LIGHTEN UP! MEET ERIN RAE, EASY-GOING MODERN WOMAN OF TRIPPY AMERICANA.
YOU KNOW your mom lives in the sticks when the local draw is the World’s Largest Cedar Bucket. “Only in America,” chuckles Erin Rae, whose mother’s current locale – near Oxford, Mississippi – has this honour. “You get these weird attractions. Like this summer, we were on our way to Red Rocks and stopped in Kansas to see the World’s Largest Ball Of Twine…”
Supersizing might be a national pastime, but it’s far from Erin Rae’s aesthetic. The Nashville-based singer’s tunes have a simple beauty and her voice a pure clarity – a little bit country, a little bit Laurel Canyon. “When Erin opened her mouth and started singing I was hooked,” says Jonathan Wilson, the producer of her bewitching new album, Lighten Up.
“And it’s the lack of affect in the vocal that makes her music so easy to listen to.”
Raised Erin Rae McKaskle in Jackson, Mississippi and Nashville, Tennessee by parents who sang Judy Collins in the house, she’s been a performer since the age of five, when she joined her dad on-stage for a chorus of Tex Williams’s 1947 hit Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette). Later, she quit college after one semester to try her luck as a singer-songwriter. “My dad was so encouraging of it,” she says.
“I suppose I’ve always been a daddy’s girl. Whatever he thinks is cool is OK by me.”
What Mike McKaskle thought cool included Doc Watson and Mississippi John Hurt – the heritage music of the American South. Rae carries some of that gravity while exploring themes she hopes challenge her homeland’s cultural climate. Recent single Modern Woman called for the junking of some old-fashioned definitions of femininity and was accompanied by a video featuring friends from across the distaff spectrum, including Brittany Howard. Crucially, it’s more finger-popping than finger-wagging – a balance Rae is keen to strike.
“I have a song called Bad Mind from my last record that’s talking about being afraid to be gay in the South,” she reminds MOJO. “And I have songs about mental illness. At the same time, it’s important to bring lightness to the stage. I don’t wanna be, ‘Hey guys! Now we’re gonna play you this song about depression!’”
Rae’s two previous albums have delivered their heavy payloads with a gentle touch. Lighten Up takes that sense of Zen ease with life’s crises to another level. Working with Rae in his Topanga studio, Jonathan Wilson has added a subtly ’60s sizzle. “I knew I wanted to feature Erin’s voice above all,” he says. “But the demos were beautiful and trippy, so we wanted to expand on the psychedelia.”
One thing Wilson left alone is Rae’s habitually leisurely pacing. In fact, Rae reveals, he slowed one song, the opening Candy & Curry, until it was more languid still.
“I keep joking that, like, one day I’ll write a faster song,” shrugs Rae, “but I have too much of that Taurus energy. Take it easy, y’know?”
Lighten Up is released by Thirty Tigers on February 4.
“It’s important to bring lightness to the stage.” ERIN RAE
LOS BITCHOS’s lead guitarist Serra Petale was drumming with London indie-rockers Kid Wave when her eureka moment arrived. Playing a compilation album called The Roots Of Chicha: Psychedelic
Cumbias From Peru, she came across the sashaying instrumental A Patricia by
Los Destellos – a 1960s combo credited with introducing the electric guitar to Peruvian indigenous musics. The discovery sparked a life-changing realisation.
“I was like, ‘Ah, right, of course you can do an instrumental band – why can’t you?’” Petale recalls today. She’d been playing guitar privately at home, but “lyricism never came to me”, and A Patricia showed her how she could express her tequila-bumping personality without the necessity for words.
Petale, who grew up in Western Australia, shared her find with her friend Josefine Jonsson, who’d moved to London from Sweden to play bass in punk bands. Together with the Uruguayan woman who’d hipped them to cumbia’s dance-crazy pleasures, keytar beginner Agustina Ruiz, the three formed Los Bitchos in late 2016, quickly sourcing Brit drummer Nic Crawshaw via a shout-out on Facebook.
A quintessentially London collision of cultures, Los Bitchos’s music contains more than just straight-ahead cumbia, with strong flavours of surf-guitar twang and exotica thrown in. While Ruiz brings diverse South American influences, Petale is half Turkish and had grown up listening to Turkish psych-rockers like Bariş Manço, which, she says, “is where that little bit of zing-zang comes in”. “Plus,” adds Jonsson, “me and Nic used to be in punk bands and didn’t grow up with a lot of world music. We don’t know the rules of certain genres, but we do know how to play with a bit of attitude.”
After debuting in the capital’s dives, their infectious sound and vision soon landed them a European tour support with Mac DeMarco. And while opening for NYC post-punks Bodega at Dalston’s Shacklewell Arms, they wowed Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand, who subsequently produced their debut single.
“He came to a lot of our rehearsals,” reveals Petale, “and really helped us bring the best out of the songs.”
The relationship gradually extended into an opulent debut album, Let The
Festivities Begin!, bubbling over with upful moods, irresistible grooves and, indeed, pan-global
‘zing-zang’.
“We’ve never talked about long-term goals,”
Jonsson concludes of their in-the-moment ethos. “We don’t overthink it. We’re all so happy with what is right in front of us.”
Let The Festivities Begin! is released by City Slang on February 4.
“We know how to play with attitude.” JOSEFINE JONSSON