From: owner-jinglejangle-digest@smoe.org (jinglejangle-digest) To: jinglejangle-digest@smoe.org Subject: jinglejangle-digest V1 #1 Reply-To: jinglejangle@smoe.org Sender: owner-jinglejangle-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-jinglejangle-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk jinglejangle-digest Saturday, February 7 1998 Volume 01 : Number 001 Today's Subjects: ----------------- welcome/Entertainment Weekly [Rachel ] rkb200Entertainment Weekly! [Rachel ] welcome and cool Request article/photo [Rachel ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 12:46:45 -0500 (EST) From: Rachel Subject: welcome/Entertainment Weekly Welcome everyone...I just wanted to say we only have like 10 people now on the new list, and considering there are like 125 or so people on the old list, I'm gonna wait till more people join to really get the list going. BUT I had to fill you in on the awesome news that...article on Mary Lou, Ani, and Cheri Knight in Entertainment Weekly (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on cover)!! I just got home and it was here so I didn't read it yet, but this looks very cool... :) Rachel ps. So, you can post if you want, but I may repost stuff when more people join, maybe by Sunday or Monday will give people enough time to rejoin. Also, I've been told there's gonna be a fundraiser for smoe.org in the near future, more details when I get 'em. Also, I found out they're selling 3 Mary Lou t-shirts at her shows - one of the self-titled cover with a white background, and white and black backgrounds of the Martian Saints cover! "Bring out the jester and shoot out the lights Rattle your diamonds and pearls There's swill for the swine and pills for the mind More rhythm and booze for the girls" -- Mary Lou Lord, "Throng of Blowtown" - -------------------------------------------------------------------------- my Mary Lou Lord page is at http://pages.nyu.edu/~rkb200/ To join Some Jingle Jangle List, the Mary Lou Lord mailing list, email me your with your name and email address. :) Email me for information about my zine I'M NOT WAITING. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 13:50:13 -0500 (EST) From: Rachel Subject: rkb200Entertainment Weekly! Hi all...Mary Lou and Ani, along with Cheri Knight, are featured in the new Entertainment Weekly (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on cover) with an article entitled "Our Fair Ladies" (page 68-69. Turn the page for an article called "A-'Hunting He Will Go" - about the awesome Elliott Smith. Is that Mary Lou's dog Mona in the photo? :) Mary Lou is holding her guitar and sitting in a chair looking at the dog; Ani has wild orange long braids and is sitting in some weird way that I probably would get stuck in if I tried, she is sitting in the street. Also, I'll have this up at my website (http://pages.nyu.edu/~rkb200) w/o the photos sometime this weekend. OUR FAIR LADIES Forget touchy-feely Lilith. Behold the grrrl power of edgy folkies Ani DiFranco, Mary Lou Lord, and Cheri Knight. by David Browne Last summer's Lilith Fair tour made rock fans, the press, and concert promoters alike rediscover the merits of a woman, an acoustic guitar, and her feelings. It also unintentionally promoted the notion that a woman with a guitar and her feelings made for a touchy-feely experience. How can Sarah McLachlan insert a little grit into this summer's second Lilith? For starters, she can recruit one of a slew of underground folkies who've been carrying on an alternative Lilith Fair all decade, on small labels and on tinier stages than those that hosted McLachlan's sister-songwriter road show. Ani DiFranco is the godmother of this scene, and with good reason: Her do-it-yourself aesthetic, punky hairdos, and caffeinated stage presence have been nothing short of uncompromising, even if her sensitive-folkie broadsides have been pretty conventional. Dilate (1996), her last studio album, used harder guitars, hip-hop shout-outs, and distortion effects to accent the anger, hurt, and self-loathing that raced through its songs. Little Plastic Castle (out Feb. 17) is comparatively calmer but takes several more musical steps ahead. Her brisk, full-bodied guitar chords and pugnacious voice remain front and center, but she ventures into folk noir ("Deep Dish") and incorporates ska-laced horns. She's