancing became the new normal. While Arnez says hearing the recording transports him back to the studio, Stewart points out that playing it for a backyard full of friends post-vaccination took on “this whole new level of relevance.”
“The pandemic and everything gave us the chance to put our music down and just tap into the world around us and be a part of it in really meaningful ways. So then, when we came back to these songs… I feel like I fell in love with them all over again. They’ve revealed themselves to be about other things to me that I didn’t even realize they were about, so it’s been a really nice process actually, to get to know them again,” she explains.
Stewart can also appreciate the new meanings that listeners bring to each of the songs, particularly the raw honesty of “Come Clean.” Shortly after it was written, Stewart shared it amongst some friends, and one of them, who stars in the gorgeous visual for the track, had an unexpected take on the song’s message. “He just came up to me, in tears, and told me how he remembered when he came out to his family as a teenager and what that was like for him, and that’s what the song meant to him. I never really thought about it meaning other things to other people – I just knew where it came from for me,” Stewart recalls. “I think everybody has a kind of universal experience – we grow up, and we realize that a lot of times we’re not the person we were raised to be or were told we were. You hopefully get to become who you really are in your lifetime.” To reflect that poignant message, Stewart wanted to tell a variety of stories with the music video, which Anderson shot and Arnez edited. In addition to Stewart’s friend and his partner, it stars Chapel Hill’s poet laureate CJ Suitt and dancer Anna Maynard, who add choreographed movements to illustrate the narrative further.
At the end of the day, the biggest hope Blue Cactus has for Stranger Again is that folks will find new meanings every time they listen to it, imbuing each track with their own perspective. “A little something that we sort of have in the back of our minds when we’re writing is that there is this little bit of space that is left for the listener to insert themselves into it and complete it, in a way,” says Arnez.
“I don’t have a specific takeaway I want them to get out of it other than some significance for themselves. I want people to connect with it in their way, whatever that means for them.” Stewart adds. “When I fall in love with an album, the meaning will totally change depending on the context of what’s going on in my life, and I hope that’s the case for people who listen to this record – that they’ll put it on the shelf for a little while and then come back to it when they feel like they need it, and it will be there for them.”
For Papa Gora, everything comes down to timing. The Cincinnati native has been working hard the past few years to emerge as a rising star in the city’s hip hop scene and released his latest album, The Feel (An Album by Papa Gora), earlier this year. The project was initially meant to drop in 2020 – a year that seemed bleak for many local artists. However, Papa Gora decided to delay the album, which ended up bringing on a host of new opportunities, remote performances and organic collaborations.
“Everything with this album was based on a feeling; I wanted to make sure that I expressed myself so people could feel something from the music,” he tells Audiofemme. “This one started with production – the beats. The intro song [‘The Best’] was the first beat that I got, and from there, more producers were sending me different sounds.”
“Nothing was forced, it came about really naturally,” he adds. The feelings he wanted to capture shine through on every track on the album – from the spiritual highs of “Testify” to the raw emotion on “Violence,” which features Cincinnati rapper Jay Hill.
“I had ‘Violence’ sitting there and was like, who can bring that emotion in? Jay Hill,” he says. “Shalom, same experience. He’s more of a poet and he was transitioning into songwriting at that time, and we ended up making ‘Divine Timing’ maybe in 20, 25 minutes. And also Harmony [Haze], her vocals are just amazing. I needed that texture to add an extra layer to that song, [‘Truth Will Set You Free’], and she did amazing.”
Papa Gora’s visceral vocals also stand out on “Too Wild,” which, like “Violence,” speaks vulnerably about police brutality, systemic racism and loss.
“I can’t say there was a particular thing that triggered those songs, but they came from a soulful place; a place of this keeps happening,” Papa Gora says. “Even before 2020, stuff like police brutality, violence, people getting murdered… I actually had a coworker whose son got killed, and I’m not saying she was the reason I wrote the song, but it is something that constantly happens and myself, as an artist, I feel like I have a responsibility to speak out about it.”
Papa Gora also recently wrapped up a remote performance series called “Live-N-Direct,” for which he was able to virtually perform several of the album’s solo tracks as well as collaborations.
“It was awesome. I honestly did it because I miss performing,” he said about the series. “I miss that, and it’s not the same as performing in front of people, but performing in general is just my favorite thing to do. And I was able to include Shalom and Jay Hill on the performances, and we did the season finale at a clothing store in Cincinnati. It was a great experience and it came about naturally.”
Later this month, Papa Gora will head to Texas for a string of live shows. He’s also performing at the Thompson House in Newport, Kentucky on May 28. Currently, he is putting the finishing touches on a new music video for album cut “Open Your Heart,” which is slated for release at the end of this month.
“I always say the album is done, but it’s not finished,” he reflects. “I’m really big on visuals and I feel like I need to take my time and push out visuals for almost every song on this album. That’s one thing I’m really focusing on right now, but my studio is also in my house, so I’m always creating.”
Follow Papa Gora on Instagram for ongoing updates.
Photo Credit: Daniel Boud x Giulia Giannini McGauran
Alt-country, nu-folkie Imogen Clark is possibly the hardest working musician you haven’t heard of. She wrote her first song at 13 (“I loved writing my own music,” she admits), going on to tour Australia, release two albums, and work with some well-known Australian talents. Lately, she’s been keeping busy preparing for a national headline tour and the drop of her EP Bastards on May 21, 2020. The EP and the tour are named after the track of the same title, a vehicle for Clark to exorcise the demons of misogyny that had haunted her career and her confidence.
“’Bastards’ is a song about really struggling with patronizing people in the music industry. I’m sure every industry has people like this – people who just underestimate you at every turn and make you feel like you don’t know how to do your job,” says Clark. “I just felt like I was encountering it a lot, and that comes with the territory of being a young female artist.”
She calls it her “fire in the belly song” – one which she hopes will give other female artists the strength and sustenance to know that they’re not alone, and that they can use their music and voice to call out bastard behaviour.
Clark chose to work with LA-based producer Mike Bloom after their successful partnership on her acclaimed 2020 EP, The Making Of Me. Clark and Bloom (who has worked with Jenny Lewis and Julian Casablancas) initially met at an Elvis Costello concert; her manager had a hunch that the two would work well together, and that forecast that proved true.
Though The Making of Me happened unexpectedly, creating Bastards was an organic process. “We started making what we thought were just a handful of demos, but as we were moving along with them, we realized we were putting so much effort into these, we cared about them, and we were having so much fun,” she recalls. “We realized we were making a record.”
On their second outing together, Bloom provided Clark with the comfort and confidence to do things that scared and challenged her, resulting in her most confessional work to date. Leading up to the anticipated release of the EP, she has shared four singles, including the just-released “First Class Man” and a candid behind-the-scenes video; the yearning, sweet “Forget About London;” heartfelt “Eat You Alive;” and confessional, vulnerable “Never This Time.”
“Never This Time” was co-written with none other than Taylor Goldsmith from Dawes and Jason Boesel of Rilo Kiley, who also plays drums on the track. In the studio, Clark had casually mentioned to Bloom that she loved a song by Dawes, only to discover that the world is really very small; Goldsmith and Bloom are friends, so the producer offered to set up a writing session.
Clark’s “jaw hit the floor,” she says. Other than Taylor Swift, she believes that Goldsmith is one of the best contemporary songwriters around. Together with Jason Boesel, who often writes with Goldsmith, the trio gathered at Clark’s little Airbnb in Silver Lake and wrote “Never This Time.”
“They were so wonderful,” she says. “They really helped me bring to life a topic that I’d wanted to write about for a long time but hadn’t quite known how to. They made me feel comfortable enough to do that with them, and I really loved the result.” In the wholesome, unfussy rock tune, Clark reveals the many chances she’s given someone close to her, only to be disappointed over and over again. It aligns very much with the exploration of relationships and Clark’s position in the world relative to the push-and-pull of people around her.
Where Bastards is an exploration of her relationships with the external world, her earlier work was more inward-looking and very much created within Australian borders. She released her first album Love And Lovely Lies in 2016, following the success of her 2015 song “While Women Wait,” which received national and US radio attention.
Her second album, 2018’s Collide, was produced by guitarist/singer-songwriter Mark Lizotte – best known to Australian and international audiences as Diesel. Clark had supported Diesel on tour over a couple of years, so it was a natural fit for the Lizotte to transform Clark’s live energy into a studio album.
Clark has made big choices her whole career – and much like Taylor Swift, she has recognized the power of surrounding herself with people who share her vision and give her the tools to sculpt it her way. “Taylor’s just one of my all-time favorite artists,” she says. “I think she’s unparalleled when it comes to the success of a modern-day songwriter who has been able to so successfully reinvent themselves countless times and has never really dropped the ball when it comes to creating consistently good art.”
