Reading Room

If you have some old 'zines with press on Freakwater or a fond memory to share, I'd welcome the opportunity to place it here.

(all libraries need a mural, so here's a shot of Louisville, KY & the 2nd St Bridge, courtesy of Kentuckianna)

1. "A Brief History of Louisville Music As It Pertains to Freakwater", by hiddenoverlord, July 2002.

2. "The Big Time's Big Price" for The Chicago Reader, November, 1996.

3. "Freakwater: Plays Well with Others" by J.R. Jones for The Chicago Reader, September, 1999.

4. "Freakwater: Fundamental Things" by Bill Friskics-Warren for Puncture magazine #45, 1999.

5. "Catherine Irwin Blesses Me and Atlanta with her Graces" (October, '02) by newoldtymer, your humble fansite guy.

6. "Universal Soldiers: Freakwater's Themes for Life" by John Lewis for Option magazine, 1996.

7. "Chatting Over the Wire with Janet Bean" (April, 2003) by newoldtymer, still your humble fansite guy.

8. "Freakwater at VZD's in Oklahoma City, March 18,1999" by James Murray, for the 'zine 100 YEAR WAR.

9. "Freakwaters Run Deep" by Thomas Peake for the Atlanta alternative weekly Creative Loafing, February, 1998.

10. Catherine Irwin Interview by Hillary Harrison, published in the Louisville 'zine Bejeezus, January, 2004.

11. "Nothing So Pure" by Cyndi Elliot for Puncture magazine #34, 1995.

12. Excerpts from a chat with multi-instrumentalist Jon Spiegel, March, 2008, by newoldtymer.

A Brief History of Louisville Music As It Pertains to Freakwater

Freakwater was formed simply because two girls enjoyed singing country music together. Originally, the creative force behind Freakwater was Catherine Irwin, whose interest in hillbilly folk music predates the period described in this document - she ALWAYS played hillbilly music, whether publicly or not. Nonetheless, the background from which Freakwater arose was Punk Rock.

The first series of Louisville Punk bands were for the most part East End/ Middlin' Bourgeois and comprised of, for want of a better term, freaks and what used to be called "art fags". The Louisville School of Art was the original locus. No Fun came first, then the short-lived I-Holes, then the Babylon Dance Band, the Endtables, and the Blinders. Probably the most significant figure among the musicians involved was guitarist Tara Key (No Fun, then the Babylon Dance Band, and eventually Antietam).

The more-or-less official gathering spot for early Louisville Punk was 1069 Bardstown Road, a run-down rental property surrounded by fast food restaurants and moribund businesses. The Babylons, Blinders, Dickbrains and various other bands rehearsed there, and residents included, at one time or another, Stuart Campbell, Tari Barr, Doug Maxson, Charles Schultz, Catherine Irwin, Michael O'Bannon, and other musicians and artists.

The connection between East End/Art School Punk and the later South End/Hard Core scene was established in 1979 when the Abromavage brothers and Kenny Ogle wandered into a Babylon Dance Band gig. Shortly thereafter they became Babylon "roadies" (nominally) and subsequently formed their own band, Malignant Growth. They also became regular guests at 1069.

That's the general background. What follows is a bare bones listing of bands and personnel, with some elaboration as concerns Catherine, Janet, and others of specific interest to Freakwater devotees.

The Dickbrains (roughly 1980 - Catherine would have been about 17 at the time)
Catherine Irwin - guitar
Alec Irwin - bass
Douglas Maxson - vocals, keyboard
Charles Schultz - drums
Tari Barr - vocals
(a full-fledged teen-aged garage band - loud, electric, and primitive but frequently melodic)

(Editorial note - "agent_lance_link_secret_chimp" interjects: "Although it affected nobody else in the world, before The Dickbrains was an unnamed folk trio, which sometimes considered debuting but never did, consisting of Cathy and her brother and me--noteworthy mainly for having played Dreadful Snake, Little Black Train, Make Me a Pallet Down On Your Floor, and an assortment of other semi-familiar three-chord strummers--Fixin to Die and Take a Whiff On Me are the ones I remember, with Play With Fire tossed in for nothin. Cathy set most of the repertoire and I readily concede I had no business there except that I was around the house a lot, our fathers both had vast libraries of Irish folkies (except that her father's actually Irish), and I owned a Woody Guthrie record and a fiddle.")

In 1981 three inquisitive teenagers showed up at Tari Barr's door at 1069, apparently curious about the cadre of freaks and mutants who frequented the place. These three were: John Bailey, Wolf Knapp, and Janet Beveridge Bean. Bailey and Knapp almost immediately formed Orange Orange with Barr on drums (and this band later transformed into Your Food). Some months later, Bean joined Skull of Glee as a percussionist.

Skull of Glee (1982)
S. "Chile" Rigot - vocals
Wink O'Bannon - guitar
Thomas Dumstorf - drums
Eric Smith - bass
Mark Dickson - keyboard
Kit Luthi - percussion
Janet Bean - percussion

(in October '82 O'Bannon fired Bean for missing rehearsals. He subsequently fired Luthi and Dickson, then everybody else.)

By the summer of '82, Tari Barr had been replaced in Your Food by ex-Dickbrains drummer Charles Schultz (Doug Maxson had also joined that group). She and ex-Blinder Michael O'Bannon put together a studio-only project (The Trouser Snakes), then attempted to form a working band with Catherine Irwin and Michael's brother Wink (operating simultaneously with Wink's Skull of Glee group). Catherine insisted on calling this group Bunny Butthole, as a result of which the humorless Wink quit before the band ever played out.

Bunny Butthole (1982)
Catherine Irwin - guitar, vocals
Tari Barr- vocals
Wink O'Bannon - bass
Michael O'Bannon - drums

In '83 Catherine Irwin and Janet Bean first appeared together on stage, performing "Stand By Your Man" with Bruce Witsiepe (No Fun, Circle X) on snare drum, Steve Crume on lap steel guitar, and probably Gary Stillwell (Bodeco, the Kentucky Travelers) on guitar. Catherine also performed on stage with S.Rigot and Wink O'Bannon in an ad hoc set which consisted, as memory serves, of a very long song called "We Are Same" (which were the only lyrics) and some other improvised songs that sounded pretty much the same as that one.(It was probably at about this time - at any rate, between '83 and '85 - that Catherine recorded a series of four-track demo.s with former Skull of Glee bassist Eric Smith. These were folk songs in the Carter/ Guthrie mold, several of which eventually made their way into the Freakwater repetoire.)

(From this point of it can be assumed that Catherine and Janet have formed a loose and intermittent partnership of sorts.)

During this period ('83 - '84), Bean joined the Zoo Directors with ex-Babylon Dance Band musicians Tara Key and Tim Harris, and guitarist Mike Weinert. Key, Harris, and Weinert subsequently relocated to New York and formed Antietam. Bean, meanwhile, met guitarist Rick Rizzo (who attended school in Lexington, Ky.) and moved with him to Chicago, where they formed Eleventh Dream Day. (The core of Dream Day was always Rizzo and Bean, and, later, Douglas McCombs. Numerous other musicians have performed and recorded with them, including Baird Figi, Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo, Tara Key of Antietam, and Wink O'Bannon. In that there are a number of Dream Day web-sites where information concerning that group can be obtained, further references to them in this document will be brief. I will note, however, that among their early songs was a piece called, as I recall, City of the Seventies, composed by Catherine Irwin. It was never to my knowledge recorded, and I have only a vague memory to go by.)

An attempt was made circa '84 to form a band comprised of the O'Bannon brothers, Charles Schultz, and Catherine Irwin. Catherine called this group Catbutt/ Dogbutt. The attempt failed, and no one remembers anything whatsoever about the project.

In 1986, Catherine's brother and former Dickbrain Alec Irwin returned to Louisville from school and formed Butt in the Front with Wink O'Bannon, Tom Dumstorf, and Catherine, who, strangely, played electric lead guitar. Most of the material was written by Alec, although Catherine wrote some of the lyrics. (This is the only one of the "Butt" bands to actually play in public.)

Butt In The Front (1986-87)
Catherine Irwin - vocals, electric guitar
Alec Irwin - vocals, acoustic guitar
Wink O'Bannon - bass
Tom Dumstorf - percussion
(For years O'Bannon claimed that this was the best band he'd ever been in. They recorded a four-track demo., of which there is currently one known copy.)

(Editorial note - "agent_lance_link_secret_chimp" interjects: I've got a copy of BOTH Butt in the Front demos, as well as The Snot Song, Something I Saw in the Sky Last Night, and the Hidden/Cathy/Tom endless afternoon jam with a lot of shouting about squirrels. I was thrown out of Butt in the Front because I didn't want to practice if I had to play drums. Fool me twice, shame on me.)

(Editorial note - "Earth A Tit" interjects: I have a copy, I know someone else who has a copy. So this is false rumor.)

At about this same time ('85-'88), Catherine's ongoing (but somewhat erratic) partnership with Janet Bean was gradually becoming more concrete, and they occasionally played out, usually "opening" for friends. In '87, for instance, they opened in Louisville for a garage band called The Bulls (John Bailey, Charles Schultz, Wink O'Bannon, ex-Babylon vocalist Chip Nold), calling themselves "Penny and Jean". At some point, probably '88, they became "Trippy Squashblossum and Mojo Wishbean", and then Freakwater per se.

(Editorial note - "Earth A Tit" interjects: Another thing I remember is that Cathy and Janet AND OTHER FRIENDS used to sing together. This was around 1986. Specifically , I remember seeing Cathy and Janet and two others singing in an elevator at University of Louisville. This was before Freakwater (the moniker) was even thought of, but I think it is important to note that the early formation was not such an exclusive thing between Janet and Cathy.)

(Editorial note - "agent_lance_link_secret_chimp" interjects: "I do believe the incarnation of Cathy & Janet which performed with Bruce Witsiepe and The Bulls was Mojo Wishbean and Trippy Squashblossom already.")

Initially, Freakwater and its variously named antecedents were strictly duos, accompanied only by Catherine's guitar. Only occasionally did other musicians join in. For instance, Wink O'Bannon was drafted to play lead guitar at a gig in Louisville circa 1989 or '90, at a tiny coffee shop called the Café Dog (run by O'Bannon's sister-in-law Tari Barr - and, if memory serves, the girls were warming up for the South End Hardcore band Kinghorse, whose vocalist, Sean Garrison, eventually became a contributing Freakwater songwriter). Dave Gay joined Freakwater with the recording of their first album, and is the only musician to appear on all of their records, but, originally, Freakwater was Cathy and Janet by themselves, or augmented temporarily by whoever they could dig up (and in those pre-No Depression, pre-Insurgent Country days, hillbilly musicians were hard to come by in Indy Rock land).
Freakwater was from its inception intermittent. It was never a constantly working band, and is perhaps best perceived as a "project". (In Chicago Freakwater was always seen as a "splinter" of Eleventh Dream Day, although, as this document makes clear, the relationship between Irwin and Bean, both personally and musically, pre-dates the formation of that group.) The geographical distance between Irwin and Bean (or Louisville and Chicago) is perhaps not as much of a significant impediment as is sometimes assumed, particularly when one takes into consideration that Catherine is and always has been a ramblin' girl, moving frequently from one part of the country to another, and sometimes out of the country altogether. (This seems a likely point to mention that Dream Day itself was always a more or less intermittent project, and were it not for Dee Taira and the Rainbow Club most of the musicians in Wicker Park would have ended up pawning their instruments - but that's another story, I guess. Suffice it to say that Rick Rizzo, Catherine Irwin, and every member of Tortoise have at some time been employed by Dee, and a job was always waiting when the tour was over.)

Part two: Sean Garrison
Sean Garrison claims to have climbed over the back wall of the Beat Club in 1982 to see Skull of Glee. This may be true, or not. He would have been 14 or so at the time.

(editorial note: "Earth A Tit" interjects: Sean Garrison never saw Skull of Glee. That is certain.)

(editorial note: Sean Garrison interjects: After talking to Chris A. I am told that my first visit to the Beat -at age 14 or 15- Skull of Glee was not playing. I assumed it was S.O.G. because of the way the band was described to me by Wink and others many years later. It could have been Your Food or something. I know that they were local and I know I didn't like them at the time because they didn't sound like D.O.A. My bad.)

Garrison is the point where South End Blue Collar Hardcore (as pioneered by the Abromavage brothers and Malignant Growth) meets (or re-unites with) East End Art Punk. It stands to reason (in an irrational cosmos) that he would end up writing country music.

In the mid-80s, Squirrel Bait was the first of the East End (and Brown school) bands to achieve anything like a significant national following. Louisville punk bands before them had an extremely limited audience (usually other punk rock musicians - very insular and incestuous). Drummer Britt Walford, typically perverse and inscrutable, quit Squirrel Bait after their first recording sessions and formed Maurice with Garrison. From Maurice came, on the one hand, Slint (the quintessential Indy "post rock" art band) and, on the other hand, Kinghorse (the quintessential tougher-than-nails HC band). Walford went with Slint, Garrison went with the Horse. Slint almost never played in Louisville, and gained a significant national following. The Horse played in Louisville frequently, and never got out of town. Slint was widely influential, in the U.S. and beyond. Kinghorse was influential only in Louisville, where they absolutely dominated the local HC scene for years.

(editorial note - Earth A Tit interjects: I saw three Slint shows in Louisville, one at Tari Barr's Cafe Dog. They also played at Tewligan's, etc.)

