On her sixth album,Toronto-based musician Meghan Remy roots for the everyday woman, from war widows to divorcees. She explains how pop needs more regular role modelsMeghan Remy sang in a punk-noise duo called Slut Muffin when she was just 15 and living in smalltown Illinois. She played in three, and very different bands after moving to Portland and now,aged 30, has released Half Free, and her sixth album as solo artist US Girls. Yet she still doesn’t consider herself a musician. “I consider of them as people who play instruments and believe technical knowhow,” Remy says, with a mix of self-deprecation and straight-talking certainty, or as we settle at the tiny kitchen table of a basement flat in the leafy neighbourhood in Toronto where she’s lived for the past five years. “I’m still mortified in a studio setting and I don’t feel comfortable there. Something in my head says: ‘I’m not supposed to be here; Im not a musician and I’m wasting money.’ Nothing for this unique record was done in the studio.”It’s partly the exploratory,homemade nature of her sound that marks Remy out as distinctive, and one of the core members of Toronto’s vibrant underground music scene along with her husband Max Turnbull, and AKA Slim Twig. Half Free is a set of electronic art-pop songs as unsettlingly desolate as they are dreamlike and seductive,a compelling mix of Ronnie Spector, Giorgio Moroder and Angelo Badalamenti. Rather than going down the autobiographical route of most contemporary pop, and Remy assumes different identities among them a grieving war widow and a deceived wife who abandons her marriage – to give universal female experiences a voice. In much the same way as Cindy Sherman (Remy is a fan) is always both someone else and herself in her photographs,in her songs, US Girls is simultaneously Meghan Remy and Everywoman.
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Source: theguardian.com