FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: Steph Martyniuk for The New Yorker
Part Fifty-Three: U.S. Girls
___________
LIKE I do with my Modern Heroines feature…
PHOTO CREDIT: Colin Medley for Loud and Quiet
I am focusing on a terrific female artist who is one of the best in the world right now. I usually focus on their most-recent album. I shall get to some reviews of U.S. Girls’ 2020 album, Heavy Light (one of the very best from the year). U.S. Girls is a Toronto-based Experimental Pop project formed in 2007, consisting solely of American musician and record producer Meghan Remy. Remy signed to 4AD in 2015. She is a tremendous musician whose songwriting is among the finest in the world. There are a couple of interviews that caught my eye, because they are less about her creative process. For instance, the first is from Loud and Quiet of 2018. They took a tour of her wonderful and hugely interesting house. I wanted to highlight this first, because I think the home environment can impact and infuse the music artists make. There are some fascinating items in the home of U.S. Girls’ Meghan Remy. I have selected a couple for special focus:
“In far west Toronto, at one of the final stops on the subway, Meg Remy lives with her husband and collaborator Max Turnbull, who also records music under the name Slim Twig. Meg describes her quiet neighbourhood as “full of mostly old people” and she’s happy about how unhip it is.
Inside her place, there’s everything you’d expect to find in the home of US Girls – an outsider pop project that, over the course of ten years and six albums, has quietly and fully embraced a life of DIY creativity that goes hand in hand with Remy’s true rejection of consumerism and her fight for gender equality and fair pay for musicians.
To say there are books everywhere suggests there’s no order to them, but that’s not the case. The shelf above Meg’s computer is strictly for books that have already been read; the cupboard in her bedroom is for all those that haven’t. The stack on the right is of plays and scripts; the doorstep ones on the tree stump table are by other strong women like Yoko Ono and Clarice Lipsector. There are books for reading, books for studying, books for making flyers and T-shirts, books for elevating rubber plants. They’re partly responsible for why Meg and Max live without an Internet connection at home. “The conversations we have from reading are far greater than if we vegged out online,” she says.
Statues of Mary
These are a hangover of my Catholic upbringing. I’ve picked these up from all over the world, travelling. There’s a glow in the dark one from Portugal that’s super funny. You can always find a Mary somewhere, but I can’t explain how the Mary thing started. My grandmother had them and my mother had them and now it’s almost like a tradition… something that I feel guilty about, y’know what I mean? The Catholic religion is beyond anything that I can comprehend, and I’m completely against it, and yet I almost fetishise these little totems of this woman.
Bruce Springsteen portrait
I use to mention Bruce Springsteen in interviews and when I was onstage to put it out there that I’d love to meet him, but it’s still not happened. But my Bruce obsession has dwindled a bit – not with the music, but, y’know, he’s the perfect example of when art and commerce meet. I have a hard time getting over the fact that he’s stock-piled so much wealth, so don’t ever look up peoples’ net worth – that’s what I learned. I was like, ‘I wonder how much Bruce is worth,’ and then I looked it up and was like, ‘Oh fuck! It’s like 300 million. I’m sure he gives a lot, but you could give more, because the thing with all these people is it’s still coming in each year. Forget the new albums and tours, just the back catalogue! I just don’t understand why he’d keep so much. You can’t even spend it. It’s almost as if you could give everything away because it’s just going to be replaced”.
I am really interested in artists’ homes and how they work. Maybe it is a stretch to suggest that her home comes directly into her music. That said, reading the interview from Loud and Quiet, U.S. Girls (I shall refer to her as such going forward) has a great environment and space to imagine and create her beautiful music!
PHOTO CREDIT: Colin Medley for Loud and Quiet
I will end with a playlist consisting of the best U.S. Girls songs. I am keen to get to reviews for Heavy Light. Despite the fact there are several co-writes on the album, it is very much the voice and spirit of our heroine who shines through. Before coming to an interview that is a little more music-specific, a Talkhouse interview from December of last year is another that struck me:
“Meghan Remy is the creative force behind U.S. Girls, and she released her latest album under the name this year, just as the pandemic took over everyone’s lives. Jack Name just released Magic Touch, his third album. The two have known each other a while, and U.S. Girls even covered a Jack Name song.
“Meg: Have you seen anyone during that time, during the major lockdown time?
Jack: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was dating somebody, but that was funny, too, because it expedited the whole thing where it was like you’ve been with somebody for three months, but it feels like you were together for three years. You’re pretty much living together. It’s a weird kind of way to do things.
Meg: Well, it seems that people were either breaking up or it just seemed to be a very revealing thing.
Jack: If you’re in somebody’s life and you’re excited about it, and then all of the sudden someone says, “Oh, you guys got to just stick together now.” It doesn’t seem like a big deal at all at first. And then a few months in you’re like, “Woah.” I’m grateful that that was a part of that experience for me. The people that I know that were completely alone through it felt like that it was a good realization after the challenge.