Creating good art and performing for an audience are in Clark’s blood, and especially after the prolonged hiatus from touring due to the pandemic, she’s ready and excited to take Bastardson tour this month. After all, home for her is not the four walls she’s known throughout 2020; stuck in her house, she’d wondered whether home might not be a physical address; the sense that home is not a place, but a feeling is perhaps most indicative on Bastards track “Forget About London.”
“The pandemic made me realize that home is definitely more of a feeling, because I was in my house so much, but I didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin because I wasn’t touring and I wasn’t doing the thing that I love and the thing that I dedicate my life to, which is music and performing for people,” Clark says. “I realized that, for me, home is on the stage, wherever that stage may be.”
When she first wrote “Perfect Love,” Dorothea Paas and her friends jokingly referred to it as a Phil Collins song. “I could just imagine the song being arranged with the full Phil Collins treatment – chorus, guitar, big reverb tones,” the Toronto-based singer-songwriter says by phone. When Paas wrote the song, she was actually inspired by Celine Dion’s rendition of “The Power of Love” and imagined “a big Phil Collins drum fill on that second chorus.”
The version that appears on her debut full-length, Anything Can’t Happen, sounds nothing like that though. Instead, it’s become a somber folk number that builds to a rich choral arrangement near its end – something more in line with the British folk group Fairport Convention, using an acoustic guitar with a “sparse and vaguely eerie arrangement.”
One of the challenges that Paas found with working on Anything Can’t Happen, released May 7 via Telephone Explosion Records, was that her songs could have been performed in various different ways. “Maybe that’s why I like the idea of redoing old songs,” she says, “because there’s just so many possibilities.”
Anything Can’t Happen might be Paas’ debut album, but she’s actually been performing, recording and releasing her music for about a decade. Her first recording was a MySpace-era CD that she burned in her living room. Afterward, she started releasing cassettes here and there, particularly when she was set to play on the road. “I love tapes because they’re affordable to make and affordable to buy,” she says. “I think they sound really good also, but, even if you don’t listen to them, they’re just a fun object to have.”
Paas isn’t the sort of artist who likes to debut her songs with the recorded version. She prefers to play them live for a while to grow comfortable playing them. Maybe too, she’ll decide on her favorite arrangement of the song through live performance, although, she adds, sometimes there’s “weird improvisatory magic” in the studio.
Paas started playing shows while attending college in Kingston, Ontario. “Starting out in that scene, I really wanted to fit in, but also maybe blend my sound that into that,” she says. “And then, over the years, I’ve wanted to carve out a specific niche for myself in terms of owning the things that make me different.” For Paas, that means leaning into her voice and bringing elements of classical, folk and rock influences together in her work.
Born and raised in Toronto, Paas gravitated to music as a child. In her youth, she was in a Christian worship band – that’s where she learned to play guitar and harmonize – and learned choral singing through Canadian Children’s Opera Company, where she met young singers who she would work with as an adult, like Robin Dann of the band Bernice, who lends her voice to “Closer to Mine” and “Perfect Love.”
Plus, the choral background continues to be an influence on Paas’ songwriting. “I try to use it as inspiration if I’m feeling like I want to create or introduce some variety into my writing,” she says, “because I think my songwriting practice pretty much grew out of my time in Kingston playing in the post-punk scene.”
In Kingston, she met a few of the musicians with whom she would continue to collaborate over the years, including Paul Saulnier from PS I Love You and Liam Cole from Little Kid, who played bass and drums respectively on Anything Can’t Happen. It’s also how she connected with artists from outside of the city. Paas and her pals were often local support for bands coming through Kingston. And, she notes, because the city is between Toronto and Montreal, they would get a lot of tours. “As a result, I made a lot of friends in the music scene,” she says.
Paas, who has also collaborated with artists like Jennifer Castle, U.S. Girls and Badge Epoque Ensemble, began writing the material that would become Anything Can’t Happen back in 2016, and the most recent songs on the album are about two years old. She chose to organize the tracks in a loose chronological order to reflect how her influences and style have evolved during that course of time. “I like the idea of moving through that experience through the track list,” she says.
There are no “true oldies” on her debut album, but she’s considering redoing one song she wrote more than five years ago on her second album. “I don’t want to put it to waste,” she says of some of her catalog material, “especially because my older songs have been heard by such a small audience.”
This process also presents an interesting situation for an artist who has played a lot in her hometown, but hasn’t toured as extensively. “My friends have heard them and people that are really avid show-goers in the city, who go to a lot of independent shows, have heard them,” she says. “Most people have never heard them and, through having a label and being able to put stuff out in a way where it can be heard more, I have to remind myself that this is going to be new for a lot of people.”
Follow Dorothea Paas on Instagram for ongoing updates.
The video for “Refraction Overdrive,” from Japanese duo Crystal’s latest album, Reflection Overdrive, is so unabashedly ’80s that you might, for a second, think that you’ve been transported to a wood paneled living room, where you’re drinking wine coolers while flipping channels between MTV and Night Flight. It’s a clip filled with keyboards and fog, plus effects that might recall The Cars’ video for “You Might Think.”
Two of the big influences for the “Refraction Overdrive” video were actually “The Number One Song in Heaven” from Sparks and Hall & Oates’ hit “I Can’t Go For That.” They aren’t flashy videos, but they have distinct vibes with their subdued choreography and musicians decked out in blazers. In “Refraction Overdrive,” you can see the similarities in the dance moves, the costumes and the close-ups of hands tickling keyboards.
When the subject of the video comes up during our Zoom chat, Tokyo-based Sunao Maruyama and Ryota Miyake start to mention other artists that have influenced them in the course of making the album, released on May 7. Maruyama notes that J-pop had an impact on the duo. Miyake mentions Pet Shop Boys, as well Fancy, the German singer of ’80s disco jams like “Slice Me Nice.”
On Reflection Overdrive, the idea was to fuse various styles, amongst them ’80s J-pop, future funk and new jack swing. When mixed through Crystal’s aural aesthetic, it’s an album that sounds neither retro nor completely like 2021. It exists on its own plane.
Visually, Crystal pulls from multiple pop culture sources as well. The dolphin that appears on the album’s cover is inspired, in part, by the dolphin in Johnny Mnemonic. Their take on the creature, though, is far more whimsical. On the cover of Reflection Overdrive, the dolphin is caught mid-air, practically shimmering against a purple-and-pink sky that’s reflected on the water below. Held in the dolphin’s mouth is a compact disc. Miyake worked with Shinya Sato, who also directed the “Refraction Overdrive” video, on the artwork and design, while Maruyama provided the calligraphy on the cover.
Crystal first gained cult popularity in the MySpace era, when their music caught the attention of Gaspard Auge from Justice. Their debut full-length, Crystal Station 64, came a few years later, in 2015.
Reflection Overdrive had been in progress for about five years. “It took so long to make this album,” says Miyake, who adds that he began developing the songs while attending Red Bull Music Academy in Montreal back in 2016. During the course of making the album, though, Miyake did release music from other projects, including the Flash Amazonas album Binary Birds and Other Rubbish Surreal Things and an EP for his solo project Sparrows, Gold in the Tide.
Reflection Overdrive includes several collaborative tracks: “Taxi Hard,” features bass from Copenhagen-based Vincent Ruiz; Julián Mayorga, who previously worked with Miyake on the project Flash Amazonas, lends a hand on “TV Fuzz;” DJ/producer Matias Aguayo sings on “Kimi Wa Monster.”
“I wanted to collaborate with him, but he told me that he wanted to sing in Japanese,” says Miyake. “We made up this song.”
Plus, Miyake sings more often on Reflection Overdrive. He says that the intent was to perform more like Japanese pop singers of the 1980s. However, he adds, “I’m more like an indie musician.” He likened the experience of trying to mimic pop singers to karaoke. “I made melodies, but it was so hard to reproduce it with my voice,” he says. Despite the challenge, he adds, “it was good to experience that.”
All of that has lent itself to an album that’s a bit of a departure from its predecessor. Where Crystal Station 64 was very much a synthwave album with a good dose of electronic funk, Reflection Overdrive taps into a pop sensibility. There are still plenty of moments that feel like an ’80s film score, and some tunes, like “Phantom Gizmo,” seem perfect for breakdancing, but there are also a good amount of sing-a-long moments here. “Our last album has more machine-machine-machine, very tight,” says Miyake, “but this one has more deep feeling.” It’s also a feel-good album, one that can instantly transport listeners to an imaginative alternate universe that draws from past fiction, but looks towards the future.
In music, the unequal representation of women is an industry-wide issue with a lasting ripple effect. There’s no sector of the industry with a more pronounced gender gap than in engineering and producing. According to reports by the Audio Engineering Society, women make up just 5% to 7% of audio engineers and producers. Organizations like Women’s Audio Mission, report that the number is probably even lower.
