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Hi Frazey. Obvious question first – When did you start thinking about making a solo album?
Um, I think it was a natural progression. I was spending a lot of time being a mom and being at home, and The Be Good Tanyas had reached a point in our career, where we all needed a change.
Did it feel like the end of your career?
I think I knew that I would continue with another project at some point. I'm always kinda writing songs anyway. A couple of years ago, I started to realise that the songs I was writing had some kind of theme and would probably one day become an album.
It must have been intimidating suddenly being on your own without Samantha (Parton) and Trish (Klein) standing next to you?
It was very intimidating. I've always been in bands, I'm a group-person. Other people had always brought the musicians in or lead it in a way, and it was very intimidating know having to figure out how to find the right muscians, how to finance it and everything. But I started working with (co-producer) John Raham right away, and he was a huge help. In some ways, he replaced the band. But you know, it's just about doing something you're afraid of doing, and then realising that it wasn't such a big problem after all.
Was it difficult now having to write for yourself and not for the band?
Well, I think I always wrote for myself. The material which suited The Be Good Tanyas, I brought to the Be Good Tanyas, so there wasn't really that much of a difference. I did however feel a real sense of freedom, knowing that I could really include a full range of my own tastes. After the last album I did with The Be Good Tanyas, I went through a period where I stopped writing completely. I just got very silent, and I really had to let go of who I thought I was as an artist. Should I let go or should I continue? I wasn't sure what was next for me. I did a lot of soul-searching. Did I even care about music anymore? But having completely stopped for a while, songs started to appear, and it felt as if they were coming from a new place. So I said to myself, okay, you still have something to say, and I decided to let the music guide me.
Why do you think you reached that place where you weren't sure if you even wanted to make music anymore?
There can be a lot of compromising going on when you decide to take the thing, you're so passionate about, your art, and turn it into a job. It starts getting clouded with your ego, you start getting attention for something, and you end up having this idea that your value is based on your talent. I think a lot of artists become attached to the idea that our value is based on what we produce, and that's not what our values are. I felt very lucky to have that attention as an artist, but it still affected my ability to connect with music for the sake of music itself. Even though it was very difficult, it also felt healthy for me to let go of the music for a while. It occured to me that I should accept myself just as I was, even though I wasn't a ”talented artist” anymore, and that felt really cool. Having let that go, I can now write on a much cleaner slate. I don't have all that baggage of whether or not what I did would be succesful or matter.
But would you have been happy, had you decided to actually leave music behind? Is there a life to be lived outside of music?
If that's what was right for me, I think that would make me happy. I have a lot of things that I'm interested in. I do a lot of art, I'm very involved in my community, and there were other things I wanted to be. I've always wanted to be a mid-wife or a lawyer, I've always had a lot of different interests. But I've found that the thing that's closest to me on a spiritual level, is music. So I'm sure I'll always have the music in my life, but at this moment I'm quite happy to be doing the other things I'm doing.
During the recording of Obadiah, did it ever cross your mind to turn this record into a Be Good Tanyas record instead of a solo record?
No. I did have Trish Klein with me though. She plays electric guitar, and she got the opportunity to really show her soul-chops on this album. I've spent a long, good time with The Be Good Tanyas, and before that, I was freewheelin' between projects. I was definitely ready to collaborate with other people. I'll always value my time with Trish and Samantha, but it felt healthy for me to be in the studio with different people.
As a whole, what do you think the message on Obadiah is?
When I got out of that period of time where no songs were coming through, I would do a lot of grieving. There were some tragedies in my family, some really hard things that I was protesting about, my own childhood, and some of the songs on this album are connected to that time of my life. But one thing I learned, is that everything you experience is a weather pattern. It passes through you, and as much as you allow yourself to embrace the dark sides of life, the more you allow yourself to experience the joys in life as well. There's a lot of joy in grief, and there's a lot of grief in joy. That's what this album says. Life is difficult, we've all been through hard things, but it's also important to celebrate and move through those things without holding on to them.
Did you feel the need to try to distance yourself from the sound of The Be Good Tanyas?
No, I didn't really have those thoughts. Before I was in The Be Good Tanyas, I was in a lot of other projects. The Be Good Tanyas just represented one of the things I was interested in, musically, and with this being a solo record, I'm able to be more free and include the other things I love, like old soul. It's more of everything.
Your parents were, as your bio says, on the run from the Vietnam war, and they both moved to Canada before you were born. How has your background influenced you?
It has had a huge influence on who I am as a person and my perspective on many things. For my parents, it was such an era of extreme change. They were just coming out of the 50's and suddenly everything changed. I think it was very stressful, and I've met a lot of people from that generation, who are still in some ways very traumatized from having their whole world shook so quickly. I think my generation can learn a lot from that time. It was a very sexist era, there was the sexual revolution which I think was very difficult for everybody. It's an interesting story. One thing that affected me very deeply was, my parents were very wild, very creative and very outside the box, and I think in some ways that was very hard for me. But it has also enabled me to using my own mind and to not be afraid of doing things in a completely different way than what we are taught by society.
It seems like history's repeating itself, isn't it? I saw a documentary recently about young American men moving to Canada in order to avoid being sent off to Iraq or Afghanistan.
I think there will always be people trying to get away from a government trying to get them to do something they don't believe in. What's different nowadays … well, during the Vietnam war, we had a much more free system of media where people were allowed to see that there was a lot of resistance against the war. Now I find that the media is so suppresive on what people's actual opinions are and what's actually going on. There is a strong movement, you just don't see it in the media. People feel isolated today.
The Be Good Tanyas were among the pioneers of the folk/bluegrass revival. What are your own thoughts on your musical legacy?
When we first started, it was very surprising to us. We didn't expect the attention we got. To us, it was basically just the music, we sat around our living rooms playing, so it was shocking to us that people were interested in what we considdered very plain, simple music. Since then, there's really been a huge sway in that direction with all this folk music. Now, people really seem to value individuality in vocals and sincerity and honesty. Ultimately, I think music's popularity is determined by what people need and crave, and I'm honoured that we were a part of that.
Finally – do you think there's a chance The Be Good Tanyas will one day reunite?
I don't think that we will get back together. We are going to release an album on vinyl with old tracks we haven't released before. We're working on that right now, but I don't feel like we'll get back together. That was an era of my life, and people have this thing where they want something to go on and on, but this doesn't seem like the way life is. I still love those girls, and I'm sure we'll get together and play sometime, but right now we're happy doing what we do, our own projects.
I suppose you could always get back together in 20 years and do the big reunion shows. Like The Police and Guns N'Roses…
Yeah, but come on, how good were those reunion shows? Not very good, were they?
Frazey Ford's Obadiah is out now on Nettwerk. For more on her upcoming UK tour, go to Myspace.com/frazeyford
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