Gretchen Phillips is the New Pere Ubu

This post is submitted by TNG reader Paige Schilt, a dyke mama, "low-femme" nerd, activist, and part-time professor of Feminist Studies. She is currently a Research Fellow at Soulforce, and she serves on the board of Girls Rock Camp Austin.


How do indie-rock girls find their way to lesbian music?

In my case, many of the crumbs on the trail were left by lezzie rocker Gretchen Phillips. Her new album, I Was Just Comforting Her, features Melissa York (of Team Dresch and The Butchies) on drums and Thor Harris (of Shearwater) on vibraphone.

The quality of Phillips’ co-conspirators can serve as shorthand for her rock cred, but I would argue that you can also hear the influence of her eclectic style and impressive career on bands as varied as Le Tigre (who call Gretchen’s name in the feminist anthem Hot Topic) and Lesbians on Ecstasy.

I still remember the first time I heard her voice. It was the early nineties, and I was listening to Seattle’s famed college radio station, KEXP (then KCMU). When the usual barrage of angsty boy-rock was interrupted by a clear, quirky female voice, my interest was piqued. I waited for the DJ to i.d. the song. When he said, “that was the lesbian band Two Nice Girls,” I seared the information in my brain for future reference.

This was before Team Dresch or The Butchies. I already had a raging crush on future TD drummer Jody Bleyle, but she was still drumming for the power pop boy-band Hazel. Two Nice Girls, with their good-humored mix of underground, new wave, folk, and country influences, were prophets for a new musical reality where “lesbian rock” did not inevitably equal “Indigo Girls.”

On I Was Just Comforting Her, Gretchen proves that she's also a prophet of the current cultural moment with songs like Red State, Blue State, the perfect Obama-era electro-pop paean to hope (available as a free MP3 download). The song In Case of Rapture begins with a stuck-in-traffic-behind-an-evangelical-bumper sticker kind of moment and ends with a rousing chorus of "Why don't we stay here and try to make things work?"--a sentiment that perfectly reflects the new political landscape of optimism and responsibility.

In honor of the record release, Gretchen is launching a west coast tour and a YouTube channel, which archives many memorable video moments in lesbian cultural history. Two Nice Girls may have been the first out lesbian band to make the college charts, but Gretchen also helped create influential bands like Meat Joy and Girls in the Nose (who played at the 1993 March on Washington). The YouTube material ranges from live performances, to interviews and videos for the new album.

I Was Just Comforting Her showcases the ease with which Gretchen can slip between genres, moving seamlessly from talky lounge to disco to country-tinged gospel. The lush instrumentation, which features everything from pedal steel to vibes to lo-fi synthesizer, explains why Gretchen’s musical aesthetic remains nearly impossible to classify. Gretchen makes a wry meta-nod to her unclassifiability in the following interview, in which queer performance artist Silky Shoemaker helps Gretchen ponder the question, “who am I ‘the new’?”

The album is available for purchase on Connextion and ITunes, but for maximum DIY pleasure, I recommend ordering it the old-fashioned way through gretchen-phillips.com, where every copy comes in a package hand-assembled by the artist.