Recovery Time
The Dexateens Serve Up Rock & Roll, Straight-Up
originally published January 31, 2007
The Dexateens
The Dexateens must be the punk crossbreeds of the Southern rock pack. These boys out of Tuscaloosa craft their music with the kind of earnestness that marks a singer-songwriter, yet they unleash a guitar fury that smacks of classic "I-know-it-when-I-hear-it" Southern rock mixed with blissful feedback that evokes Crazy Horse's proto-punk Rust Never Sleeps.
No, The Dexateens don't fit so neatly into any of those pigeon-holes that get tossed around too casually these days. They can purr, can croon, but most often they snarl balls-on Bondo-colored rawk, grinding and bluesy. At times, their twangy punk ventures into that somewhat elusive genre that was etched with Americana pissbucket blues and Texan solo troubadours.
Ultimately, what makes these Bama boys stand out is their soulful yowl, earthshaking honesty and earnest desire to touch the folks kind enough to give 'em a listen. And hardly an afterthought, there's that goddamn kerosene fire of a live show. "I think no matter what kind of record we put out, our show is gonna have a punk-rock approach," says Elliot McPherson, frontman and one of three guitarists for the band.
The group's albums have indeed evolved over the course of The Dexateens' career, and the release of the band's third album Hardwire Healing gets underway on Friday, Feb. 2 at the 40 Watt Club. The first two albums, both on Estrus Records, felt more urgent and raw, deeply affected by the Texas punk vanguard Tim Kerr, who produced. This third effort was recorded a year ago in Athens at Chase Park Transduction Studios, with Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers and David Barbe at the helm. Not only does Healing's more gentle sound reflect the easy-going atmosphere working with these two Athenians, but it also shows how the bandmembers have evolved and grown more confident in their abilities. Among the quieter moments are the melodic "Neil Armstrong," moody "Downtown" and sorrowful "Nadine."
"We tried to make a quieter record from the very beginning," says McPherson, "but I don't think we were ready for that," with tunes like "Naked Ground" and "Makers Mound" covering some of the noisier territory that built the group's reputation.
The Dexateens do enjoy recording and playing shows in Athens. "Athens is a lot like Tuscaloosa in a way, [it] just feels like a second home to us," says McPherson. "People here will try new music without someone telling them it's okay to like it," which explains why The Dexateens are playing one of their two scheduled gigs in Athens and as of yet have not booked a national tour.
"I call them surgical gigs," says drummer Craig "Sweet Dog" Pickering, referring to monthly weekend jaunts to play select shows. Although he defers to the family men in the band, he recognizes that he is the driving force to make things happen. He laughingly admits, "If it were up to me, I'd do 200 shows a year!"
"He's really the one who gets it off the ground and makes it happen," says McPherson. "Every band needs that guy. Sweet Dog's the guy who's always turning us onto stuff," he says. "He finds these things and gets infatuated with them. Once he wears them out, he turns them over to me." Among those discoveries are Captain Beefheart and Leon Russell.
"I like the way a lot of '70s stuff was recorded, how the drums sound." McPherson pauses a second to think. "But the last record that really killed me was Fort Recovery from Centro-matic." Also close to his hi-fi sits Jesus Was A Capricorn by Kris Kristofferson, Thee Headcoats, Flamin' Groovies, Bobby Bare Sr., The Replacements' Let It Be and Hootenanny, and the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
More than booking gigs, banging drums, and sharing music, McPherson readily credits Pickering with giving The Dexateens a second wind, one that swept them into the recording studio for the first time in 2000. Family obligations and day jobs threatened to end the band.
"Everybody had agreed to see it through, but Sweet Dog wasn't ready," says McPherson.
"Yeah, this band should've died about six years ago," adds Pickering. "I think we have something really cool, and I exhaust all efforts."
And those efforts lead The Dexateens to record with Bruce Watson in 2000. After gathering dust under Pickering's bed, these tapes were finally released by the U.K. label Dellorso in November of last year.