Meg: I know people that didn’t touch another human being for six months.
Jack: I know people that are still freaked out, like, “I’m not leaving my house.” And I get kind of nervous about some of my friends because they’re getting kind of weird.
Jack: I’m glad for the people that make it crazy big and they have mansions and everything. But I feel like music, in general, I feel like when I just have something that I’m doing that’s like this normal, totally unrelated thing, I feel it’s a little more sane, too. It can get kind of dark when it goes the other way sometimes.
Meg: For sure. I can remember a really fulfilling time in my life when I was cleaning houses and getting paid cash. I made my own schedule. I could pick up clients and drop them whenever I wanted. I could take time off and I could go play shows and go on tour. And then I had lots of free time to make music. And I had just enough money. And yet it was this separation in my work. I didn’t rage against it because it was the thing that allowed me to fund going on tour”.
I feel the next few years will see a shift where there is greater equality in terms of gender. I feel women will be put more at the forefront and rightly recognised. There are a lot of terrific rising artists worth watching out for. In terms of those who are more established, I feel U.S. Girls is one of the absolute best. I am intrigued to see what follows Heavy Light.
When promoting the album, The Guardian spoke with U.S. Girls. Not only do we get an insight into her songwriting and process; it seems that there is a lot of self-criticism and scrutiny:
“Her lyrics encompass abused women, global heating, political revolution. The Quiver to the Bomb casts the climate crisis as Mother Nature inventing humanity out of loneliness, then “kicking us off her land”. Remy says, “it’s going to get really interesting” when our social orders break down as a result, when “you can’t pay attention to them any more because your survival is so immediate. As a white western person, I’ve never been in a war zone. So we’ll see what that’s like.”
The single 4 American Dollars is a socialist anthem about the evils of accumulated wealth (“numbers on a screen mean nothing to me / We’re on the same boat, just different seats”), sounding like a 60s girl group anxiously entering the disco era. “You can’t take money with you,” Remy says. “But people want money, because it covers up all the stuff that should actually be your job, which is feeling, being curious, trying to know yourself, trying to know others.”
I don’t have an off switch when it comes to drinking – I just keep going. That’s the way my brain’s wired
This is Remy’s chief project. “It’s that cliche: if you can’t love yourself, you can’t love someone else. I’ve been in a relationship for 10 years now and I’ve found that is the case. The other person starts acting like a mirror for you and it’s so revealing.” What has she seen? “I don’t have an off switch when it comes to drinking – I just keep going. Because the way my brain is wired, it wants that, and my body’s not going to be the one to reveal it to me. Also, I have always had an inner monologue that’s always really negative about myself, and living intimate with someone means it starts coming out. It’s like a tic, I’m so hard on myself. And when someone who loves you is like, ‘Give yourself a break!’ … there’s nothing more powerful than someone feeling pain for you. It’s really healing.”
This relentless scrutiny of herself and others has left her with an almost supernatural-sounding ability to sniff out repressed feelings. “When I know that something doesn’t sit right, I feel it physically,” she says. “My stomach starts hurting and I know there’s something more there. Some things happened to me when I was a kid that broke that part of my brain, or implanted a bullshit detector. I have these really fine-tuned antenna, constantly picking things up because I’m trying to survive.”
This relentless scrutiny of herself and others has left her with an almost supernatural-sounding ability to sniff out repressed feelings. “When I know that something doesn’t sit right, I feel it physically,” she says. “My stomach starts hurting and I know there’s something more there. Some things happened to me when I was a kid that broke that part of my brain, or implanted a bullshit detector. I have these really fine-tuned antenna, constantly picking things up because I’m trying to survive.”
There is a long pause. “This is always the part in so many interviews where it’s like: do I want to go there or not? I’ve been dancing around it in my work for ever.” Her songs are full of lines like “we can never know the hands we’re in, until we feel them grip”, from MAH, which stands for Mad As Hell. “Do I want to be that vulnerable and tell someone exactly what happened? I feel everyone knows what happened.” It was an abuse situation? “Mm-hmm, yeah.” A physical one? “Mm-hmm. So when that happens to you, and you decide to acknowledge it for yourself, it’s a paradigm shift. I can’”.
