WASHINGTON COUNTY GETS WEIRD
The Weird Sisters’ Izaac Short was born in Coal Center, but the duo’s new album sounds light-years away
Who are the Weird Sisters? Some point to “Macbeth”or “Harry Potter” for the answer. Others, however, may tell you about a duo that includes Coal Center in Washington County’s hardest-to-wrangle earworm exporter, guitarist and co-vocalist Izaac Short.
The latest genre-shifting journey from the funk, blues and electronic rock outfit — comprised of the onetime adolescent Pittsburgh club-scene hired gun and a rock-radicalized professional orchestra defector, Gabrielle Lewis — is called “Who are the Weird Sisters?” And though written with the echoes of an entrancing visit to a NYC dance club throbbing in their brains, it’s far from a typical four-on-the-floor affair.
“If you want four orgasms in one night, listen to The Weird Sisters,” The Fray co-founder Joe King said in a statement. “If you want to experience GN-z11 [one of the farthest-known galaxies from Earth], listen to The Weird Sisters. If you want both, go to their show.”
On their second full album (available on most streaming platforms and YouTube) Short doles his words with streetwise-goofy and elevated attitude a la the White Stripes’ Jack White, debris-laden supernova prose exploding over monolithic blues rock riffs when the duo is at its molten groove core. And much of their gravitational pull comes from the mind-bending milieus and sleek space-faring dance atmospheres of Short’s musical co-pilot, Lewis, who portals in classically inspired keys, sax and ethereal vocal melodies.
Floating along in its head-bobbing ether, you’ll find yourself borne away to an interstellar dance club, spurred to gesticulating orbit by clean funk and disco chords, then catch one of Lewis’ haunting serenades in your disconnected headset and find you’re well on your way to cosmic apotheosis.
The Big Bang
But terra firma, and Short’s hometown of Coal Center, population 110, is approximately 32 billion lightyears from GN-z11.
Short, the son of a coal miner and a nurse, grew up on a 30-acre farm and wouldn’t make for Nashville, where The Weird Sisters formed, until he was 19 in 2015.
“It’s funny, there were a lot of things that I wasn’t allowed to do [growing up],” said Short. “I wasn’t allowed to have a cell phone. I wasn’t really allowed to spend too much time on the internet or watch TV. I was just encouraged to play my music and spend time outside, and that’s mostly what I did growing up, was run around the train tracks and abandoned buildings and play the guitar as much as I could.”
First inspired by hours spent with his dad’s 45s of Elvis, The Jordanaires, Chuck Berry and others, his parents enlisted Pittsburgh-guitarist-turned-Nashville hitmaker Dave Pahanish to teach their son guitar.
“I finally saw the movie ‘Back to the Future,’ ” Short said. “... You know when Marty McFly gets out there and he plays ‘Johnny B. Goode’? I saw that and was like, ‘I gotta get my hands on a guitar.’ ”
Reared in the Western Pa. scene by “old bluesmen” who shaped him into a hired gun by age 15, Short warped across the Mon Valley and to The Rex Theater, Diesel Club Lounge and The Mr. Roboto Project.
“The Pittsburgh scene was tricky, because this is like 2010 to 2015, and there were so many post-hardcore bands, just people screaming like ‘ Ahhh!’ into microphones, and I never fit into that,” Short said. “I was always trying to do some like bluesy rock, psychedelic stuff, because that’s where my heart has always led me.
“Everyone always reacted positively because what I was doing was just so different than the normal. You’d have 15 hardcore bands [at a showcase] and then whatever bluesy, funky [expletive] I was doing. ... It was such a backward thing to be doing, it seems like.”
Crash landing
Short experienced a revelation while on his two weeks’ notice with his thenband’s bass player at Mon Valley Country Club in Monongahela.
“We were just listening to Herbie Hancock ... riding around the golf cart digging holes, crashing into [expletive]. And then [the bass player] stuck it in neutral one day and we went down this super hill.
“The whole golf cart landed on top of me and landed right on my face — broke my face. ...I should have immediately gone to the hospital,” he said.
Instead, with Short likely concussed, the pair began “tapping into the universe in our own way.”
“We ended up staying up all night, jamming and listening to Herbie Hancock,” Short said.
“And I’ll tell you what, man, I was on the cusp of some funky stuff. I would say I was born with a little bit of funk, but after that experience, I was funky. We started writing the craziest music in the universe. It very much came from some very weird distant galaxy,” he said with a laugh.
The Spaghetti Incident
Inspired in part by Pahanish, Short left for Nashville in 2017, taking a job building studio furniture.
“In the back of my mind I was like, ‘I can move to Pittsburgh and see where that goes, but I know if I really want to do this I got to move to Nashville,’ ” Short said, noting he wanted to master recording. “It was no slight to Pittsburgh, it was just the music scene wasn’t bubbling the way that it is now. … I wanted more experience and to go to the source.”
There, he and Lewis found each other at a friend’s spaghetti dinner.
An accomplished orchestra conductor, the Canadian-Floridian, who also holds a love for jazz, had been allowed to leave school in the fourth grade to pursue a life in classical music.
“With my writing and everything I approach, the way I play the keyboard, the chords and harmonies I choose, it’s from a classical vantage point,” Lewis said. “I think that’s part of what makes us stand out.”
The pair bonded over Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” played over “The Twilight Zone,” started jamming and forged the band.
“I went full-on into the Weird Sisters because it was more creatively fulfilling for me,” Lewis said. “And the classical culture socially just wasn’t my thing. It was closed off.”
Feet on the ground
Since then, they’ve worked with such names as Grammy Award-winning producer Vance Powell (The White Stripes, Phish, Chris Stapleton) and bandmates who have come and gone. Their most recent work, however, is almost entirely DIY. It materialized at Brooklyn dance club House of Yes.
“We went in there and were just stunned by, first of all, how hot everyone was,” Lewis said. “Everyone was sexy. The sound was insane. The decor in that place, it’s just everything is a 10 out of 10. It’s just the wildest, most freaky, sexy, awesome place we’ve ever been to. ...We discovered electronic music together that night and we danced with reckless abandon in ways that we’ve never danced, the way musicians don’t dance, if you know what I mean.”
The pair left at 3 a.m., hoofing it the 4½ miles back to their room in Chinatown.
“We’re walking through the city at sunrise, people are jogging and biking and just getting their day started and we’re ending our night,” Lewis said. “And we kind of knew at that moment, we don’t know what’s going to change, but something’s going to change.”
Over the next year, the duo cancelled all shows based around in-process material, worked out how to play dance music live sans laptop and released the album on Feb. 3. Its first full track, “Bells,” speaks to Nashville.
“There’s all these expectations in Nashville for being a local band. You have to pretend like you like everybody. You have to be fake sometimes,” Short said. “You have to put the right stuff on Instagram and do this, that and the other, and that’s never what we’ve been about and never what we’ve done. …
“People from Western Pennsylvania, everybody’s honest, everybody’s real and I refuse to be any other way down here because I know, if Nashville makes me fake, and I go home, then who am I?”