Things I Think About While Reading the Paper on Saturday Morning.

This brings up so many thoughts.

When Y’all moved to Nashville in 1998, we got a lot of attention and got to work and play with some astoundingly great musicians, but there was no festival hosted by John Waters. I think Y’all may have gotten lost if there was, we would’ve been maybe too on the nose. But it’s hard to compare Y’all to an artist like Orville Peck, who is also drawing heavily from traditional country but is, in the end, a singer singing songs. Y’all’s music was, in its sort of homemade way, legit, but we were always more, and less, than a queer country act. Still, we would’ve killed at this festival.

It’s a pretty regular occurrence, the feeling an article like this arouses.

It’s the feeling I get when LIZZIE is (regularly) compared to—and often positioned (ahistorically) as influenced by—shows that it prefigured: Rent, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Spring Awakening, Six … and on and on, it’s a very long list, and of course now musicals set in a historical era with a rock score are commonplace. I’m proud to be on that list with some great musicals. I’m also proud of LIZZIE’s roots in downtown experimental theater, and thrilled that our show has bubbled up into the mainstream. That’s what experimental art does, and is kind of for, if you’re lucky. (I also acknowledge how LIZZIE has changed over the many years, how it exists now in a kind of dialogue with those later shows, and has been influenced by them.)

Y’all, too, grew out of the 80s/90s downtown New York theater scene that spawned LIZZIE. Y’all got a lot of love when Jay and I moved to Nashville in the late 90s because Nashville is tradition-minded when it comes to music and Jay and I were doing something, at heart, very traditional. Our act was a kind of cheeky reclamation of a tradition we loved, and very much a tribute.

The bands and home recording I was a part of in the 1980s were maybe arguably a little more situated in their time. It was one part emulating artists we liked and one part “what’ll it sound like if we do this?” making stuff up as we went along, but you can see how the type of experiments we were doing evolved into bands and movements that got a lot more attention than we ever did.  

I’m not claiming I was some genius always ahead of my time. I just never wanted to do what other people were doing, I wanted to do what I wanted to do, I didn’t care if I didn’t know how, and in fact I saw that as a bulwark against inauthenticity. And trying to define or locate a “cutting edge” is a slippery undertaking. Just because you’re working outside the mainstream doesn’t mean you’re not following in others’ footsteps, they’re just different footsteps, combined in different, possibly new ways. LIZZIE stands on the shoulders of the Wooster Group and Lita Ford. The Woods stood on the shoulders of Jackie DeShannon and Eno and Steeleye Span and the Raincoats. With Y’all it was Minnie Pearl and Ellen DeGeneres and the Louvin Brothers and John Denver. But standing on shoulders is probably the wrong metaphor here. It sounds too, I don’t know, heroic. The process is more like picking up threads or dipping into a stream.

These are just musings on a Saturday morning. I reserve the right to retract or contradict any or all of it!