(editorial note - Shawn S. interjects: To say that Kinghorse never played outside of Louisville and were influential only in Louisville is just not true. They toured a few times and in every corner they went to there was always a handful of people who "got it". I have toured all over the U.S. and Canada with bands like Lords, Coliseum and Breather Resist and in every town there is always someone who asks if we know Kinghorse or Endpoint.....and sometimes Slint. Over the years I have received letters from people who somehow or another heard about Driftin Luke, etc. and being Kinghorse fans they wanted recordings. In Minneapolis we stayed at a guy named Patti's house (He is in Dillinger Four) where he proceeded to proudly pull out his Kinghorse collection. Several years ago a band from upstate New York played the BRYCC House and between songs they played Kinghorse riffs and asked general questions about them. They were stoked to finally visit the hometown of the Horse. Blah, blah. Point being, their influence is much wider than Louisville proper. Sure, not on the scale of Slint, but the fact remains.)

Garrison's transition from frightening punk to frightening hillbilly may have been inevitable. Be that as it may, his acquaintance with such exotic characters as Catherine Irwin and Wink O'Bannon helped things along. His girlfriend bought him a cheap acoustic guitar, and O'Bannon showed him how to use a capo. 4000 painful country songs ensued.

In the mid-'90s, after the final break-up of the Horse, Garrison formed a series of bands called Driftin' Luke (until Hank William's estate stopped him!). The first version of the band, a studio project, included the Kinghorse rhythm section and guitarist Dave Bird. Mach Two, which began in 1996 and continued intermittently for two years or so, was a more acoustic/ folk unit, with Garrison on guitar, Corey Roederer on bass, and Wink O'Bannon on "lead" guitar. Other personnel came and went: Dave Bird was in and out, as well as members of a local band called the Pennies. The last incarnation of the group included mandolinist/ vocalist/percussionist John Paul Wright, but for most live performances the band was a trio.

After '98, Luke faded away. During the course of the next four years, however, interest (primarily local) in Garrison's hillbilly period resulted in the compilation and eventual release (Summer, 2002) of the '97-'98 material, culled from studio sessions, rough demo.s, rehearsals, and live performances. In 2001 Garrison assembled an ad hoc band for a performance under his own name (rather than a group name) with Rising Shotgun (a band fronted by Garrison's friend Brett Ralph, veteran of Malignant Growth). This new and temporary group consisted of Garrison, Dave Bird, Wink O'Bannon, Gary Stillwell, and Freakwater bassist Dave Gay.

Some months later Garrison played a solo set as a sort of "tribute" to a local record store owner (not coincidentally, the same record store which is releasing the Luke album), and was so disappointed with the results (bad p.a., low volume, luke-warm reception) that he put away his acoustic guitar and vowed never to appear in public again unless backed by the loudest hillbilly band on Earth.

That group has scheduled its first appearance at an in-store performance in support of the Luke-era recordings compilation. Whether the loudest hillbilly band on Earth or not is undecided, and probably beside the point.

Sean Garrison and band:
Sean Garrison (Maurice, Kinghorse, Driftin' Luke) - vocals
Dave Bird (Out, Driftin' Luke, Speed To Roam, Fire In The Saddle) - guitar
Mike Seymour (Red Sun) - bass
Matt Odenweller (Out) - drums
Wink O'Bannon (The Blinders, Skull of Glee, Bodeco, Eleventh Dream Day, etc.) - guitar

A second, "real" debut is scheduled for late August, on a double-bill with Catherine Irwin (in what I suppose will be her first solo performance since recording her upcoming album).

Part Three: Those Wacky O'Bannons
Artist Michael O'Bannon (Blinders, Little Elvis, Pure Jesus, etc.) composed a song for each of the first two Freakwater albums (at that time, Janet was not writing much material of her own).
His brother, Matthew "Wink", played guitar on one song on the first Freakwater album (which also included a performance by former Squirrel Bait vocalist Peter Searcy on cello). Wink also played on the obscure "War Pigs/ Goddamn mouth" single. He has occasionally performed with Freakwater live, usually with disastrous results.

Part Four: Miscellany
Although this has nothing whatsoever to do with Louisville, one ( which means "me") is inclined to mention Catherine's work with the Unholy Trio, the Sadies, and other bands. And did she really sing "Ode To Billie Joe" with noisy uber-garage band Juanita? I don't know, even though there's a good chance I played bass at that gig….

From the Chicago Reader, November, 1996:

The Big Time's Big Price
Freakwater: No Sale

When Catherine Irwin wrote "Waitress Song" a couple of years ago, she thought of it more as a reflection than a prophecy:

Maybe money can't buy everything
It looks like I'm never gonna know for sure
Maybe money can't buy happiness
Well neither can just being poor

This past April, Freakwater, the old-timey country band that the sharp-witted Irwin leads with Janet Bean, was being courted heavily by country-rocker Steve Earle to sign with his new Warner Brothers-distributed vanity label, E-Squared. It seemed as though Irwin might discover for herself if money could buy happiness, or at least soften the blows chronicled in her bittersweet songs.

But after months of fruitless negotiations, what originally seemed like a sure thing has finally fallen through. Freakwater is back where it started-the sole country band on an indie-rock label that doesn't have the resources or connections to break into the country market. "All in all I think it's good that we went through this nasty experience," says Bean with a wry smile. "Maybe my bitterness will now be understood by the other members of the band."

Bean's bitterness comes from previous unsavory entanglements with major labels. She is also a drummer and songwriter with Chicago rock stalwart Eleventh Dream Day, which made three albums for Atlantic amid strained and unsatisfactory label relations before returning to indie land a few years ago. While EDD's apples were spoiling, Bean's casual partnership with Irwin, a long-time chum from back home in Louisville, was ripening. In 1988 they released their debut album for the LA indie Amoeba, which had also issued the first Eleventh Dream Day recordings. By last year, with the release of Old Paint (the band's fourth album and its second on Thrill Jockey), Freakwater had expanded well beyond its original status as a lark, embarking on major U.S. and European tours.

Although Irwin and Bean had encountered major label interest before, the overtures made by Earle and E-Squared A&R man Jack Emerson were the first to result in anything beyond a free dinner. Leery of getting tangled up in red tape right away, Irwin and Bean initially met and talked with Emerson sans lawyers. They liked what they heard.

"He said we could continue on the path that we'd already been on," recalls Bean, who juggles her musical activities with raising a son and hostessing at the Wishbone. "They just wanted us to do it in a way that we could tour and support ourselves without being out of our minds about it." But when it was time to iron out a contract the band consulted prominent New York music attorney Richard Grabel. "[E-Squared] had to reveal their true intent when we got a lawyer," says Irwin.

"What emerged," says Grabel, who provided his services pro bono, "was that they both had very different ideas about what Freakwater should be. Jack wanted Janet and Cathy to go down to Nashville and work with Nashville session musicians and make more of a produced, slick record. Janet and Cathy just wanted to keep making Freakwater records the way they always had been."

Prospective record deals often fall apart, but considering Earle's reputation it's surprising that creative control became the main stumbling block. With the increasing popularity of new Nashville traditionalists like BR-549, Dale Watson, and Gillian Welch, it's no longer uncommon for the Nashville machine to grant artists the power to go against the prevailing commercial winds. Emerson declined to comment on behalf of E-Squared, sending only a tersely-worded fax that wished the group success in future endeavors.

Bean and Irwin say they weren't entirely hostile to input from the label. Bean claims that they were willing to experiment with outside musicians, outside songwriters, and outside producers (their last three albums were produced by Brad Wood). "I would've done pretty much anything they'd asked to a certain degree," says Bean. "If they wanted us to wear wigs every now and then we probably would have done that--but they presented themselves as one thing and they turned out to be something altogether different." The label's refusal to grant Freakwater the ability to make final creative decisions finally ruptured the deal. The group (whose third permanent member is the silent, chain-smoking upright bassist Dave Gay) will record their fifth record, once again for Thrill Jockey, this winter.

Irwin's never without some humorous bile, but she's making a special effort to cope with this disappointment. "Around the time the decision was made I started thinking about in the future how I'll be living in a cardboard box, ranting constantly and disturbing all my little box friends by talking about the day we marched into the Time-Warner building and said, 'I don't need your goddamned money!' and everybody would be moving their cartons away from me, thinking, 'There's that woman with that weird Warner Brothers fixation," she explains. "I'm not a very religious person, but I think that everyone will pay for their sins."

A month later, in the Letters section:

L E T T E R T O T H E E D I T O R
Dealing With Freakwater

In response to the Freakwater article which ran in the November 22 issue of your paper [Post No Bills], we would like to clarify a few things.

First, we do not consider the main stumbling block in completing a deal with Freakwater to be creative control. Regardless of the fact that major labels (of which we are aligned to Warner Brothers) do not give up 100 percent creative control lightly, we still must take creative differences into consideration when we are signing artists to E-Squared. With the band's previous recorded history in mind, it would be hard for most people and/or labels to consider them anything more than a niche artist. We, however, felt that they were much more than that and that they could reach an entirely different and much larger audience if they could only be heard (think Alison Krauss story). In our minds, due to the expense and obstacles involved with putting Freakwater on the road to promote their records, we would have to depend largely on radio airplay to expose them to the aforementioned larger audience, specifically AAA radio and, if we were lucky, mainstream country radio. As we are sure you are aware, those formats dictate a higher level of sound quality and production value than Freakwater's previous recordings have captured (due largely, we are sure, to their minuscule recording budgets). Because we are essentially an independent label, we must feel about both the artists we sign and the records they make that we stand a modicum of success once those records come out. Otherwise, we go under.

It is our intention with all artists that we sign to make records of which everyone involved can be proud and that we feel we can market with the resources we have at our disposal. If we don't feel we can do anything with a record we have made, it is our responsibility to the artist to cut them loose to find a better home. With Freakwater, we ultimately came to feel that we were not seeing eye to eye, and we unfortunately did not trust that we could come up with a record with which we could all be happy. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, it began to feel like an unrewarding relationship.

Incidentally, the players we suggested using on the band's record if they signed to E-Squared are Peter Rowan from San Francisco, Norman Blake from Stone Mountain, Georgia, and Roy Huskey Jr. from here in Nashville. We hardly consider them to be your stereotypical Nashville session players. If the band thinks that they are, that is just another example of the unlikelihood of us being able to have a conducive relationship with the band.

E-Squared is essentially an independent record label working on independent label budgets, and therefore we must always take finances into consideration. We were willing to offer Freakwater a substantial amount of money for such an act since we had Warner's backing on this deal, but the band's lawyer kept coming back for more and ultimately we had to pull out, feeling that we simply could not afford the band and the concessions for which they were asking. As for Richard Grabel's "pro bono" work for the band, we were informed by the band that he would be receiving a percentage of the monies he procured for them. With that in mind, it would appear that the work would not have been pro bono for long.

In the end, we are all still great fans of the band and feel that Catherine Irwin is an exceptional writer with a great deal of potential. We regret that we could not feel comfortable making this deal and wish them the best of luck.

Steve Earle
Owner/Operator
Jack Emerson
Owner/Operator
Kelley Walker
A&R
E-Squared

TOP

"Freakwater: Plays Well With Others" by J.R. Jones
September 17, 1999

Catherine Irwin's door stands open, her keys hanging from the lock. I know it's her door because I recognize the National acoustic guitar standing in the front room: she strums it on the cover of End Time (Thrill Jockey), the sixth and latest album by her warped country band, Freakwater. Irwin lives in a ground-floor apartment at the south end of Cherokee Triangle, one of Louisville's most coveted neighborhoods: a hundred years ago, the city's leisure class lined its hilly streets with stately brick houses, marked by two-story white columns, leaded glass, and decorative ironwork. Irwin's building is no mansion, but last night someone tried to get in through her kitchen window, so she and her roommate have stationed a plastic watch frog on the sill; it has a motion sensor in its belly and croaks urgently as her next-door neighbor passes outside. "Maybe the frog is too sensitive," says Irwin, giggling. "It's probably gonna get on that guy's nerves pretty bad." Way up in a hollow tree, perfect idolatry.

For more than a decade Freakwater has been a long-distance band, held together by the stretch of I-65 that connects Louisville to Chicago and by Irwin's long-standing friendship with Janet Beveridge Bean. The two met in their teens at a Circle X show, and spent several years as a couch-bound country duo. But in the mid-80s Bean moved to Chicago, where she cofounded the rock band Eleventh Dream Day, and Freakwater didn't make its recorded debut until 1989. She and Irwin have been friends for 18 years now, but neither woman seems interested in moving closer to the other. "The beauty of living in a place like this is there's just nothing to do," says Irwin. "You really do have to make your own fun. So people just sit around. I think that's probably what drives Janet crazy, because she's a little more active. But that's why they have all these dumb bands--'cause there's nothing else to do."
Freakwater may have begun as one of those "dumb bands," but End Time shows how far it's come as a vehicle for Irwin and Bean's modernist twist on traditional country music. Over the past few records--Old Paint (1995), Springtime (1998), and now End Time--the two have adapted the genre's unsettling harmony and extravagant drama to life in the 90s with a wickedness and poignancy few No Depression bands have been able to match. Irwin has always been the principal songwriter, but the two women divided the new record down the middle; they also brought in a drummer, Steve Goulding of the Waco Brothers, and decided to use a string section. The album aspires to the full-blown orchestration of Elvis Presley's Memphis sessions and Vegas bands, and both Irwin's dark hollers and Bean's grieving waltzes blossom under the treatment.

"Horrible," says Irwin, describing the sessions, which took place at the beginning of the year. "We didn't have much time to get it done, and it was very frustrating trying to explain to people what I wanted. It was a bad January." Bean had just separated from her husband, Eleventh Dream Day bandmate Rick Rizzo. Freakwater bassist Dave Gay had left Chicago for Asheville, North Carolina, making him the second commuting member. Max Johnston, whose sterling banjo and pedal steel were highlights of Springtime, had moved to Austin and played his last show with Freakwater in Louisville on New Year's Eve; replacing him for the new record was steel guitarist Eric Heywood, formerly of Son Volt. Just after they convened in Chicago, the blizzard hit, and Irwin got sick. "It was a lost month," recalls Bean. "It was like a month that doesn't exist within time as we know it." Learning to play with a drummer was the biggest challenge for a group whose material has always relied heavily on dynamic range. "Catherine and I drove the band, rhythmically speaking," explains Bean. "We were working with free time in spots where we would stop singing, and we just cued each other. Now you realize they have to be more concrete, or else you have to play with the drummer for a long time, so he understands all your little movements and stuff." Bean, who drums in Eleventh Dream Day, says her songs are naturally more rhythmic than Irwin's. "It should make everything easier," admits Irwin. "That's what Janet always says. Really, it should. It does put constraints on the drama: you can't just make things longer or shorter in such a random way, as we always did before."