Rampant sexism is the cause—and the effect— of such poor representation on the tech and production side of music. Most women don’t even get into sound engineering because it’s so male-dominated, which then perpetuates the inequity. If a woman does manage to survive school and become sound engineer or producer, they can then expect to be continually mistaken for something other than the engineer (usually the singer or a roadie) and to have their engineering or producing abilities consistently questioned and ridiculed.
This dejecting reality is one that Washington-bred queer roots artist McKain Lakey knows well, both a graduate of Berklee School of Music’s mostly-male audio engineering program and as a live sound engineer who’s toured with bands. In fact, it was the unsavory experiences she had as an audio engineer that inspired her new single, “Decibel Jezebel,” which she premieres with Audiofemme today in anticipation of her upcoming debut full-length album, Somewhere, out May 14, 2021.
“Decibel Jezebel” begins with what Lakey calls “audio nerd jokes” and then dives into a biting criticism of the sexual objectification and under-appreciation she experienced as an engineer.
“You’ll notice the difference if I increase by three/My voice doubles at ten – if I do that again, will you stop stifling me?” Lakey sings. “That decibel jezebel, she couldn’t possibly hear in those jeans/But you can’t scare me straight cuz I know that no one listens linearly.”
Though the song is specifically addressing what she experienced as a femme audio engineer, Lakey also found it grew into a larger commentary of “women and non cis-dudes in the service industry being in this position of having to conform to ways of being in the world that are placed upon us rather than being given the agency to present as we want to and as we are. [It] morphed into a commentary on the patriarchy.”
In service of the broader relatability of sexism in music, Lakey invites her close friend, saxophonist Jane Covert-Bowlds, to appear on “Decibel Jezebel.” Covert-Bowlds performs a goose-bump-giving solo that exudes solidarity and sisterhood and exhibits her command of an instrument that is been typically associated with men.
“Jane was someone – we connect as friends, but I knew she had a really special take on that song as an [woman] instrumentalist and I really wanted to feature her,” says Lakey. “I knew specifically that I wanted Jane to play on it because we have talked a lot about experiences being queer women musicians and what that looks like and the struggles that go along with [our] identity.”
With Somewhere, Lakey also contributes to the growing visibility of queer-identifying artists in country music, a genre that is typically associated with two forces that typically harm, hinder, and exclude queer folks—conservative politics and rural America. But, as Lakey, who grew up just north of Seattle in the rural town of Bow, Washington, points out, that’s not the entire history of roots and country music.
“The more that I learn and go back and research the beginnings of country music and the class and racial history of country music and roots music in general in the United States, the more I think there was this turning point in the history of recorded music where all of a sudden music went from being something you played in your living room to being something that was sold and marketed to specific audiences,” says Lakey. “That was the point at which country music… created these lines. When in fact, there are many amazing, radical, queer, Black blues singers from like the ’20s and ’30s. You know, I think about the history of music in the US and think like, actually, queerness has a place in this and always has had a place in this. This isn’t so much a radical new thing. This is just saying, ‘We’re here. We’ve always been here. And it would be nice to be seen for who we are.'”
In that way, Lakey highlights and subverts forces in society that work to suppress her identity, purely by sharing vulnerable, arresting stories from her life as a queer person on Somewhere.
“I have benefitted a lot from the privilege of being a white person, a straight-passing, cis-passing person, and have not had to bear the weight of mistreatment that so many of my LGBTQ+ siblings have. But I did spend a long time feeling unsettled and unseen,” says Lakey. “And it feels important to me to represent queerness as something that has as many expressions as there are queer people, and that queerness is about your relationship with yourself, not about who you have sex with or how others define you.”
There is perhaps no song on the album that does the latter better than “Queer AF,” Lakey’s take on classic country twang with a rainbow twist. With the bold chorus—”Queer as fuck and cute as fuck,”—Lakey highlights queer love in the face of persistent anti-LGBTQ sentiment.
The song was written during Lakey’s time in Mountain View, Arkansas, where she lived above a music store and taught old time music to kids from 2018 until the fall of 2020. Since then, Lakey’s hit the road and stopped in Seattle—where she recorded the new record at Seattle’s Crackle & Pop! Studio—New Orleans, and now, Indianapolis. Lakey’s travels lend her lyrics a searching quality and put a variety of sonic tools, from old time banjo to the Seattle rock grit, in her toolbox. She draws on each with creativity and ease, following her philosophy about roots music.
“I’m definitely simplifying this narrative, but the history of roots music in the US is very diverse and represents a lot of different people bringing a lot of different things to the table and referencing each other and learning from each other,” she says. “I feel like for me it’s not so much being radical as it is saying, like, hey actually let’s look back at the history of this music and be true to what the history of this music is, which is representing working-class people of all different backgrounds.”
Lakey says her travels also contributed to her landing on the title Somewhere, which was produced Johnny Sangster (Mudhoney, The Posies, Neko Case) and features a cast of Seattle mainstay artists like fiddler Annie Ford, guitarist Bill Patton and bassist Aaron Harmonson. “[Somewhere] is about searching for home. [I’m wondering] what is home? What is the culture of this country? It’s all these different things that I’ve been learning and digging into that hopefully translate to this…idea of where are we going? Oh, somewhere.”
But even as she wonders where she’s going, Lakey is clearly someone who knows who she is and what she has to say in her music. “Decibel Jezebel”—with its fierce self-possession and dismissal of those who’ve underestimated her—is proof of that, as is the rest of her brave forthcoming album.
Peter Ricq and Robbie Slade, the Canadians behind indie-electronic act Humans, are back. The band’s latest single “Let Go,” a previously unreleased song from the sessions that produced their 2018 LP Going Late, features their signature mix of electronic soundscapes and Slade’s tactile, chill-wave vocals. It’s a more subtle form of their usual club-ready fare, a song meant for clandestine camaraderie under diffused lights.
The single features fellow Canadian musician Cayley Thomas, a collaboration that the band’s producer Nik Kozub (Noontide, The feels EP, Water Water, and Going Late LP) brought in. The song takes a full minute to boil: Slade’s voice enters the scene around the one minute mark, Thomas following suit around four minutes in. “Enjoy your life/And hold your breath for a minute/We’re gonna roll/If you’ve a car, go get in it/We’ll take a ride, but make sure there’s room for two,” Thomas sings sullenly, giving off the aura of the cool art school chick smoking a blunt on the back porch of a party. The conversation between her and Slade is like a dance down a narrow hallway, tightly wound with little release.
It’s a single that Humans fans could easily imagine playing very differently on stage. The duo is known for their live sets, shows where the often subtle nature of their work spirals out from itself – beats deepening, patterns fracturing, creating a kaleidoscope performance that reverberates with richer color and sound with every loop. It’s an aspect of the band that makes every single feel like a first date, and the show itself third base.
“Our whole writing style has been a bit of a gut feeling,” Slade says of Humans’ creative process.
“At first it was really to engage with the crowd and get people dancing and then we started experimenting more, doing really long songs. We’re both into songs that are over ten minutes; we’re always trying to make the longest [song] possible,” Ricq says.
The two musicians met in 2008, at Ricq’s art show at Ayden Gallery in Vancouver. Ricq and Slade immediately bonded over a love of male voices singing in falsetto. After that meeting, Ricq moved to Vancouver and Humans was born. Much of their early work centered around Ricq’s upbringing as the child of French and German parents.
“French people are very sad and romantic. Like low-key Russians,” Slade laughs.
“Robbie was like, ‘What do you want to write about? Tell me a story about one of your family members,’ and I was like ‘Okay, let’s go’,” Ricq recalls.
Both musicians took up an interest in music at an early age. Ricq reluctantly learned piano, but once he started creating his own music, he found himself at the keys with no need for pushing. For Slade, it was a similar story; he was trained in singing from a very young age, but took little interest in it until one night at a party with his parents.
“One of my friend’s moms had this [party] – and you know when you look back on it and you think, ‘Those adults were super wasted’ but you didn’t know it at the time? I didn’t know it at the time. Someone pulled out a bunch of home hardware, these large buckets, and everyone started a drum circle. Everyone was losing their minds. My friend Gavin, his mom Bonnie was doing spoken word and I was like, this is the most lit thing I’ve seen in my life,” Slade remembers. It was the kind of party that Humans would later replicate in their live shows, a feeling of natural progression, of improvisation within a theme.
The band usually tackles an 8-16 bar idea, then builds everything around it. “Let Go” was written in an hour or two in the studio, then Thomas came in for an hour of vocals.
“Now, because we’re old, we’re totally cool with the idea that whatever you have in mind may fundamentally change when you go through that process,” Slade says. “I miss working in the studio; it’s a great little corner of everyone’s brain. I think everyone should write an album.”
