Music

Marnie Stern

Jon Fisher | Tuesday 2 November, 2010 19:42

In a world where tepid singer-songwriters Little Boots and Ellie Goulding sit atop year-end success forecast polls and the utterly gaudy Florence & The Machine bellows to thousands of paying customers a night, a closer look is needed to find female artists to believe in and to cherish. When we find them, however, the journalistic focus is still on their gender, whether as a factor of marketability or as a patronising comment on their abilities.

Marnie Stern gets this worse than most, her guitar-shredding prowess used as an excuse not to mention the elephant in the room – that she just happens to be a female guitarist who plays with more intricacy and skill than the majority of her modern male counterparts.

“I regret that there’s such a focus on me being a ‘female guitar player’ because it forces me into a niche, and I would like for people to hear my stuff and be thinking less about the guitar and more about the material itself.” She moves quickly to point out that this is a help as well as a hindrance: “At the same time, the guitar/female thing is what got me attention in the first place, so of course I’m really appreciative of that. I just can’t think of a single ‘band’ who gets reviewed where the focus is just on the guitar.”

In one fell swoop, Stern displays so many vital parts to her intellectual make-up, both in personality and in recorded content. She’s sensitive to criticism (or, “a really insecure person”, as she puts it), intelligently (“obsessively”) analyses whether something is working in her favour, but yet at the same time, she honestly believes that she’s not written a single good song in her lifetime.

“I think ‘For Ash’ is a good song, that’s the closest I’ve got. But for me, I’m always comparing my work to songs from my childhood like ‘Born To Run’ or any Rolling Stones song, because for me these are ‘good songs’. That’s what I want to write: just a ‘classic song’, a great one. That’s what I want to do, so that’s why I keep going. My life is set up to do this, all I really have is music and the dog.” [The dog, Fig, which I’m told is beautiful and lovely, barks almost constantly throughout the interview, making my transcription even less fun than usual.]

She admits that keeping self-satisfaction at arm’s length is a useful creative tactic and one which, with the parameters controlled by time and nostalgia, ensures that she’ll keep on writing and creating “until one sticks”. A prevalent theme throughout her new self-titled release, her third for legendary indie label Kill Rock Stars, is how much of a coping mechanism writing is for her.

Even though they hadn’t spoken for eight years, Stern confesses to thinking about her ex-boyfriend Ash every day, carrying him in her thoughts everywhere she went. It was their break-up which prompted her to spend so much time honing her fretboard skills and it was his suicide, last year, which shook her out of a self-confessed “songwriting rut”. She spent nearly 72 hours straight composing and recording, the album bearing two of the fruits of this session, ‘For Ash’ and ‘Cinco De Mayo’ – two of her most openly biographical songs to date. Each song is an exercise in catharsis and an exploration of painful experiences and it’s something she finds difficult to recreate live. “In the end, it just makes me feel stronger in some ways, I guess, that I’m brave enough to write it and sing it and do it and, Jesus…”

The songs about Ash only scrape the surface of what is an intensely personal record, the last track (along with several others) being about her then-boyfriend, Matt Flegel of Canadian indie band Women. During an interview filmed in a launderette for the online series ‘Dirty Laundry’ couple of years ago, Stern told the story of when her touring drummer was infatuated with her, emotionally wounded when she started seeing someone else and then threw a tantrum and quit the band three hours before their big showcase show at SXSW. On whether she’s learnt her lesson about this, she is unapologetic.

“There’s not much blur between the songs and myself, so whatever’s going on is what’s going to happen inside the music. I just happened to not have a personal life until this record, and that’s why it came in when it did. On learning lessons, I’m learning that it’s hard for me to do and it’s hard for the audience to take in. It would never mean that I wouldn’t do that same thing if I was feeling it, but my goal is to have people enjoy it and have it affect them and move them in some way.

Someone was comparing it to an artist like Elliott Smith and saying that he’s someone who some people really like and some people really don’t, because his stuff is so emotional. I think the trend in music in music now is to make really basic, upbeat, easy-breezy nostalgia for childhood which is a weird thing for me to think about.”

It’s a weird thing to think about because Stern’s music is the polar opposite, a dense weave of pain and emotions embedded within walls of scattering finger-tapped guitar and drum lines which often defy logic but fit perfectly. On repeated listens, these layers fall away, exposing red-raw vocals. “I cannot bear/Nothing compares/I miss your smile/Sadness all the while,” telling you all you need to know about the fragility and exposure offered up here.

There was a ten-year period from when Stern began to make her own music to signing on the dotted line with KRS, but she looks back upon this period with more bullish defiance. “Quitting was not an option. I mean, quitting was the option every day, but it just wasn’t an option.”

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