Lesbian Musicians Bring Ferron’s ‘Boulder’ CD to Cafe DuNord July 14
Canadian folk legend Ferron admits “ambivalence and insecurity” nearly kept her from beginning her fourteenth studio album. In fact, if not for the persistence - some might say insistence - of New York indie rocker Bitch, who not only produced but released the 12-song collection on her own Short Story Records last month, Boulder might never have been recorded.
“I felt very inspired and determined to record her the way I wanted to record her,” recalls Bitch, who spent nearly a decade as one-half of queercore outfit Bitch and Animal. “I kept asking, and she was saying no over and over again. Finally, I was like, ‘You can run, but you can’t hide. I’m coming to your house.’”
At the memory, both women break into laughter, because that is, in fact, exactly what was required to get the woman Rolling Stone magazine once compared to Bob Dylan to participate in the project. They bring the finished product, released commercially June 17, to San Francisco’s Café DuNord Monday, July 14.
Bitch remembers driving to the home Ferron shares with her partner in rural Michigan, parking her RV in the yard and setting up a pared down recording studio consisting of little more than a laptop computer and single, high-end microphone. For Bitch, it was an “exercise in determination and not taking no for an answer.” To Ferron, “it was an exercise in taking a chance, putting something out there again.”
After more than three decades in the business – Ferron made her first splash with a self-titled 1977 release she has since acknowledged as almost amateurish in sound – the lesbian icon often questioned for walking away from the music industry just as major mainstream success seemed imminent questioned her relevance. Ferron confesses feeling “old-fashioned” and disconnected from many of today’s lesbian musicians.
“It’s confusing to me that I create music, or the music I hear, is in some ways square,” she reveals. “That’s a shocking thing to take in because there was a time when I was not a very square thing at all, not in the way that I played or the way that I wrote.”
For Bitch, bridging Ferron’s perceived generational gap was a significant part of her desire to record Boulder. Sharing stages around the country in the years before the album, say both women, has introduced their respective followings to one-another. Through this collection, Bitch hopes to further introduce audiences to Ferron’s career-long contributions.
“When I started my band back in ’96 with Animal, we didn’t feel like we belonged in any sort of scene,” she says, “I didn’t know any of the work of these older women. We always felt like we were making art in a vacuum. That is just a sign of lack of communication, lack of passing on the information. It’s important to pass our heritage on.”
While Ferron agrees whole-heartedly with the observation, she was unsure whether she wanted to reenter the music industry’s “collective dream” – meaning the rat race - in America’s youth-oriented culture. “Here you just get old and fade away,” asserts Ferron. “We don’t all love our old people.”
Seeing a photograph taken with the younger performer changed her mind entirely about recording. “I realized she was looking at me with love and kindness,” she recalls, “I thought, ‘What are you afraid of, Ferron? There’s someone here who cares about your work, who cares about you.’ I made my decision then.”
So with a “handshake deal” that the elder woman would have to do little more than lend her vocals to the disc, the two began work on their eventual opus. Carrying the recordings with her as she toured the country, Bitch produced, provided violin for and called on some well-known friends all-too-willing to contribute to and perfectly in line with the album’s “very bare and raw and homemade feeling.”
Among the top names appearing on the final recording are Ani DiFranco, The Indigo Girls, Le Tigre’s Jd Samson, Tina G of God-Des and She and many more. Ferron was deeply moved to find all these performers were fans of and cited her work as an influence.
“The joke is I’m saying, ‘Nobody needs to hear from me anymore’,” Ferron relays. “She had to make me understand that wasn’t true. By bringing in all those younger women who wanted to honor me, it gave me the sense I really do matter. That’s a big gift!”
For more information, visit: http://www.FerronOnline.com