End Time was recorded at Uber Studio, on Division in Humboldt Park. Producer and owner Brendan Burke--who recorded Springtime and works frequently with local free-jazz outfits--asked cellist and composer Fred Lonberg-Holm to arrange the strings; Bean and Irwin wanted to avoid the usual country cliches, so they agreed on a sparse chamber sound similar to Big Star's Third or John Cale's Paris 1919. Lonberg-Holm, bassist Kent Kessler, and violinist-fiddler Joel Batty played the charts; in addition, the De Milleian cast included Jim Baker on piano, Jeff Jacobs on Hammond organ, and Freakwater alumnus Jon Spiegel on Dobro and mandolin. The numbers made a tough production job even more difficult. "This record has more time-signature changes than a lot of Rush records," says Burke. "There's a lot of really weird nontraditional stuff here. These guys are singing in 11ths and 12ths, and the actual structure of the tunes is very strange, and I like that. But yeah, it was a struggle to put other players on it."

Yet End Time came out sharply focused. Jacobs's soulful, literate organ and Heywood's sunny pedal steel knit together beautifully on the quiet final verse of Irwin's weary gospel tune "Good for Nothing." Bean's terrifying blues on "Cloak of Frogs" combines fiddle, Dobro, and vibrating pedal steel into a ghostly drone. Her love of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris inflames the waltz-time ballads; the heartbreaking "My History" melts together organ, piano, and strings but seems still and spare, while on "Raised Skin" a cold, clear string line frames the conjoined voices. And for all the record's layering, among its best cuts is "Sick, Sick, Sick," for which Irwin's guitar, vocal, and tapping foot were recorded live through a single room mike. "Even though we needed more time, it was good that there wasn't any more time because people would've been dropping like flies," says Irwin. "If we'd been in there for another week, there'd probably be open real estate in Chicago."

On Friday, September 24, the band kicks off a three-week tour that will come to Chicago's Athenaeum Theatre on October 9--one of only two dates on the schedule that will feature the string section. But today, the afternoon before Labor Day, is just another lazy Sunday in Louisville. Outside Irwin's front door--from which she's long since rescued her keys--sits her "chia man," a nylon stocking filled with grass seed, crude features shaped with rubber bands, eyes marked with red beads. A little green grass has already begun to sprout from his forehead.

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'Freakwater: Fundamental Things' by Bill Friskics-Warren

One look at Freakwater's Catherine Irwin when she's onstage singing is enough to let you know everything's not right with the world. Banjo or fiddle may be playing their dulcet mountain twang behind her; Irwin and her partner, Janet Bean, may be weaving their rapturous back-in-the-hollow harmonies; but there remains a look of pain on Irwin's face that no amount of Carter Family conjuring can conceal. Irwin might even be urging her audience, as the Carters did theirs, to "Keep on the Sunny Side," but hers is the underbelly of that gospel. She's there to testify: there's a dark and a troubled side, too. Today, Irwin is clutching a longneck and talking theology. In town from Louisville to visit a friend, she's sitting in the backroom of Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, the most celebrated honky-tonk in Nashville. It's an unlikely scene for the Buckle of the Bible Belt, a place where folks don't often mix the pleasures of Saturday night with the pieties of Sunday morning. But the dissonance suits Irwin, an apostate at once drawn to and put off by Christianity. Like a scab she can't stop picking, religion is something Irwin just can't leave alone.

At least, that's the sense you get from Freakwater's records. where vestiges of down-home dogma crop up all over the place. They're in the hymns of Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers that the band revives; and they arise from the songs Irwin writes - which routinely allude to God, the wages of sin, and the great bye-and-bye - and from the band's rustic picking and singing: untutored sounds straight from the church in the wildwood. It's hardly what you'd expect from Irwin, a woman who tosses off tropes like "there's nothing so pure as the kindness of an atheist. Indeed, for her to drink this deeply of the holy spirit is tantamount to holding a prayer meeting. Irwin doesn't profess to be a Christian: in her view, faith breeds false hopes and heartache. Her songs, however, own that religion is stitched into the fabric of Southern life. "It's everywhere," she insists, as if to say, How could I not write or sing about it?

"It's everywhere in this country, and everywhere in the world, at least the places I've been. It's inspiring to me to see to what levels of creative lunacy Christian faith can drive people. Like the cathedral builders. That kind of passion is endlessly fascinating. "

More than anything, though, Irwin is captivated by cillennial prophecies of the end of the world, and the sway they hold over folks. "Some of the things people do are hilarious," she says. "You couldn't make stuff like that up. Well, you could, but you don't have to make it up, because it's right there. You watch the Grammys, or the Day-TIme Soap Opera Awards, and there's somebody thanking Jesus for helping them win. I would crack up laughing at that even if I was lying on my deathbed."

Irwin has always had plenty to say about the state of the world, and about matters of faith, gender, and social class in particular. Even so, she insists the title of Freakwater's new album End Time was an afterthought that arose as a gibe at televangelists and their sheeplike herds. Intended or not, "end time" sounds a theological note that stikes at the heart of Irwin's songwriting.

Long before the advent of today's literalistic accounts of Armageddon, Biblical prophets used apocolyptic language to dramatize tyranny and injustice in hopes of changing the hearts of the rich and powerful. Contrary to what those pining for the rapture might think, men like Isaiah and Jeremiah weren't painting pictures of some pie-in-the-sky hereafter. Rather, much as the punks did a few millennia later, they were aiming their vivid rants at oppression in the here and now. The prophets were not so much predicting the future as trying to create it.

Irwin's songs do much the same thing (without the ranting and sense of divine calling) when they tap religious themes and imagery - still standard currency in much of the US - to plumb issues of suffering and injustice. Irwin's brother Alec may have the Ph.D. in theology (from Harvard no less). But insofar as his unbelieving kid sister has, over the last four Freakwater albums, articulated a vision of a better world, she would seem to be the prophet in the family.

Which isn't to say that Irwin's, or Freakwater's, idea of what the world could become is especially sanguine. At its best, it's a qualified, even tragic, vision: it assumes hardship is a given and the best we can do is endure it, without hurting each other too badly in the process. "Heaven, " Irwin tells us, "is for the weak at heart. "

Freakwater's gripping fourth album, Old Paint, gives voice to Irwin's vision as well as any
record in the group's catalog. "Gone to Stay", the song with the oftcited line about the good will of atheists, finds a griefstricken mother at the graveside of her baby. "How many heartaches do you think you can stand," she asks herself amid strains of sobbing steel and a resolutey strummed guitar. "I used to count them all on the fingers of just one hand/Way back in the distance before these sad times began/ Now I'm down by the ocean counting grains of sand. "Ugly Man," an outwardly cheery country ramble, lays bare dreams shattered by domestic violence: "I always thought that I knew what wanted, what I wanted was a family man/ We'd lie in bed at night to gether makin' all kinds of plans," sings Irwin, her hopes buoyed by Bean's soaring harmonies. "I always thought that I knew what he was thinkin' and I knew I didn't understand But I knew to lay low when he came home drinkin' 'cause knew him like the back of his hand."

"Waitress Song", a driving fiddle-and-steel breakdown, conveys the guilt and rage of a woman saddled with her lover's oppressive expectations, as well as those placed on her by society. It also reveals Irwin's unerring ear for the rhythms of everyday speech: "If I didn't come home every day smellin' like fried eggs/ If I didn't have those veins poppin' out all over my legs/ If I had my hair done up real nice, if I had some clothes that weren't too tight/Would you still be comin' home drunk in the midde of the night?"

These last two songs owe a pronounced debt to the protofeminist minidramas of Loretta Lynn. The main difference is that Irwin replaces the pluck of Lynn's "Don't Come Home A Drinkin'" with a stolid resiliency It's a mood, she fears, too often mistaken for surrender.

"I don't feel resignation," Irwin says. "If I was resigned to the horror, then we wouldn't have to talk about it. I feel like there's honor in the struggle. If I believe anything, it's that there's some sort of honor and value in struggling. . .. I grew up listening to songs about the potato famine." (Irwin's father, a teacher, is an Irish immigrant).

Potato-famine songs, along with ballads from the dust bowl, notably those of
her hero, Woody Guthrie, instilled in Irwin a fierce populist streak - heard, for example, in this couplet from "Waitress Song": "Some people are born too late, some people are born too soon/ Some people are born to die chokin' on their silver spoon."

" Surely everyone agrees there's nothing more im portant in the world than looking after your fellow
creatures," Irwin says with only a hint of sarcasm. "There may be some people in charge who don't share my opinions about distribution of wealth, but I think most people on the street agree that libraries are important, that everybody ought to get a measles shot, that everybody should have shoes if they want 'em."
Although Irwin's writing takes its cue from songs of bygone eras, it doesn't just revive obsolete conventions. Nor is it merely an exercise in fiction. Indeed, most of it is autobiographical. And the fact that Irwin once slung hash like the protagonist of "Waitress Song" lends her material both insight and hardwon punch.
"I'm way deep into my own experience," Irwin admits. "I'm sure I make stuff worse than it really is, 'cause my mom always says, 'That never happened. We never beat you like that. We never did that to you.' Luckily, my brother was there. He can say to my mom, 'Well, yeah, I think maybe you did'."
"Either way, pretty much everything I write is about me. I don't know if anyone else's songs are about anything but themselves. What could be more fascinating? Besides, putting out albums sure beats therapy."

JANET BEAN has only lately be gun writing songs for Freakwater, but, judging by her comments, she would doubtless agree. In fact, speaking by phone from Chicago, Bean attributes her hefty contribution of material to Freakwater's new album - six of its titles - to having had "a particularly miserable year," involving severe family stresses. Yet she's quick to point out that the group's songs aren't just gloom and doom. "There is also a sense 'We're all in this together,' which is kind of beautiful. Not only that, there are times when we can be downright hilarious."

Bean mentions Queen Bee as an example a song from End Time that gives men their comeuppance.
"One little bee, the only square in the hive, tried to get smart back when he was alive," sings Irwin as a swarm of fuzz-toned guitar notes buzzes in the background. "She aimed her hexagon right between his eyes and said, 'The queen of the bees beats the lord of the flies.'"

At once slapstick and serious, this fantasy is one of many songs where Irwin makes her point with a honey-dipped stinger. Regardless of tone, though, most of Freakwater's material probes human nature and male-female relationships as incisivelyas "Queen Bee."

CATHERINE ANN IRWIN and Janet Beveridge Bean met in Louisville in 1981, while both were still in high school. Bean was into FM rock; Irwin and her brother were raised on their parents' hillbilly and folk records, but played in a punk band called the Dickbrains. By Irwin's account, the Dickbrains made "the kind of punk-rock that the children of college professors would make" - that is, music that was more self-conscious than aggressive. Irwin and Bean began singing together in 1982, the year they became roommates.
"Janet got thrown out of her parents' house, and I had an apartment, so she moved in with me, " Irwin recalls. "My mom had this really excellent dress. It was like a Tammy Wynette evening gown. I didn't know Janet could actually sing, but I wanted to do this open mike night [at the Beat Club in Louisville], so I told her, 'If you sing with me, you get to wear this dress.' So we played at that open stage a couple times, just doing covers of songs like [AI Dexter's) 'Pistol Packing Mama' and [Wynette's) 'D-I-VO-R-C-E.' It was exciting to find that Janet could really sing."

It wasn't long before the two women committed their voices - Irwin's loamy, Bean's luminous - to tape. "Janet's parents had a basement with a bunch of country hams hanging from the ceiling," Irwin recalls. "At some point, somebody rented a four-track and we recorded a few songs there. Some of them were songs I had written."

The cassette Irwin and Bean made under that canopy of salt-cured pork came to the attention of Keith Holland, a Louisville native who expressed interest in signing the duo to his San Francisco-based Amoeba label. Meanwhile, the two women, both of whom play acoustic guitar (Irwin flat-picks, Bean strums), met bass player David Gay and formally constituted themselves as Freakwater. (Over their 10-year history, the band have also included such all-purpose pickers as former Wilco sidemen Bob Egan and Max Johnston; and currently, Eric Heywood, who has played steel guitar with Richard Buckner, Joe Henry, and Son Volt.)
It was also during this time that Bean hooked up with Rick Rizzo. The two eventually married, moved to Chicago, and started the band Eleventh Dream Day (in which Bean sings and plays drums). Freakwater in turn became the long-distance proposition they've been ever since.

In 1989, Amoeba finally got around to putting out Freakwater's self-titled debut-a full year before the release of Uncle Tupelo's No Depression LP, an album cited by many as the cornerstone of the '90s country-rock movement. Amoeba also issued Freakwater's second record, Dancing under Water, in 1991. With their ragged-but-right harmonies, creaky Appalachian arrangements, and tragic songs of life, these lo-fi, DIY albums offered up Freatkwater as post-punk's answer Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard, the pioneering female-led string-band.

And as with the early Dickens/Gerrard recordings in the mid-'60s, most of the songs on Freakwater's first two albums were covers of hillbilly chestnuts, "Dark As a Dungeon" and "Rank Strangers" among them. The band didn't find their own voice until the release of their third album, Feels Like the Third Time, when Irwin's narratives began to illuminate broader social and political aspects of life in the rural South. Her sly reading of Conway Twitty's "You've Never Been This Far Before" also proved she could bring these larger concerns to bear on others' material.

