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Idol worship
Mary Timony gets happy
BY BRETT MILANO

"Can I tell you about something really exciting?" asks Mary Timony across the table at the Middle East. But what she’s excited about has nothing to do with the band she’s just assembled, with her excellent new The Golden Dove (on Matador), or with the national tour that begins next week (with a show at 608 on Thursday June 6). No, the real news is that Mary met Tammy Faye Bakker the previous night. She and her drummer/main collaborator Christina Files were backstage at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, where the grande dame of televangelism had come to introduce the film The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Recalls Timony, "The first thing I see backstage is Tammy Faye walking over to me with her arms outstretched, and she hugs both of us. She was just great — totally sweet and totally insane at the same time."

Some would find the same qualities in Timony’s music, with its haunting tunes and dark emotional undertow — both of which have gotten only more pronounced since she went solo and disbanded Helium, more through inertia than through a formal break-up. And the parallels go on. Like Tammy Faye, Timony has flirted with spiritual themes more than once, and she’s been known to strike her fans as a mysterious figure. At the Middle East, she’s even wearing bright pink lipstick and matching flowered shirt, a fashion statement that Tammy Faye would likely approve.

Still, the image that Timony has projected over the years is less televangelist than doomed fairy-tale heroine. She came into Helium as an angry guitarslinger but left as a modern-day prog-rocker. Helium’s The Magic City and her solo debut, Mountains (both Matador), cranked up the gorgeous melancholy, with Timony playing a character who’d suffered numerous tortures: having her heart broken, getting menaced by dragons, being compared with Yes. The details were left unspecific, but nobody in these tales seemed likely to live happily ever after.

From a quick survey of the titles — "Magic Power," "Musik and Charming Melodee," "Look a Ghost in the Eye" — you’d figure that The Golden Dove is more of the same, but you’d be wrong. The last of these songs opens the disc, and for a few moments we’re in familiar territory, as Timony, playing one of her trademark skeletal guitar lines, sings about staring down ghosts and watching snakes fly. But then the drums kick in and she pulls a pure-pop chorus hook, using strings and echoed drums to flesh it out. And she’s asking direct questions: "Will I like you then, like I like you now? Do you radiate hope, do you radiate doubt?" Yes, she’s dealing with one of the oldest and most resonant pop-song themes: the thrill of a new relationship, and the accompanying sense of risk. The song winds up haunted less by specters than by Phil Spector.

That mood continues throughout the disc, as she sings about boys (using that term) in four songs, mentions California in two others, and gives a general sense of shaking a long-time depression. (The saddest song here, "Dryad & the Mule," is just too pretty to be depressing — besides, it’s got handclaps.) Her musical style’s been tweaked enough to make this her warmest album, with shorter songs (many under three minutes), fuller arrangements, and production that, for a change, puts her voice in the forefront. And yes, prog-rock is still in the mix: damned if the first few chords of "The Owl’s Escape" don’t come straight out of Supertramp’s "Breakfast in America."

Even in conversation, it’s clear that Timony has been through some changes. She hasn’t fallen in love or moved to California, but the part about shaking depression is real. "When I wrote those songs [on Mountains], I was spiraling downward. I’d come out of a long relationship and was going through some dark times. Things just got better in my life — I stopped dating people I didn’t like, got busy with the music, worked really hard at getting better. I still think a couple of songs on this album are pretty depressing, but I’m getting less bitter as I get older.

"I still get people asking why I’m obsessed with animals. I really hope the images in these songs make sense to people, but I still make things coded: a peacock usually means a boyfriend; a river is depression; a tiger is strength. That doesn’t stem from me trying to hide anything, it just seems more pleasant to sing. California is another one of those images that works for me, meaning a glorified fairyland." So what of the source of the disc’s title, the line (in "Blood Tree") that "The only boy I ever loved turned into a golden dove"? "It means that he flew away and became an idol, a statue to the memory. If you’ve ever dated somebody that you really regret dating afterward, that’s what the song is about. I’m not saying I feel that way about anyone in real life." She breaks into a coy laugh. "But it rhymed."

By now Timony has earned her share of odd comparisons — her own label bio includes a quote describing her as a cross between Kafka and Charles Manson. "It’s hard to figure what they mean by that — after all, I’ve never killed anybody." And she’s still considered an angry feminist in some quarters, thanks to the murderous songs on Helium’s first EP, Pirate Prude. "I was using metaphors then as well; but it was pirates and prostitutes instead of fairy tales. I don’t think I’ve done anything else as overtly feminist, probably because I stopped being quite as angry. I believe that the personal is political and that the best way to be a feminist is to do what makes me happy; that’s supporting myself as a woman. Being yourself is a good feminist thing to be doing."

One of the catalysts for her move to a poppier sound was Mark Linkous, the Sparklehorse leader who produced the album along with Timony and fellow Sparklehorser Al Weatherhead, and whose usual work is as far from pure pop as one can get. But she admits that Linkous came into the project only in the 11th hour, after she and Files had cut the basic tracks at Q Division and moved on to do overdubs with Weatherhead at Sparklehorse’s DC studio. "Mark wasn’t here as often as I hoped he’d be, but he played the optigan [a mellotron-type ’70s keyboard] and had some good ideas about vocals."

More significant is the fact that eight different persons played on the disc, including Weatherhead on pedal steel, Amy Domingues on cello, and Karate member Jeff Goddard on bass, all of whom have joined her touring band. In the past Timony has kept the live shows as stripped-down as possible; for most of the post-Helium shows she and Files have performed as a duo. "The problem is that I’m a really shy person, so it hadn’t occurred to me that I could reach out to people and collaborate. I could never imagine calling up someone I didn’t know and asking them to play."

If anything inspires her music, it’s people who don’t do music: recent passions include baton dancer Miss Dominica K and Puppet Master J, both of whom have become regulars at local performance-art events. "That’s what I love to see — people who just go for it and don’t hold anything back." The closest she gets to a musical homage is the new disc’s closing instrumental, "Ash and Alice" — Alice is Coltrane (rather than Cooper) and Ash is Ash Bowie, the ex-boyfriend and Helium bandmate who still looms large in her world. "I really think he’s a genius. I have no idea where he gets those incredible chord changes from, but I learned a lot from him about pushing limits. We tried to play together on this album, but it probably makes more sense for us to be apart right now."

One thing that hasn’t changed is that her live show will still consist of her new album and a few songs from the previous one. So even though she just hit her 10th year as a recording artist (her first band, Autoclave, started in DC circa 1991), don’t expect her to go back even as far as Helium. "That’s not something I even think about. Helium broke up, so we don’t play Helium songs. We focus on what feels good for us to play, and that’s usually the new songs. I’ve never been too focused on pleasing the crowd."

RIP SUZETTE??? We thought that rock-and-roll suicide hoaxes had gone out after the Dwarves got bounced from Sub Pop for pulling one. But joining that elite group is former Tulips/Daviess County Panthers singer Suzette Fontaine — rumors of whose death appear to have been greatly exaggerated. According to her ex-bandmates, who were profiled here last month as members of the Takers, Fontaine took her life on Valentine’s Day 2000. That story has been on the Takers’ Web site for more than a year and was confirmed by the band in their Phoenix interview. Now, a Taker who prefers to remain anonymous says the story was cooked up with the cooperation of Fontaine, who wanted to leave rock and roll with some kind of mystique. In any case, the truth, we’re now told, is far more prosaic: she’s off in the suburbs raising kids.

Issue Date: May 30 - June 6, 2002
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