In addition to Humans, the duo has been at work on some side projects (Ricq will release some singles this summer from a forthcoming album he’s putting finishing touches on with his band Gang Signs; Slade released an EP with his band Sabota last year). But the musicians also stretch themselves in other creative directions. Ricq published a children’s book called Ghosts are People Too, full of creepy illustrations sure to delight the most devious of toddlers; he also composed the score for the theatrical motion picture Dead Shack in early 2018 under the Humans moniker.
“If we had just focused on Humans, Humans would have been a lot bigger. We kind of fucked up,” Ricq jokes. “But us doing these other projects, I think we’ve made Humans better.”
“I agree with that. Maybe now we should drop everything else and just focus on Humans,” Slade says. The duo is at an impasse of sorts; Slade is moving back to his hometown, a small hamlet in British Columbia, to renovate a house for his young family. Ricq dryly jokes that he should “drop the baby” so they can return to Vancouver together. But he’s got plans of his own to spend eight months of the year in Bali with his girlfriend, who runs a handbag business on the island. Slade says he wasn’t aware of that, but it’s hard to tell if he’s being sarcastic.
Humans has always been a passion project for the pair, each music video ornate and detailed in its scope. It took quite a few iterations to find the visuals that now define Humans’ style, but there’s always been a vein of hedonism running through the project. For instance, they named their 2015 album Noontide, which was the name of Ricq’s first band and “means you’re at the peak of elevated happiness,” he explains. The band’s red-eyed Cyclops logo, with long fingers covering its mouth, was inspired by a tic of Slade’s: when he gets excited he wiggles his fingers over his face.
“Right now we’re taking it really easy and if we have the money we will record new stuff,” Ricq says. “That’s why I’m trying the NFT game, because it’s been successful for some artists. I’m hoping that it will help us to get back into the studio.” He’s referring the band’s latest NFT offering – the single was made available as an early download with NFT purchase on Rarible. Ricq likes that the money raised from NFTs goes directly to the artists, bypassing labels and corporations. “Robbie and I, we’ve always tried to try new things: our light setup when we play live, the gear that we use, the music videos we’ve done. We’re always trying to do new things, but it doesn’t always work.” Fans will be happy to learn that Ricq is hard at work on a new custom jacket for the single; each piece is usually one of only 30 or 50 made.
In the meantime, Slade has a new Gibson J-45 and is planning on building a studio in the backyard of his new home. “We wrote a lot of early stuff on the guitar and I feel like you could come over, Pete, and I’d say ‘Check out all these tunes’ and you’d be like ‘oh my god!'”
“Let Go” is a little piece of the band’s past, a digital polaroid of where they once were. Both musicians are focused on the here and now, exploring new aspects of their lives, and driving in different directions for a while. The line “All you’ve gotta know is when to let go” repeats like a mantra for reckless abandon, but there’s no doubt that Humans still have their hands on the wheel.
Artistic evolution takes many forms, and for Philadelphia-based pop-punk quartet Remember Sports, that growth is represented in their latest LP Like a Stone. Released April 23 via Father/Daughter Records, the album signifies the next stage in Remember Sports’ development from friends with shared interests to becoming mainstays in the basement-rock scene.
“I think this album represents us finding our groove as not just a band who plays for fun but as one who takes things seriously,” Carmen Perry, the band’s lead vocalist, tells Audiofemme. “Not that we didn’t before! It’s just that we’ve been doing this for a while now and we’ve become more comfortable with the process.” The album was recorded at The Honey Jar in Brooklyn, with help from Carlos Hernandez and Julian Fader (of Minneapolis indie pop trio Nadine). They’ll celebrate with a release show via Bandcamp Live on May 22.
Initially called Sports, the band has seen numerous variations of members, and added Remember to their name in 2017. But the constant within the band has been the friendship it grew out of. “So much of our music is about memories and being nostalgic and sentimental,” says Perry, who formed the band while at Kenyon College in Ohio with Catherine Dwyer – who’s still in the band – and Benji Dossetter and James Karlin. “We were friends since the first day in freshman year; we liked the same kinds of music and really liked playing music together so it felt pretty natural to play in a band. We’ve gone through a lot iterations in the band since then, but its been me and Catherine since the beginning.” Currently, Remember Sports is comprised of singer-songwriter and guitarist Perry, bassist Dwyer, guitarist Jack Washburn, and drummer Connor Perry.
Like a Stone starts off with the punchy, pop-rock bop “Pinky Ring.” Utilizing their staple musical diet of rollicking drums and raw guitar chords, a quick, two-beat intro sets off the melody, fully immersing the listener into Remember Sports’ world. Tugging on themes of self-doubt and the inevitable self-imposed pressure that we tend to exert on ourselves, the melody captures that frantic emotional state. “It speaks to the themes of the album and is a good mix of the pop punk music we started out playing and what else we can do as a band,” says Perry. “Usually when we’re writing a new album I go through some dry periods where I’m not writing much and I think ‘I’m never going to write a song in my life!’ I think I then wrote ‘Pinky Ring’ in an afternoon. I don’t really write in minor keys a lot so this was outside my writing style but I like that it opens the album on this confusing note.”
Following the fast-paced chaos of “Pinky Ring,” “Coffee Machine” plays as an interlude in both a literal and metaphorical sense; it demonstrates the band’s experimentation with sound after “Pinky Ring” revisits their signature style, while the lyrics “Stay here ’til it don’t hurt anymore,” could read as a plea directly pointed at listeners.
The laid-back “Sentimentally” follows with electric guitar evoking a feeling of a nostalgic summer haze as Perry’s vocals paint a bittersweet picture detailing the trepidation that comes with change as we grow older. With “Easy,” Perry pulls on a thread of destruction and the breakdown of a toxic relationship, combining it with strong guitar riffs and a rapid drum beat. “Eggs” and “Materialistic” see Remember Sports break new ground as they change gears and come down, letting the energy and angst of the previous track settle before the title track picks up the pace again. Perry’s vocals command attention in a quietly confident manner throughout the album, while the band’s ’90s grunge influences and atmospheric guitar solos shine through as well.
Standout track “Out Loud” is a somber, yet inspirational listen that diverges from the album with pop elements. “It’s sort of a pop song that I always really wanted to write. When I was working on a popsicle truck one summer in Philly, the melody popped into my head and I had a lot of free time so I just sort of came up with the lyrics and was singing it to myself before I could get home,” Perry remembers. “I was watching Euphoria that summer and I felt really inspired by the camera work, the glitter and the make up of that show that just reminded me of being young and really feeling things very deeply.” The intensity of emotions that come with being a teenager is depicted in lyrics like, “Won’t stop/Never give up/Trying to get everything out/Of your head, into your mouth/We can make this last if you say it out loud,” Perry letting loose and letting her vocal soar at the titular words, which are then repeated back by each band member in turn during a mellow outro.
“Odds Are” ties up Like a Stone in a similar way to the final scenes of a coming-of-age film. Discussing themes of change and moving on, the track begins with the crystal clear notes of an acoustic guitar as Perry’s twangy lyrics recount a complicated relationship in cheeky lines like “I spaced out and walked past my street/I got lost in thinking something/Though the thoughts were cheap.” As more instruments and vocals gradually materialize, joining forces for the final verse, the album ends with the cautiously hopeful lines “Well I don’t know why but I think we all deserve another try/Yeah, I don’t know why but I think my odds are good this time.”
Perry might as well be talking about Remember Sports’ trajectory. Previous work, such as 2018 LP Slow Buzz, zeroed in on the breakdown of a relationship and as a result communicated an overall feeling of unbridled frustration. Like a Stone, on the other hand, emanates a sense of cathartic closure, and represents a marked departure for the band both in their sound and storytelling.
This shift owes itself not just to the investments they’ve made in new equipment but also the shift in their outlook. No longer interested in creating the “perfect” track, Perry has allowed herself to feel her way through the lyrics. “When we were writing Slow Buzz, recording it and putting the finishing touches on it, I really tried to make sure I put everything I was trying to say in it, to the point of reworking lyrics and taking things out,” she recalls. “It worked for that album, but this time around… I put less pressure on myself to say everything that I needed to say or wanted to say and being less definitive in the process, because this isn’t going to be the last album that I’ll make in my life. I just took some of the pressure off and wrote what was in my head.”
Remember Sports have a knack for capturing both a peppy wistfulness and an all-consuming emotional intensity. Partly a result of Perry’s diaristic style of song-writing and the musical rawness of the band’s sound, the combination of the two strikes an unexpected chord.
Throughout this album there is a sense of evolution, of looking at the parts that make us who we are and acknowledging all their effects on both ourselves and our environment. Like a Stone holds nothing back as Remember Sports use the album as a vector to tackle themes of self doubt, insecurity and self hatred, turning them on their head in the process.
Follow Remember Sports on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.
