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September 11-17, 2008
buzz@boulderweekly.com
Raising her voice
Jesse Sykes speaks out on fans, critics and the Seattle Sound
by Dave Kirby
Proud to be gay American
Boulder Pride celebrates gay culture with their annual festival
by Margaret Hair
Raising her voice
Jesse Sykes speaks out on fans, critics and the Seattle Sound
by Dave Kirby
I don’t like cell phones very much. I prefer to do my interviews on my old rotary corded phone,” Jesse Sykes explained when we caught up to her last weekend, an oddly confessional introduction to her abiding techno-skepticism. “There’s just something about having the cord there that’s, I don’t know, grounding in a weird way. Gives me something to hang onto.”
Hanging on, or teetering between hanging on and giving up, is a sentiment that lingers through Sykes’ songs, and maybe most compellingly on her third and latest long player, Like, Love, Lust & The Open Halls of the Soul, released with her band The Sweet Hereafter earlier this year. Frayed stringlets of memory and exhausted emotion, bruised redemption, the impossibility of love or the inevitability of loss — Sykes’ raspy murmur, threadbare imagery and compelling command of space trace mini-operas of half-spoken thought and calloused passion.
Produced by Tucker Martine (The Long Winters, The Decemberists) and co-arranged by band guitarist and longtime Sykes collaborator Phil Wandscher (formerly of Whiskeytown), the album comes as follow-up to the widely acclaimed Oh, My Girl from 2004. This year’s offering, though, inches away from the alt-country label slapped on Sykes’ rattletrap Seattle club sound, into an almost murky neo-goth-folk — intimate and, at times, almost disincarnate. Anyone calling this year’s model alt-country hasn’t wasted much time actually listening to it.
Sykes sounds pretty content to have shaken the moniker.
“I think we’ve shed it, at this point. We’re out there touring with bands like Black Mountain, and when we play live… it just comes across a lot heavier. The thing is, we’re attracting a lot of kids that would otherwise be listening to much heavier stuff. I think that’s a good thing.
“I had some douchebag out there, some longtime big fan of alt-country bands, slamming the record because it is ‘too self-absorbed’ or ‘too serious’ or something. But that’s the point — we’re not trying to be an alt-country band. We’re not trying to fit into some category.
“But still, you know, I think there’s something really… people don’t listen anymore. There’s so much out there, so much digital music, people these days just want to categorize it, collect it, horde it. You go out to a MySpace page, ‘Oh, she’s read Gabriel Garcia Márquez, so she’s just like me,’ you know? It’s absorbing culture by association. And I really think it’s done terrible things to our culture, and the relationship people have to art. Any kind of art.”
The album, we noted, struck us as deep craft, meticulous and poised. It spoke to us about an artist struggling with, and maybe even conquering, a kind of perfectionism.
“It’s a weird question. Every time you set a standard for yourself, as you mature and you get better at what you do, you raise the bar a little higher. You end up chasing yourself. It’s like a cat-and-mouse game, like looking in the mirror and trying to see what you really look like.
“So, I’ve kind of learned that what you do will always be seen by someone else, and they’ll see something that you don’t. The thing about making a record is, the end result, for me anyway, is that it never comes out the way you imagined it when you went into it. And a lot of times, you find passages or new lyrics that take one idea into a totally new direction.
“That’s the kind of thing Phil [Wandscher] is a master at. He has this almost classical ability to create passages and bridges and connections that give the sound a whole different form. He’ll come up with a bridge, and all of a sudden a three-minute song is a seven-minute song.
“And the thing about this record… it was a hard record to make. We didn’t plan everything out ahead. A few songs were practically written in the studio. It was actually an extremely spontaneous record in a lot of ways.”
Sykes also handles the frequent comparisons between her voice and song craft, and that of Marianne Faithful, with resigned grace.
“I’m OK with it. I mean, if I were going to be compared to anyone, I’m honored it be her. She was very complex, someone who really sang as a person, instead of just a woman.”
Sang from her scar tissue, as much as her heart.
“I like that, definitely. Something very human about her. So, no, I don’t mind that much.
“The thing is, I’ve got this jaw disease [TMJ]. There’s some nerve damage and half of my face is paralyzed when it’s really bad. So, it’s added an… almost a lisp, or a rasp. It’s progressive — if you listen to our earlier work, you can hear how it’s gotten worse over the years. I mean, I have a weird voice anyway, but this definitely affects it. ”
We asked about remarks we read in another publication that sounded vaguely disparaging of her hometown of Seattle, where she moved almost two decades ago, eager to escape the leafy-suburb claustrophobia of Westchester County, New York — something about the Seattle scene being too cynical for earnest, deeply felt songwriting.
