Tumyeto interview

An email interview with Edith Frost

Perhaps you have not heard of her. In fact, I’d put money on it. But you will. Edith is a smart and sassy cowgirl who has a double seven coming out on Drag City. It’s her demos that she sent them and the guys at Drag didn’t want to change a thing. And soon it will be in a record store near you.

I started writing Edith a few weeks ago when I discovered her very cool site on the Web and then decided to email her some specific questions for Earfood readers. It was a long list so she has been picking and choosing, answering one every couple of days or so. Since they are long and wonderous answers, I have decided to run the first of them now and then, in a couple of weeks, I’ll run the rest, if you’d like.

My questions are in bold. Her answers aren’t. And don’t forget to stop at Edith’s Web site. It’s a dream!

Can you give us the major points of your history regarding making music. How did the latest double 7" come to fruition?

Well, I feel a little funny answering this question since the thing hasn’t even been released yet, but here goes…

I’ve been into music for as long as I can remember. The first group I really flipped out over, when I was ten years old, was the Carpenters, believe it or not. I bought all their albums and I would stand in front of the mirror and sing along, into a hairbrush. I’m not embarrassed to talk about that now that it’s cool to be a Carpenters fan again. And I still do that thing with the hairbrush, doesn’t everybody? ;-)

I’ve had a guitar since I was fourteen, and I’ve taken lessons off and on throughout my life but I think I’m still pretty much at that fourteen-year old level! I like playing guitar but I don’t think I’m very good at it, I was basically forced into backing myself up when I realized that nobody knew the songs I was playing.

The first actual band I was in was called the SufferJets, an all-female, mostly lesbian band⁽¹⁾ in Austin, the year after I graduated from high school. I was playing rhythm guitar. This was a future all-star band featuring Gretchen Phillips (later of Two Nice Girls), Teresa Taylor (later of the Butthole Surfers and featured as the Slacker posterchild), Melissa (can’t remember her last name but she was the lead singer for the Stick Figures)⁽²⁾ and Layna Pogue (who was the singer of an Austin band called The Delinquents). The SufferJets only had one gig when I was with them, but damn if we didn’t have a great time getting ready for it! We played "Wild Thing," that’s the one song I remember us doing.

I met my ex-boyfriend Bill Neubauer that summer after high school, when I was 17 and he was 25. He was a guitarist in a popular synth-dance band in Austin called talmadge d’amour. We ended up staying together for ten years, and during that time I sang on some of his tunes but didn’t do a whole lot of my own stuff. I mean, I went to college and took music classes, and wrote a few songs here and there, but I didn’t really think of myself as a "real musician." I was living with an attitude that it wasn’t ME that was the musician in the house, it was Bill, and everything I tried to do wasn’t near as good as something HE could do in his sleep! So I guess I had a poor image of myself and what I could do musically.

I got into country music at maybe 19 years old. A friend named Blue loaned me a Janis Martin record (one of the queens of 50s rockabilly) and after that I got really obsessed with other (mostly female) rockabilly and country artists. Bill was NOT a country fan, and very few of my friends were either, so for about ten years I just collected the music and enjoyed it that way.

It wasn’t until I moved to New York and broke up with Bill that I started actually playing music in public and putting my knowledge of country to good use. Bill had moved to New York with me in 1990, and when we broke up and he moved back to Texas in ‘92 I didn’t have that many friends of my own. I started hanging out at the corner bar, Gallagher’s Ship’s Mast here in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s gone now, but there used to be a very happening neighborhood music scene that centered around an open mike on Thursday nights, hosted by one William "Wild Bill" Teller. One night I asked him to play "Making Believe" by Jimmy Work. He thought he knew the song, but when he stumbled through the first verse and couldn’t go on, he made me come up onstage to finish it. That was the first time I’d ever sang in front of anybody, probably since grade school, and I was just terrified. But everybody clapped and it was no big deal, so I kept coming back week after week, and each time Wild Bill would insist that I get up and sing. He has a funny schtick where he pretends he’s Johnny Cash, and he would play like I was Patsy Cline and we’d do the three big Patsy numbers.