While McPherson fronts the band onstage and Pickering is busy bolstering morale and making things happen, both credit John Smith's songwriting for a large part of their band's appeal.
"John brings in these songs that are nicely arranged and easy to learn. He's such a good writer that the songs are easy to comprehend," says McPherson. "But my songs, we struggle with them, wrangle with them and then mess with them a bit."
Rounding out The Dexateens' roster are the ever-smiling Matt Patton on bass, who also fronts the mod band Model Citizen, and new member Nikolaus Mimikakis on guitar. Although The Dexateens don't systematically tour, their two albums on Estrus have drummed up fans abroad. Twice they have toured the United Kingdom and also toured once in Spain. They have landed in Mojo (which ran a complimentary review of Healing) three times.
Just last October, they played the 10th anniversary celebration for London's prestigious Dirty Water Club, opening for the Fleshtones and exposing the band to an audience rife with rock press and industry types, as well as the hipster regulars. They even dined with Pickering's single biggest influence: session drummer Andy Newmark, whose credits include work with Sly & the Family Stone, Ron Wood, John Lennon, Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music, Carly Simon and dozens more. "Newmark's got a great feel, totally in the pocket," said Pickering.
And Newmark told Pickering that The Dexateens sound like "Ron Wood's little stepchildren." Still in touch, they owe the friendship to a drunken single-spaced fan letter after Pickering had found his hero's email address.
But creature comforts during the U.K. leg were skimpy and their morale was hamstrung by a cracked skull suffered by Smith. After the second U.K. show in High Wycombe, he blacked out, and did what Pickering described as a nasty plunge on the concrete. Unconscious and bleeding from the ear, he was taken by ambulance to the hospital where he was admitted for a week's stay before he was given the green light to fly home.
"It really messed with everybody's head," recalls Pickering. By the time Smith was home safe, they were off to Spain where they played bigger shows and enjoyed more creature comforts.
"People sang along, knew the words, wanting us to sign autographs!" marvels Pickering. "It was nothing like I had ever seen before or any of The Dexateens!"
Back on the red dirt of home, The Dexateens' yowl grows more seasoned with each new recording. Meanwhile, the live show blasts forth with a fury true to the punk vernacular that bore the group. Dogged endurance binds these guys together as good things rise just beyond the horizon. To nick a line from one of their tunes, 'tis unlikely that these guys will have to trade infinity for an air show any time soon.
WHO: The Dexateens, Dead Confederate, Wheels On Fire
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Friday, February 2
HOW MUCH: $5
Stadiums, Clubs, Studios
It's All Metal To Mastodon
originally published January 31, 2007
It's time to face facts: no genre of music embraces the opportunity to enact the duality of good versus evil, greatness versus failure and heroes versus villains as much as metal. And that's not a coincidence: wash off the corpsepaint, peel off the vaguely jagged accessories, and within the typical metalhead you'll find the steadily beating heart of a one-time comic book fanatic. It makes perfect sense, as the larger-than-life personas played out in the pages of Marvel and DC translate not only to the fantastic, violent imagery of metal, but to the scene-at-large.
Shit-talking online forums and skeptical purists create an environment that stoically hails the approved and heaps scorn on those deemed "false." That said, the members of Atlanta's Mastodon are almost universally agreed upon as true heroes of the underground metal scene.
Mastodon
Since 2002's Remission, Mastodon has lived out a thrasher's dream: to record uncompromising, progressive music under the world's most renowned metal label, Relapse, tour like your life depends on it, and even wrest from major label Warner Brothers that Excaliber of industry jargon: full creative control. Troy Sanders, the band's bassist and co-vocalist, actually speaks fondly of his band's new label and the freedom graciously granted the band on newest album Blood Mountain. "That was the first thing that we hammered out - we didn't even have to hammer it out," says Sanders, speaking from his home in Atlanta on one of the band's rare respites from a nigh-insane touring schedule. "The first conversation that was engaged was, 'Hey, we love what you're doing, we want you to continue to do what you're doing, but we want to take over where Relapse will leave off.'"
