Thalia Zedek's second coming
The Allston musician hits the road again with a retooled sound
For Thalia Zedek, it was time to mess with a good thing.
Coming off a successful tour behind her last album, 2004's "Trust Not Those in Whom Without Some Touch of Madness," the Boston singer-guitarist and her band wanted to move in new directions. It was time to reconfigure, finesse, rework their three-piece crew.
"We had taken the viola-drums-guitar lineup as far as we could," Zedek says of her trio with violist and trumpeter David Curry and drummer Daniel Coughlin. "I was afraid we were starting to sound the same from record to record. Maybe we needed another personality in the mix."
As Zedek began writing new songs in her Allston basement, serendipity soon knocked. Bassist Winston Braman (Consonant) came aboard for Zedek's quick tour with Dinosaur Jr. and never left. After the tour, Zedek got a call from pianist Mel Lederman. His band, Victory at Sea, had split up and he wanted to play. Quickly, her band had gone from a three- to a five-piece. Zedek had a new musical palette to work with, new material flowed, and soon the quintet was recording with producer Andrew Schneider (Unsane, Cave In).
Those sessions blossomed into the new "Liars and Prayers" (Thrill Jockey), which melds the chaotic intimacy of the former trio with a newfound rhythmic punch. The songs, delivered in Zedek's hardened-by-life alto, are blues in the way Nick Cave's Bad Seeds might be considered blues - a raw, low crunch of heavy lyrics and instrumentation that mirrors the melancholy weight of the songs they carry. It's probably the most powerful Thalia Zedek album to date. It's definitely her most political, bookended by jarring commentaries on government deception, religious hypocrisy, and a domestic policy based on fear.
" 'Next Exit' is about how there won't be a good end to the Iraq war no matter what," says Zedek, who plays at the Middle East Upstairs tonight. "With 'Begin to Exhume,' I really didn't want that song to be about what it ended up being about - lies and the culture of paranoia in the country. But I've always been something of a news junkie, I have an almost paranoid need to know what's going on around me. And I tend to write about whatever is in my head."
Zedek slings subtle arrows, more poetic, gut-level venting than venomous diatribes directed at particular officials, even though she may feel like launching the latter. She offers that writing songs with a political bent "wasn't a conscious thing. I just start singing a lot of the time, a few lines here, a few there. Then I'll figure what the song is about, sit down with a notepad, and work on it."
In spite of her laments, Zedek maintains she is a generally hopeful person. "Even though some people find my songs depressing," she says, "I'm pretty much an optimist."
Indeed, an upbeat though always restless undercurrent threads through the "down" themes of "Liars and Prayers." The striking "Do You Remember" recollects the day the twin towers fell, noting the blue skies over New York while thousands of people covered in white ash walked by. "Lower Allston," a love-hate ode to her longtime stomping grounds, sprang from strolls across a crumbling bridge, looking for familiar graffiti tags, shortly after the deadly bridge collapse in Minneapolis. The deeply personal "Body Memory" brightens some dark memories in a walk through Zedek's thoughts. Though her songs are full of discontent, there's catharsis in her singing.
"I don't know where this whole 'everyone likes happy music' idea comes from. When you think of most classic songs - look at Greek rebetica, or Russian folk songs, even Irish music, like 'Danny Boy' - they're really sad songs," the former Come frontwoman says. "The music expresses real passion, and part of passion is pain. When you hear them, you're not thinking, 'Oh, how depressing.' There's something beautiful, even uplifting."
What would Zedek consider the most optimistic of her bittersweet songs on "Liars and Prayers"? " 'Come Undone,' " she answers. "It's pretty personal and when I wrote it, it really disturbed me. But I think it's about having moved past something bad to the other side, and now I can see it in a good way."
With tonight's show, Zedek's band kicks off a few months on the road. Beyond the tour, Zedek hopes to tackle her fear of computers. "I'm a famous technophobe; I'm still figuring out how to get Garage Band to work." But one area where Zedek will remain happily retro is in the battle of compact discs versus vinyl records. "Liars and Prayers" was released on vinyl as well as CD, and Zedek prefers the vinyl version.
"Vinyl sounds so much better," she says. "With an old, say, Neil Young record on good speakers, you would actually feel like you were in the room. There was this 3-D-ness about it that you can't get from a CD. There was so much skill in recording those records. It's fascinating reading about George Martin and the Beatles sessions, or seeing the movie 'Sympathy for the Devil' - watching that song slowly transform into something incredible, realizing that it wasn't just born that way, and seeing all the hard work behind it."
She adds: "It's heartening, too, knowing that the Stones had to do 50 takes of that song before they got it right. I guess it does pay off to keep reworking your music."