Audiofemme first encountered the otherworldly “doom pop” of Death Hags back in 2018, when we interviewed the project’s mastermind Lola G. in anticipation of her debut LP. Since then, the Los Angeles-based artist has been chipping away on her prolific Big Grey Sun series, self-released on her own imprint of the same name. 2020 saw installments #1 and #2, and Big Grey Sun #3 drops on May 13. Today we premiere single “Future Now,” off a limited edition Bandcamp-only lathe-cut 7-inch that’s available for pre-order this Friday, May 7.
Lola describes the Big Grey Sun series as “an ongoing experience, a sort of quest or underworld journey.” Initially she intended the third installment to espouse a more hopeful, spring-like energy to follow #2, which she described as “nocturnal, like the darkest moment before dawn or the Balsamic moon,” but the pandemic threw a wrench in that vision. While she says she works well in isolation, the pandemic forced her to reevaluate all her work-in-progress tracks to make sense of what the third volume should be in light of our new context. The result was far more existential.
“In the end it coalesced around the idea of a sense of place, the land, belonging,” Lola explains. “We’re living in a time of great technological change with new space exploration, the metaverse, synthetic biology, and yet we have a powerful longing for a simpler world, with everyone baking sourdough bread or nerding out on cottagecore. There’s something fundamental going on. If we do colonize the moon or Mars, at some point people will be indigenous to that land – but will they feel that they belong there? And once we successfully create synthetic beings, will they have a sense of place? That’s what #3 is about.”
While she intended to include “Future Now” on Big Grey Sun #3, she ultimately felt it didn’t align with her new vision of the release. “I’ve had the bass line forever and the lyrics came together last summer, when it felt like we had finally entered the 21st century,” she says. “People are ready to create a new future and they want it now. I have a lot of affection for this track and I think it will probably be on Big Grey Sun #5 or #6, but I didn’t want to wait to release it – it felt like a 2021 track.” And besides, who knows what our world will look like by the time we make it to volumes 5 and 6?
On the track, Lola’s characteristically haunting, layered vocals float above grungy, almost psychedelic riffs. As she soars into the chorus, the tempo picks up in such a way that we feel as though we’re zooming into the new normal at supersonic speed. She writes and records nearly everything on her own except for drums, which she outsources to a friend. “I’ve toured by myself and also with a band,” she says. “The last tour I did was a hybrid, part band, part solo electronic set. I think that might have been too weird for most people.”
The weirdness is crucial for Death Hags, however, as Lola remains true to her unique vision and commitment to a DIY ethos. With the exception of one single released on Burger Records, she’s put out everything herself. “The DIY process is important to me. I need to be in control,” she explains. “I think labels can be wonderful but I haven’t felt the need to look for one yet.” The one downside, she notes, is the lack of access to physical distribution in record stores, but says that “Self-release is a very empowering thing to do for an artist. I saw a funny tweet the other day that read ‘you don’t need to get signed to Warp records bro, you need to drink more water.’”
If anything has changed in the last year – and a lot has – it’s that many consumers have begun to shop more consciously, to intentionally seek out and support independent artists, artisans, and creators. So do yourself, Death Hags, and DIY culture in general a favor and cop a pre-order of this new 7-inch on Friday, in anticipation of the Big Grey Sun #3 later this month. With your help, we might just make it to a better future. Or, at the very least, Big Grey Sun #5 and #6.
Follow Death Hags on Instagram for ongoing updates.
“I’ve spent my whole career promoting other people’s work,” says Mandy Brownholtz. “Now I’m in this position where I have to talk about myself and things that I’ve created; it’s this peek into my brain that I’ve never really allowed people to have, and it’s scary.” Brownholtz has certainly been indispensable to us here at Audiofemme, coming on board in 2017 to write album reviews, eventually expanding her incisive music coverage into her role as our Marketing Director after working for some of Brooklyn’s best known concert promoters. But this week, Brownholtz has announced her own epic endeavor – her self-published debut novel Rotten (edited by yours truly) is now available for pre-order, with limited-edition physical copies and some extra swag shipping June 22.
“This book is very, very personal to me, and the fact that I’m putting it out in the world for everybody to consume and have opinions about, it’s a lot of nerves,” she adds. “But nerves indicate that what you’re doing is important and that you care about what you’re doing. Nerves are a good thing.”
Rotten is a story that’s overdue to be told in fictional format. Set in Washington DC’s DIY scene – the same scene where Brownholtz came of age and cut her teeth in the industry, working at the legendary 9:30 Club – the story centers the experiences of freelance writer Viv Taylor, a hapless, haunted early-20-something tasked by City Paper with chronicling the history of Fort Rotten, the kind of party house that anyone who’s been to a basement show anywhere in the United States will recognize. But she has a complicated history with the venue and its residents – including one who sexually assaulted her during a night of hard partying. Grappling with the trauma of that event in a series as flashbacks, as well as the difficult childhood that led her to seek out “people who smelled bad and wore leather in ninety degree weather; ones with pieces of metal lodged in their faces and relentless tinnitus,” there are simply too many women who will find Viv’s story relatable, even if the specific setting is new to them.
“I wanted to write this book for women who have experienced these types of things. I wanted them to feel seen and I feel like I’ve succeeded in that, because almost every woman I know has a story like this and every woman I know that’s read it has been like, this really spoke to me and it resonated with me,” says Brownholtz. It’s been through many iterations – the setting evolved from a webseries she was working on in an MFA screenwriting class, and in its first form as a novel was more conceptual, examining the illusion of choice for women from all walks of life in a country that had just elected Donald Trump.
“I was mad. Everybody was mad; there were like five million things to be mad about. But I wanted to examine what choice and consent really mean when you’re making a choice based off of these circumstances that oftentimes you have no control over,” Brownholtz recalls. “And what really kind of put the idea in my head was that after Donald Trump became president I went and got an IUD, because [women] were like, ‘We’re all gonna lose our birth control!’ And the IUD was not good for me. I went and did this thing that I didn’t really wanna do, I made this ‘choice’ that I didn’t really wanna make, because I thought that I didn’t have a better choice.”
Combining these ideas, and interrogating free will from the perspective of a vulnerable young girl exploring her city’s tight-knit DIY scene, proved to be a perfect vehicle for Brownholtz to introduce herself as a novelist. Building on her own experiences and that of friends adds a layer of authenticity and dark humor to the accurate portrait she renders in Rotten – not just of the DIY scene itself, but also to the archetypes that populate millennials’ lives.
“I wanted it to be as much about what it feels like to be in your early twenties right now – the sexual politics of it, the confusion, and our struggle to communicate in a good way – as it was about heavy #MeToo stuff,” Brownholtz explains. And if you’re a Boomer who’s never been in a basement mosh pit, well, “that’s what fiction’s about – transporting you to a world that you normally wouldn’t have access to.”
Brownholtz doesn’t see DIY scenes as inherently predatory, though she certainly recognizes that some aspects of the lifestyle can lend themselves to problematic situations just as easily as they can uplift otherwise lost souls. “It’s more intimate. It’s people who know each other very well, it’s relationships and friendships, it’s small and close-knit,” she says. “You’re paying with a crumpled five dollar bill at the door, and it’s about supporting bands that are traveling. It has this heart to it that’s a little different than the corporatized music industry machine.”
Last summer, everyone saw the flipside of that when the Instagram account @lured_by_burger_records outed the wildly popular SoCal tape label/record store as a predatory institution that had harmed dozens of young girls, either through grooming, gatekeeping, or outright assault (in the aftermath, Burger Records folded). Teenagers can hardly be blamed for failing to recognize that the subculture niche they’ve discovered can turn into a trap just as easily, particularly when drugs and alcohol are involved. Though some might feel capable of engaging with adults, the situation can change rapidly or evolve into trauma over time, once they begin to reflect on those years with some maturity.
“When I was seventeen and going to shows in places like [Fort Rotten] and hanging out with people who were a couple years older than me, I didn’t think anything of it. I was like, I’m an adult, I’m grown up. But then you get older and you’re like, wow, it was like mad inappropriate that I was hanging out – I was seventeen, I was a kid!” Brownholtz says. “I think it’s important that young people [have access to DIY] communities because I don’t think I would be the person that I am today if I hadn’t. But we have to somehow achieve this balance between welcoming younger people and making sure that people are not taking advantage of them.”
While the sense of community and creative energy a DIY scene fosters can be positive for the many, it also serves to obfuscate abuse – or potential for abuse – only discussed in whispers, and its perpetrators rarely suffer consequences, especially if they have clout. “It’s uncomfortable for men to have to disrupt their business arrangements, whether it’s something as legit as the Bowery Ballroom or some shitty DIY venue. It’s like, that guy is important, he’ll book my band, so I don’t wanna cause any strife with him – he’s only ever been nice to me,” Brownholtz says, adding that another function of Rotten‘s narrative, hopefully, will be creating insight and empathy in men.
