Bolder and “Boulder”: An interview with Ferron

By Gregg Shapiro
PGN Contributor
© Gregg Shapiro and Philadelphia Gay News

It’s difficult to underestimate the significance of “Boulder” (Short Story Records), the latest album by out women’s music legend Ferron. “Boulder,” produced by Bitch, consists of nearly a dozen Ferron tunes spanning her lengthy and influential recording career, all of which are reimagined with a brilliant cast of guest musicians — including Amy Ray and Emily Saliers of Indigo Girls, Julie Wolf, Ani DiFranco, J.D. Samson, Tina G. and Bitch, and Ferron herself on lead vocals. Full of songs you know and love, such as “The Cart,” “It Won’t Take Long,” “Shadows On a Dime” and a drum-driven chanted “Misty Mountain” as well as “Highway,” a new song written by Bitch, and a stunning version of “In The Meantime” guaranteed to blow some minds — “Boulder” will rock your world. We spoke with Ferron about the project shortly before its release.

PGN: I want to begin by saying that I love the new CD.
F: Tell me what you love, because I was the most dubious about this whole process. Oh yes. [Bitch] had to fight me. Well, we didn’t know what it would be. Basically what she had proposed was, “I want you to sing into a microphone and then I’m going to go away and make a record and I don’t want you to bug me.” And I was like, “Uh, but I’m singing on it [laughs], so I want to know what’s going on.” No, that wasn’t the deal. And so I finally understood it was like, if you’re gonna let your kid drive the car, you don’t go with them.

PGN: That’s a great way to put it. Much of the material on the new disc, “Boulder,” consists of songs drawn from your albums “Turning Into Beautiful,” “Driver,” “Phantom Center,” “Shadows On A Dime” and “Testimony.” What was involved in the selection process of the songs?
F: No, I had no role! That’s what you have to understand. Finally, when I agreed it was more like, I understand what’s going on, the torch is trying to be passed. And it needs to be passed, and she’s trying to reach across the generations. And the only way you can be a really good teacher is to be a really good auntie. So I just had to say yes or no. I had no choice in the songs. She just said, “I want you to sing this song, I want you to sing that song.” So she followed me around, and I avoided her for two years. I mean, we’re friends, but I avoided this project. I couldn’t get my feelings around it. It was probably a possession thing. I own me, I don’t own my songs. Finally, she came. She said, “I’m coming to your house, you can’t get away from me.” She came and she asked me to sing these songs, and one day I sat and sang them in front of a microphone having no idea she even knew how to record. [laughs]

PGN: Was she playing violin there while you were recording?
F: No, just me and the guitar. Everything else happened later. That’s what’s so curious about the whole story. She didn’t have any money, and she went around to people who loved Ferron, Ferron’s work or have always loved this particular song, like Julie Wolf loves “Our Purpose Here,” so does Emily [Saliers], so they’re both on it, and just went through and did their part. I, at one point, thought that I better not hear this halfway through because it’s not finished, and if I get scared for whatever reason, I’ll blow it. So I just said I don’t want to hear this until it’s done.

PGN: But she truly does honor the work. She honors the material.
F: Absolutely. What some people have been remarking on is the thing that they may have wanted all along from the Ferron, which was just the voice up close and personal, and then this other thing going on behind, which sometimes is really melodic and sometimes it’s really kind of modern to me.

PGN: Modern is a good word, because you have the presence of J.D. Samson from Le Tigre and Tina G. from God-des and She. I think what Bitch did was she took the more modern hip-hop interpretation of what a remix is and, even though they’re brand-new recordings from your point of view, she “remixed” them. She ran them through a computer in a way. Does that make sense?
F: Yeah, but she didn’t. Except for the last song, which I love. Of all the songs, I really love the last one, and I love her song that I sing. I think that they’re very unusual. She’s 32 or something and I’m 55. So we’ve got a couple of decades between us, and a lot happened in those two decades. We went from tape recording to digital. All the way down to MP3. I don’t know that a lot of these younger ears have heard music that isn’t cramped down into MP3s. They don’t notice that something is somewhat small. They don’t care about it. They’re doing something else. I listened to the whole CD several times. Because it’s such a digital world, and there are loops and loops and loops, and you can make music at home. I mean, I try and make music every day on the computer, and I don’t even have to pick up an instrument. So that’s her challenge, and she challenged it, in the sense that it’s very immediate on the record, except for “In the Meantime,” at the end. All the rest of it you couldn’t find in a loop if you tried.

PGN: How did it feel to hear beats and loops on a song of yours? How did it feel to have a song reinvented in that way?
F: I loved it! “In the Meantime,” the last one that’s done with a low [boom] bass and everything, I thought it was really interesting. The other thing, of course, is that I don’t even remember if I sang to a click [track]. So at one point I just marveled at my own time. [laughs] But maybe I did play to a click and I just can’t remember.

