SPOTLIGHT: Community and Creativity Fuel Rainbow Girls’ ‘Welcome to Whatever’
Photo by Brittany Powers
EDITOR’S NOTE: Rainbow Girls are No Depression’s Spotlight band for December 2023. Look for more about them and their new album, Welcome to Whatever, out today, all month long.
Before they were Rainbow Girls, the band, they were Rainbow girls, fellow residents of the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Rainbow House dorm and hosts of an underground open-mic night on Mondays.
“One of the things that was really the impetus [to forming the band] was looking around and noticing that a lot of the male-bodied creatures that would come and hang were playing together, and so often it was the women that were playing alone,” says Vanessa May. “We got curious about what it might be like if the women that played every night at Rainbow House came together.”
At first, May recalls, it was “like 10 girls and eight acoustic guitars on a bed, hanging out, singing songs together.” But she and her Rainbow Girls bandmates Erin Chapin and Caitlin Gowdey were among those who saw all the colors of possibility in the music they made, and they’ve stuck together for a journey that has brought them as a trio to their sixth album, Welcome to Whatever, out today.
But wait, hold on, today is a Monday. New albums come out on Fridays, as dictated by the music industry. A Monday release, a callback to their open-mic night origins, is just one way Rainbow Girls are giving a middle finger to industry norms, conventional thinking, and constraints on their creativity.
An Independent Streak
Nothing about Rainbow Girls’ story has been normal, really. They built their chops as a band by busking, first around Santa Barbara, then a little farther afield, in Europe. They roamed the continent over several summers, “making the money that we needed to get around as we went,” May says.
“Then,” quips Chapin, “we decided to give America a shot.”
They built a following slowly, and then things started happening fast. In 2018, they threw together a cover of “Down Home Girl” and posted a back porch performance video on YouTube to promote an upcoming show. First recorded by Alvin Robinson in 1964 and then by The Rolling Stones in 1965, the song came to Rainbow Girls via Old Crow Medicine Show, from their 2006 album, Big Iron World. Within a week, the Rainbow Girls version — with May on bass, Gowdey on acoustic guitar, and Chapin on steel guitar — had a million views (it now has well over 3 million).
“Suddenly all of our shows were sold out, and it was awesome,” Chapin says. It wasn’t just fans paying attention, either: The viral video also gained them a manager and booking agents. “And so we just started making more videos from there.”
Their videos show up in the usual social media places and formats, evolving as platforms, trends, and attention spans change. But one constant since 2019 is their “Live at 5” series on Facebook, a video started or posted at 5 p.m. Pacific Time every Monday — another echo of those early Monday night open mics. True to the Rainbow Girls spirit, there are no rules to the videos. They’re shot on an iPhone, with no edits to smooth out giggles or flubs. Most are performances of cover songs, often with friends. Sometimes the band offers a peek at a new song of their own, and sometimes it’s a little chat with fans to preview upcoming shows or share news.
During the pandemic especially, fans showed up for the videos, and when it came time for the band to gather resources to finish Welcome to Whatever, they took a leap of faith that fans would show up for that, too.
“Since we started touring again, people would come up to us at the table all the time and just tell us, ‘Your videos got me through the pandemic,’” Chapin says. “When we were like, ‘OK, we need help, I wonder if these people would help us now,’ we just asked and they were like, ‘Yep, OK. Sign me up.’ … It didn’t even feel weird asking because there were so many people who were like, ‘How can I help?’ They were asking us.”
Rather than crowdfunding their album through Kickstarter or other established platforms that take a cut of proceeds in exchange for their services, Chapin built the band its own funding page, which allowed them to keep 100% of the donations that came in.
“It’s very much and always has been a part of our ethos to just do things as independently as we possibly can and to be rooted in community,” May says. “And there’s something special about having creative autonomy, and then for this record also to be able to allow our supporters to feel like they’re invested in this project.
“So much of fandom in the internet age, it’s such a high turnover rate because we have nothing invested in any of these people,” she continues. “And to have over 500 people that feel like they invested in this project — we really feel it when we’re out on the road. People are like, ‘I supported you,’ or they feel invested and we know that they’re going to be there for the long haul. And those are the kinds of people that we want supporting the music.”
