“When we’re arranging songs, we try to take the best moments of those living-room situations and preserve them. We’re always conscious of not putting so much into a song that there’s no room for the emotion. When other people are playing so much over your vocal that you can’t breathe, you have to pull back.”
With their vintage clothes, acoustic instruments, old-time songs and breathy harmonies, the Be Good Tanyas can seem like the ultimate traditionalists. In fact, however, they see their music as fiercely alternative, a natural outgrowth of the punk, funk and hip-hop music they had championed in their younger days — and which they remain fans of even now.
After all, if you wanted to create the antithesis of today’s commercial radio — and it wouldn’t matter if the station were country, pop, rock, urban or adult contemporary — it would be hard to find a more radical departure than a whispery version of “In My Time Of Dying”.
“When I first heard bands like No Means No, GBH, X, the Accused and Fugazi,” Klein remembers, “I realized that there was an alternative to the radio.” She grew up in Winnipeg, out in the Canadian prairie. Her family wasn’t very musical, and she was just a typical bored kid hanging out at the mall until she discovered punk.
“These were bands that played with intensity and passion. The radio bands played in these big arenas where you couldn’t get close and couldn’t afford the ticket anyway. These bands you could actually see live in a club.
“Later I was basically homeless in Winnipeg, and I found myself hanging out at the Blue Note Cafe, this folk coffeehouse that stayed open till four in the morning. I became best friends with this girl Carla who was also a dispossessed teenager but who was a hippie instead of a punk. She got me to smoke grass and listen to these Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen records, and I realized folk and punk had a lot in common.
“They both talked about real things and real feelings from a very subversive perspective. And it was easy to see the performers live. A lot of punks and hippies hung out together, because we were all the rejects. We had the same values and we couldn’t see the point of working your whole life just to get a pension.”
“But in the hippie movement,” Ford interjects, “you weren’t allowed to be angry, and in the punk movement you’re not allowed to be tender. Both of those are fucked up. That’s why I was drawn to old country and blues tunes, because it allowed you to be both. If you’re looking for alternatives in music, you’re going to be drawn to those old songs, because it’s some of the best music out there.”
“I was looking for alternatives,” Klein continues, “and the first alternative community I encountered was punk, but a lot of them were self-destructive. The second alternative community was folk, which was more nurturing. Today I know a lot of punks who are totally healthy vegans, but the ones I knew back then were selling everything they owned by buy crystal meth.
“In any case, I realized you didn’t have to be loud to be intense. You could sit with one guitar and sing with deep feeling and be more intense than a guy with a stack of Marshalls.”
Ford grew up in Vancouver, the daughter of an American draft dodger and his wife. “As a kid, I was obsessed with Motown and Otis,” she says, “and that’s still my main love. But my mom was always singing Emmylou Harris songs when she did housework. That’s the music she used to express herself. And even when I was in a trip-hop band, I realized that the music I used for expressing my truest feelings was my mother’s music. I tried to get as far away from country as I could, but I kept coming back to it.”
Parton, too, grew up in Vancouver, but hers was a more conventional childhood of classical piano lessons. “I loved Dolly Parton as a child because we had the same last name,” she admits. “I went through a punk-rock phase like everyone else, but I came back to folk and country. For one thing, my twin sister and I liked to sing together, and country music lends itself to harmony.
“For another, I had a high school boyfriend who played mandolin and banjo. I had heard of Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie, but I had never heard of Woody Guthrie till Gregg played me ‘Hobo’s Lullaby’. I was so struck by it that I wanted to become a hobo. And, for a while, I did.”
That hobo life led her to the Kootenay Mountains on the eastern edge of British Columbia in the early ’90s. For years the lumber companies have hired seasonal labor to re-seed clear-cut areas there. For the bohemian communities of Vancouver — punks and politicos as well as hippies — tree planting is an attractive proposition. You can work outside in the wilderness during the short Canadian summer and earn enough money, when combined with unemployment benefits, to support yourself the other eight months. Which leaves plenty of free time for music, writing, politics, art, travel or whatever.