Freakwater's next two albums, Old Paint and Springtime, maintained the high standard set by Feels Like the Third Time. They also exhibited greater vocal and instrumental command, as well as somewhat more polished production. These advances, though, were nothing compared with those heard on End Time, the band's new Brendan Burke-produced album. Employing a drum kit, Hammond organ, pedal steel guitar----and, on one song, a string section - the record has a markedly fuller sound than the primitive twang oftheir previous projects.

"Good for Nothing," the album's organ-drenched opening track, announces these changes from the start. "That song sounds very different from when I was playing it in my kitchen," Irwin says. More country-soul than old-timey or bluegrass, "Good for Nothing" evokes records cut in Muscle Shoals during the late '60s and early '70s, if not the sides Billy Sherrill produced for Tammy Wynette and Tanya Tucker during that era. "Dog Gone Wrong" and "When the Leaves Begin to Fall" recall the incipient country-rock of Buffalo Springfield or the Flying Burrito Brothers. A couple of other songs exude the dusky air of Richard Buckner's Devotion + Doubt.

"I hadn't played with a drummer since I was 18-well, since the Dickbrains," admits Irwin. "But it seemed like all that production lent itself to the new songs. Not that the songs are intrinsically different from other songs we've done. We just had an opportunity to do all this other stuff, and I think everybody wondered what it would be like to make a record this way."

"Some of the songs remind me of when I was a kid and we'd be driving back from my grandmother's in Bartow, Florida," observes Bean. "My dad would be playing AM popcountry on the radio. The record sort of has that feel to me, sort of like that song that begins, 'Take the ribbon from my hair' [Sammi Smith's breathtakingly intimate 'Help Me Make It through the Night']. I don't know if anyone else would see it, but that's sort of what I felt."

No matter how people respond to Freakwater's burnished new sound - burnished, at least, by indie standards - there's no denying the band's commitment to country and bluegrass music. In contrast to the trailer-park kitsch of most alt-country bands, Irwin and Bean didn't just woodshed with a clutch of Buck Owens LPs and a Southern Lit reading list and come out making records. Far from it. Neither glib nor expedient, the two women have been singing the songs of Bill Monroe, Merle Travis, and Tammy Wynette for nearly two decades. And Irwin has often stated that she rarely listens to music made after the year she was born (1962). This love of hillbilly music was more than evident during Freakwater's recent visit to the Country
Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. The band had been asked to model vintage Western wear for a photo exhibit featuring duds from the museum's collection, many of which were stitched by such renowned rodeo tailors as Nudie and Manuel.

"Dave got to wear Hank Thompson's Nudie suit," Irwin recalls. "It actually fit him. I was wearing T. Texas Tyler's coat with the deck of cards on it. And Janet was wearing [Johnny Dollar's] famous coat with Jesus and the whip, the one where Jesus is carrying a cross and there's a whip coming up from the side. "When we went to change our clothes, we were in the basement, where they had a shelf as long as this bar that had nothing but lefty Frizzell's cowboy boots on it - like, thirty pairs of 'em," Irwin continues. "I went over and kissed one of his boots. I looked up and saw this man staring at me and smiling. Then they sent me into a little vault - like a safe - to change my clothes, and Faron Young's guitar was in there. I said to myself, 'I don't know if there's a camera in here, but I'm gonna play it. I didn't play it, though. I just fondled it. I rubbed my musk on it."

Despite this palpable devotion to honky-tonk music, some have charged Freakwater with playing dress-up. Chief among these detractors are bluegrass purists who gripe about the band's lack of chops and the fact that they don't kowtow to conventions concerning tuning and harmony singing. Doubtless some pickers also look askance at the group's indie-rock affiliations, notably the fact that they record for Thrill Jockey, a label more known for putting out albums by progrockers like Trans Am and Tortoise.

"We approach country and bluegrass music with genuine respect," counters Bean. "We treat it with care," Irwin agrees. "We don't claim to be playing bluegrass. If we did we'd probably end up with our throats slit in
an alley outside some bluegrass festival. Anybody who knows anything about it knows that that's not what we're doing and that we couldn't play true bluegrass music even if we tried. If somebody held a gun to my head I still couldn't do it. But I'd drive to the ends of the earth to see Ralph Stanley play.

"The vocal harmonies are what really interest me, and I think Janet too. It's the singing, really, more
than the instrumental virtuosity. That's something that I've never dreamed about. I've never even
dreamed of finding people [for the band] who could play that way. It's the singing that captures my interest." Indeed, it was singing that first brought the two women together, and it's singing that has bonded them ever since.

Irwin and Bean certainly haven't gotten rich in the 10 years that Freakwater have been touring and recording. Springtime, the band's 1998 album, has sound-scanned just under 8,000 units. That's a respectable figure for a record released by a small indie label, but such sales are hardly enough to allow the two women to quit their day jobs. (Irwin, a talented watercolor artist whose work adorns the covers of
several Freakwater albums, paints houses. Bean answers the phone at the group's booking agency.

Recently, Irwin had occasion to take stock of her career when her brother Alec, the theologian and former Dickbrain, landed his first teaching job, a tenure-track position at Amherst. "I was pretty upset when I heard about that," Irwin admits, only half-jokingly. "I thought, now I'm kind of alone in a way...
- before, neither of us had a job - and now he has one. But my mom was real happy about it."

A feature on Freakwater in a small Louisville publication after Irwin learned of her brother's good fortune merely added to the dissonance she was feeling at the time. "My mom met the editor and told him about Freakwater when she placed some ads in the paper for her do-gooders workshops," Irwin recalls. "So the guy did this interview with me just after our last record came out and the headline in this little local newspaper read: 'Freakwater hopes to hit big time with release of new album.' It was so funny. They even used a picture of me that my mom had sent. "The story also had a quote from me saying, 'I believe the release of our new album Springtime will put us squarely in the mainstream," Irwin laughs. "Of course I didn't say that. I wish I could have said it, though."

Two years earlier, however, it had seemed Freakwater might indeed be headed for the big time, or at least for a maxi-indie backed by major-label muscle: Steve Earle's E-Squared imprint offered the band a
record contract. But just as the two parties seemed to have struck a deal, negotiations broke down and they had a bitter falling out.

Even thouqh it's unlikely that Freakwater's rough-hewn twang will ever grace the mainstream, much less the country charts, Irwin believes she's lucky to be making music at all. "It's fun," she says. "We get booked to play better shows all the time. And we get to play with people we like. We got to open for George Jones at the House of Blues in Chicago. So it's really, not that bad. When somebody pays for you to put out records, you're really lucky."

Bean-who has a school-age son and isn't as keen about touring as she once was (although both she and Irwin agree that reports about her aversion to touring have been exaggerated in the press) - says she can't imagine life without Freakwater. "It's so tied up with my identity at this point," she explains. "We've been doing it for so long I wouldn't know how to stop. It's as much a part of who I am as getting up in the morning. I don't think of it as a goal. It's just a process."

"We're still learning," Bean adds. "We started at a very uneducated musical point. We're still figuring out how to write songs, how to sing, and how to get by. It's taken us seventeen years to get to where we are."

"We have a certain spontaneity, that's the funny thing," says Irwin. "We've been playing some of these songs for fifteen years and they still have that spontaneous quality. Half the time we still don't know where
we're going."

There's no denying Freakwater's unstudied approach to music, but Irwin's last comment fails to do the band justice. The group may not know exactly where it's going, but as Irwin and Bean's remarks suggest, inasmuch as they remain committed to working together, they have a focus, if not a sense of vocation. Along with bass player Dave Gay, the two women soldier on with the pilgrim-like determination of Irwin's most resilient characters.

It seems Irwin holds too vivid "a picture in her mind," as one song puts it, to do otherwise. Hers is rarely a pretty picture; more often than not, the frame is broken, too. And it has no use for palliatives, especially religion. Still, it is not without hope. Indeed, as novelist Dorothy Allison writes of her ownwork, it is a "shout of life against death, of shape and substance against silence and confusion", a way of setting " a small piece of stubbornness against an ocean of ignorance and obliteration."

There was a full house of about 750 people, maybe. The 600 in the back made a lot of noise, but Cathy and Dave held the attention of the other 150 in front very well throughout a set of almost all unknown songs - pretty impressive. The most surprising thing about the set was, of all things, Dave: Sure, he smoked a lot as is inevitably reported, but, mostly, he kept looking at Catherine with the same mild, admiring smile that many in the audience had, following her nuance like a real pro.

Afterward, I was fortunate enough to sit down and chat with Catherine. She was so kind and easy to talk to, as you might expect. (I edited down a lot of my own blather, you'll be relieved to know):

You turned 40 this year, didn't you?
Yes, on March 4th.

Any epiphanies?
No. I wish I had stayed in school. I'm sure everybody thinks they will be dead before that happens.

Freakwater played Europe last month. Did you have a chance to hang out once again in France?
Yes, it was fun. We had about a day and a half open. We just wandered around and said, "Oh, look at these peoples' beautiful lives!"

When I went, I found France to be really difficult.
I was there with really gregarious French people. I went there one time with a friend from Louisville and he didn't speak any French at all and every day he would ask how you say "mother-fucker" in French because people were really atrocious.

Are the "Switch" songs pre-End Time or post-End Time? Is there any left-over stuff that you were holding back?
No, they are songs I have written since then. We were supposed to make a Freakwater record two years ago, and then again last year, but it never worked out and we haven't done it.

I heard the new Janet song on the latest Thrill Jockey sampler (Janet Bean and the Concertina Wire's "Glass of a Stranger"), and I'd say her time is well spent. I think it's great, though it sounds like she is here and you are way over there.
Her record is really nice and I couldn't have contributed to that in any way. Her record is a really perfect vehicle for her voice. Her voice sounds really beautiful on it.

How did the ("Cut Yourself a Switch") sessions in North Carolina go? You have this "less is more" sound that I love. I suspect good albums sound easy to make, but they are not.
Yes. I think it could have been a lot easier. Originally, I had planned on my dream: When I am just driving in my car, I feel I can sing a lot better when I'm not playing guitar. (But) when we went in to make the record, I should have remembered what has always happened before, which is I can't play the guitar if I am not singing. We spent a couple of days of me trying to do the guitar tracks separately and it was a complete failure. I would play the guitar track and I'd think it was pretty good, and then I would go in and try to sing on top of it, and it just didn't work.

That's a by-product of recording, as you've done in the past, with just one microphone?
Maybe it's just that I'm a dope. I leave out verses and I leave out where I am supposed to hold a note really long. We spent a couple of days doing that and then I finally said, "I'll just play the guitar and sing my songs at the same time, and we'll just get out of here."

I really enjoyed the track with the Unholy Trio. They showed remarkable restraint on that one track ("The Only Hell my Momma Ever Raised"). I didn't know they had it in them.
Yes. I love that. It's funny; I think we recorded that song sixteen times. It took like an entire day. I kept wanting to play it faster. We kept speeding it up, then we said it needed to be slower. Also, Chris (Geer) kept saying it is so much sadder when the girls sing it.

Do you like playing new material (live)? You seem completely casual about it.
It's kind of hard to put across to the audience. I know when I go to see a show and if I'm not familiar with the song, especially if they are playing some place with a really shit sound system, and people can't really hear what you are saying, it is a little bit tedious.

I think the pacing of your work is demanding but the reward is tremendous.
Well, maybe we'll try to get a fiddler player or something to try to make it a little more diverse.

You don't need it. If you want to pay somebody else, go ahead.
We couldn't possibly at this point! (smiles)

Last thing: Tell me about your guitar. How long have you had it, where did you buy it, and do you call it 'Maybelle'?
Maybelle? I've never heard that.

Well, (Mother Maybelle Carter) played a very similar-looking guitar.
She played a Gibson, I believe. I think that my National has a Gibson body. It is very similar to those. It was made in the forties. When I got it about eight years ago, it was like new. Someone had really taken care of it. I had it for about six months, and I wore a hole in the back because I had this really giant belt buckle.
When we toured Europe, we had to take a plane from Louisville to Chicago, from Chicago to London, and from London to Paris, and every time I put it on the plane I thought, "This is really stupid, I should never do this," but it came out okay. But when I got on the plane the last time I swore I would never do that again. It is such an excellent guitar.

Hold on to that!
I will. I try to really take care of my things.
_______________

Later, I spoke with Dave at the merchandise table; I was fairly drunk, he was sober (ten years running, I learned), and, like a gentleman, he explained that he was originally a Chicagoan who was introduced to Janet Bean and Catherine by someone on the team who recorded Freakwater's first LP. About time a "reporter" asked that question for public record, don't you think?

So, why should you make the long car ride or plane trip to see Catherine Irwin play? Because I guarantee you can meet and talk with her and Dave, tell 'em they're great, and they'll be nice as shit and, as a fellow fan put it, make you feel good about yourself. And, oh yeah, they play some vital freakin' music, too.

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'Univeral Soldiers: Freakwater's Themes for Life' by John Lewis

There isn't much to do on a frigid Wednesday night in Louisville but drink. So Catherine Irwin, leader of the locally-based Freakwater, has left her beat-up 1982 Datsun idling in front of the SuperAmerica convenience store while she runs in for a six-pack. A trebly Roy Orbison tune blares from speakers hanging outside the store, traffic rumbles down Bardstown Avenue and a billboard nearby advertises tattoos — "done while you wait." The setting would be perfect for one of Freakwarer's raggedy country weepers.

After a few minutes, Irwin emerges empty-handed and climbs behind the wheel. "They carded me," she says in a sweet, deep drawl. "Can you believe that? I didn't have my license with me, either." She shakes her head and mutters something about looking older than her 33 years. "If I was under 21 and looked like this, wouldn't you want to buy me a drink?"