In order to better navigate the course from (albeit hugely successful) indie label to major, the Atlanta four-piece - Sanders, guitarists Brent Hinds and Bill Kelliher and drummer Brann Dailor - maintained much of their trademark crew. Paul Romano's spirit-animal artwork graces Mastodon's jewel cases for a third consecutive time, and once again producer Matt Bayles (Botch, Isis, HORSE the Band) was behind the boards. As Sanders puts it, "We kept all the players intact; we just switched teams."
Even a cursory listen to Blood Mountain, the band's third full-length and first for Warner Brothers, dispels any cries of "sell-out" without even breaking a sweat. Instead of doing what detractors may have expected (going poppier, writing a "single," collaborating with Ja Rule), Mastodon simply stays the course, with maybe a slight deviation into even more complex arrangements. And while Blood Mountain features the band making broader and more frequent attempts at "clean," melodic singing, Sanders claims this option simply never occurred to the group in the past. "It never really entered our minds," he says. "We listen to a lot of bands that really use their voice as a fifth instrument and we were not afraid to dive into this record attempting to use our voices to better the songs. For example, [we were influenced by] Thin Lizzy, Melvins, Neurosis, shit that's heavy, amazing, pure, brutal and uncompromising, but with clean vocals, with melody. The more vocal stylings, the more character the record has. Clean vocals does not equal a giant bag of cheese."
A recurring theme that pops up in conversation with Sanders is the persistent concept of Mastodon's steadfast commitment to staying true to its uniquely personal creative process - in other words, if anyone doesn't like it, it's certainly not Mastodon's problem. "We're not worried about any backlash," Sanders firmly states, regarding the members' choice to sing where they once might've screamed. "We weren't afraid of any criticism whatsoever. We never have been. We've always gone into the studio when we write the songs that we want to write and we record the songs the way we want to record them. It's always been from our points of view since our first demo we recorded in Woodstock, GA."
But to say that they've always followed their muse, whether grinding or soaring, isn't to say that there was necessarily an overarching a game plan. "Every step forth we've taken has been a natural progression of the Mastodon evolution," says Sanders. "We've never sat down and said, 'We should have some more epic songs, 10 minutes or longer.' Or, we've never sat down and said, 'We should have a couple of crazy songs, balance it out with a couple of mid-tempo, catchy songs.' We've never had any agenda, ever. It's just poured out of us naturally and very honestly and I think that's something that we enjoy about ourselves and the level of authenticity that we've been doing." As opposed to the chest-beating martyrs of underground metal snobbery, Sanders and his bandmates' insistence upon their own unaffected songwriting and basis of operation sounds less like a band bolstering its own cred and more like a tight-knit group that has proven itself with a consistent output and, of course, lots of time spent in close quarters in moving vehicles.
With nary a whit of weariness, Sanders rattles off a dizzying laundry list of tour dates that the band has committed to through July, including its first jaunt to Australia and a desert festival in Dubai. Having recently completed a tour of Europe with Tool and a fifth (!) outing with Slayer, it seems that the Mastodon guys are becoming acclimated to their success and, additionally, what it cost to get them there. Remember, this is a band that used to play Tasty World in 2002 and 2003, only to struggle into the 40 Watt and, clearly, beyond.
"Watching bands like Slayer and Tool over and over and over, they just come out and they punish, and they're still amazing, and they deliver the goods every single night. That's what they're known for, what they're respected for, that's their craft, their genius," says Sanders. "It's just nice to watch this over and over and over and also realize that this has… become our place, to a degree. This is what we make a living at. People [ask us], 'Do you still have day jobs?' Well, we would if we were home for more than three months collectively per year, total! So this has become our lifestyle, morning, noon, and night, every day, we have been living, breathing, walking, eating and shitting Mastodon for seven years straight, and it kind of just becomes you."