“This book gets pretty cerebral and it’s pretty much in this girl’s head and you’re really seeing her anxieties and her fears and reservations about things,” she says. “I wanted them to see how damaging something can be, that they might think is kind of innocuous, just a ‘misunderstanding.’ It wasn’t a misunderstanding to her, and it’s gonna haunt her for fucking ever. I want them to get in the headspace of understanding that.”
That understanding needs to happen, Brownholtz says, because “men are the solution moving forward. Women getting angry is not gonna do anything but make men defensive. It needs to be men calling out their fucking friends when their friends do disgusting shit or say disgusting things. It needs to be about men shaming other men into line. That is gonna be the saving grace of the music industry.”
Viv Taylor may not be a sympathetic character to all, and that’s what Brownholtz intended. “I wanted her to be imperfect and I wanted her to be, at times, unlikeable. I wanted her to make bad choices because I wanted to show how so many things in our lives that are formative to us are things that we have no control over, like who are parents are, what our family is like, all this stuff. All of those things cause the wounds that cause you to seek out problematic people, that put you into these kind of situations,” Brownholtz says. “I also wanted to emphasize that just because she does kind of suck sometimes and makes bad choices, it doesn’t make her any less deserving of being believed or respected.” She never places the blame on her narrator’s shoulders; instead, we see an arc that turns her from a victim to a local hero as she gains back some of her agency from her abuser, her family relationships, and her friendships to emerge with a more holistic view of herself.
And ultimately, that’s Brownholtz’s personal narrative as well; after small publishers gave positive feedback, but balked at the touchy subject matter, she decided to self-publish. “I was shopping it around and then the pandemic hit,” she says. “It’s hard enough to get a book published as it is – most publishers only put out a couple titles a year. Even if I had gotten in at a small independent publisher, it might not have seen print until like, 2022 or 2023. I’d been working on this book since 2017, and I was like, you know what? I’m just done.”
She enlisted Jonny Campolo (a musician and designer she’d worked with at PopGun Presents, but never met) to put the book together while they were both out of work during lockdown. “Jonny and I shared a very unique vision; since it’s such a small run of books, we wanted them to feel like a nice object, like an art book. It was kind of cool to do it that way because it made it more personal and unique than just using the Amazon self-publish tool,” she says. “I’ve had a couple people be like, I wanna write a novel, and it’s like, okay, so fucking do it. That’s all that writing is – if you sit down and do your pages every day, you’re a writer, even if nobody has published it or read it. It took me a long time to be comfortable referring to myself as a writer because it seems so lofty and kind of silly, but then like it got serious and was like, no, that’s what I do right now. I kind of feel like I’m like bludgeoning myself to some sort of relevance, because I don’t have the MFA or the ‘right’ connections – I’m just sort of forcing my way into people’s heads and making them pay attention to me.”
“Self-publishing was mostly just a result of me getting tired of waiting for someone to give me permission. And tired of waiting for someone to tell me that I’m good enough,” she adds. “I realized that printing a book costs less than pressing a record, and bands press records all the time with no institutional help. More people should just publish their own books; it’s not cheap and I don’t expect to see a complete return on investment. This was an investment in myself, honestly, and it was an investment in my community too.”
The members of brand-new Detroit trio decliner can’t decide if they’re a punk band or not. “I don’t consider decliner punk,” says bassist and beat-maker Steve Stravropoulous. “I think there’s a difference between Tim and I because Tim thinks it’s a punk band and I don’t… the more he thinks it’s punk the more I try to make it not that.” Genre label aside, the group – made up of Stavropoulous, Rob Luzynski (vocals), and Tim Barret (guitar) – certainly embodied the punk lifestyle whilst making their debut EP, Remember, out today on FXHE records.
The recording process, which is generally known to be long and arduous, took decliner about four hours and was produced and engineered by notable Detroit producer and techno artist Omar S, aka Alexander Omar Smith. The experience boiled down to two distinct lenses for the members of decliner. “I was drunk and having fun so I wasn’t stressed,” says Luzynski. “I was drunk and stressed,” adds Stavropoulous. The stress element was mostly due to the shock of the fact that the band was actually recording. They went into the session with the idea that they were going to show Smith a couple songs, see if he liked them, and leave. Instead, they went in, recorded one track of each song live to a Tascam 16-track recorder, and had an EP. “I was like, ‘damn, I’m not sure how I feel about this,’ because it’s just not how Steve and I usually work,” says Barret.
Without the ability to add overdubs or edit the tracks after the fact, the band had one shot to get it right, and they laid everything on the line. “You can hear in some of the tracks that my voice is giving out basically,” says Luzynski. “Like, in ‘Know,’ that’s me almost passed out…like I almost passed out from doing that.” For someone whose entire musical career up to this point has been making rap music, it makes sense that Luzynski felt winded after a few hours straight of deep, guttural singing. But despite that it was his first time dabbling in this uncharted vocal register, Luzynski’s disquieting vocals sound like they’ve been brewing in the depths of his soul all along, waiting for the right time to come out.
On “Burn,” the first and only single from the EP, decliner encapsulates the isolation of dead winter and the destructive paths we can go down to try and escape it. Barret’s whirring guitar and Stavropoulous’s unabating bass-line paint a vivid picture of quotidian mundanity. January in Detroit, when this EP was recorded, is always one of the most desolate months, especially during a pandemic. Plagued with iced over streets and sparse sunlight, a stillness sweeps over the city, making it easy for loneliness to make its bed in your home. Luzynski captures this bleakness with his blunt lyricism: “Man this weather’s really something/I can barely feel my face/I keep falling, someone catch me/Before I go up in flames.”
Luzynski explains that the song is a capsule for how he was feeling at the time they recorded, and also serves as a vague warning for the things that lure us in at times of darkness. “It’s thinking about the moth to the flame… things that can save you but also be your demise,” says Luzynski.
The video for “burn,” out exclusively via Playground Detroit last Friday, personifies this sentiment without allowing the band to fall too deep into despair. It starts by introducing the band hanging out in an attic, getting ready to record. Luzynski drinks a mysterious liquid and is transported into another realm, presumably by the UFO that makes frequent appearances. In this barren realm, Luzynski is found alone and desperate, climbing to nowhere and constantly being set ablaze. It honestly just kind of seems like an acid trip gone terribly wrong. But we find moments of levity when the camera pans back to the attic, watching the band play while Luzynski sits in a trance state, or finding the friends clinking beers on a sunny day. These brief moments of reprieve serve as a reminder that the dark times don’t last forever.
In that same vein, decliner don’t aim to take themselves too seriously. As musicians with multiple projects, the artists started decliner more or less on a whim, prompted by a few texts from Omar S. “Omar was texting me like, ‘I wanna record your band,’” says Stavropoulous, “and was simultaneously texting Rob, ‘I wanna record your band.’” Luzynski adds, “We didn’t have a band yet.” So, the two thought it was the perfect opportunity to join creative forces, because when Omar S. says he wants to record your band, you show up with a band. The preparation for the actual session was minimal. Stavropoulous and Barret had skeletons for the tracks and thought that Luzynski’s energetic stage presence would be a good match. Again, having only used his voice for rapping previously, it was a bit of a process for Luzynski to finalize his vocal style. But he had Smith to guide him in the right direction. “He said ‘I want you to sing like you’re watching your house burn down or someone just put out a cigarette in your eye,’” remembers Luzynski.
Up to the challenge, Luzynski said he used his trademark method of “kush and push” – smoking a joint and doing some push ups – before recording, and it more or less worked out. “I totally did push ups in Conant Gardens party store to get ready as I was relatively inebriated on PBRs,” says Luzynski. His straining vocals make a novel pair to the undulating instrumentation and four on the floor techno beats, marrying the sensation of dissociating at a basement rave with the relentless energy of moshing at a hardcore show. The group describes the project as an “exploration of sound” that pulls from their varied musical backgrounds. Put simply, Stavropoulous adds, “We’re just dumb boys doing our thing. We’re doing our best and we’re gonna try.” Sounds pretty punk to me.
Growing up in the musical melting pot of the Bay Area, neo-soul singer-songwriter Simha gained an ear for both western and eastern musical influences. He seamlessly weaves elements of the Indian classical music of his heritage with jazz and soul sounds, the result being a lush, ethereal vehicle through which he expresses his emotions. He premieres single “Losing Focus” on Audiofemme today.
The song deals with the idea of “imposter syndrome,” a term that’s entered the popular lexicon to loosely mean doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud. Simha says that for himself, it manifested as “feeling like doing music was not really something I was good at.” Collaborating with others in the past has helped keep that feeling at bay, but the pandemic forced him to adapt, to look inward and write alone. Though his imposter syndrome initially saddled him with a bad case of writer’s block, “Losing Focus” helped him dig out of it.