I am going to finish off with a couple (of the many) positive reviews afforded Heavy Light. It is a remarkable album and, to me, one of the very best U.S. Girls releases. It establishes her as one of the finest songwriters and artists of this age. In their review, this is what AllMusic had to say:
“U.S. Girls isn't as much a band as an ever-mutating organism. Begun by experimental songwriter Meg Remy in the late 2000s as a noisy solo act backed by reel-to-reel tapes, the project grew into a monolith of larger-than-life pop. 2018's In a Poem Unlimited was one of Remy's finest moments, with her polymathic songwriting bending disco-funk, glam rock, and ambient composition into new forms. Heavy Light expands on the colorful complexities of In a Poem Unlimited, with Remy dipping her toes in different styles on almost every song but retaining the experimental intensity that has always been at the core of U.S. Girls. Album opener "Four American Dollars" juxtaposes a light, summery soul instrumental with lyrics about destitution, poverty, and the inevitability of death. It's one of several moments on the album where Remy is joined by a host of powerful backing vocalists, a technique that's been flirted with on previous albums but is utilized to its fullest on these songs.
This shows up in the form of girl group melodrama on eerie, beautiful songs like "IOU" and "Denise, Don't Wait" and theatrical synth-heavy glam rock on "The Quiver to the Bomb." The brief spoken interludes that showed up a few times on In a Poem Unlimited are swapped out here with several similar pieces, this time various voices stacked on top of each other answering survey questions about childhood memories. These interludes underscore themes of nostalgia and painfully looking back that become central to Heavy Light. "Woodstock '99" mulls over a stream of melancholic younger memories over a syrupy lite rock instrumental borrowed from late-'60s AM radio hit "MacArthur Park." Looking back also takes the form of several songs revisited from the U.S. Girls back catalog being reworked to various degrees of reinvention. Album standout "Overtime" takes on new life with the dramatic emphasis of newly added backing vocals, and album closer "Red Ford Radio," originally a dark smear of distorted vocals and looped drums on 2010's Go Grey, becomes a shockingly clear statement of fear and intensity. Remy takes a personal inventory throughout Heavy Light, sometimes contemplating the present but oftentimes remembering or returning to different threads from the past. It's another huge step forward for the uncontainable U.S. Girls organism, one that skillfully combines the immediacy of personal memories with Remy's uncanny ability to inject her singular creative voice into every sound she touches”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff Bierk
I will wrap things up with a hugely positive review from The Line of Best Fit. It is interesting reading the various perspectives and examinations of the incredible Heavy Light:
“Opening with “4 American Dollars”, it’s just heaven from there; a pure, ecstatic plastic soul, right down to the chiming Philly Soul guitars and rapturous backing vocals. “Born to Lose” is one of a handful of tracks that evokes Patti Smith’s largely-forgotten 1997 collection Peace and Noise; from Remy’s impassioned, Smith-esque vocals to the clear-eyed spiritual lyrical focus. The subdued atmosphere extends out to the bewitching, earnest longing of “Denise, Don’t Wait”, and the haunting glow of “IOU”, which may as well be lit by the Moon for all of its seductive romanticism.
The album also offers reinterpretations of three old tracks: “Red Ford Radio”, from the 2010 LP Go Grey makes an appearance in a new guise with a haunted, ghostly thunder trailing behind it. It closes the album on a startling, unsettling note – listen to how claustrophobic Remy’s voice is, and how clamorous the instrumentation is. “Statehouse (It’s a Man’s World)” first appeared on the third U.S. Girls LP, U.S. Girls on KRAAK, and now surfaces here in a rapturous gospel reworking.
“Overtime”, from 2013 EP Free Advice Column, is transformed into a slice of insistent, pulse-pounding funk – with a special saxophone appearance by Jake Clemons, current E Street Band member and nephew of the legendary, sadly missed Clarence Clemons.
The closest track to the sound of the previous record comes on “And Yet It Moves/Y Se Mueve”, filled with Latin tropicália and funky percussion. It’s an album highlight on a record full of them. Across the rest, Heavy Light covers topics ranging from the personal (on “Woodstock ’99”, where Remy’s narrator compares her experience of that disastrous day with her friends) to the ‘planetary’, even on the conversational interludes - which add their own nostalgic kick. On “The Quiver To The Bomb”, the focus is on how short human history is in the grand scheme of universal expansion. There’s even some suitably cheap-sounding sci-fi synths and a dizzying vocal crescendo.
From a personal perspective, you might miss the electric-burn intensity of the lead guitars from In a Poem Unlimited, or you might miss the Iggy’s The Idiot-meets-Marc Bolan-and-Madonna-on-a-Tarantino-soundtrack vibes, but ultimately, there’s just as much to enjoy here. Heavy Light is more subdued, more restrained, and certainly more beautiful than its big sister. God knows where Remy will go from here, but you can rest assured that it won’t be boring”.
I shall leave things there. I wanted to draw people’s attention to the incredible music of U.S. Girls. Since 2008’s Introducing... through to genius albums like 2018’s In a Poem Unlimited, Toronto’s U.S. Girls has continued to wow and distinguished herself as a future legend. She has put out so much incredible music, though we all know (and hope) that there is going to be…
SO much more.