Any urge to tuck-and-roll out of the bus after several weeks on the road playing with/ for deodorant-challenged dudes? "We've maintained our sanity through sarcasm and friendship," laughs Sanders. "Thankfully we haven't gotten to that point."
WHO: Mastodon, Converge, Priestess
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Wednesday, January 31
HOW MUCH: $15
Environmental Results
Madeline's New Album The Slow Bang Reels With Intimacy And Melody
originally published January 31, 2007
Madeline Adams
Teenaged Athens native Madeline Adams needed little more than her pronounced, ringing vocals and primitively rhythmic acoustic guitar when she broke onto the local underground scene as a solo performer in 2000. She briefly fronted a dance-pop band called The Sugar Shakers, and easily defied the conventions of girl-with-acoustic-guitar stereotypes, burning CD-Rs of her direct and folk-leaning songs and self-releasing the album Kissing & Dancing in 2002, followed by a handful of shorter releases.
"I got my first show at the X-Ray Café when I was 15," says Madeline. "I think if I hadn't have been so young and clueless, I wouldn't have been ballsy enough to ask for a show. I'd only been playing guitar for two or three months."
Now 21 years old and back in Athens' crowded scene after some time in Indiana, Adams - who performs under the lone moniker Madeline - delivers The Slow Bang this week, a new collection of charming and serene songs released on the local label Orange Twin. Madeline recorded and produced the album at the country house of Matthew Houck, the songwriter who performs solo and with band under the name Phosphorescent; his sparse approach and affinity for the Southern rustic marry well with Madeline's evocative vocals.
From the plaintive "From Hell and Back," on which the subtle creak of Houck's backing vocal complements the chime of Madeline's voice, to the swoony waltz of "The Demise of Madame Butterfly," the album features surprising variety in just more than half an hour, working in piano, guitar, drums and crickets chirping. The lyrics range from wry to sensual to tender, and the album's a big step forward for an already experienced songwriter.
Accidental Creations
Madeline met Houck near the end of 2005. Several casual recording experiments late that year and in early 2006 showed immediate promise and resulted in a full album with Houck producing, somewhat to the surprise of both involved.
"It started with just hanging out," says Madeline. "I was seeing him around more and more and we became friends. But rewind to a few months prior to that, I'd spent most of what I earned on a tour recording in a studio, and it sounded so bad. Just not what I wanted at all, and that was $600 down the toilet. It sounded like it was recorded in a hospital. Well, that might be a little strong, but it was sterile and just not what I wanted. So after that, I was totally frozen and indecisive and didn't know what to record or even what I wanted stuff to sound like.
"Fast-forward back to when I met Matthew: he gave me a copy of [his album] Aw Come Aw Wry. The production of that was kinda my dream. And the recording of the album started with the song 'Madame Butterfly.' That [came from] just hanging out after the bars closed, having fun. That was how the first five songs we recorded happened, just casually. Once I realized that that's what I wanted for an album, we kind of got serious about it and worked on some more songs that winter."
Houck lent his rough-hewn sensibilities, not just to the recording sessions (Madeline says an unofficial one-take, "mistakes and all" rule was in effect for the vocals and guitar, recorded together), the final product and its production qualities, but was involved from the beginning. "Matthew had a really heavy hand in it," says Madeline. "I gave him a tape of 30 songs and told him to pick his favorites. With some arguing and juggling around, that's pretty much how it happened."
According to Houck, the specific songs that he selected for the Slow Bang sessions simply made sense. "Two things: one, I thought they were great songs, and two, the nine we chose, they all seemed to kind of fit together," he says. "The sound we got from just having fun was one thing, and we agreed that those songs fit the kind of sound we were getting, while some of the other songs she gave me seemed to want something different."