“I ended up writing the whole song by myself, and it was a lot of just sitting with myself, and trying to be as honest with myself as possible,” he says. “I still deal with it…but I think now rather than it being, ‘Oh no, this isn’t good enough, no one’s gonna like this,’ it’s more leaning into it and just saying, well maybe the fact that I feel insecure about this might change something about the way I write, or create something new in the music that might capture a different feeling for me.”
And it worked! The solitary time helped Simha to dig into his roots in Indian classical music in a way he hadn’t before, inviting his mother to play the tabla, an Indian percussion instrument, on the track. Simha’s mother had enrolled him in Indian classical music classes as a child and practiced with him at home, but collaborating together as two adults was a new experience for them both. “Being able to recreate that experience [of making music with my mother] was really important for me, because it pulled me back to the idea that music isn’t just work for me, it’s fun for me, you know? It’s something that really grounds me to my heritage,” he explains. “We were charting new territory together, and it was really fun, because I think she also discovered new things about herself when it came to her creative process and her expression, just this new thing she’s never done before. It was really insightful and really a beautiful process.”
The result is profoundly unique. The tabla rhythms weave in with jazz and soul sounds, all layered under Simha’s smooth vocals and deeply personal lyrics. A lifelong fan of jazz, soul, and neo-soul, he lists Donny Hathaway, Stevie Wonder, Lianne La Havas and Erykah Badu as major influences. They all shine through, but spliced with Simha’s beautifully intentional cultural injections it becomes something all his own.
He’s working on an EP to hopefully drop late in the summer, and seeking opportunities to perform outside under remaining COVID restrictions. As a queer artist of color, he says that the “biggest thing for me on this EP, that drives it, is mental health, and specifically mental health awareness for queer BIPOC in the music industry.” The EP will emphasize these themes, and while he works on it, he’s collaborating with artist Emma Timberlea Brown (who designs his cover artwork as well) and an organization he started with some friends called The Humxn Collective to drop a merch line where 50% of proceeds will go to an organization that connects queer BIPOC creators with therapists in their own communities. “I’m really excited about that because the biggest thing I really want to do with this project is give back to the community that has basically raised me,” he says. “For the longest time, if it wasn’t for this community, I would be so lost. The influences I get, the support that I get, is really through how tight-knit this community is. I can’t stress that enough, and I’m really grateful for it.”
There’s no doubt that Simha’s community plays a role in quashing that pesky imposter syndrome by allowing him to see the beauty he is capable of offering to the world. He notes that “there’s so much amazing art that has come out during this time, which has been inspired by so many different things, so it’s really beautiful.” Simha’s art was part of this, and even if he doesn’t always see it, it matters.
The past year has added deeper dimension to that old adage about making lemonade. In other words, life has thrown a lot of lemons our way since last March, for better or for worse, and what to do with them is up to you. Such was the case with Rachael Pazdan and Loni Landon of Four/Four Presents, a new NYC-based curator platform that seeks to bridge the gap between the live music and high-art dance communities through linking independent musicians with seasoned dancers to create collaborative performances. What began as a live venture pre-pandemic quickly pivoted to accommodate our new style of living with recorded video performances, and is slowly transitioning to a live performance model that meshes with our new normal.
Their combined experience, long friendship, and well-earned clout in their respective industries intersected to make them the prime candidates to take on such a challenge – in general, live music and dance are both separate, niche communities. Pazdan danced growing up, and though she still considers it a passion, she is best known for her work in NYC’s live music scene. She’s worked as both an in-house talent buyer at venues like LPR and The Bell House and a freelance events presenter in her own right, producing The Hum, a concert series celebrating female and gender-nonconforming artists. Landon is a Juilliard-trained dancer and highly sought-out choreographer, having produced work for The Joyce Theater, the American Dance Institute, and more. Prior to collaborating with Pazdan on Four/Four, she co-founded The Playground, an initiative designed to give emerging choreographers the space to experiment while also allowing professional dancers to participate affordably. In other words, these are two women passionate about entrepreneurship in the arts and celebrating female and otherwise marginalized creators, themes central to Four/Four’s mission.
The name comes from the 4/4 time signature, something utilized by both musicians and dancers, to further emphasize the pair’s shared vision. “We wanted to create a space for dance and music to co-exist in a contemporary, cool way that’s not on like, a Proscenium stage, that’s not at Lincoln Center,” Pazdan explains, add that the end goal here is “making dance way less esoteric and super-accessible in the way music is really accessible. The thing I’ve said a few times is that we want people to watch dance the way they listen to a record.” And while they seek to make dance something less intimidating to outsiders, they also want to introduce dancers to new music, combining these separate audiences into one larger, more supportive arts community. “It’s connected us with so many artists. I’ve learned about so many new musicians and composers and people, and that’s what it is,” Landon adds. “We wanted to connect people and artists, even if it’s online. I think it’s important that we can create new connections and make new art.”
The concept came about nearly four years ago, when Pazdan and Landon collaborated on an LPR-presented performance by Landon’s company at Knockdown Center. They found a space and began plans for the first live Four/Four event in February 2020 – in the final weeks before our lives changed indelibly into what they are now. Once the lockdown hit they realized they needed to adapt in order to bring their vision to life, or to take these unprecedented lemons and make the lemonade, as it were. They ended up with Tethered, a video compilation of recorded dance performances set to curated music, which they presented projected on an outdoor screen at Public Records in Gowanus this summer. “It was kind of serendipitous because Public Records got in touch with Rachael, and they were moving all their content online,” Landon explains. “There were so many amazing artists just sitting around, out of work, including both Rachael and myself, and we were both like ‘Okay! Let’s just do this!’”
As far as lemons go, the pandemic offered up one unexpected benefit in particular – dancers who would normally be unavailable due to busy touring schedules suddenly found themselves sitting at home, stationary. “So many artists that we were probably never going to be able to get to do stuff were just available, and at home, not doing anything,” Pazdan says. “So we were connecting with artists literally all over the world. We had dancers in Israel, and where else? Spain, Amsterdam, Norway… That was kind of the plus side to the pandemic, that we had access to artists we normally wouldn’t have access to.” And on top of that, they did not have to factor in the exorbitant cost of flying these performers into New York City, a constant albatross hanging around the necks of all independent events producers.
In other words, their optimism in the face of an otherwise hopeless situation is what ultimately made their project a success. They could have sat watching the news in those first few dire weeks of the pandemic, so soon after they decided to move forward with the project at all, and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. But they chose to think on their feet, combining the best aspects of high art with a DIY ethos to produce something new and entirely unique. They worked together to assemble choreographers and contributing musicians, gathering the music first and sending it to the dancers with some instructions, then collected all the videos, which Pazdan learned to edit and patch together in light of budgetary limitations. “Being a freelancer I’ve learned how to create my own opportunities. You can’t wait for people,” Landon says. “If you want to create something you just have to do it… It’s not going to be perfect in the beginning but you learn by doing and just putting the energy in, you see that energy come out.”
As the weather warms and vaccination becomes available to all New Yorkers, Pazdan and Landon are already making moves for Four/Four’s sophomore summer. In collaboration with Audiofemme, they are producing a series of outdoor events called Open Air: four live, site-specific performances in New York City from June through September of this year. Utilizing spaces like Greenwood Cemetery and Brooklyn Bridge Park, among others, these events will bring to life – quite literally, as they are live events! – the original shared vision of Pazdan and Landon. They will be free to the public in line with Four/Four’s mission of creating accessible, equitable, and joyful events for everyone. Each performance will begin with a traditional music set, followed by a presentation from the choreographer and dancers, and conclude with the premiere of a new, original collaboration between both.
Ultimately, they want Four/Four to work with music and dance presenters alike, an unprecedented intersection of these communities. As we enter the New Normal of live performance, it would seem there’s no better time to challenge our perceptions of what live entertainment can be.
There’s a running gag that Tristen likes to close out her shows with: “If you need advice, I’ll be at the merch table.” As someone who studied relational group and organizational theories of communication in college, the parting line is less of a joke and more of a sincere offering to fans; Tristen is a devotee of psychology, admitting that she often plays the role of therapist in friendships. She even hosts a segment called “Dear Tristen” on Partners in Crime with The McCarltons, a radio show hosted by fellow Nashville residents Vanessa Carlton and Carlton’s husband John McCauley. Her interest in the human psyche is an extension of the thought-provoking paradigms she presents through her music, exemplified in her new song “Wrong With You,” from upcoming LP, Aquatic Flowers, out June 4 via Mama Bird Recording Co.
Tristen tells Audiofemme that she was intrigued by the concept of someone being attracted to a mess they can clean up, the cycle of “liking someone less the more they like you because you, underneath it all, have a self-hatred that makes you suspect something’s off if somebody would like you.”
The song’s defining line, “there must be something wrong with your for loving someone like me,” which reprises twice in the chorus, is inspired by a real-life argument from a friend’s toxic relationship. The line stuck with her for years, and eventually Tristen built a song around it – one that happened to align perfectly with the themes on her fourth album, the follow-up to 2017’s Sneaker Waves.