PGN: I recently interviewed the delightful Capital B herself, Bitch, about her new CD, and we talked about the meeting of the minds that took place at the Queer As Folk Festival in Chicago a few years back, when you invited her to join you onstage during your set. What is the significance of that meeting to you?
F: I think it had to happen, and if it hadn’t happened I’d probably be where I was when she dragged me out. Saying, “You matter.” And I’m saying, “Well, maybe I did, but it’s over. I’m 55 years old, and I just want to be in the garden, and I can’t stand the road.” She just said, “You owe it.” What she kept saying to me is, “Listen, when I play a Ferron song off a Ferron CD, and they hear it, they love it. But they don’t know how to find it.” And she is an indie rocker, as she likes to call herself; she can reintroduce me.

PGN: In the accompanying press materials, the disc is described as “the story of an elder” that “challenges the youth to do what youth is rarely encouraged to do: tune in to the ones who have come before us, hear their wisdom and grow from it.”
F: I mean, I’m amazed at that. I have nothing to do with the promo. You have to understand, I was like a hired hand. This is Captial B and Amanda’s dream. And I finally decided to get the hell out of the way, and just do what she was asking me to do. Just do it and get over myself. So I did. And when I saw the kind of PR that’s going out, if I was young now, that’s exactly the way I would’ve done it. Very earthy, very grassroots. That’s how we did Lucy Records. I used to write handwritten letters before we had the Internet. Very homey. I think deep down we are really in trouble, and if we do not figure out who we came from and where we come from, we are orphans.

PGN: We were just talking about that in regard to the new gay community center here in Chicago. And I made a joke that there should be a class called Gay 101 or Lesbian 101. Gay 101, for instance, would include a screening of the 1939 George Cukor movie “The Women.”
F: Absolutely! All of that. I’m getting choked up. Aren’t you finding that you have some of the feelings of despair that your own parents had? [Laughs.] People will go all the way to Europe to look at a fucking old building, but they won’t cross the street to see their auntie.

PGN: It’s great that you actually made yourself available for that purpose. When you agreed to do it, you’re helping with that History 101 that we’re talking about. You really are.
F: The thing is, what was important about [the concert in] Chicago was that we laughed. If people cannot laugh together, then they don’t have a shared experience. You can lecture each other but until you can laugh, you’re not friends. That would be my theory. So when we were on that stage, we were laughing. She was laughing from her corner and I was laughing from mine and it met in the middle. So we took that show to a few places and then finally took it to Michigan [Womyn’s Music Festival]. A few weeks earlier I had seen Chris Thile, you know him?

PGN: Yeah, sure, he’s the mandolin player.
F: I saw him at a festival. His whole band comes out and stands in a glob at the very center, with two overhead mikes and one vocal mike. They hover around these two overheads. And as one has a solo they move forward. But they look like they’re completely connected. They’re shoulder to shoulder. If the bass player moves, he’s going to break the other guy’s teeth. And they did this dance that was just so eloquent, and said so much. When I saw Bitch the next time, I said, “Bitch, the next time we go on stage, why don’t we just stand as close as we feel?” So we were right next to each other on this huge stage. Touching shoulders and laughing, and I brushed her hair at one point. That’s what was really going on, a friendship.

PGN: I recently interviewed Cris Williamson, whose new album features musical support from Barbara Higbie, Vicki Randle, Teresa Trull, Laura Love and Julie Wolf too. Would you say that that kind of musical community building in the women’s community can be directly linked to music festivals such as Michigan and the National Women’s Music Festival?
F: It has to be. I lived in San Francisco, I lived in Seattle, I lived in Boston, I lived in Provincetown, I lived in New Mexico. I moved around and I ultimately met musicians everywhere. The most expedient way to meet — and I mean that just in terms of time, not in motive — is if you’re at Michigan. It’s a long history. Barb Higbie and I just did a show in Indiana. I’ve known her since 1981 — my whole career, basically. We’ve grown up together. We do end up making a musical community and I think it’s fun that the people on my CD, I don’t even know half of them. But I know everybody else is like “ooh,” and I’m thinking I’ve got to find out who these people are.

PGN: I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
F: I know God-des. I know Le Tigre. I’ve seen them, but we haven’t hung around. I saw them in Michigan. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have seen them.

PGN: “Boulder” has just been released, but I was wondering if you have started thinking about or writing songs for your next disc?
F: I’m trying to. Time is a spiral and when we were younger, the spiral was tight. It’s like I’m on a planet that moves so slowly around the sun, it seems to be taking me so long to understand a truth, which is all I ever sang about, not “the truth” but my “truth.” Something that I thought over time would hold up. For instance, saying you can know anybody but until you laugh together you’re not really having friendship. That’s my truth, and I came to it over time. And I don’t have to doubt it anymore. When I finally put it out as a thought, it’s like, I believe that, that’s fine. But it takes longer and longer to get to those things. There just seems to be so much chaos. Not enough time to even plant the garden let alone come up with a piece of wisdom. [Laughs.] The wisdom being I got the peas in. [Laughs.] I do adore B. I love her, actually. When we do shows together and she looks at me, it’s just so loving, and we’re about as odd as a turtle and rabbit together.

PGN: There’s something big-sister and kid-sister about it, don’t you think?
F: It can seem like that, although she teaches me just as much. I come out with green hair.

PGN: And dreads.
F: Yes! [Laughs.]