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Bio
for Amy Ray: Lung of Love
In
the pantheon of body parts romanticized in song, the heart is
clearly the favorite (See: All Pop Songs), while the lung is as
overlooked and misunderstood as a gangly feminist at a beauty
pageant. But in Lung of Love, Amy Ray's sixth solo album in a
decade, the punk-folk icon gives the humble apparatus its due.
Ray
has always been on the side of the underdogs. In the mid 1970s,
Amy Ray was a Georgia 'tween, plucking out Partridge Family songs
on her guitar and dreaming of becoming David Cassidy, the ardent
teen idol who got all the girls. She loved the psychedelic hippies
like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, too. A poetic tomboy with
big green eyes, Ray began writing songs about injustice and the
tragedy of unrequited love, and playing her music in the schoolyard.
"Even then, I had a sense that what I was writing was not for
authority," says Ray. "I wrote for me and my peers."
By
age 15, Ray was making music as "Saliers and Ray" with her school
friend, Emily. Other than artists like Cris Williamson and Holly
Near who were part of the Women's Music Movement, gay musicians
weren't open about their sexual identities, so Ray's musical world
was straight and her private life was queer. Both lives were taking
off. After a chance glance through the dictionary to find a word
they liked, Saliers and Ray were reborn as the Indigo Girls -a
Grammy award-winning, multiplatinum-selling, social justice-promoting
beloved folk-rock duo with dozens of recordings and thousands
of tour dates under their belts. Spurred by an increasingly visible
gay rights movement (and unable to stomach singing about standing
up for yourself while being cagey about their love lives), the
Indigo Girls were early celebrities to be "out" on record.
At
36, Ray released Stag in 2000, her first solo album. Although
she'd been writing folk, then rock, music for a majority of her
life, Ray sensed that neither was the ideal form for what she
was trying to express. "When I first listened to Patti Smith or
The Replacements, I thought, 'That's the way I feel, but I can't
figure out how to write that [kind of] song,'" she told indie-artist
Lois Maffeo in a 2000 interview. "It took me a long time to figure
it out."
"It's
not like I felt short changed or blocked by the Indigo Girls,"
says Ray. "But there was something I was trying to express that
didn't fit into that format." Stag, she says, "was a desperate
attempt to get these songs out of my system." The record was eclectic-Gothic
ballads ("Johnny Rottentail"), raucous odes to suffrage feminists
("Lucystoners"), and a pin-drop quiet song about the death of
her grandma ("Lazyboy"). It was recorded piecemeal, all around
the country. The effect was raw, urgent, and exciting.
Prom,
in 2005, was more "thematic and focused." Ray created a band of
"punk royalty"-Donna Dresch and Jody Bleyle from Team Dresch,
Kate Schellenbach from Luscious Jackson-and played with the same
musicians throughout the record. "I wanted to work in a structured,
less frenetic way," says Ray. Prom evoked the epic feelings of
the high school era, whether it was coming out in a small town
("Rural Faggot") or the sureness of a pro-life zealot in the anthemic
"Let It Ring." She was touring so much as a solo artist that she
released Live from Knoxville in 2006.
By
Didn't It Feel Kinder in 2008, Ray worked with her first producer
since launching her solo career-Greg Griffith, who had produced
Le Tigre, The Butchies, and Vitapup. "At first I found his strong
ideas challenging to work with-it felt like he didn't value the
experience I already had in the studio," says Ray. "Later, I realized
what a gift it is that he doesn't defer to me." The fine-tuning
Griffith pushed Ray's gritty but always flexible "voice into new
territory," and added "extra sparkle and sheen in the production,"
according to Paste magazine. The partnership rendered her third
solo album the most musically mature and heartbreaking.
Greg
Griffith is back in Lung of Love-and this time as a co-writer,
the first time Ray has collaborated as a songwriter. (She and
Saliers write separately, then come together to arrange and record.)
Another first: After all of the basic tracks were recorded, keyboardist
Julie Wolf laid Moog, Farfisa, Rhodes, and Wurlitzer sounds on
top-the vintage keyboards and synths both adding to the uniqueness
of the record and creating a subtly unifying motif for the diverse
songs.