In the video for the song, premiering today exclusively with Audiofemme, the singer takes to the woods in a vintage wedding dress. With tear-stained cheeks, she walks alone in the lush green forest, her train dragging in the mud and getting caught on the branches as she slowly strays from the path. “So deep are the grooves/I’m sinking into/No love could ever wash away,” she sings, shooting dramatic looks at the camera all the while.
“I don’t necessarily try to define myself through my music,” Tristen shares. “I do take first person a lot because I see myself falling into the same mistakes everybody makes. I think that a song is worthy of writing when it’s something that I feel like people can relate to…and it’s common enough so you can distill some behavior or pattern or trait.”
The 11 tracks that comprise Aquatic Flowers resonate on varying psychological levels. The singer spotlights a frustrated emapth on “Die 4 Love,” while the character in “I Need Your Love” has taken many partners, yet longs for the feeling of falling for someone. Meanwhile, “Hothouse Flower” follows a comfortable and privileged artist who is ironically envious of others’ artistic suffering. “I do believe that everybody has these range of emotions whether we were taught to avoid them or we don’t acknowledge them,” Tristen observes. “Part of the enjoyment of writing, for me, is that you can relate to people by pointing out some kind of behavior pattern.” She will celebrate the release of Aquatic Flowers with a livestream on June 11 at The 5 Spot in Nashville. She’s also slated to appear alongside Kesha’s mother, songwriter Pebe Sebert, for a music and motherhood Q&A on Twitter Spaces on May 9 at 9:30 p.m. ET, where she’ll likely dispense more sage advice.
Tristen’s psychological approach to the music process has made for some interesting songs, but it’s also in her nature to want to help those who are struggling. “I feel like I have a hopeless optimist in me, like we can solve that – there’s a way to solve it with creativity,” she says. “The problems are fun. I think that there’s underlying patterns happening for everybody’s problems and there’s ways to pick them apart. For me, writing songs is a way to analyze things and put all that thinking energy into lines and soft words, and then the melodies and the music and all that is easy for me.”
In her daily life, Tristen dedicates herself to saving vintage clothing via Anaconda Vintage, the Nashville shop she runs with her sister. In her songs she captures characters with individual flaws that all embody the human experience in their own unique way. Both reflect Tristen’s desire to fix what feels broken. “I don’t really take a lot of responsibility for the writing and the music. I feel like it just happens and it’s a very natural, untouched thing for me. I have worked really hard to keep that untouched,” Tristen says of her artistic process. “I keep it pure.”
Anita Lane was an exceptional talent – a songwriter, a singer, a creative powerhouse. The greatest pity of her lifetime and now, after her passing, is that she is often referred to only in relation to the men she co-wrote and duetted with, but in the interests of karmically restoring the universe to rights and doing justice to Anita’s legacy, here is why you ought to spend a few hours at least indulging in her prolific work.
Born in March, 1960 in Melbourne, Lane was clever and musically gifted. While a student at the Prahran College of Advanced Education in Melbourne’s inner south, she began writing songs and singing in her mid-teens. This was also where she befriended Rowland S. Howard – the iconic post-punk guitarist most commonly associated with The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds.
Still a teenager, Lane met Nick Cave in 1977 when he was fronting The Boys Next Door, a seminal Australian post-punk band featuring Cave’s schoolmates from Caulfield Grammar: Mick Harvey on guitar, Tracy Pew on bass, and Phill Calvert on drums. The two began an on-off romantic relationship that lasted another 10 years, but it was their powerful co-writing relationship that was epic and memorable. The following year in 1978, Lane’s schoolfriend Rowland S. Howard joined the band on lead guitar and, riding the popularity of post-punk, frenetic guitar and furied lyrics over immense walls of feedback fuzz, the band moved to London in 1980, freshly renamed The Birthday Party.
Their debut 1981 album Prayers on Fire featured “A Dead Song,” co-written by Lane and Cave. She also co-wrote “Dead Joe” and “Kiss Me Black” on their sophomore album Junkyard(1982), released the same year the band and Lane moved to Berlin just before breaking up in 1983.
“Kiss Me Black” epitomises the best of The Birthday Party – clattering percussion like starving cats released into a drum set, Cave’s gothic baritone shifting between hollow cries and frenzied, almost shouted pleas and accusations. Chugging bass drives the whole bloodied, brilliant body of a song while snaggle-toothed guitars take savage bites into the melody.
Lane went on to join Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on keyboards and vocals. The band comprised ex-Birthday Party member Mick Harvey, Barry Adamson, Hugo Race and Blixa Bargeld. Most notably, she co-wrote the beautiful, tragic “From Her To Eternity,” also the title of the band’s 1984 debut album. She left the band soon after, but would continue to co-write with Bargeld for both the Bad Seeds and Bargeld’s other band, Einstürzende Neubauten. She would later feature on Einstürzende Neubauten’s sixth album Tabula Rasa (1993) both as a co-writer and vocalist on a couple of tracks, including “Blume.”
In 1986, she co-wrote “Stranger Than Kindness” with Bargeld, which appeared on Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Your Funeral… My Trial. It is a glorious, jangling, delicate beast of a song that reveals the significantly mellowed yang to The Birthday Party’s frenetic yin. The same title was given to an exhibition of Nick Cave’s life and work in 2020 and to a book released to align with the exhibition.
In 1988, Lane sang vocals on the soundtrack to Australian gothic western movie Ghosts…of the Civil Dead, which Bargeld, Cave and Harvey scored. The same year, she also provided vocals on the German post-punk band Die Haut’s Headless Body in Topless Bar album. She’d also duet with Kid Congo Powers on Die Haut’s Head On album of 1992.
One of her most wonderful collaborative outings was with Mick Harvey on his Serge Gainsbourg tribute album Intoxicated Man in 1995 and again on his second Gainsbourg-inspired album Pink Elephants in 1997. She sounds so gorgeously young and louche on “Harley Davidson” when she claims to be a “hell hound.” “I don’t need anyone on my Harley Davidson,” she sings, “If I die tonight, it’s my destiny, I’m alright.”
All the while, Lane had been in the process of recording her debyut solo album; Dirty Pearl was released in 1993 after a decade in the making. It opens with another devastating and beautiful Harvey co-write, “Jesus Almost Got Me,” a divinely gothic ballad in which the country-folk guitar is tempered by solemnly poetic lyrics (“Love is cruel/Love is truly absurd/Jesus almost got me/I don’t know how many prayers he overheard”).
Four of its tracks were originally released on a 4-track EP called Dirty Sings in 1988. Adamson, Cave and Thomas Wydler (of both the Bad Seeds and Die Haut) perform on these, along with Mick Harvey, who also produced it. She sounds breathy, sad, like there’s only a thread holding her to this earth and yet, there’s something primal and sacred in her shameless femininity. Even surrounded by men, or perhaps because she is, she embraces the elements of girlhood and womanhood in her voice, her writing and her videos. One moment she is delicate and complicit, the next she is scarily knowing, determinedly solitary.
The album also features her solo versions of some of her best co-writes, like “Blume,” along with a brilliant, quite creepy, cover of “Sexual Healing.” You’ll never hear the song the same again; the same is true of her 1991 collaboration with Barry Adamson on their version of “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’.” Anita Lane put an indelible mark on everything she touched.
Her second solo studio album was also produced by Harvey. Released in 2001, Sex O’Clock was a little less jangly, primitive and arty. Instead, it embraced greater melodic hooks and pop elements, though Lane’s deadpan, sardonic approach to lyrics and vocals was ever present. Pop Matters referred to her as “the female Leonard Cohen.” Track names like “Home Is Where the Hatred Is,” “I Hate Myself” and “The Petrol Wife” contrasted with the almost sunny, laidback album cover image of Lane swinging an umbrella as she gazes, smiling, to the horizon.
Lane was a bit of a nomad, as many musicians were in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and still are. She moved from London to Berlin, then later lived in New York and Sydney before returning to Berlin in the late 1980s. She married a German man, Johannes Beck, and had her son Raphael in 1990, before that relationship ended four years later and she moved to Morocco. She had two sons to her Italian partner, Luciano (born in 1995) and Carlito (1998).
Melbourne reclaimed her in 2008, when she returned to live in the suburb of Glen Iris, where she’d grown up. Last year, she moved to Collingwood at the same time that I was packing up to leave it, and remained there until her death in April, aged 61. She isn’t the first nor will she be the last woman to be shrunk down, becoming merely the “muse” to the men around her, but let’s hope, at least in this case, that Melbourne names a lane after her, or erects a statue, or both. Vale Anita Lane.
Ticket Giveaways
Each week Audiofemme gives away a set of tickets to our featured shows in NYC! Scroll down to enter for the following shindigs.