From the dusty, simpler tracks like "Fish in the Sea" and "Simple Words" to the decidedly more baroque "The Demise of Madame Butterfly" and "Good Houses," arrangement decisions and instrumental augmentation also evolved organically. "It was figured out kind of as we worked," says Houck. "The songs presented themselves - some were beautiful right away and didn't need anything, and others we just figured out as we went."
Some tracks were newly written, while others, like "Fish in the Sea," were songs written years ago, says Madeline. "I was just lucky enough to capture exactly the sound I wanted," she adds. "Everything was spontaneous and natural."
Growing Pains
Putting out an album on a label, sending said album to magazines, trying to book more club shows out of town: Madeline says she's slowly moving into the more "professional" corner of music. "I'm starting to learn the language of talking to bars and shows, but I still feel uncomfortable asking for money and negotiating and stuff like that. It's definitely a lot easier to do house shows and stuff at DIY places. Number one, when I play houses, the person setting up the show is, if not a friend of mine, at least a friend of a friend or a fan of my music and excited about [it], whereas a bar is, y'know…" says Madeline. "And as far as pay goes and getting gas money and whatever, I'd say it's the same, money-wise. I've never had a guarantee or anything, and at a bar you have to pay the door guy, the sound guy, etc. So I'd say it's about the same. The only thing [is that] the exclusiveness of house shows sometimes is cliquish, and that's limiting in terms of who actually comes to my shows. I'd like to be in a position where people's moms can come to shows, too. But bars can be cliquish, too. Maybe I should do a whole tour and put on the flyer 'The Bring Your Mom Tour.'"
As to the origins of the union with Orange Twin, which is the label releasing and backing The Slow Bang, Madeline says specifics are hazy, but that everything started with a conversation with the label's cofounder Laura Carter. "I was backstage at a 40 Watt show," says Madeline, "and Laura came back and she was like, 'I hear a rumor that you're on Orange Twin.' I just laughed and was like, 'Well, I haven't heard about that.' Then she said, 'Let's make that rumor a reality.'"
Despite the step up in label-hood, Madeline says little has changed in terms of actual processes; she's still booking many of her own shows and handling much of the promotion. She laughs, and says, "I've even gone under a different name to call radio stations and newspapers to promote myself. It's still DIY, and it's a bigger work load. I love being able to be on Orange Twin, and also being a small part of being able to fund their land project." Though much of the work remains on Madeline's shoulders, and she bankrolled the initial pressing of 1,000 discs, she says the name recognition of Orange Twin has been one of the many benefits. Silly stuff like a magazine is more likely to open an envelope that has an Orange Twin stamp on it rather than one that's just, 'Hey! From me! Madeline Adams! Listen to my music!' There's a good support system, and they have a great reputation.
"I guess before I never really thought about where reviews in magazines come from, but, y'know, you don't think that each one has to have a copy and they all have to be mailed. It gets to the point where it's sad to give away so many of my babies to press. It's nerve-wracking. It's weird, it's something I never thought I'd do. The whole review thing, I mean, press, sending albums to Magnet."
But the dauntingly curious world of seeking press has had its positives, says Madeline; "Good Houses" appeared on the Jan. 5 edition of National Public Radio's show "All Songs Considered," couched between tracks by The Arcade Fire, Of Montreal and The Shins. "I got on 'All Songs Considered' and they brought up the Sugar Shakers, and I was like 'What? That lasted for seven months!'" says Madeline, adding that the inclusion of her track came as something of a surprise, and was the result of a simple package mailed to the station. "It was really wonderful, because I'm a total NPR dork, and I try to listen to 'All Things Considered' as much as possible. That was the one package I sent off with a kiss, and it worked!"
