The Be Good Tanyas

Singer-guitarist Frazey Ford talks about her start in trip-hop, her cameo in The L-Word, and the trio’s new album, Hello Love

By Caralyn Green
Published: October 16th, 2006 | 12:21pm

The tea-sipping, back porch–rocking, sepia-toned aura that swirls around each of the Be Good Tanyas' tenderly crafted albums, it turns out, is more of a way of life than just a way of making music. Although, for Tanyas singer-guitarist Frazey Ford, life and music seem to be one in the same, interwoven, incomplete without the other.

Childhood is dancing as Mom croons from a bar's stage; growing up is scouring libraries for old gospel and blues albums; working is singing loudly and soulfully while tree-planting in the mountains of British Columbia; and being an adult is beaming as one's 3-year-old son bangs on the drums, a relic of his nine months spent in a gently rhythmic womb.

Sometimes music is beautiful, sometimes music makes you dance, and sometimes, as in the case of The Be Good Tanyas, it taps into something so lonesome, so intensely candid — yet comforting and jubilant — that it's impossible to react with anything but a sigh of, "Right on," another swig of that whiskey-laced chamomile, and a dusk-to-dawn gaze into the murky Southern skies.

The Be Good Tanyas (consisting of Ford, and fellow multi-instrumentalist chanteuses Trish Klein and Samantha Parton) crept onto the American radar in 2001 with Blue Horse, which earned admiration from the likes of matriarch-of-all-things-twang Emmylou Harris. The trio followed that lovely record with 2003’s equally cozy and rootsy Chinatown, and the just-released Hello Love, the Tanyas' first album in three years. Hello Love presents listeners with all that we have come to expect from the Vancouver ladies: simplicity, heartache, languid harmonies, fiddle solos, and a surprising selection of covers, all recorded in a single room by a single family of unrelated women, who share more in life and music than most sisters from the same lineage.

How does a Canadian girl such as yourself get into Americana music?
My parents. My dad was a draft dodger, and my parents came to Canada in 1969, so I'm Canadian but a lot of the culture I grew up with was American culture… My mom had a strong relationship with music and sang my whole life — she used to sing in bars when I was a little kid. My mom was always singing and wanted my sister and me to sing the lead so she could harmonize. The thing that [all of us in the band] have in common is that when we were all teenagers we were searching record stores and libraries for older music, gospel and blues. When we met, we were all in a phase of rediscovering instrumentation of an acoustic kind, almost in reaction to being musicians in the '90s and craving something else, something warm.

You started in trip-hop. How did you transition from that genre into a completely different genre?
All genres influence all other genres, especially with the more interesting singers — they're getting influences from places you wouldn't expect. I was living in Montreal for a while, and that's where I first started writing songs. I had this band, and we'd just go out into the middle of the winter and get stoned and make music spontaneously. I love trip-hop and jazz and soul, but when I was sitting around writing, when you're doing that singer-songwriter exploration, a lot of it is about storytelling and making sense of your own life, and that's what pulled me to this style. A lot of what was coming out [during my writing] was sounding like the earliest music that I had heard, which is what my mom was playing when I was a child.

When you cover a popular song like Prince's "When Doves Cry" or a traditional number like "Oh Susanna," how do you approach the song?
We come from this culture that is overly focused on the individual. In most other cultures, art is more collective. Songs, blues songs, folk songs, country songs, they're not so much considered possessions of a writer, as much as they're considered tools for a person to express themselves, and that's how I see all songs. They're tools for you to express yourself. For me, it's not, "How can I make this song interesting for other people?" It's more like, "What am I feeling here?" I guess you can write songs, and then you can take other people's songs apart, inhabit and interpret somebody else's song.

Did the band have any particular intentions when you set out to record Hello Love?
We had stopped playing together for a while. I was pretty consumed with being a new mom. Trish had a side project, and I had another side project going on, this DJ electronica stuff. I think that the time apart enabled us to come back together and to realize that there's something about what we do that only happens when we do it. We came at this album with a renewed appreciation and joy about some of the culture of our thing, the family-ness of it. Going into the studio was different this time around because we were doing stuff that hadn't been done on the road, we were going through a lot of the songwriting process as we were recording. I don't think we ever had any intentions for any of these albums, though; we were just following what moved us, which is the only way we know how to put something together.

I heard you had a cameo in an episode of Showtime's The L-Word?
They called me up and were like, "We want you to be a nun singing a gospel song on a lesbian soft-core porn television show." All I could think about was when I have grandchildren, one day they'll be like, "Grandma was so cool. She was a nun on a lesbian soft-core porn TV show!" I did it for my grandchildren. I still to this day haven't seen this episode, though… I don't watch TV. I'm not so Internet savvy. I don't have a computer. It's a whole world I don't know about.

You've said that no one in the band is really interested in the entertainment aspect of performing, so I'm curious how you would describe your live shows?
If I go back to when I originally started getting up on a stage in front of people and why I chose to follow this path, it just seemed like a necessary job in this society. So many people are unable to access or express a deep sense of their sorrow or their deep joys. I think that we [in the band] all have a sense of trying to create a space for that, a space where you can just feel moved. If I'm feeling moved in myself, if I feel like singing the song is bringing forth something in me, then that will touch other people. But I can't touch other people unless I'm feeling something myself, so every time we get back on stage, we open ourselves up, we open our hearts and open our souls, and allow a feedback. Sometimes it's really trippy. I definitely feel this kind of flow, where it's no longer a bunch of people in a room, but a oneness. We live in a society where there's not a lot of room to express things deeply. People are depressed and they're given Prozac. Everything is brushed under the covers… But I feel like that's why people are often drawn to whatever it is we're doing. Because it's coming from a place of pulling ourselves through our own lives.

Caralyn Green lives in and loves Philly. She's studying a bunch of stuff at some snooty grad school, but mostly she prefers to go to shows, dance like Molly Ringwald, drink peanut-butter milkshakes, and write articles that have nothing to do with media theory.