Down the road at a dive called the Cherokee, Irwin doesn't get carded. In fact, she seems to know everyone in the place. The room is thick with cigarette smoke and the sound of Barry White's laconic funk, occasionally punctuated by the crack of a cue ball on the break. As Irwin settles into a corner booth, she notices a copy of the Louisville Music News with Billy Ray Cyrus on the cover. She shakes her head and offers an evaluation of her country music contemporaries. "Maybe there are some folks who are doing things I wouldn't hate, but I don't know where they are." She pauses for a drink of beer. "There's Emmylou Harris, she's good. And George Jones — can't go wrong there. But like any kind of music, most of it's bad."

While most current Nashville artists have abandoned country's roots in their pursuit of a pop audience, Freakwater embraces tradition as if it was long-lost kin. Founded in Louisville by Irwin and her childhood friend, Janet Beveridge Bean (who also plays drums for Eleventh Dream Day), the band wraps aching harmonies and Appalachian twang around Irwin's somber tales of southern life. Bean's clear soprano whirls around Irwin's weary alto, while steel guitar, fiddle, acoustic guitar and upright bass mingle and pair off in waltz time.

With the ambience of an old-time, Blue Ridge porch stomp, Freakwater's four albums nod to legends like the Carter Family and the Louvin Brothers. And though the band's self-titled 1989 debut unfolded a bit unevenly and its follow-up, Dancing Underwater, included just six originals among its 14 cuts, the two most recent discs, 1993's Feels Like the Third Time and last year's Old Paint, are accomplished, unvarnished gems. Produced by Brad Wood — known for his work with Liz Phair and Ben Lee — and released on Thrill Jockey, they're the perfect tonic for the pop pretense that's long kept Nashville awash in tight jeans and slick 10-gallon sentimentality. "One thing I like so much about traditional country and bluegrass music is that, in a way, it's so limiting," Irwin says. "Some people get so confused with songs because there aren't any reg ulations. The beauty of country music is that it's restricting in the same way haiku is restricting. It puts limitations on you that I personally need. Otherwise, there's no telling what kind of freaky rock opera I
might come up with."

She laughs, stubs out her smoke and picks up her beer. When asked what rules apply in making good country music, she hesitates. "That's kind of hard," she says, "but you know what it is when you hear it."

ALTHOUGH BEAN, bassist Dave Gay and guitarist Bob Egan reside in Chicago, Irwin continues to live in her native Louisville, a city that also claims Muhammad Ali, Hunter Thompson and the Palace Brothers' Will Oldham as its own. It's a medium-sized city with a small-town feel. There are a few skyscrapers downtown, along with the Louisville Slugger factory and the Churchill Downs race track, but overall Louisville exudes a quiet desperation that's endemic to many Southern towns in winter, when the dogwoods are bare and there isn't a sky in the clouds. It's a vibe that's especially noticeable in Butchertown, the neighborhood where Irwin lives. Bordered bv stockyards, it's the kind of place you might find a cow's tail on the sidewalk, or see a pig being chased by a forklift. It's also the kind of place where locals speak in a nearly impenetrable dialect, spraypaint things like "Jim is a fuckwad" on flood walls and post signs urging others to "Help keep this a dog shit free area."

Irwin and her boyfriend, Brian Burkett (who plays drums for Bodeco), share a sparsely furnished, second-floor walk-up over Berley's Do-It-Yourself Plumbing. The living room contains potted plants, bookshelves, a stack of records, an Olympic hi-fi console, a snare drum and a couple guitars. In the bedroom, a red futon lies on a frame made from a large table top. Porch, a black-spotted feline, sits wide-eyed at the foot of the bed. This time of year, Irwin likes to sit at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and soaking up the warmth from an open oven. Amidst colorful knick-knacks — cow-shaped salt-and-pepper shakers, delicate art nouveau pitchers and various refrigerator magnets — she looks out the window at snow falling over Butchertown. Although she's lived for short periods in Chicago and France, this part of Kentucky has always been home. "It's a pretty good environment for me," she says. "People just leave you alone, especially in this neighborhood. Nobody ever talks to me. If they do, I can't understand what they're saying."

Irwin grew up in Goshen, about 10 miles northeast of the city, in a split-level ranch house surrounded by rolling hills, horse farms and corn fields. Her parents were English teachers who listened to Pete Seeger and the Kingston Trio. Mom played some piano and dad played the bagpipes "badly," Irwin recalls.

At 16, she and her brother, Alec, formed a folk band called the Dickbrains. She strummed acoustic guitar, he played recorder. "I always wanted to be in a band like the Incredible String Band with a bunch of really handsome hippie guys," she says, with a laugh. "Looking at the pictures on their records, I thought it would be so great, sort of like dreaming about being in the Manson family. I kind of wanted to have, like, the Manson Family Singers. Our little band was kind of like that, except it was just me and my brother." After discovering the Dead Boys and bar chords, the Dickbrains went punk for awhile and eventually disbanded.

WHEN SHE WASN'T THRASHING withthe Dickbrains, Irwin played country music alone in her bedroom. She was working up a few Tammy Wynette covers when she heard about an open stage at a local bar. "I don't know why I chose Janet [Bean] as my victim for this, but I wanted somebody to sing with me," says Irwin. "She lived near my best friend in high school, and I used to see her walking down the street. We used to be really mean to her because she was younger than us, but by this time we had been friends for about six months. Anyway, she said she would do it.

"I was terrified," Bean says later. "It was at the Beat Club, a place surrounded by strip clubs on the seedy side of town. We got dressed up for it, and I wore a red polyester dress, vinyl boots and a wig. I might have stuffed my brassiere, too. lt was a lot of fun. I remember people were clapping and singing along to songs like 'Pistol Packin' Mama' and 'D-I-V-O-R-C-E.'"

Irwin and Bean continued to sing and play guitar together, and though they made tapes on a four-track in the basement of Bean's parents' house, their attitude about releasing records was laid-back to the point of indifference. In fact, when Amoeba, a Los Angeles-based/indie label, approached them about making a record in 1988, they didn't even have a name. When they settled on Freakwater, a made-up word they con- sidered meaningless, neither of them knew it was a term for moonshine whiskey.

By that time, the two women were living in separate cities. Bean was in Chicago drumming for Eleventh Dream Day and Irwin was painting houses and canvasses (her artwork graces the covers of all four Freakwater discs, as well as two by Eleventh Dream Day) around Louisville. According to Irwin, making Freakwater records and touring with the band was little more than an excuse to get together with her old friend. "Singing with Janet is really the only fun thing about being in this band," she says. "That's why we started doing this in the first place. The rest of it all is just stuff we have to do."

Like touring, which Irwin and Bean do begrudgingly. "It's an utter nightmare," says Bean. "It's kind of like having a baby. The pain is monumental, but you forget how awful it was. Then, you're ready to do it again." Recent swings through the U.S. (opening for Wilco) and Germany were arduous affairs. "One thing that really struck me when we played those shows with Wilco was they seem like they have a lot more fun in their band," Irwin says. "I guess they're just better musicians, but they actually seem like they're having a good time, whereas we seem like we're being tortured. When we're on tour, I keep telling myself, 'This is kind of hellish, but it's better than painting some-body's bathroom.'"

Irwin is low-key about the future. She anticipates recording a follow-up to Old Paint this summer, but says the band is not seeking a deal with a bigger label. Freakwater will continue to tour, but how extensively depends on two factors: the health of Bean's four-year-old son,who suffers from glucose intolerance,and the status of Eleventh Dream Day. "I don't know if I'll always get to make records," Irwin says, "but it's nice that in the kind of music I play — like writing or painting — people don't really expect you to be any good at it until you're 60."

Late in the afternoon, Irwin pours another cup of coffee and turns her attention to the subject of writing songs. On Old Paint, she tackles themes such as thankless jobs ("Waitress Song"), physical deterioration ("Gravity"), AIDS ("Gone To Stay") and fractured dreams ("Ugly Man"). Her material on previous Freakwater albums is similarly dark. When I point out that traditional country themes — such as death, despair and poverty — keep coming up, Irwin says she doesn't understand why they're so strongly associated with the genre. "It seems like they should be themes of general life," she says." It seems odd to me that they wouldn't just be everywhere. Any horrible thing that's happened to any one person has probably happened to somebody else, at least in terms of having a bad job, getting beat up by somebody, getting sick or some-
thing like that.

"They're pretty universal subjects," she continues, "so I feel like if we stick to them, we'll just keep cranking out the hits. I mean, what else do people have to write songs about? How nice everything is?"

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I'd always fantasized asking Janet about her music over beers, but one must work within the realm of the possible: Last week, I sat at work in a unpainted cider block room with no windows, sharing the telephone earpiece with my microcassette recorder, floor polisher humming on the other side of the wall, while Janet, at work in a Chicago high-rise, patiently put up with my questioning and technical problems. Amazingly, we were still able to share a decent conversation, and a laugh or two.

I thought it was clever how you put the lyric sheet to the new CD (Dragging Wonder Lake) on the CD itself. I own a lot of music, but I've never seen that before.
Well, we did that once with Eleventh Dream Day. I like the idea of someone having an interest in what the words are but I don't want them to be able to read them while the music's playing. Sometimes it's fun to come up with your own little mistakes.

Dragging Wonder Lake has been in the can for a while now. Have you been chomping at the bit to get it on the street, or are you feeling casual about it?
We recorded it last summer. It's been the normal time frame to put out a record, really, from the time that you start it to when it's released - there's a sort of set-up process. I'm apprehensive but excited at the same time; yeah, great dread, but excitement.

So how does it feel, at least for the time being, not being half of a team anymore - no Eleventh Dream Day, no Freakwater - does having that latitude give you more satisfaction, more peril, both, neither?
There's always peril, but rejection is sort of diffused if there's more people. You can (better) take the criticism that way, you know, but that's been taken away now.

It's not so much being satisfied as just finishing it. I've been playing in bands for twenty-five years, and I've always said, "I'm going to make this (solo) record, I'm gonna do this." So I'm really excited by the fact that I've done it, that I've actually completed something I said I was gonna do, which is so rare for me! (laughs) Despite the fact that I work an eight- or nine-hour day, have a son, and am a single mother, I got it done, so I'm sort of like "Well, damn, I accomplished something!"

That's pretty amazing, you've got such a full plate, I'm not sure how you do it. . .
A lot of medication! (laughs)

Share some with me, then, I need it. I've assumed the origin of this new project is in the making of End Time, since they're somewhat sonically related. Did you get introduced to Fred (Lonberg-Holm, who plays cello on both LPs) at that point, or did you know him already? What role did Fred have in the creating of End Time and Dragging Wonder Lake?
No, the fellow that produced End Time brought Fred into the sessions. Fred can play the cello like all get out. He wrote the charts for End Time, and he wrote his parts for this record, but he didn't write any other parts. I feel really comfortable with Fred, and I think we probably communicate the most of all the people in the band. It's more of a friendship thing, not just a working partnership where we get together and hammer things out.

I think everyone that played on the record has an equal contribution. I just brought the songs in, and I desperately tried to show the best I could how they go, and I said to everyone, "Can we make this song have this kinda feel?"

I'm continually struck by how unique and original songs like (Springtime's) "Binding Twine", (End Time's) "Written in Gold" and (DWL's) "Glass of a Stranger" are. I've just never heard anything quite like them. Can you tell me a little about where you draw your musical ideas from?
Y'now, I think I'm fairly confused by that myself, really. I think I'm just driven by the fact that I play a chord, and I've never played it before, and it sounds great. There's just something that comes out - I just don't have any choice. I know that sounds really elliptical.

I think Catherine (Irwin, of Freakwater) has a framework she works in that can be traced down from more specific places like the Carter Family and Hazel Dickens. I think that is her forte and she writes compelling, beautiful work within those constructs. I, on the other hand, operate without those types of specific constructs or, if there are constructs, they are far less consistent. This is neither a good or a bad thing for either of us - just a different thing.

So, how many shows are Concertina Wire going to play this year?
I don't have any notion. I know we're going out for a little bit with The Dirty Three, and I have dreams doing some more, but there's a lot of stuff going on, and it's problematic with this large band I'm taking along. All these guys play in so many different outfits. They play every night of the week in different jazz outfits. Some of the guys are in that Blue Man Group, two shows a night, four nights a week, so it's very complicated. They're all very pleasant to be around, but it's not exactly cost effective.

After I turned the tape machine off, Janet told me more about her future schedule, leaving me fairly certain that I will probably never get to see Concertina Wire play. My loss.

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"Freakwater at VZD's in Oklahoma City, March 18,1999" by James Murray, published in the 'zine 100 YEAR WAR

On stage, Catherine Irwin conjures up not a single legend from the country or folk that was. No shades of Loretta or Tammy or Patsy exist in her. Perhaps a shade of the gloomiest side of Carter family women, but mostly that is a Kentucky accent and a thousand-yard stare. Catherine is completely unposed, as she slouches arounds stage in boots, trousers and a "Future Farmers of America" jacket bearing the name of a Confederate Army war dead. She pauses to squint into the audience (maybe twenty people). She bickers with her band, exhibits her sarcasm and breaks into nervous laughter. Then Freakwater begins to play, and Catherine and Janet Bean trade verses and wail together. The song is a tragedy - everyone pays, everyone loses. When they wail it's like a hot wind, two hundred years of southern working woman
loss and reclaimation. They finish the song and everyone applauds. In the fidgit session that follows someone asks (almost pleading) from the audience, "Do you have any happy stories?" Janet sets down her glass of beer, livid with art, and snaps back, "No."