“Y’know, that’s the thing about interviews. A writer can take a sentence or two and all of sudden spin a grand statement from a tiny window.
“I love Seattle, it’s the best city in America for music. We have the best bands, the best clubs. I love my friends and my fans… everything.
“I’ve kinda had several different lives here, and with everything that went down in the ’90s, a lot of people felt very chewed up and spit out from it. The whole thing about every band coming was going to be the next big band from Seattle. But I got here before it all hit, and like a lot of people, watched it come and go. For me, it’s still the best place to be.”
On the Bill
Jesse Sykes and The Sweet Hereafter will perform with Chris Brecht at 8:30 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 15, at the Fox Theatre, 1135 13th St., Boulder, 303-443-3399.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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Proud to be gay American
Boulder Pride celebrates gay culture with their annual festival
by Margaret Hair
The PrideFest Block Party probably could attract the attention it’s after based solely on its wealth of entertainment options and dozens of vendors. If that doesn’t work, the event has size and location on its side in its effort to raise awareness for Boulder County’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
“People who aren’t planning to go to it run into it and are exposed to the fact that we have a community in Boulder County,” Boulder Pride Executive Director Aicila Lewis said of the daylong event, which hits Pearl Street Mall and the Boulder County Courthouse lawn on Saturday, Sept. 13.
In its sixth year, the block party features a host of queer artists from Boulder County, with music and dance from Something About Lulu, Ryan Mintz, James Roy, The Evolving Doors Dance Troupe and Disco Mountain. Lewis said she hopes to be supportive of the local community in every aspect of the event, which features an extensive children’s area with a magician, arts and crafts, a balloon artist, a henna body painter, a juggler and face painters.
The goal is to offer an outlet for LGBT people to touch on what that one aspect of their personality means to them, and to be able to celebrate that aspect without feeling isolated or alone, Lewis said.
“The point of Pride is to give people a chance to feel safe being open in their relationships and to raise awareness that we have a queer community in Boulder County, and that while they may be a minority, they’re still an important part,” she said.
Outside of the supportive festival atmosphere, Boulder Pride will use the event as a platform for discussion and exposure of issues affecting the LGBT community. There will be a booth offering a chance to sign up for smoking cessation classes and a makeshift wedding chapel to draw attention to the more-often-than-not illegal status of gay marriage. Those who visit the chapel will get a marriage certificate with relevant facts printed on the back — namely, that it is not valid in 48 states.
“The question of marriage is not religious, and it’s not moral. It’s about a legal recognition of a relationship that is already occurring,” Lewis said. By addressing key issues and featuring local artists, Lewis said she hopes the block party presents a united front.
“The most important part of this for us is to really raise awareness in the community, and to let people know we’re here — we’re in your neighborhoods, living our lives, paying our taxes, raising our kids,” Lewis said. “And we want everyone to come, not just people who are part of our community, but people who are a part of Boulder County’s community.”
After the block party ends, festivalgoers have a couple of options: the official Boulder Pride after-party at Firefly Nightclub, and Queerapalooza, a concert featuring six Colorado gay and lesbian music acts.
Ryan Mintz, an acoustic singer-songwriter who helped organize Queerapalooza and will perform on its Laughing Goat stage, said the event is not meant to compete with the Firefly dance party.
“It’s really to add to the celebration and give people more options of things to do,” Mintz said of the concert lineup, which is heavy on singer-songwriters Mintz met in songwriting workshops at the annual Folks Festival in Lyons.
“We decided, as a group of independent artists here in Colorado, that we wanted to join in the celebration with the Pride festival and share our music with the same audience,” he said. While five out of six acts lean toward acoustic music in the concert’s first year, Mintz said future lineups will be more diverse, and that he’s already seen interest from groups in a variety of genres.
In addition to drawing attention to musical talent present in the LGBT community, Mintz said he hopes the concert highlights the prowess of local musicians in general.
“There’s just a lot of local talent, and not everybody is always exposed to a lot of the stuff that’s happening,” he said. “That’s exciting to me, to be able to open people up to new things that are happening right in their own backyard.”
In the Box:
The PrideFest Block Party will take place on the Pearl Street Mall and the Boulder County Courthouse lawn from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 13. Queerapalooza begins at 7 p.m. at the Laughing Goat, 1709 Pearl St., Boulder, 303-440-4628. For more information, contact Boulder Pride at 303-499-5777 or www.boulderpride.org.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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