"In
a way, I came back to the frenetic expression of Stag," says Ray.
"I didn't try to make the songs hang together musically or lyrically
in any thematic way. I just used what I learned about songwriting,
performance, when to keep a vocal, when to throw it away, and
tried to edit the songs until they were short and sweet." Short
and sweet, indeed. Each song is a perfectly imperfect confection
presented in her tender, scratchy voice. Backed by Greg Griffith
(Bass and Guitars), Julie Wolf (Keys), and former Butchies Melissa
York (Drums) and Kaia Wilson (Guitars and Vocals), the songs have
an urgent, bright economy. Guest vocalists pop up throughout the
record, including Brandi Carlile, Jim James, and Lindsay Fuller.
Although the songs are threaded together by an economy and craft
of writing, they cover a diverse musical geography, from Appalachia
to Punk Rock.
Working
in Griffith's Greensboro, NC studio, Lung of Love was recorded
to analog tape. And according to Ray, "even though they had to
constantly wrestle with the machine, it was worth the glue it
provided." A song like, The Rock is My Foundation, written in
the traditional style of Appalachian Gospel really benefited from
live recording. Ray says about the recording, "We got together
on a Sunday morning to record with a team of local players who
really know mountain music. The warehouse where the studio is
located also houses a couple or gospel churches. You could hear
the choirs echoing down the hallways, so the whole scene was just
really special and resonant." Brandi Carlile joins her on the
chorus when she sings:
"The
Rock is my foundation/Jesus is at the Bass/God is on the
Kick Drum/And the Holy Spirit Sings."
On
the more punk rock side, "From Haiti," is a song of respect to
Haitians after the earthquake. It's about people who had to contend
with not just rubble and wreckage, but an historically paternalistic
relationship with countries like the U.S. Against a persistent
and percussive acoustic guitar strum-beat, Ray's lyrics underscore
the resilience of the people, rather than emotionally exploiting
poverty and pain. She sings:
"Yes
we go walking in that rubble/Yes we go walking in that sun/
And our feet get tough enough to hold the travel/And our hands
get tough enough to hold the thorns."
In
the pop gem, "Little Revolution," Ray waxes philosophical about
the human desire to shut down in the face of pain-both personal
and pandemic-which is, in the long run, more painful than facing
it. It's also a love song to someone who practices being open-to
experiences, to people, and to the pains of this world. Ray sings:
"She's
got a real good equation/For the suffering I see
She says the more you let in/Ah the less it bleeds."
So
back to that lung thing. Ray wrote the title song after being
on the road, thinking about the struggle to rekindle love after
absence. "I have a compass-morally, physically-and I am pulled
in different directions," says Ray. "I was thinking about how
these opposite urges create stress and clumsiness in our lives."
In contrast to that clumsiness, the lyrics are set to music that
is anything but clumsy. Ray is quick to say, "I couldn't make
the song translate the way I heard it, but this is where I think
Greg really shines, he has such an in depth and creative musical
language to draw from, including this soul thing that is smooth
and funky -it really serves a song like this."
"
Lung of Love/ This failing breathe/ The compass of the heart
that won't rest/The murmur's beat/The the stalling gait/The
compass of the heart that won't wait."
The
lung, not the heart, stood out as the inspiring element in all
that she did. "The lung of love is my singing voice," says Ray.
"That is what comes out of me; but always in a struggle with its
own clumsiness and frailty." The lung: delicate, vulnerable, with
frond-like bronchi reaching out. It is quietly, secretly, our
connection to one another. Our breath supports our voices-expressing
song, outrage, passion, hilarity-and each individuals breath goes
from being held in their lungs, to being released into the world,
where we each yell to be heard, gasp for air, squeal in joy, and
sing. It is, literally, inspiration. Ray is also interested in
our airways, writ large. "In a larger way, what is the lung of
love in the world?" asks Ray. "How do we listen to all that expression
and take it in?"
As
a beloved Indigo Girl, Ray has long been known for her big muscular
heart, as a solo artist though; she has indisputably found her
voice.
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