Freakwater's seventy-minute set demonstrated why they are the best American folk artists working today. Their four virtually unnoticed albums (all released on Thrill Jockey) are already a body of work that outdistances all of their peers. Their recordings are perfectly produced: they sound as though they might have been released in the 1940's, but there is no crackle or hiss. The songwriting is completely contemporary, yet it exists within a historical framework. It is songwriting that could only be produced by the deep and bitter well of southern working-class history. The landlord approaches the door; a mother or child dies with so much left unsaid; friends and lovers succumb to alcoholism; a waitress keeps going to work knowing things will never, ever be different; suicide is considered with regularity. These are the themes of Freakwater, not happy but entirely honest and straight and straightforward. It requires great courage and skill to write and sing these songs, and Freakwater have both attributes in abundance.

These are the strong and deeply wounded women who traditionally have been too busy with survival to appear in his-story. In Freakwater they have a voice and a platform from which to speak. Should anyone be surprised that these songs are not happy? They are what they are - authentic, and perhaps the only real folk music being made in America today. Unlike the hundreds of sensitive, love-song writing male folkies, the women in Freakwater don't want to be Bob Dylan (although I'm sure they'd let him buy them some beer.) Unlike the plethora of "alternative country" bands, Freakwater have no interest in fashion and attitude. They know well there is no Golden Age to look back to. Life has always been as it is now, full of loss, work and worry.

Watching Catherine on stage, I could only identify deeply with her. Her constant expression of pain accepted. Her slouching and leaning, her apathy towards success and professionalism, her unsocialized southern manners, her pathological shyness and provincialism. I recognized these after seeing them all my life. Catherine could have been one of the country girls I went to high school with. Or she could have stepped living out of one of Dorthea Lange's dustbowl-era photographs. As a type she is both transendent and ordinary.

Catherine lives in Louisville, Kentucky, and I'm sure she will live there the rest of her life. She probably can't even conceptualize leaving. Celts usually migrate only when forced by hunger or the law, and
Catherine's part-time job and record sales will support her forever in a holding pattern of genteel poverty. In the meantime, she and Janet and the rest of the Freakwater crew will no doubt go on making their unparalleled folk art. The unrecorded songs they played at VZD's were as haunted and fraught with mastery as any they have produced in the past eight years: Songs about frozen trees, bad dogs, shotguns hanging on the wall; songs of class war being waged, of rage and pain mitigated only by the small
pleasures the poor can afford. They were performed with perfectly impercise harmony and instrumentation, and punctuated by scolding wails that Huddie Ledbetter heard decades before Catherine Irwin and Janet Bean were born.

After the show I spoke with Catherine briefly. The band was headed to the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. "I don't know why we are going" Catherine confessed, "There doesn't seem to be any point."
Freakwater know all too well that, in this Society of the Spectacle, only the poseurs taste success and recognition. Those who are real get little or nothing.

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Freakwaters Run Deep by Thomas Peake

Anyone who has appreciated the disturbances underneath the surface in the writings of Southern authors like Peter Taylor or Flannery O’Connor will understand Freakwater. For that matter, all ordinary folk have been there.

Freakwater’s pretty country music harbors more compelling, complex imagery than any pop music. Principal songwriter and singer Catherine Ann Irwin -- a Louisville, Kentucky, resident and painter of houses, sets and canvases when not knee-deep in Freakwater -- is indeed a fan of Southern literature.

That tradition, however, isn’t the mainstream of her band’s rough-hewn folk sound. “I don’t know how I’d feel,” warns Irwin, “if I read somebody saying ‘William Faulkner’s a big inspiration to me as I’m writing my pop songs.’” Nevertheless, Cormac McCarthy and Dorothy Allison are among the self-deprecating Irwin’s favorite living Southern authors. They may not be influences, per se, but the same sullen, perceptive desperation often exposed in Southern lit helps lend Freakwater more lyrical and musical credibility than they really need.

Record stores may stock Freakwater in the rock section rather than under folk, country or bluegrass. That may be because they have little in common with label mates on Thrill Jockey, like pop gurus The Sea & Cake or electronic media-manipulists Oval.

A better explanation for the confusion of genre, however, is their roots. Irwin’s folk aesthetic always coexisted with an affection for the energy of punk rock, and fellow singer/guitarist Janet Beveridge Bean also plays with Eleventh Dream Day.“I was always interested in bluegrass music,” explains Irwin, “but it’s just really fun to play really loud electric guitar.”

Loud, fast music was just something to do and a way to get into bars when Irwin was in a punk band, the Dick Brains, with her brother. As of Springtime, Freakwater’s fifth record, however, Irwin has long been making more melodic -- perhaps more haunting -- music with Bean and catalyzing bassist David Wayne Gay. Irwin and Bean, a childhood friend, have been singing and playing together for umpteen years now.

Though she and Bean both play guitar, singing is Irwin’s passion. “Vocal harmonies and singing with Janet,” explains the adult Irwin, “is more fun than playing electric guitar.” It’s more than fun to hear, too. Irwin, the alto, trudges through her songs with ragged glory. On 1995's Old Paint she even conjures up a femme-Johnny Cash on “My One Desire” while singing about rings of fire. Together, the duo’s intertwining harmonies are inundated with comparisons to the Carter Family.

The band has its own suitably disturbing portrayal of Irwin’s and Bean’s combined vocal impact.“If you feel like your head is being crushed in a vice, that’s me,” says Irwin. “If you feel like a drill is going through the middle of your forehead, that’s Janet.”

Freakwater’s attitude on record makes sense of their good-natured sarcasm, but their performances are anything but painful, as evidenced by Irwin’s and Bean’s enveloping delivery and the stunning arrangement of “Twisted Wire,” written by a Louisville friend.

On Springtime, the band is joined by new bandmate Max Konrad Johnston (ex-Wilco), whose adroit guitars, banjos, mandolins and other acoustic marvels seem to bring the songwriting out from the murky depths.

Bean, the one with the precious soprano drawl, penned three songs that go down with an eery equanimity. Johnston’s “Harlan” is a simple yearning. Irwin writes the remaining tunes -- timeless and gripping narratives, actually.

Freakwater fans will be thankful that the new record is all original material. On 1991's wonderful Dancing Under Water, eight of the 13 cuts are covers. Precious few recordings in this world have strung together three more jaw-dropping songs than Irwin’s first three on Feels Like the Third Time, a 1993 CD with five cover songs.

It’s not that the covers are poorly chosen or performed. Irwin’s songs are just so clever and biting one can’t help oneself. “I’m just really compulsive about lyrics,” Irwin explains. “I tend to go over things a million times.” Her songs indeed bear the mark of painstaking craftsmanship. On “Heaven,” Irwin revisits the territory of self-deception as she ponders her lack of faith. It’s a song about her deceased friends. “I forget, actually,” she says. “People that have been dead for years -- I think I should call this person up and go have some coffee. And I think, oh, that’s right, they’re dead.”

Philosophical allusions join her repertoire of witticisms on “Washed in the Blood:” “Way down at the bottom of a slippery slope/ When I start my decline/ Fast waters flow/ I’ll be lost in the flood.”

The songs on Springtime branch out marvelously from personal spheres, however. “Lorraine” is a neo-Strange Fruit, shedding tears (which “dry faster than good luck/ In a gambling game”) over hardcore racism. Irwin’s own “One Big Union” (“Which side are you on’s/ Got more angles than the Pentagon”) rivals the band’s version of the traditional “Dark As Dungeon.”

The keeper is “Louisville Lip,” which masterfully and deliberately explores the time when Louisville’s protested-minded Muhammad Ali cast his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River after being refused service in a nearby restaurant. “Whip the world/ Whip this town/ Whip it into the river/ And watch it go down/ Whip the world/ Your lashing tongue/ Big men crying like a baby/ From where the bee stung.”

Freakwater’s temperament isn’t entirely dark-sided because it’s redemptive. Irwin, Bean, Gay, Johnston and their listeners clearly draw joy in tossing out worst-case scenarios, but it’s all in the name of embracing our constructive cynicism.

As on previous records, Springtime’s jacket is graced by Irwin’s original painting. Its pretty colors and shapes even belie the album’s title. There’s a bail bonding firm in Athens, Georgia, that caught Irwin’s attention. “I had some matches from there, and their motto was ‘Where it’s always springtime.’”

Despite their aversion to traveling, Freakwater is touring. But they’ll miss a large chunk of the country. The way Irwin thinks about places she’s never been, the West for example, is revealing, if not hilarious. “It must be really different in Colorado. I have no idea,” she speculates. “I don’t have any idea what’s wrong with everybody out there.”

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Catherine Irwin Interview from the Louisville 'zine Bejeezus

Catherine Irwin is a Louisville, Kentucky native. She is a founding member of the amazing country band Freakwater. Along with her bandmate Janet Bean, Catherine will begin work on Freakwater’s new album in 2004. She recently released her debut solo album Cut Yourself a Switch on Thrill Jockey Records. It is an album full of originals and covers, sung in Catherine’s beautiful, plaintive voice. I sat down with her on a cold evening in December and we talked over several cups of tea. Way too much stuff to cram into these pages—maybe I’ll do a part 2 sometime. It was a fun evening, filled with Catherine’s infectious laughter and funny as hell stories.

Hillary: You grew up in Louisville, right?
Catherine: I grew up really in Oldham County, but basically in Louisville. I went to Brown School.

So in high school you started playing in bands?
Yeah, just with people that I knew and stuff. We had punk little bands, but I think that everyone pretty much does that. Everyone I know did things like that.

You just played guitar mainly?
Yeah, I don’t think I really ever played…well, except for the trumpet and the French horn. I don’t think I really played any other instruments except guitar. I guess I just played in a lot of bands with people that I knew and with my brother and stuff in high school. And then we played later basically just to try to get in to bars and stuff.

I don’t know a lot about local music because I’m not from here…
Where are you from?

I’m from West Virginia.
Oh, yeah? Where in West Virginia?

Sissonville.
Is that near Beckley at all?

No. Its about, it’s probably an hour or two from Beckley, like 20 minutes from Charleston.
My best friend lives in Pineyview, it’s about ten minutes outside of Beckley. It’s so pretty there.

I love Beckley. We used to go camping in that area a lot when I was younger.
My friend built a house there, a log cabin. It’s near the river and stuff--the New River?

Have you been to Tamarack (over-priced craft store/restaurant in Beckley)?
Uh-huh. We went there cause they had a fried green tomato bacon sandwiches, but then we learned to make those ourselves. Fried green tomato and bacon…very very good. (laughter)

I saw you play a while ago, years ago, on Mountain Stage (a public radio show based in West Virginia).
We just played there one time and that guy, Larry Groce (host of the show) hated us so much. We were so mean and rude and stupid. For a long time with Freakwater I thought that they ought to ask us to play on that show. They have people way worse than us on there. And I always listened to it. And I guess it was about 7 years ago or something, we played a show in Lexington, KY and Janet and I were standing in the dressing room. Some guy from the club came in and said, ”that guy from Mountain Stage is here. He wants to talk to you all about being on the show.” And the guy from the club was all excited and everything. Janet and I were standing right around the doorway and I said something like, ‘I want to be on the show, but I don’t want to do that stupid thing at the end, where that guy makes you come out and sing with them’. (laughter)

Ugh. That is the worst part.
I guess I just went on about that for a few minutes, about what an idiot that guy was and how I would be on the show, but I didn’t want to do that stupid thing at the end where everyone sings together. And of course he is standing like right outside the door. I turned around and he was right behind me. Looking at me like he wants to kill me. (laughter) He didn’t call us back for like three years. (laughter) I think he got really mad. Every time they do that thing, it seems like he tries to take the mike from everyone. It’s awful. It was really, really nerve-wracking. I hated doing that show. Its good to be on it, but… It’s on TV now I think.

Yeah, I think it is like on PBS or something.
I don’t think they will ever let us on there again. We didn’t get along at all. We kept making jokes that he didn’t think were funny. It was just awkward. I’ll do that show, but I don’t want to do that stupid thing at the end where they make you sing with them.

You should play there again sometime. (laughter)
Yeah, but I don’t know if he will ever ask us again. I had a record out last year and nobody called me. I think he took a real dislike to me and Janet. I guess we are just jerks. We’ve done a bunch of shows like that. I know we’ve done one, what is that one called from Philadelphia? The World Café. We did that show and they never even played it. We were so nasty. We just kept saying horrible stuff. I’m obsessed by Terry Gross (host of Fresh Air). She is my idol and I guess I said too many things about how since we were in Philadelphia, too bad we weren’t doing her show. What time did her show come on? Did he know her? And all these things.

I got kind of addicted to her show at work. Did you hear the one with Gene Simmons, where they got in a fight?
Yeah! He is going to be here! Did you see? He is coming to Louisville, to Carmichel’s bookstore on Frankfort Ave. He’s signing books. It’s true. I saw a sign. I couldn’t believe it, then I saw another one.

We should go harass him.
At Carmichel’s they have a sign that if you buy one of his books, then you get a place in line for the autograph. Then in the paper today it said that he wasn’t going to sign anything but copies of his books. Like if you had a Kiss album or something he wouldn’t sign it. You have to buy like a $28 book just to get in line.

He was really horrible to Terry.
Yeah, its so crazy. Do you know Sean Garrison?

I’ve heard of him, but I don’t know him.
We were talking today about going over there and yelling at him for being mean to Terri. It was horrible. It was actually funny.

I already forgot what we were talking about… (laughter)
Gene Simmons, my friend that lives near Beckley, how much that guy from Mountain Stage hates me! (laughter)

There is going to be a lot of editing with this interview. (laughter)
How about the various ways I have tried to destroy my musical career by being a jerk to people who could help me. (laughter) That is the theme, I think.

I wanted to ask you about your band names when you first started out, like Butt in the Front.
We had a lot of great names. There was another butt…Butt in the Front, Dick Brains. That was our first band. It was like an electric band. With a drummer and electric guitars. I guess there was electric guitar in both bands really. But in Butt in the Front all we mostly did was argue. Me and my brother, and my friend Wink were in that band. We always yelled at each other.