That independent spirit shines through the songs of Welcome to Whatever, which starts with a heavy dose of Rainbow Girls’ wry humor and sharp social commentary in “Compassion to the Nth Degree.” Against a slow, reverb-y backdrop, the trio offers a dis by way of comparison:
I love you like I love white supremacists
And people who still steal from small businesses
I love you like the bully who made fun of me
and made me doubt my worth and capability
Also invited to this searingly sarcastic “love” fest are HughesNet, Fox News, airport security, and, perhaps most sharply, “those who look the other way.”
“No Limits,” however, finds something to love in earnest, and that’s the embrace of one’s full identity, no matter how many categories it spans or lines it blurs. May wrote the song based on personal experience, sparked by a long-ago question from a schoolmate when she was in third grade.
“She was like, ‘Wait, are you white? Or are you Black?’” May recalls. “I remember being very caught off guard and confused about how to answer her question, because I had never had to decide that before. I just knew I existed in this place that just encompassed both of those things and something that’s bigger than that. In that moment it was hard for me to understand, but now as I’ve grown and reflected, I very much appreciate being able to be in this intersectional place. Being a woman that comes from many different backgrounds, being a woman, being queer, and just existing in all of these places gives me so much power.”
On the chorus “No Limits,” over a chill retro soul-inspired groove augmented by members of The California Honeydrops, May poses some questions of her own:
Why would I wanna be just white anyway
White keys alone they’re just gonna limit your play
Why would I wanna be just Black anyway
Black keys alone they’re just gonna limit your play
On “City Slickers,” Rainbow Girls embrace the chaos of city life but find a bit of respite in the right person to navigate it with. And Welcome to Whatever ends in another whirl of chaos, a cathartic scream, lyrically, in the midst of modern America. “Patriotism Killed the Cat,” like “Compassion to the Nth Degree,” names a litany of bummers — “us or them,” endless wars “for blood and soil,” “love of guns and pressing one” — but finds the band, and all of us, still standing and still fighting.
It’s a gift, the band says, to be able to channel their anger and frustration into songs, and fans seem to be grateful as well.
“We have a literal platform that we get to stand on and we get to share our thoughts and our opinions and the things that we feel angry about, and then have that reflected back to us after we play a show,” May says. “We just got back from a tour and we were playing in some states that would be typically identified as red spaces. After so many of the shows, I had so many people come up to me that were so grateful that we were talking about these things that they felt like they weren’t able to talk about. And so we thankfully can filter these things out and we can move them through us. The performance and making the music, writing the songs, is a huge part of the cycle of catharsis and moving anger through the body.”
Reading the Room
Even as they build a following online, Rainbow Girls are hard at work gaining fans in person, too. Earlier this year they toured with fellow Californians The Brothers Comatose, and after a string of shows on their own in January, they’ll join up with The Wood Brothers to open shows in February.
Their years of busking have made them quick on their feet when adjusting to new audiences as an opener, the band says.
“You never know until you play that first night exactly what the other band’s crowd will want because it’s not your crowd,” Gowdey says, and they’re constantly recalibrating to find “the best way to rope them into liking you.”
Reading the room, Chapin adds, is “a nice challenge instead of just doing what comes really naturally easy for us. It’s nice to be like, ‘OK, people want to dance right now. We don’t have a drummer, so we gotta throw this down!’”
Even while they’re out connecting with new fans in person, one city at a time, Rainbow Girls plan to keep making videos as a way of keeping in touch with people all over.
“We’re going to continue making content because that’s how people see us,” May says. “Not everybody in the country can make it to the show that we’re playing in Salt Lake City. And we still want to be accessible to that community of people that is supporting the project.”
Tapping into another longstanding Rainbow Girls tradition, the band will host a livestream on New Year’s Day that will double as their album release show. Playing that show online means there’s room for everybody, and Rainbow Girls fans won’t even have to bother marking their calendar. New Year’s Day 2024 falls on a Monday.