even learning to relax without lapsing into cutesiness. The hymn "Pulse" unfolds dreamily, hypnotically, over 14 minutes--it's the alt-folk "Like a Hurricane." However, the flaws that have made DiFranco's albums such arduous listens still linger. As with many singer-songwriters before her, she lets her lyrics steer her melodies, not the other way around, resulting in songs that feel like nervous twitches. Her willingness to deflate her own pretensions is commendable ("I could join forces with an army of ornery hipsters/But then I guess I'd be out of a job," she admits in "Pixie"). But the disc also overflows with self-righteousness (jabs at the media and pop culture) and repeated, clunky swipes at loser boyfriends. If one isn't a "stupid circus clown," another is a "giant insect"; "Just give up/And admit you're an a--hole," she hectors a third. When she badgers a sulky store clerk to "suck up and be nice," you're tempted to throw her out of the establishment yourself. Shucking music-biz convention, DiFranco continues to record on her own label, Righteous Babe. Mary Lou Lord likewise started on an indie--the punk-inclined Kill Rock Stars--but judging by Got No Shadow, her major-label debut, Lord should have sold out years ago. Her sweet hush of a voice and winsomely strummed campfire-folk melodies weren't, and still aren't very punk; if anything, Lord is a wide-eyed balladeer, Janis Ian in army boots. Her collaborators on Got No Shadow (especially guitarist-songwriter Nick Saloman) know this and their tight, tidy folk-rock grooves lend a chimey buoyancy to songs like "His Lamest Flame" and Freedy Johnston's "The Lucky One." Lord's sound has been shaped as well; compare the urgent remake of "Some Jingle Jangle Morning" with the rawer but less focused 45 she made in 1993. Beyond her indie-rock resume, what distinguishes Lord from the Lilith posse is her journalistic composure. Whether lamenting road loneliness in "Western Union Desperate" or comparing a relationship to drifting vessels in the heart-tugging "Two Boats," she spells out her scenarios simply and directly. This dispassion can be frustrating--rarely has a song about jealous anger been as placidly delivered as "She Had You." Got No Shadow is also occasionally overbaked, but mostly it successfully whisks this former subway busker into the pop daylight. "Dead Man's Curve," the standout track on Cheri Knight's second album, The Northeast Kingdom, was written and sung by a woman, but it would probably give the Lilith crew the willies. Knight sings in the character of a woman killed in a car wreck, her spirit looking down upon the scene ("Cars with headlights on in a line/And weeping, was all I could remember"). The ghost is addressing her beau, who survived, but she's so distraught by their separation that she beckons him to rev up the engine again and join her in heaven. Creepy yet ethereal, pushed along by a grinding electric guitar, "Dead Man's Curve" is a modern-day, amplified Appalachian ballad. Knight's keen sense of the grimmer side of life doesn't end there. There's a hint of stoic, unflinching Blue Ridge mountains fatalism in her voice (even though she's from Massachusetts), and her songs are populated by other tragic women (the dead, long-suffering maid in the Celtic drone "Dar Glasgow") and mysterious troublemakers ("Black Eyed Susie"). Imagine Tom Sawyer's Becky all grown up, still single, and resigned to life. The hard-country arrangements, which swerve into sawdust honky-tonk or old-timey, never feel like re-creations of archaic mountain music. Bolstered by coproducer Steve Earle (whose label, E-Squared, released the album, and who plays guitar throughout), the music has rock & roll muscle. It feels both traditional and contemporary--a vintage John Deere tractor, refurbished with a Porsche engine. Little Plastic Castle: B- Got No Shadow: B+ The Northeast Kingdom: A- "Bring out the jester and shoot out the lights Rattle your diamonds and pearls There's swill for the swine and pills for the mind More rhythm and booze for the girls" -- Mary Lou Lord, "Throng of Blowtown" - -------------------------------------------------------------------------- my Mary Lou Lord page is at http://pages.nyu.edu/~rkb200/ To join Some Jingle Jangle List, the Mary Lou Lord mailing list, email me your with your name and email address. :) Email me for information about my zine I'M NOT WAITING. