Ryan Obermeyer
Rasputina
With one foot in the tumultuous past and one foot in the turbulent present on Oh Perilous World, frontwoman Melora Creager still sees hope for the future
By Katy Henriksen
Published: October 12th, 2007 | 1:48pm
Current events may be a recent obsession of Rasputina mastermind Melora Creager, but a serial interest in Mary Todd Lincoln is another fascination all together. “I’ve always been interested in the Lincolns,” she says. “I wrote a play in fourth grade about Lincoln’s assassination and my class performed it.” The play was called Please Pass the Popcorn and serves as evidence of Creager’s early passion for all things dram, history, and fanciful.
With Oh Perilous World, Rasputina’s sixth full-length album, Creager’s penchant for the 19th century is seamlessly melded with current headlines and wound around a fictional account of Mary Todd Lincoln as Queen of Florida and leader of a blimp army. Creager admits that she didn’t follow current world events until the calamities of 9/11 and its wide-ranging aftereffects. Located in New York City at the time of the attacks, she became obsessed with reading the latest news and decided that what was happening today could be easily juxtaposed alongside her trademark historical obsessions.
Using a cut-and-paste technique to take phrases out of stories culled from the Internet and books, the lyrics of Oh Perilous World allude to — among other things — political leaders, seasonal tragedies, and disease epidemics. “I’d never ‘stolen’ phrases before,” Creager says. “But, I looked at some important books and saw that fiction is often a straight allegory of current figures.”
Opening track, “1815: The Year Without A Summer,” is a direct description of a summer in which much of New England and Northern Europe saw record low temperatures and freak snowstorms that killed crops and humans alike. Starting out with a low rumbling sound, the song quickly builds with a percussive dulcimer and a foreboding cello that holds the tune together while Creager sings about Mary Shelley staying inside to write Frankenstein and the 1815 eruption of the Tempura Volcano.
Other tracks take inspiration directly from current headlines. The second song, “Champion,” translates an Osama Bin-Laden speech and melds it with Creager’s alternate history of Pitcairn Island. The instrumentation begins as raw, reverb-heavy, and riff-driven until it changes course into a sing-song, pizzicato-laden verse with grandiose onstage musical production. The album concludes, after taking another entirely different auditory turn, with Creager’s haunting narrative voice-over.
Rasputina has come a long way since Creager’s initial want ad that she said read something like, “female cellists wanted to form electric cello choir.” At the time, she didn’t want any guys or guitars in the band. “I started with seven [cellists] and it sounded terrible. Julia Kent [who has since embarked on a solo career] and I stuck together to figure out how to make this good idea work.”
For many years, Rasputina was a three-cello, all-woman group performing in period-costume regalia. It has since been stripped down to two cellists and one drummer, with Creager as the lead, Jonathon TeBeest on percussion, and Sarah Bowman on additional vocals and second cello. Regarding the addition of the first man to join Rasputina, Creager says, “He has made it more of a real group, less timid string-girls with a human metronome. He helps us to be tight and strong.”
TeBeest may not wear corsets or hoop skirts, but he sticks with Rasputina tradition by dressing in elaborate costume for live performances and joins in the receiving lines following their shows. The band — who is by necessity trapped behind the body of cellos during performances — started this ritual as a way to interact with audiences. “Often I don’t want to do it,” Creager says of the lines, “but then I’m glad I did because it keeps you in touch with people and it’s encouraging.”
Recounting one of her all-time favorite audience experiences, Creager describes a summer, tour-ending performance for the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls. One of Creager’s missions is to show young string players that there are alternative outlets beyond the classical world in which she was initially trained. “I love that camp and was a teacher there their first year,” she says, “It was great, because [there were] so many little girls aged 7 to 17. We didn’t have our costumes on. We just ran in and set up on their tiny P.A. We weren’t paid and nobody knew who we were. But those girls got really excited. We rocked them out.”
Speaking of future aspirations, Oh Perilous World marks another major shift for Creager, who decided to record the album in locations closer to her serene Hudson Valley home in Upstate New York. It’s a move she made partly in consideration of her daughter and partly in view of the lessons she’s learned from her study of history and drama. “I don’t think New York City is the best life for my daughter,” she says. And in a tone strangely similar to that of Mary Todd Lincoln and Mary Shelley (both notably held a high regard for solitude and were preoccupied with strange phenomena), Creager adds, “I didn’t want to be in a city when it’s underwater or some-such other full-on climate change catastrophe. I wanted to be a part of a community and I wanted to write music without all my neighbors hearing every little peep.”
Issue #25
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