MBM: Letâs talk about some other elements of your current repertoire. Youâve re-written âOmie Wiseâ a bit. BP: âOmie Wiseâ was the first one that I listened to that really stopped me in my tracks, because it was so simple and pared downâjust a woman singing in her kitchen, singing a song about a woman being murdered. I find itâs easier for me to focus and write when I have a boundary, and I chose âOmie Wiseâ because it showed up.
There were different versionsâeither he confesses, he gets caught, or he gets away, but sheâs always dead. This was the first time I had come across it so clearly. And I thought, if itâs a myth, why canât history give the woman a voice? Why canât we have a woman âwinâ once?
âFrankie and Johnnyâ doesnât move me as much. There are other ones where women âwin.â I want to steer clear of clear love stories. The idea of somebody getting upset and shooting someone is less interesting to me than the more complicated ones.
The song weâre currently working on, âLet You Goâ [see Coda below] is about a woman who drowns her children in a bathtub. Itâs based on a true story. That one made me cry when I wrote it because I felt so weird. Now I love it.
CS: She claimed that God told her to do it. Itâs a tragic story. The song is a lullaby. Weâre able to write in an awareness that the people in the story might not have. I think itâs complex in that way. But, if someone truly believed that this was Godâs word, how did her brain get there?
BP: Post-partum depression.
CS: I donât think that that factors into the song.
BP: It does in a way, but itâs not immediately present. I feel like Iâve matured in my thinking about murder ballads and in switching the voice. Thereâs been a progression from re-writing the end part of âOmie Wiseâ to what weâre working on now.
MBM: âAngel of Mercyâ sounds like a rather light-hearted take on euthanasia.
BP: It is. I have actually played that song in comedy venues. It was a character piece for a while in comedy shows and in a play that I wrote. Thatâs the comedy coming out in me. I think itâs a way better song with Christine as part of it.
MBM: How have audiences responded to your work? What do you think they connect with the most?
CS: Weâve had a few different experiences by virtue of the venues. We learned that we do really well at storytelling events. Chicago has a great storytelling communityââThis Much Is True,â for example. People that are there to listen to the stories really listen well. We feed off of their energy because weâre theater artists, so we take on personas, and I think that just makes the performances richer.
BP: Weâre not really a background noise, event band. If theyâre not there to listenâŚ
Still from Poole’s show “murder, hope” where she debuted “I’ll Lay You Down,” “Angel of Mercy,” and “Omie Homage.” Photo by David Baum
CS: For a genre and a subject matter as risky as this, people have responded so positively. Iâm probably too self-deprecating or non-confident, but I was really surprised. Theyâve been really positive. I was concerned about the simplicity of our sound, but people have really responded to it. One time, we played a busy place, but the audience really focused on us.
BP: The bar quieted down and listened.
CS: It made us realize that what weâre doing was a little bit deeper, and maybe weâre charged with a little bit bigger of a task.
MBM: What do you think theyâre responding to?
CS: I think theyâre responding to what weâve done with the stories, and theyâre responding to us.
BP: Weâll often start with an a cappella song, and having these two stark voices, and maybe a saw, draws their attention. They definitely respond to the saw. Sometimes doing something a cappella will really focus people. Then itâs the stories. Theyâre creepy.
MBM: How do you feel after singing a set of murder ballads?
CS: I think we do enough different stuff, that this [the murder ballad material] is the âdifferent.â Becky and I were performing in The Mikado, which was uber-bright and fun and engaging with the audience. But, itâs also draining and exhausting. If we can come back to this, the murder ballads, itâs meditative and cathartic.
BP: That catharsis. I donât know if itâs mine to have, becauseâŚI donât know why, but I have it.