I met a guitar player named Jeff Ragsdale through a friend who owns a record store here in the neighborhood. Jeff happened to be from Austin too, and we hit it off immediately and began playing together at the Ships Mast open mikes, doing the old country songs that I knew and loved so well. We eventually got a bass player and a drummer and called ourselves Edith & her Mysterious Marfa Lights. (Marfa is a town in Texas where people tend to see these eerie lights where there shouldn’t be any eerie lights…) It wasn’t too long before we were playing all-night gigs ourselves at the Ships Mast. We did a few of my original tunes but mostly it was the cover stuff. My boyfriend Dave eventually joined the band when the bassist left, and we even played a gig on our wedding night! (He ain’t my boyfriend no more.)⁽³⁾

I joined a rockabilly band in 1993, after answering an ad in the Voice. They were called the Tailfins but we changed that to "Edith & her Roadhouse Romeos." And at the same time I was doing the Holler Sisters too (I’ll tell you about them later), so there was a while there where I was in three bands at the same time! It was a little hair-raising and all the bands probably suffered from my being pulled in too many directions. But anyway the Marfa Lights fizzled out on their own when Jeff moved back to Austin later in ‘93. So I stuck with singing for the rockabilly band, and messing around with Deborah as the Holler Sisters. The Romeos have broken up, but the Holler Sisters are still rehearsing occasionally, and we even got another guitar player to help fill out our sound. But mostly I’m putting my energies towards getting a band together to play these original tunes of mine.

See, this is the first time in my life that I’ve really considered the idea of trying to contemplate the concept of being an actual singer-songwriter type of chick. At some point in 1994 I think, I sent out a batch of demo tapes to four or five of my favorite little labels, one of them being Drag City. One of the other labels called me up about six months later and I was dicking around with them for awhile but it didn’t look like anything was going to happen with that. So when Drag City called, I was very very excited! It took another six months or so before Drag City actually said they wanted to release my music (as opposed to just LIKING it). Now that it’s about to be released any month now (haha) I feel like the luckiest girl in the world. But I’m also a little insecure about it because I’m not sure how it’s going to go over, etc. It just feels weird to know that these little tunes I threw together at home are going to be heard by folks all over and judged against all the wonderful music that’s already out there. I guess I just hope that people like the music, and if it doesn’t get trashed too badly then maybe I’ll get to do an album, and maybe they’ll like that too. I’m takin’ this thing one step at a time. I have around 35 songs I’ve written over the years, and I’m gradually writing more of them,⁽⁴⁾ so at least I’ve got some material to pick from.

As I said I’m working on getting a new band together, so finally I’ll have a chance to play my songs without doing all the country cover tunes. It’s a very strange feeling, kind of like jumping off a cliff, naked! I’m just praying to "Bob" that I’ll find a couple of great players and get this thing together in short order. And of course, I hope it’ll sound good and people will like the songs, etc. If this doesn’t go well for me I can always go back to playing country or rockabilly music. But I want to do well with this solo stuff. When I go back to playing cover tunes, I want it to be because I WANT to, not because my solo effort was a flop! So let’s keep our fingers crossed!

Damn, I didn’t mean to make this so long-winded! I don’t even think I answered your question! :)

How about a song that just breaks your heart every time you hear it?

You know that song about the pony named Wildfire?

No, seriously:

"Girl Left Alone" by Dolly Parton (recorded when she was maybe six years old)
"If I Could Only Stay Asleep" by Patsy Cline
"If I Should Lose You" by Jimmy Work
"Wandering Boy" by the Carter Family
"Trudy Dies" by Palace

Where have you been that just about had the best darn food you’ve ever tasted?

That would have to be Ruby’s BBQ on the corner of 29th and Guadalupe in Austin. It’s not exactly your traditional Texas barbecue, but it’s just soooooo tasty. I could eat one of their black bean & brisket tacos right now, you’re making me hungry!

