Mary Timony
The former Helium front woman talks about her band’s new album, being ahead of the freak-folk curve, and dealing with the ‘angry girl’ label
By Lisa Hix
Published: May 3rd, 2007 | 3:52pm
It’s clear that Mary Timony embraces her inner guitar goddess. First sign: her latest album with the newly dubbed Mary Timony Band — The Shapes We Make — plunges into a dense, enchanted prog-rock forest previously explored by Led Zeppelin, Yes, and Hemisphere-era Rush. Second sign: Onstage, dressed almost boyishly in anti-fashion baggie T-shirts and jeans, Timony is completely engrossed in the mathy interplay among Chad Molter’s bass, Devin Ocampo’s drums, and her guitar.
“I’m trying to be more confident and assertive in my guitar playing,” Timony says during a late-April, 2007, interview. “I studied guitar, I teach guitar, and I’m a person who cares about being a good guitar player. But I’ve always been pretty modest when it comes to showing off my level of skill. Now I want to be more in your face, [more] ‘Hey, I can do this on guitar.’”
On the phone from her home in Washington, D.C., Timony sounds nothing like the husky-voiced front woman of Helium or the angry girl persona reviewers often assign her. She has a light, youthful way of speaking — almost perky. “I’m just putting some groceries in my car,” she says cheerfully as a way of greeting. But make no mistake; this is the woman who had the boys quaking in their Doc Martens in the ’90s.
Born and raised in D.C., Timony attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts before forming the highly regarded but short-lived Autoclave, which released a pair of EPs on Ian MacKaye’s Dischord Records and disbanded in 1991. It wasn’t until Timony graduated from Boston University in 1992 (with a degree in English literature) that she replaced Mary Lou Lord in Helium, eventually taking the creative reigns and putting out sludgy feedback-drenched indie rock with a feminist bent. On 1994’s Pirate Prude and 1995’s The Dirt of Luck, she documented the power struggles between men and women, in a simmering alto, with lyrics like “You’re going to pay me with your life.”
“With Helium, I was strongly thinking about women's empowerment and a lot of the song lyrics had to do with that,” Timony says. Yet she insists that for The Shapes We Make, she didn’t put much thought into her lyrics — they just came tumbling out in a stream-of-consciousness way. Regardless, her feminist leanings come to the surface, especially in a song like “Pause/Off,” in which she berates a protestor outside a pharmacy and commands anti-abortion politicians to "Get your laws off my body."
Taking a lyrical stand like this makes the 37-year-old a little nervous. “I remember after The Dirt of Luck came out, [the reaction] was just awful,” she says. “The way I was treated by a lot of male writers. I was labeled as the crazy girl who’s really angry. It was a weird time. I was only 24, and there were women writers who totally understood. I think that whole experience of talking to so many guy writers who didn’t get it — who were like, ‘What up with you? Why are you crazy?’ — it just made me not want to talk about it. I'm just a little bit anxious about that line in that song. It’s something I really care about, but having to deal with people’s negative reaction can suck.”
For Helium’s 1997 The Magic City and No Guitars EP, Timony turned her attention to fantasy-realm fables about dragons and procreating unicorns, and embellished her sounds with harpsichord-inspired keyboards and medieval acoustic guitars — a theme that carried over to her first two solo records, 2000’s stark, piano-heavy Mountains and 2002’s epic-sounding The Golden Dove.
At the time, the indie-rock world was puzzled by her interest in magic and ancient lore, á la the Brothers Grimm. But it turns out that Timony (whether she intended to be or not) was just ahead of the curve. A few years later, the freak folk movement, with the likes of Faun Fables and Joanna Newsom, came along, declaring fairytales cool again.
Timony says she doesn’t know what to make of the recent interest in folk lore, though it started with the last Helium record, The Magic City, which included medieval imagery. “I got into all this fairytale imagery, because I thought it was really cool,” she says. “And then we got made fun of and people called us, ‘The D&D [Dungeons and Dragons] band.’ Around 2000, the whole folk thing started happening, and then I was just like, ‘Whoa what’s going on? Where is that coming from and how come it’s so cool now?’ I know for a fact I didn’t at all influence any of those people. I was just [a] weird girl for being into that stuff. It’s interesting that it’s so hip. I don’t get it.”
For 2005’s Ex Hex Timony joined up with Ocampo and returned to D.C., her conservative hometown that birthed an esteemed punk scene. “Nobody moves here to be an artist anymore, not even to be a musician,” she says. “I think that’s why the music scene is so intense here, because most of the people involved in the punk scene were people who had grown up here. That’s what made that scene so interesting … D.C. is such a conservative town: We are surrounded by these people. Whenever there’s someone else who’s an artist or a musician we feel totally bonded to them as ‘the different people.’ In that way, it makes the music scene here really cohesive.” Ex Hex embraced a prog sound and left the golden doves and Dr. Cats behind, putting the loud crunchy guitars of Helium back to the forefront while maintaining the mystical musical qualities of her previous releases.
The Shapes We Make delves deeper into a mathy post-rock territory. But through the haze, Timony’s politics and ferocity comes through. “There’s definitely more political stuff like ‘Pause/Off.’ And even with ‘Pink Clouds.’ It’s just impressions, but it’s about global warming.” She giggled, as if this sounded a bit ridiculous to her. “It’s not like I sat down and said [Timony speaks in a funny robot voice], ‘I’m going to write a song about global warming.’ It just made it in there.”
That being said, working in a tight collaboration with Molter and Ocampo on The Shapes We Make, Timony is finding renewed pleasure in the intricacies of making a thick, textured wall of sound. “I really let go in a lot of ways with this record, because I just didn’t worry about it being the best thing ever,” she says. “I just wanted to have fun with it. I feel like I’ve gotten to the point where I want to enjoy the musicianship of it. I feel a little bit less like it’s a desperate thing, like I need to convey some sort of idea to people.”
Issue #23
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more