Christine Stulik
CS: I think it is ours to have. As humans, either first hand or however many degrees removed, weâve had these experiences in some ways, and being able to process them for ourselves and for an audience is important. I had a female neighbor who was being abused by her boyfriend. One night, after he had beaten her pretty badly, I ended up taking her in to my apartment until the police arrived. While I tried to write a song about that⌠I tried to process it through writing a song, but I couldnât get there. But, I feel lately that itâs sort of worked its way into other stuff we do. I donât need to write about it specifically in order to process it. These kinds of events give a sense of urgency to our experience of singing these songs.
BP: I think thatâs part of why it lasts.
I want to say, and I think I speak for Christine too, that I appreciate being asked these questions, because we want to come at it from a heady place. We might cover something just because we think itâs pretty, but we like to dive into it intellectually, too.
MBM: How do you balance the tension between the intellectual or the political and the art?
CS: I think we really just enjoy playing together. We have fun, and it keeps us from being too heavy-handed.
BP: When weâre writing or performing, we sort of feel our way through it. We realize that we might be forcing it too much. We can keep each other in check.
CS: Weâre not afraid to challenge each other.
Eileen
BP: We take each otherâs challenges.
CS: Part of it is just saying âyesâ to stuff, to remain open. We also have a repertoire of old-timey clawhammer music that we break out if things get too serious or people are just too noisy to hear us. That breaks the tension sometimes.
MBM: Iâd be interested to know from each of you your personal favorites among murder balladsâold or modern.
BP: I had Nick Caveâs Murder Ballads album. I love Nick Cave. I really enjoyed that, and probably entered murder ballads with that. I also put a call out to some of my friends in Seattle, and they came back to me with a whole library of murder ballads and songs I had never heard from all kinds of musical genres.
CS: I had never heard that cd. My dad played a lot of Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention, and they tap into a lot of Child Ballads and Scottish Border ballads. I think my familiarity with âWind and the Rainâ came from music like that. My gateway would probably be old world folk balladry and how it transformed into Appalachian folk song.
MBM: Thanks so much for talking with us about your work.
CS: Before we go, I wanted to mention that we have decided to pool our multi-faceted backgrounds into one project. Weâre in the process of developing a long-form musical production of the story of the Papin Sisters. So that will be a collection of songs, not all of which will be murder ballads themselves, but the whole piece will make up a kind of murder ballad. Tremendous thanks to Becky Poole and Christine Stulik for investing their time and giving their thoughts for this interview. Thanks also to Logan Futej for the photography and others who assisted with some of the technical aspects, including the video recordings of the performances at “This Much is True” at the Hopleaf in Chicago.
Coda: Let You Go I didn’t want to include “Let You Go” in the middle of the interview above, because I think it really deserves some sustained attention. I’m including Eileen’s performance below, as well as the lyrics, provided by Becky Poole. There’s a lot too it, and it creates a whole new layer at how we may look at various “Cruel Mother” ballads. It is based on the story of Andrea Yates. The song is not currently available on Eileen’s Soundcloud or Bandcamp sites. This recording was made at the Hopleaf in Chicago. It’s a little jumpy at the start, but everything settles down in the end. The lyrics are below the clip. [Update 19 April 2013: You can also listen to a Soundcloud recording of the song here.] Let You Go (from Eileen)
There wasnât much here for you Dry landscape, barren it seems So flat you could see forever my dear No place for my babyâs big dreams Nowhere to go born into disgrace A diamond in spite of the dust So pure in the light, couldnât spare you the fight I had to let you go. Let you go, so long Let you go, so long So long youâre never coming back. Drown out my demons, tiny soul in their snare Little boy donât be scared Talking out loud to ghosts, oh heavenly host Itâs so quiet in this old house Thereâs nothing left for me to do Bathwater splashed on my blouse. Itâs dry on the bed, kiss you on the head Thereâs a calling far deeper than home. I’ll make the call sit with you on the bed. Look at you in your Sunday best. A vessel devoid, lips smiling and blue Your angels will know what to do. Iâll see you again, washed clean of my sin Dispensation for saving young bones. A mother knows best and I put you to rest With a calling far deeper than home. Let you go, so long Let you go, so long Little one youâre never coming back.