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 19:40:37 -0500 (EST) From: Rachel Subject: welcome and cool Request article/photo Welcome to everyone, some of you for the 2nd time. To post to this list, send mail to jinglejangle@smoe.org I'm too excited about the newest issue of Request (from Sam Goody) to not post, so everyone can just post now and I think this list is archived so other people can get to it later. In the new Request (March, Miss Elliott on cover), there is a photo of Mary Lou in this cool purple dress with big hair, she just looks so happy in it. The article is by Mark Binelli. Check out the cool Courtney response...I like it! Also, I typed up the Raygun article and it's on my website, if it's easy I'll cut and paste it to the list, but it's worth reading - says that "Western Union Desperate" was originally called "The J. Mascis Song". :) And Request has some other cool stuff, article on that Cheri Knight right next to Mary Lou's article - anyone know anything about Knight? the article: On the song "Subway," Mary Lou Lord wistfully evokes her years as (literally) an underground musician, playing for change at stations of Boston's subway system. She sings of "drowning hobos," spray-painted rails, and the "light or darkness" up above. Oddly, she fails to mention a fateful trip to the loo. "I was going to school in London," Lord recalls. "I lived in a squat and we didn't have any heat, so to avoid going back home after school, I'd sit in the subway and watch the musicians and be warm and do my homework. One day this guy Mark I made friends with asked me to baby-sit his equipment while he went to the bathroom. So I picked up the guitar and plunked out a chord. And someone threw money in right at that moment. And I was like, 'Oh, man.' "So the next day, my parents wired me money, and I got a shitty little guitar. And every day after school I would go down and play my chord and try to look as pathetic as I could. We had a meter in my basement. If you put 50 pence in it, you'd get electricity for, like, three days. So I might've made just five pounds a night, but it was enough to buy a pack of cigarettes and have electricity. It was cool by me." Flash-forward about a decade and Lord has parlayed that lonely chord into a major-label debut, Got No Shadow. It's a Lilith Fair-friendly effort that showcases her wispy, baby-doll vocals, the more fleshed-out sound tending toward quirky alterna-pop. Of course, a couple of years back, when Lord was promoting a self-titled EP for indie Kill Rock Stars, the only rock star the press wanted to discuss was her ex-flame Kurt Cobain. Some accused her of using the connection to stoke the PR machine; Lord insists Courtney Love created the problem by publicly dissing her in the media. "It was just like, my God, what a dumb-ass, disconnected, not-have-anything-to-do-with-my-record thing that is," Lord says. Unlike her Versace-clad nemesis, Lord readily gives shout-outs to her collaborators. Many of the songs on Shadow were cowritten with her pal Nick Salomon; the first single, "Lights Are Changing," is a cover of a song by Salomon's band, the Bevis Frond. "I completely, totally couldn't' have done it by myself," Lord admits. "I'm a hacker. I'm used to playing by myself in the subway, and now I'm recording for a major record company." Old habits die hard. Despite being the object of a label bidding war, Lord says she still takes her act to the street when she can. As for conventional venues, Lord says they still feel a bit strange. "In the subway you play and someone comes up and gives you a dollar and it's like, 'We like you.' When I do a show, I play a song and it's like, 'Well, where's my dollar?'" - --rachel "Bring out the jester and shoot out the lights Rattle your diamonds and pearls There's swill for the swine and pills for the mind More rhythm and booze for the girls" -- Mary Lou Lord, "Throng of Blowtown" - -------------------------------------------------------------------------- my Mary Lou Lord page is at http://pages.nyu.edu/~rkb200/ To join Some Jingle Jangle List, the Mary Lou Lord mailing list, email me your with your name and email address. :) Email me for information about my zine I'M NOT WAITING. ------------------------------ End of jinglejangle-digest V1 #1 ********************************