When did you start becoming interested in country music?
That is the kind of music I played first before anything else I guess. And my dad is from northern Ireland and there is like a lot of Irish folk music and stuff around the house. They didn’t really have a lot of country records, but I heard a lot of that stuff on the radio. My brother and I, the first music we were playing was like folk type music and stuff.

Do you remember the first song you played on guitar?
Its almost to awful to say.

You have to say it then. (laughter)
I really remember struggling to learn that Doobie Brothers song “Blackwater” (laughter, Catherine sings a little of the song). I guess when I was in like fifth grade, there was some little guitar part on that and I had this friend that was a really good guitar player, and I remember her trying to teach me that. Then she just got really frustrated with me.

Like, ‘You cant learn the Doobie Brothers?! What’s wrong with you?! (laughter)
“You’re going nowhere!” (laughter)

Was the local music scene a lot different when you were growing up from what it is now?
Probably, in that it wasn’t so easy for people to get record deals and stuff as it is now. Like independent record labels, there were less of those as there are now. And it seems like it is an awful lot easier to get someone to put your record out now then 20 years ago or something.

Are there any local bands that you are a fan of now?
I really like Sean Garrison. It’s really neat when those kids play, really great. And Will Oldham.
There are other bands I like here. I like Johnny B’s Bluegrass band. I haven’t seen many bands in a while

How did you get hooked up with Thrill Jockey?
Janet’s other band was on Atlantic Records and the woman that runs Thrill Jockey (Bettina Richards), she used to work for Atlantic. She left it and started her own label. We are lucky to be on that label, it’s very good. She is very scrupulously honest which is excellent because I’m not very good with math. She is very, very nice. I like her a lot. It’s a very weird label. The whole label is based on her personal taste. There is no logic to it, other than it’s what she likes. Which is kind of great. There’s this German techno music that to me just sounds like the refrigerator humming, you know and then the microwave going ‘ding ding ding’ (laughter) And then there is us. It’s a good label.

A lot of your songs seem to be about sadness, dying or death. And that is sort of similar to like old country songs. Do you think that is what really influences your songs?
I think so. I like sort of ballady, old…even if it comes from the British Isles or Appalachian ballad songs, or just Carter Family songs about dead babies. (laughter) But they just sing them in the most, sort of just straight delivery. Its really amazing to me how they can put those songs across in this way. It’s very different from contemporary pop music in the flatness of their voices. The subject, it could be about their mother dying or it could be about something much perkier, still their voice would be maintaining the same kind of level. I really don’t know what else people write songs about. Nothing else really occurs to me to write a song about. I’m sure there are other things than death and misery. (laughter) I don’t know. It would be really hard, I can’t imagine. Betrayal, I guess. (laughter) That is one. Its funny with Janet, one of us will say to the other one, ‘Oh I wrote this new song, it’s really happy’. The other person will say, ‘No, its just like all your other songs. (laughter) Its not really happy at all’. I think both of us are hoping that we would, out of nowhere, write a song that actually was not that dreary. That it would just happen.

You should write a song like “Shiny Happy People”. (laughter)
I had this nightmare that I had to go to this songwriter’s reeducation camp. I dreamed this about two months ago. That I was taken to this camp in the short bus. (laughter) And it was held in a big amphitheatre, and there were a bunch of people, I knew, I think the Handsome Family people were there. And the place where the reeducation camp was held was sort of like the set of Let’s Make a Deal. There were like three doors, like garage doors. When you were chosen from the audience, you got to pick a door and there was this band behind the door and they were playing songs. And there was a big clock and you had a certain number of minutes to rewrite the popular song they were playing. And when I picked the door the song they were playing was the “Happiest Girl in the Whole USA”. And I had ten minutes to rewrite that 1970’s pop-country hit. (laughter)

Did you change it to a depressing song?
I can’t remember what my song was, but I did pretty well because afterwards I was taken to Applebees. (laughter)

Was that the prize or like third place? (laughter)
Because everyone had done so well they took us to Applebees. I remember thinking, this is weird, ‘I love Applebees! I’m so happy!’ (laughter)

I’m the happiest girl in the whole USA. (laughter)
I am the happiest girl in the whole USA and I love Applebees! Then I asked the waitress if I could have the menu to keep it as a souvenir. Then I woke up

I never remember my dreams. I’m sure they’re weird, I just have trouble remembering them.
I just remember being so happy to be in a damn Applebees. And I just thought, ‘Why don’t I ever come here? I love this place!’ (laughter) ‘What’s wrong with me? There’s a whole new world opening up before me. I’m gonna be here every day!’ (laughter)

Do you ever really go there?
No. I’ve never actually been to an Applebees, but I really liked it…what was the real question again? (laughter)

I don’t remember, I think we were talking about Gene Simmons.
What is the name of that university that is up in the top northern part of WV?

West Virginia University. It's in Morgantown.
I think that’s where Don Knotts is from because when we were there we were driving on Don Knotts Boulevard.

My favorite is in eastern KY. The Billy Ray Cyrus Highway.
(laughter) Yeah, that one’s pretty nice!

It’s the best.
We played a wedding one time in Morgantown, Freakwater did, and it was just the most depressing show even I’ve ever played. I kept telling these people, “This is a really bad idea”. I did not want to do it.

Did you know them?
I didn’t know them. They actually talked to us at that Mountain Stage. My banjo player got a big crush on this girl that was with them, one of the maids of honor. (laughter) Which was weird because Max kept saying, “I think we should really play this wedding.” And Janet and I kept saying, “We’re such a terrible band to play a wedding! This is such a bad idea!”

That relationship’s gonna end tragically.
It did! They were divorced within a year. I kept talking to them on the phone and telling them that we didn’t know any songs that weren’t like horrible. Either someone’s getting killed or infidelity and drunkenness. They kept telling us that we would just be playing part of the night, but it ended up lasting all night long. It was like, “Long Black Veil” one more time! (laughter)
The guy Max, that was playing banjo with us, he never wanted to do anything, but he insisted that we play this wedding in Morgantown, West Virginia for some reason. We didn’t even know why until the next morning after the wedding. I saw Max coming out of his room in the hotel with this bride’s maid and her beehive was all askew! (laughter) It was the most tawdry thing I’d ever seen in my life. The mascara running down her face and she had on this yellow dress that looked like an Easter egg. Then, her boyfriend found out about it and threw her out of their house. He threw all of her stuff out and then he broke a Freakwater record in half and took the broken vinyl from the record and actually attacked her with it! (laughter) I mean, its not funny because its so horrible, but…

How dramatic. At least he was creative with his domestic violence.
Yeah, he fashioned like a large dagger out of a Freakwater record!

Did you do the Chicken Dance at the wedding?
(laughter) No, we didn’t do that, but we did play “Cowboy’s Sweetheart” and this ninety year-old woman yodeled. That was fun. It was about as close to the Chicken Dance as we got.

I never knew what the Chicken Dance was until the last wedding I was at. People started doing it and they were like, “Aren’t you going to do it?” And I was like, “I don’t know what the hell you’re doing, but you are all crazy!” (laughter)
One time my brother and my mom and I went to Janet’s parents’ house for Thanksgiving. Janet has this uncle Jay who plays the accordion. They would always bust out the Jagermeister and an accordion. (laughter) Nobody in my family knew what the Chicken Dance was and then all of a sudden her family were all getting up out of their chairs and her mom was clapping and saying, “It’s time to do the Chicken Dance”. Janet was crying and saying, “You can’t make them do that!” Janet’s mom said, “Its my house and I can make them do whatever I want!” So, we had to do it. It wasn’t that bad. It was a romp. A light-hearted romp. (laughter) If a person could just write one song like that…

Yeah, you write a Chicken Dance song.
I could use it to spread enough joy for a whole lifetime. It would make up for everything.

Get to it, right now! Pick an animal!
(laughter) The Weasel Dance.

That sounds really perverted! See, you’re already making it all twisted.
(laughter) I’m already making it into something ugly!

Are you going to be making any new Freakwater records anytime soon?
Yeah, I’m going to Chicago in January to practice and stuff. Then, we’ll start making the record in the spring.

Do you write your songs here and then go up there and Janet has some?
Yeah, that’s how we do it. We both write songs and show them to each other and everybody has opinions, as far as the arranging goes. We’ve never really been able to write songs together. I don’t know how people do that. I know other people do, but I can’t even imagine what that would be like.

You’re in your forties, right?
Yeah, I’m 41.

Do you have a lot of pressure on you to, ‘get a real job’?
(laughter) Well, I am staying at my mother’s house! There’s a certain amount of pressure, but I think one real genius part of my life at this point is that no one really expects anything.

How did you manage to get out of that?
I don’t know…. I guess just by never doing what I was supposed to do, ever. So, I don’t think people really expect anything, which is kind of great. Because for a long time people did expect something. My brother is two years older than me and he just got a job for the first time and I was really mad at him. Bastard. I thought we had signed a pact. (laughter)

Who took the photo on your record cover? Was it your mom?
Yeah, my mom did. They’re really neat. I wish I knew where they were right now; I’d show them to you. I think they’re from 1965 or something like that. There’s this whole series of pictures of me and my brother running around at the Falls of the Ohio when we were little. When I was working on my record, I was thinking I needed some sort of bleak landscape. ‘Who would have that?’ Oh, yeah, my mom. (laughter) She has the history of bleak landscape photography. Shoeboxes full of dreary photographs. Its really nice, I had so many of them.

This is kind of off subject, what a surprise! But, are you a Hazel Dickens fan?
I LOVE Hazel Dickens. She’s my idol. I’ve seen her play a couple of times. I’ve met her.

Oh! I’m so jealous!
I had seven-layer dip with her. (laughter) My friend Diane and I went to see her at some college town in WV and this guy that Diane knows weaseled us into a party after one of her shows. It was in someone’s house and there were all of these people in a room and she was in there singing. I’d already met her once before that. I’d given her a Freakwater record. So, at the party, she said, “You’re a singer, why don’t you get in here and sing?” I couldn’t. I was just completely mortified and Diane was jabbing me so hard in the ribs. I thought I was gonna die. (laughter) There was this guy there, this poet guy, and he was trying to act all smart and impress her and stuff, while we were eating the seven layer dip. He said, “Hazel why do you think it is, that we all like these songs that are so sad?” She just looked at him and she goes, “Cause we’re all fucked up.” (laughter) She’s so great. I love her. I gave her a Freakwater record once, maybe like ten years ago or something. She was playing at this bluegrass festival in Lexington, KY and I went with my mom. I had a record and I said, “I’m going to give this to Hazel Dickens”. We got there and I saw her play and I was just like AHHHHHH! (laughter) I couldn’t even speak to her and I was just carrying this record around and I was following her. You know, like to the corndog stand and everywhere, just totally stalking her. (laughter) I went back to where my mom was sitting and I still had the record. Mom was like, “You better give her that record or just throw it in the trash.” So I went to try to give it to her again. I went back to her trailer and she was coming out of it. I said, “Here, I wanted to give you this”. She was looking at me so funny and she said, “What is it?” I was like, “It’s a record”. Then I just ran away. (laughter)

You didn’t even tell her it was yours? She was probably just like, ‘wow….’
(laughter) I know. I just ran away! Then I saw her about two years later and she remembered that I had given her the record. She knew this song off of it, “Forgettable Song”, that she was thinking about playing. I thought I was gonna die. She told me that I had a very strange mind. I was very, very excited.


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"Nothing So Pure" by Cyndi Elliot for Puncture magazine #34, 1995

Current neo-country faves like the Jayhawks, or Uncle Tupelo and vaunted spin-offs Son Volt and Wilco, haven't so much gone back to their roots as gone back to Gram Parsons and earlier Neil Young – and while the scenery is fine enough, it’s a road we've been down a few times before.

Coincidentally or not, it's women artists who are currently taking country along some less-travelled paths. From Iris Dement's austere emotionalism to the '90s morality tales and lost-highway laments of the Geraldine Fibbers, they’re going way back to the source – and at the same time developing new themes for which country styles seem the best, most bittersweet form.

The time is ripe too for Freakwater, a band whose harmonies rival the Louvin Brothers, let alone Gram and Emmylou, and whose words and voices constantly juggle passion and irony, joy and clear-eyed fatalism, for effects that are by turns funny, chilling and breathtaking.

When Catherine Irwin returned my call, she apologized for not getting back sooner. “I took a couple of naps and it was a few days later,” she said, with a laugh in her southern-styled voice I would learn was never far behind. I cracked up, reckoning I might well have heard the blurry-eyed birth of the first line of the next song she’d write.

I expected as much from Irwin, the main songwriter of Freakwater. Her lyrics, like her outlook, present a twisted sense of justice and humor, a blend of amusement with – and distaste for – the world at large.
From her home in Louisville, where she earns a living painting houses and ballet sets, Irwin seems as willing to discuss the “nail-maintenance phase” she’s going through as her music (“I haven’t had nails this long since I got teeth. . .but it’ll end once we go on the road and I’m playing guitar”). And there are some musical questions she won’t even answer – like what was the first record she bought: “too near and too painful,” she claims, though she states proudly that the first concert she went to was a KISS show.

Irwin tells me she was raised on her parents’ Irish folk music, Pete Seeger, and Kingston Trio records. Then, like so many, she was inspired by the Sex Pistols and started her first band with her brother. They called themselves the Dickbrains.

She met her partner in Freakwater, co-singer and arranger Janet Beveridge Bean, at a Circle X show in Louisville.

“She used to wear this long army coat. I thought she was a crazy, punk-rock-hippie chick,” Bean confides from her Chicago apartment, which is hung with Irwin’s paintings.