Forward Motions
At this week's Athens show, Madeline plays with a full band backed by bassist Caleb Darnell of local folk-blues act Bellyache and drummer Matt Cathcart of Indiana band and frequent Madeline tourmates The Door-Keys. A handful of friends will also make their way onstage throughout the performance, including Laura Carter and Theo Hilton, among others. "The 40 Watt's great, I've never played anywhere that matches it or its sound. I'm really spoiled by it. We're going to try to mimic the production of the album," says Madeline, "at least to a certain degree. It'll probably be a little more rockin'."
A March tour finds Madeline hitting the Eastern Seaboard, swinging from Athens all the way up to Rhode Island, left through the Midwest and then back down South. Following that stint, Madeline says her next conquest is Europe, where she'll tour solo for several weeks in May. "It'll be my first time going there," she says. "The booking's being handled by a guy called Paper & Iron who does the European booking for a lot of American DIY and punk acts, so he knows what he's doing. I'm really excited about that."
Following that continental jaunt, Madeline plans to settle back in to Athens for a bit before deciding on her next project. "I've been thinking about the next step a lot. I've got a lot of songs to record," she says. "I've never put out anything I've recorded in a studio and I don't know if I should go to a studio ever again. I'm scared of the studio, to be honest. It's intimidating. There's nothing warm about it. And the time limitations… I've never gotten a great sound when trying to work against the clock, so the more open thing seems to produce the best results, for me at least. We'll see what happens."
WHO: Madeline, Nana Grizol, The Ginger Envelope
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Saturday, February 3
HOW MUCH: $5
International Pastoral
Heavily Lauded Brit Folk Singer Vashti Bunyan Tours The United States For The First Time
originally published January 31, 2007
Vashti Bunyan
The well of rewarding yet critically and commercially neglected post-Woodstock, pre-punk singer-songwriters runs deep. Bill Fay’s apocalyptic baroque pop songs, Emitt Rhodes’ companionable, Paul McCartney-indebted melodies, and Roy Harper's oceanic space-folk ballads spring most immediately to mind, and those are just tips of the iceberg. Now, thanks to a number of factors - file-sharing, “record collection rock” acts like Stereolab, pop culture’s retro fixation - many of these artists are receiving more attention than in their heydays. And CD reissues of forgotten gems often sell better than blog-approved indie-rock records; most of the “new” releases on display at Wuxtry were first released more than three decades ago.
Foundational Sounds
Vashti Bunyan possesses one of the most compelling stories and most affecting bodies of work to emerge from this wide-scale recovery project. As a teenager in mid-1960s London, Bunyan recorded a couple of pop singles for Decca and Columbia. These records flopped, however, and the songs she subsequently cut never even saw the light of day. Disenchanted with the music industry, Bunyan left the city in 1968 to pursue a rural life, setting out in a horse-drawn wagon with partner Robert Lewis and a dog named Blue. “I [tried] to escape modernity,” she recalls, “as a way of teaching myself the basic things of life - something I felt was missing from my upbringing.” Her travels also helped her develop her songwriting voice, and when she returned briefly to London in the winter of 1969, she brought an album’s worth of material to the doorstep of storied folk-rock producer Joe Boyd (he helmed classic albums by Nick Drake, Richard and Linda Thompson, and, years later, R.E.M.), who had unsuccessfully petitioned her to enter the studio with him before her wanderings.
Boyd quickly recruited a pack of musicians with whom he worked regularly - Fairport Convention members Dave Swarbrick and Simon Nicol, Incredible String Band-er Robin Williamson, and arranger Robert Kirby - to help Bunyan bring her songs to life. Just Another Diamond Day, the LP that resulted, sold only about 300 copies when it was released the next year, though, so Bunyan, then a mother, once again washed her hands of recording and resumed her rural travels.
