Who Are…Grass Widow
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“A major theme in the way we work is we don't have a frontperson and we really do everything together,” says Hannah Lew, “so I'm going to do my best to represent all of us.” She makes a good point: Grass Widow's sound is completely dependent on interlocking voices and roaming guitar and bass lines that zip past and into each other, generating tense pockets of dissonance and beautiful moments of resolution. The group's second full-length album, Past Times, chronicles a tragic year in the bandmembers' personal lives, though you'd be hard-pressed to find a lyric on the disc that spells out the drama.
eMusic's Caryn Ganz chatted with Lew about the band's democratic writing style and scariest moments:
On naming the band Grass Widow after two-thirds of the group had been in an act called Shitstorm:
Shitstorm is kind of the facial tattoo of band names. We did a radio spot and they had to bleep our name out the whole time. We tried to change it several times, but once you are that band, you kind of are that band. It's really hard to name something and think of a linguistic way to sum up sound. All our lyrics are written the same way, using words that reference things but coming from a different perspective on them. We rarely will do a “baby, baby.”
On rehearsing in a meat locker:
It's one of those multiuse Mission buildings that used to be a meatpacking company, so we're in the fridge. There's really dodgy electricity in there and weird crackheads. The refrigerator door is pretty heavy duty, and you can't help but have this morbid “oh my God, what if I got stuck in here” feeling. Phones don't work, it's very horror movie. We're in the basement, in a meat locker — it's kind of the scariest place we could be.
On the band's songwriting technique:
Someone will have a dream or something, and we'll talk about it and all give our two cents. When all three people describe what they're seeing, you get a well rounded picture. We use metaphors and ways to mask literal meaning. It's a good way to say things that are really hard to say without using plain English. We'll come up with different landscapes for one given topic. And then we've each drawn our own picture, so we all believe in what we're singing. We have to record every practice. We'll write something and be like, oh my god, what did we do?
On what inspired their new album, Past Time:
We took a band retreat where we put trippy movies on and wrote songs. We stayed in a cabin with three beds with matching polar bear sheets. I had a crazy night of feeling like there was something in the woods, and I think a lot of that anxiety got channeled into the writing. Raven had it the next night and Lilly the night after, so it was like contagious night terrors. When you isolate yourself from everything, things come out of the subconscious. Feelings and thoughts jump out when you're not distracted.
On how Grass Widow's music is extremely visual:
We have almost the same like, hallucinations or something. We definitely paint landscapes together and we can describe this whole place, like it's a dreamscape. Someone actually made a music video using our song “Tattoo” and it was really weird. We found it on YouTube and it was a weird sexy, '60s vampire movie. We were just like, oh, that was totally not what we were thinking.
On dodging the law while shooting the photo for Past Times' album cover:
We almost got a ticket for taking that photo! We had this idea of setting stuff up in the middle of a road, which someone told us later Pink Floyd had done, which bummed me out. We liked the idea of this moment of tension when something's about to happen. We put the yellow stripes down to make it look like a freeway — it's yellow tape. We actually sing about the broken lines on the road in one of our songs and it's one of the images we've always talked about.
On the group's collective love of Black Sabbath:
Black Sabbath songs are so simple. It's like two chords, but it just kind of gets you. There's no real mystery to their lyrics. It's funny because there's been hundreds of bands that have emulated that sound, so it's easy to take it for granted, but if you think nobody else was really doing that then, I can definitely appreciate that. Sometimes we'll be writing something and we're like, oh it's too simple! We're the kind of band that makes it hard, and if it's not hard, we don't enjoy it.