“Cathy went to the Brown School, an experimental school that Will Oldham, Dave Grubbs, and the Slint guys all went to. I went to the opposite kind of school – where we studied Latin three hours a day and scrubbed the floor with toothbrushes. . .I switched schools to get out. It was 1981.”

Bean, who’s still probably better known in the music world as the drummer in Chicago’s Eleventh Dream Day, claims the two avoided each other at first. Janet’s mother asked her, “Why don’t you make friends with that Irwin girl?” Janet’s reply: “But Mom... she’s mean!”

When the two finally met, Catherine was mean: so mean that she fell on the floor laughing when she heard Janet’s full name: “It cracks me up to this day,” she confesses.

“We began singing together when we met,” says Janet, remembering Freakwater’s origins some thirteen years ago. “But I think the last year or so we’ve grown even closer. Maybe because we don’t live nearby, we sing together so much better now. Cathy was my matron of honor and she’s going to be my son Matt’s godmother. We don’t really want to baptize him, but I like the idea of everyone getting together and saying they’ll look after this kid.”

Bean talks of the high-school years as a musical turning point. “I had played clarinet and piano; but all the other stuff that set the direction my life would take seemed to happen when I was seventeen. When Catherine played Tammy Wynette for me, I didn’t know if I liked it at first. Then the voice clicked.”
After meeting Catherine (around the same time she met her future husband, Eleventh Dream Day bandmate Rick Rizzo), Janet took up singing – something she hadn’t thought of doing. “I’d never sung, except once I was singing some bad Fleetwood Mac song on the radio and my Dad knocked on the door. He said, "We know one thing you’ll never be, and that’s a singer!"

“Singing makes people feel good. It’s a gift everyone should have, but I don’t think you really know if you have a gift. I still feel pretty inadequate most of the time. I’ve always been rebellious, so when my Dad said I couldn’t, I figured I would,” she explains as her son methodically applies Scotch tape to his mouth. “Now a lot of my day involves singing, with Matt in the car. I’ll be one of those Moms – my Mom did it too, sang the pop songs of the day with the car radio – whose kid is like, ‘Mom, shut up!’ Singing makes me happy.”

Freakwater’s self-titled debut and their second album, Dancing Underwater, have been out of print for some years. The band’s current label, Thrill Jockey, hopes to re-release them but, Catherine says, “the guy who put them out has a delusion that some day he’s gonna make a lot of money off them.” The band’s first release on Thrill Jockey, Feels Like the Third Time, was widely hailed by critics on its appearance at the start of 1994. Their style was taken seriously: this was no country piss-take, no glib rundown of trailer parks, guns, and Budweiser. Irwin and Bean weren’t slumming, and their songs weren’t veiled in smirks.

Though they’ve been compared to country legends like the Carter Family, Irwin shies away when asked if she’s a purist. “There’s gotta be a reason we’r’e not as popular as everyone else,” she laughs. “Either we’re really bad, or we’ve got integrity.”

Music writers may label the popularity of country- and folk-influenced groups as a “new country” movement, or champion stripped-down, lo-fi music as it veers towards singer-songwriter solipsism. Self-taught and indie rock hands in the ’90s have distilled elements of gospel, jazz, country, folk, and blues with a philistine’s passion. Chiseling away at grunge for the simple, bluesy, emotional blast of a vocal melody, or stripping off layers of ego and overproduction in conventional rock cliches, the underground has continued to listen for the heart of what it means to create. Perhaps hoping for the next Sex Pistols, Dylan, or Nirvana, the urgency and sincerity sought in the rock aesthetic seems sorely lacking.

“Yeah, maybe. There are people who come to our shows who I’m surprised to see there. They’re too urban and hip for a Freakwater show! After doing this for over ten years, I’ve heard it a lot: ‘the kind of music you do is really coming around!’ I hope it’s true, but I don’t know how it starts. It’s not that no one plays this kind of music just because it’s not ‘in’ – the bluegrass guys are playing down at the VFW hall every Saturday night!”

Equally cautious about explaining Freakwater’s appeal, Bean adds, “If you’re really into music, your interests wander. I'm into jazz and all sorts of stuff. You need something new; and country music lends itself to age. I can envision myself being seventy and singing these songs. But not being forty or fifty and doing punk rock!

“It’s true that country is close to punk in terms of anguish, though. You can’t get any more down and out and disgusted than Hank Williams. Country and punk at their purest are pretty rigid. The country basslines are all the same to me, but the melody and the sentiment behind it - they go a million ways."
Catherine scoffs at the notion they might do well with the mass country audience. "We don't play the places those people play. And people with a punk background may think we're purists, but country fans think we're freaks."

"There are 'alternative' fans who don't really listen to country music who listen to us, and there are 'neotraditionalists' like Nanci Griffith fans who might have some interest in us," Bean concedes. "But most of the people who go to a Reba McEntire concert, and to church every Sunday. . .they make me nervous. I think if you played a song like [our] "Gone to Stay," which has a line, "There's nothing so pure as the kindness of an atheist," on country radio, you'd get a lot of shit. It wouldn't be appreciated any more than KD Lang saying she doesn't eat meat. Freakwater are staunchly unconservative."

"I like Dwight Yoakam, but Garth Brooks? I'd like to tie him up and smack him!" Irwin responds
when asked what country music she listens to. "He's done a lot for pudgy white men in America. That's who's buying those records. At the dance club in Louisville, that's how those guys look - balding, with Mondrian-ish cowboy shirts. They've never touched a girl, and now they're all the rage!

"Being hateful, I don't usually like people unless they've been dead thirty years. But I think Will Oldham's a genius. He's a smart-alecky little kid making records that are great. A lot of people would take his cleverness and make something horrible, but he's got restraint."

In a straight format, Freakwater veer away from revisionism with innovative, sometimes near-dissonant vocals, lyrics, and arrangements. The vital accompaniments of Bob Egan's pedal steel and Dave Gay's upright bass coalesce with Irwin and Bean's rhythmic strumming. Covers of Conway Twitty and Woody Guthrie songs evince both reverence and reinterpretation. When Irwin sings "You've Never Been This Far Before" (on Feels Like the Third Time) she bends gender lines like a pro. That song creeps Bean out.
"I'm glad we recorded it anyway. I hope we didn't kill Conway Twitty - he died real soon after
that. I guess when you record other people's songs and you don't notify anyone. . .I don't know if you can get sued, but I was kinda hoping we would, and we'd get to meet Conway Twitty in court."

If there's a constant in Freakwater's work, it's the wrenching execution of the vocals, the lyrical perfection of the themes. Gettin' old and dyin'. Gettin drunk and cryin'. Cheatin' and lyin'. Who can't relate to that? Along with poignantly narrated simple verities, a healthy reminder of death haunts Freakwater's new album, Old Paint. Irwin herself seems haunted, wise beyond her years: the philosopher in a rocking chair, or the pontificating friend at the bar, telling tales that point toward truth.

There are reminder songs, like Guthrie's "Little Black Train" ("You may be a ballroom gambler/Cheat your way through life/But you can't beat that little black train that's coming 'round tonight") or her own "Gravity" ("All your beauty will be stolen/By a young girl in the night"). In the top-ten-simple-truths category: "Everyone who gets drunk will not write a good book." "The lyrics are kinda autobiographical," Catherine laughs. "Some things are made up, but some of the more horrible things are true."

Her personal tales uncover universal nuances, often dosed with morbidity for the finely tuned heart and strong spirit. On "Smoking Daddy," a song inspired by Catherine's father, a Lucky Strike smoker, the voices of the two women transcend country-music topics and reach into a sort of psychic call-and-response pattern as they articulate the unsayable: the devices one uses to rationalize doing something one knows to be harmful: "You never know/I might get Lucky/You never know/I might break that Camel's back/I'll be lit up/like those girls down in Salem. . .."

"Cathy's songs have a real balance of self-loathing and being pissed off at the world," Bean notes. "I have a problem not being the victim when I write. Cathy's never the victim—if anything, the world around her is. 'White Rose' is beautiful—it could be a classic bluegrass song about death and dying, but it's more. The White Rose were a group of anti-Nazi German students who were executed."

Old Paint credits the arrangements to Bean, but mistakenly omits crediting all the songwriting, apart from four covers, to Irwin, who notes, "Something's gone wrong with the printing on all our records!"
Bean explains what taking on the arranging meant: "These songs are just as much a part of me. I suggest structures, endings, ways of singing. I've often felt I wasn't represented; now I'm more comfortable. I don't have Catherine's prolific nature. This is the first Freakwater record I didn't write a song for."

Old Paint was recorded live (with Brad Wood at Chicago's Idful Studios). "The pedal steel was the only overdub," Irwin says. "Even if we have to do twenty takes of each song, it's still less painful for me than separating everything. The worst part of that is when the others are finished and you have to go do your part, and then you come out of the little room where you've been trying really hard to do something, and they're all reading magazines. . .."

The two musicians have been described as sounding like they look: Bean, the blonde soprano, complementing Irwin's tousled, crooning alto. That may be a writer's oversimplification, but the soothing, effortless listening and commiserating that Freakwater offer lends itself to idealization. Their songs evoke front porches, acoustic guitars, the wash hanging on the line. A funeral, a birth, and a broken heart later, Freakwater revel in a simple style that reflects life's vital statistics: a sound and view that is more in touch than it is archaic or glossy.

"I suppose my life is simple compared to others. . .I don't have to worry about investments or anything," Irwin muses. "I'm just painting and making some bean soup. But you know, you could still lose your mind."

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Excerpts from a chat with multi-instrumentalist Jon Spiegel, March, 2008, by newoldtymer.

Jon Spiegel has been playing with Freakwater live and on record since 1989. When Freakwater came to Chattanooga for a few shows in March, 2008, I asked him about how he became part of Freakwater’s first recording session, the music that has influenced him, what makes Freakwater distinctive, and his current endeavors. What follows is an edited collection of snippets from that discussion.
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I was raised as a classical musician from a classical family. My mother was an opera singer and a choir director at our synagogue, so there was a lot of Jewish liturgical music in my family. I grew up singing in the choir, and I worked as a cantor, but, when I went to live in Israel for a year between high school and college, I heard Little Feat, and it changed my life entirely. I became a total slide guitar fanatic. So, in one world, there’s Debussy, Beethoven, Ravel, Verdi and maybe some Puccini, and then, in the other world, there’s Lowell George, George Clinton, and James Brown. Those three make up the tripod that my whole musical life sits on.
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In the late Eighties, I worked in a music store called Flats & Sharps, and I was giving lessons to a guy named Baird Figi, who used to play in Eleventh Dream Day. He had just got a steel guitar. I was teaching him, and he said, “I know these two people who are making an album. They wanted me to play on it, but I really can’t help them out. You’re really good – maybe you could go over and play some slide for them - they could really use it on some of their tracks. ”

It turned out to be Janet (Bean) and Catherine (Irwin) in this third-floor recording studio on Lincoln Avenue. I went down there with a pedal steel, a lap steel, and a slide guitar; I met them for the first time when I walked in. I remember it was really nice because they brought all this ridiculously heavy equipment up the stairs for me. They just ran a bunch of tracks, and I played on everything.

After that, some live shows started to happen. We used to rehearse in this totally hideous, empty, raw space above the Cubby Bear (in Chicago). We played at places like the Heartland and the Czar Bar. After that first record was finished, there was an east coast tour: They used my van and took me and Dave (Gay) along. I happened to be wearing all white at that time for some reason - white painter’s pants and white button down shirts - while Dave wore all black, and I’m sure we looked very peculiar because of that. Very shortly after, we did the Dancing Underwater record. The picture of us on the back of that record was from a show at the Czar Bar, a night we played with Urge Overkill.

(Janet Bean, listening in, interjects): No, it was the Jesus Lizard. I worked with Dave Sims, who was their bass player, and I knew David Yow really well. They wanted us to tour with them, but it seemed like a too nutty of an idea to me.

(Jon continues): There was a break of time that I didn’t play with Freakwater for eight or nine years. When I returned, the first thing I noticed was how unbelievably deft and strong at songwriting they had become. Freakwater do have a delicacy and a vulnerability of spirit, but there’s something truly courageous in the way they write. They really open up a lot. Everything about their performance is really, really full-on, and they’ve only got more and more driving as time passes. Their vocals are just relentless.
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When I play with Freakwater, I try to lay down this huge brick bed under the vocals. They way the person in my chair plays with Freakwater is totally different from how someone in my chair would play with any other band. It’s almost like the third vocal part, in some weird kind of way.
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As songwriters, Janet and Catherine have great contrast. Janet has this wonderful sense of modality in the way that she writes. I love “Binding Twine”; it’s such a beautiful song. You can also hear a lot of great examples of that modality on her record, Dragging Wonder Lake. Catherine’s strength, meanwhile, is her tonality - she writes with a lot of secondary dominance. She writes like a show tune composer.
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Every musician, to be good, has to have a tremendous amount of arrogance. It’s not confidence, it’s not a good sense of self-worth – it’s arrogance. I heard Branford Marsalis talking one time in an interview: He said Art Blakey told him that you have to bring so much arrogance to the table. You do not play above someone. You do not play below someone. You play directly to them, and that’s the thing about Freakwater’s performances. There are always 100% direct to their audience. They are positively fearless.
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These days, I work with the Goodman Theater, where I’m contracting a show, “Ain’t Misbehavin’”, in the spring. I still play with my brother Matt in the band Brother Brother - we’re a big 12-piece funk club band with two and a half CD’s out. Also, I’m with the Otters, who continue to play every once in awhile. I teach at the Old Town School of Folk Music. I’m trying to put together this little bluesy trio with John Abbey and Brian Wilkey, a great pedal steel player who still teaches me stuff. I play with singer/songwriter Michael McDurmott. Michael was inspired by Mike Jordan, who is an icon of Chicago’s rock songwriter scene. I was very fortunate to have played on an album Mike recorded called Indian Summer.

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