Vinyl nerds would refuse, however, to let Diamond Day languish in obscurity, and by the late 1990s, it had become a prime collector’s item. The Spinney label quietly pressed a CD reissue in 2000, and a clutch of influential artists - Four Tet’s Kieran Hebdan, Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde and Devendra Banhart - began to tout the album as a personal favorite. Banhart became a particularly vocal Bunyan proponent, gushing with hyperbolic praise in interviews and cultivating his own aesthetic with an eye towards her work. When DiCristina Stair sponsored a second re-pressing of the record in 2004, critics and folk-pop fans crowned it a five-star classic, and with good reason: its songs stood the test of time well. Young Bunyan’s back-to-nature optimism was more convincing than that of many of her peers, largely because she wasn’t afraid to let catastrophes befall her characters. In “Timothy Grub,” for instance, a car called Happiness runs out of gas during a countryside drive. And the musical accompaniment - delicate banjo, fiddle and mandolin, tasteful strings - is nearly as immersive as that which Kirby would arrange a couple of years later for Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter.
Generational Growth
But Bunyan’s story doesn’t end with her enshrinement among Britain’s folk-pop elite. Greatly encouraged by the warm reception her music received throughout the early part of this decade, she began to record and perform once again. She chalks her reemergence up to a more liberal artistic climate: “Popular music conventions have changed, and in doing so have made somewhere for my songs, mainly because ‘convention’ is now a much wider and ragged-around-the-edges place,” she says. In early 2005, Fat Cat released Prospect Hummer, an EP-length collaboration between Bunyan and acclaimed American experimental rock act Animal Collective. Later that year, Lookaftering, Bunyan's second solo LP in more than 30 years, hit the streets. A lush, fragile affair orchestrated by Max Richter, a modern composer whose accessible pieces have found a broad nonacademic audience, Lookaftering couches Bunyan’s radiant voice within an inviting world of shimmering piano, vibrant mellotron and Hammond organ, and glistening acoustic guitar.
If this description leaves you expecting an overly polite swath of indie-pop wallpaper, then take a look at her lyrics, which bear the marks of unresolved inner struggles. In “Brother,” for instance, Bunyan eulogizes her late brother John. Other songs discuss difficulties she experienced in reconciling her free-wheeling spirit with the constraints of motherhood. “When I was young, I refused to dream of motherhood and domesticity,” she explains, “so when I had children and my life was reigned in to accommodate their need for security, there was always conflict. This is what I addressed in some of the songs. Motherhood and femininity and the expectations placed upon women have been battlegrounds in my head all my life - I was never an ‘earth mother’ however much I adored and spent all my time with my kids. I think my music is about the captivity that comes with love and a need for freedom coupled with responsibility and care for my young.”
In “Wayward,” these issues come to the fore: “Didn’t want to be the one / The one who’s left behind / While the other one goes to life / And comes back home to find / Me sitting pretty happily,” sings the mother of three. In “Lately,” she comments on motherly anxiety’s spiritual pull (“Never was much given to prayer / But lately I’m pleading with the air / To keep you safe from harm my dears”) and encourages her offspring to adopt her come-what-may liberalism (“The only things that you should keep in rows / Are your perfect teeth - and the rest you know / its own sweet way will always go”).
Bunyan’s reservations about traditional gender roles do not, however, mean that she regrets putting music on hold to care for her children. “I have no regrets," she says, "especially now that I have experienced being back in music and touring and have found out how selfish I have to be. I know how much it would have taken out of my children’s lives and I am so grateful I have been able to do both now.”
National Travel
For this tour, Bunyan's first of the United States, five backing musicians will join her; two of whom, Kevin Barker and Helena Espvall, play with psych-folk revivalist act Espers. The band will perform songs from both of Bunyan’s solo albums. Even though the Diamond Day songs were written long ago and were left untouched for most of that time, Bunyan feels that “they are still deeply rooted inside of me… They are my background.”
Bunyan & Co. will premiere no new pieces, but she is “slowly” writing more material. As long as it doesn’t take 35 more years for album No. 3 to come out, her deliberateness seems wholly acceptable.
WHO: Vashti Bunyan, Vetiver
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Tuesday, February 6
HOW MUCH: $15
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