I’m partial to the chicken-fried steak at Trudy’s (also in Austin). For New York, it’s harder to say . . . of course I have to mention the Cowgirl Hall of Fame first, though I don’t eat there all that often. Other than that I guess I have two favorite restaurants. Stacy’s Diner in Brooklyn⁽⁵⁾ because it’s one block away, has a nice neighborhood vibe, and very good food. (Stacy’s fruit salad is the reason I lost 40 pounds in one year.)

But my "special occasion" place is a restaurant in the city called Lupe’s East LA Kitchen, on 6th Avenue right below Spring Street. It’s just a colorful little Mexican food place with great enchiladas and a very laid-back atmosphere, old Celia Cruz for background music, an accordion hanging on the wall. Being from Texas I have a very discriminating palate when it comes to Mexican food . . . it’s really soul food for me. Every time I try a new place, I’ll guaran-damn-tee ya I can find something wrong with it, something completely anti-Tex-Mex, like for instance they’ll have picante sauce on the table but it will be PIPING HOT, fresh out of the microwave. (They got the "hot" and "HOT hot" thing mixed up I guess.) Or they won’t give you tortillas, or the chips are stale, or the cheese is obviously Velveeta. So when I say "there’s nothing wrong with Lupe’s food" that’s a HIGH compliment! :)

Is stage fright ever an issue?

Stage fright is ALWAYS an issue, unfortunately. It’s probably the biggest issue for me, besides writer’s block. See, I’m not an exhibitionist or anything. I get all embarrassed just talking to somebody I don’t know on the phone; you can imagine it’s even harder getting up on a stage and singing!⁽⁶⁾

It’s not something I’m proud of. I mean, I know it doesn’t do me any good to get all worked up and self-conscious about how I’m going to come off at a show. I’m putting myself under a microscope and who needs that? If I were in the audience seeing some girl onstage complaining about how she’s scared to death, and then proceeding to sing in a choked-up fluttery voice . . . well I can see myself getting annoyed at that . . . like "somebody please go pour some courage down that gal’s throat right now or I’ll do it myself!" ;)

But thankfully, people usually end up telling me "you didn’t *look* nervous at all, you carried yourself just fine!" That’s why it’s more annoying than anything . . . because I feel like it’s something that I’m sort of torturing myself about, for no good reason that I can think of. It’s a panic syndrome, really just a physical thing, and I’m sure I could control it better if I did some deep breathing or something.

Shyness in general is also a problem inasmuch as it’s very difficult to go out and get gigs when you’d rather not even leave the house. I’m NOT a good schmoozer! The minute a club owner starts giving me the runaround, I tend to cave in and never call them back . . . it’s pathetic and I really ought to get myself a good booking agent.⁽⁷⁾

And last but certainly not least, which gangsta rapper do you most identify with?

Coolio!

I just this second finished watching him on Conan O’Brien with the New York Boys Choir. Brought tears to my eyes, it did!

I know this is not gangsta-related, but I used to follow the female rappers pretty closely, back in the eighties. I still have a whole shelf full of 12-inches by MC Lyte, Salt ‘n’ Pepa, Roxanne Shante etc. But I fell out of that and started buying less records, buying other things, and I’m ashamed to admit it but I’m seriously deficient in my knowledge of today’s rappers. I wouldn’t know a gangsta if (s)he bit me in the ass. I don’t have cable TV anymore since I moved to New York and the only place I get to see the new stuff is Friday Night Videos! It’s truly sad.

One time when I was still living in Texas, in 1988 I think, I was visiting New York on vacation and I actually saw MC Lyte in a BBQ ™ restaurant. She was with a bunch of other people at a table not too far from ours, and I was just sitting there quaking in my boots, as I am wont to do while in the presence of someone I admire greatly. I really wanted her autograph but I felt like it was the wrong place & time, so I didn’t say anything. But, man, I really respect her shit. I think the song "Kick This One For Brooklyn" made me really want to live here.

I know you meant for that question to be the ringer at the end, but I stuck it in the middle…I couldn’t think of a good punch line. I really like all kinds of music except certain types of really lame whiteboy jazz fusion. Ask me about Tejano and conjunto music sometime! I can do some Lydia Mendoza songs in Spanish if I get enough tequila in me.

To be continued . . . ⁽⁸⁾