Ditto keeps it simple in solo debut
Beth Ditto never decided to go solo. At least not in the way that some people might imagine a frontwoman leaving behind the rest of her band and going it alone. Ditto, who sang vocals for the punk-pop band Gossip for nearly two decades, says it more or less just happened — as if it was the only road she could travel.
After Gossip released what proved to be its final album in 2012, guitarist Nathan “Brace Paine” Howdeshell moved back to Arkansas. That was a place Ditto knew well. They had both grown up there, and getting out was a part of their shared identity, a piece, even, of Gossip.
Ditto knew it wasn’t a place she could go back to. Not for long. They had looked for recording space, tried collaborating over distance, but “it became really difficult to write songs together and be in the same room,” Ditto says. “It was just very hard.”
And it wasn’t just logistically; Howdeshell was reconnecting with a past that Ditto had firmly left behind. The label, though, wanted an album. They put her in writing sessions with other musicians, and she turned out song after song. “But it just wasn’t working,” she says. “Who was I to think I could write a Gossip record by myself ?”
Instead, she had songs with a familiar thread; there was some Gossip in them, but really they felt like her own. She didn’t want to throw them away, and she and Howdeshell had always said if stuff got hard — if Gossip started to “feel like work in a bad way” — they’d quit. No use forcing a thing. So, she texted Howdeshell. “I think we should quit,” she told him. She wanted to write a solo album.
“Let that baby fly,” he texted back.
Ditto went back into the studio, sifting through the songs she had written, writing new ones. She had about 80 in all, and boiled those down to 12 for an album called “Fake Sugar,” which she’ll be performing live at the Independent on Wednesday, July 26.
The album takes Ditto back to her Southern roots. There’s a twang that’s worked its way throughout it. Even so, the record is genre-less. There are nods to disco and pop and country and soul and R&B — and her voice still offers up a punk edge. Some songs come storming at you; others are soft and considered.
None of this was on purpose exactly. Ditto knew she didn’t want to make a dance record. And she didn’t want to make some singer record. “Those would have been easy things to do,” she says. “I wanted to do something that felt more like me.” Something not so “cool.”
When Ditto says this, you believe her. She talks fast and doesn’t have much of a filter. She doesn’t mind doing her phone interview from the coat closet. Every so often she’ll pause to shout something sweet at somebody passing by. She giggles a lot and asks about you. She doesn’t mind talking about how you can’t go No. 2 on a tour bus.
It’s this sort of openness that defines the album in a lot of ways. There’s no pretense to it as she sings about how it feels to settle into a comfortable life and own a home in Portland, Ore., while her family down south still struggles day to day, or about the difficulties that come with marriage once its newness has worn off.
“The sun don’t always shine on you, Baby/ And that’s all right/ ‘Cause that’s what happens when you love in real life,” she sings in a sweet lilt over power ballad chords on one of the album’s standouts, “Love in Real Life.”
If the songs — their styles and themes — don’t always fit together, Ditto is fine with that. She’s not the sort to overthink things or worry about which song goes where. “Just put them on the record. And who cares?” she says. She laughs at this. That sort of attention to detail misses the point.
“I just wanted to make a record where there wasn’t too much thought put into it,” she says. “I just wanted to be true to myself.”
Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @RyanKost