Thompson-King gives life to ‘Melancholia’
MUSIC
On the surface, Hayley Thompson-King’s new album, “Psychotic Melancholia,” is a wild and lusty set of rough-edged country songs. But after you catch all the biblical references and make it to the German lieder that closes the album, you realize the locally based singer’s world runs a lot deeper. She’s the kind of artist who can rock your soul and tweak your brain at the same time.
Part of the credit, she says, goes to the characters who invade her head when she sits down to write a song.
“I’ll keep returning to this one character, someone who’s a bad man or at least a bad figure. He’s someone who feels an intense love that’s got a powerful hold on him — he wants to escape, but he can’t leave. There’s a strong loyalty keeping him there. That’s the best way I can explain it. It’s not a real person in my life, but someone in my psyche who I write all the songs to.”
She’ll premiere the new album at City Winery tonight with an ace band that includes lead guitarist Pete Weiss (the Weisstronauts), bassist Chris Maclachlan (Human Sexual Response) and drummer Rob Motes. Sharing the bill is another of Boston’s top-drawer songwriters, Dennis Brennan.
Thompson-King began writing the album soon after her exit from the wellliked psychedelic band Major Stars, with whom she made two albums. While she was wrestling with that bad man in her head, she was also flashing back to her religious childhood, which included a stint in a performance group called the Clowns for Christ. This led her to think about the role of women in the Bible, which turns up in the songs “Lot’s Wife” and “No Room for Jesus.”
“I hate the idea of not being able to question it when you’re told what to do by a higher power. Lot’s wife disobeyed her husband and was turned into a pillar of salt — but she wasn’t evil, just defiant. So the song is my fantasy of her, not being killed, but being far away to watch the city burn down.”
The biggest surprise is the operatic track, Robert Schumann’s “Wehmut.” It’s not only a nod to her musical roots — she was operatically trained and still teaches voice at Bunker Hill Community College — but a key to the emotions behind the album.
“None can feel the sorrows, the bitter grief in song,” she said, quoting the English translation of the lyric. “Now, that really spoke to me. Schumann felt this sadness, this haunting, and that’s a lot of what I write about. ‘Psychotic melancholia’ was what they said he died of. Also, it was originally part of a song cycle, and to me, that’s the old version of a concept album.
“I keep trying to write about the kinds of things I really should write about — like being happy, which is an emotion I genuinely do have. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”