Alvin has surrounded her in the studio with an A-team of his own invention, including her husband, Buck, and Leisz. He has also brought her vocals to the foreground for the first time.
“There’s a quality in her voice that I think was being obscured in the Picketts,” Alvin says. “In the Picketts it’s like she’s a rock ‘n’ roll babe, and she’s sort of shouting above the band, which she is more than capable of doing. I thought we could use some of that, but also, there’s this whole sort of…tender, vulnerable quality in her voice that, once you crank up the amps, gets lost. That’s what I meant about having her show that side of herself. That side of her voice was a little scary at first for her, I think.”
Only an unstrung violin ornamenting a built-in bookcase suggests anything out of the ordinary at the McWilson-McCaughey house. Behind her chair the family’s 17-year-old cat, Helen, snores so loudly it threatens to be a death rattle. The family turtle struggles to heave itself into a pan of water, finally lands with a satisfying smack and is quiet again.
The tables are covered in cookbooks, which she has decided to bring up from the basement, perhaps in the theory that if they’re closer to the kitchen she’ll call upon their wisdom more often. The furniture is neither old enough to have acquired kitsch cred, nor new; it’s simply home, and comfortable.
Outside it is, quite improbably, a beautiful January day. Wide, clean living room windows offer a splendid panorama of evergreens and Puget Sound, everything blue and green to the horizon (and only by that view — a significant measure of status in the Northwest — might you guess at an unusual level of musical success in the house). Yes, Seattle will tease you like that, even in winter. Especially in winter.
Alvin is fond of comparing McWilson’s language to that of poet Sylvia Plath. It is dangerously accurate, and doubtless Alvin knows it. Plath, a formidable poet in her own right, was married to the British poet laureate, Ted Hughes. Their marriage ended, she spiraled into mental illness, and took her own life, at 31, in 1963. McWilson is married to Scott McCaughey, quite possibly the most prolific musician this side of Billy Childish, and suffers from bipolar disorder.
It doesn’t show, of course. “Hey, Scott?” she calls into the other room. “My mind is falling apart. Who did David Jackson play with?”
Roger Miller. Dillard & Clark. Everybody. He even plays upright bass on Christy’s new record.
She calls back the next day, leaves a message explaining that the new medication isn’t quite in balance yet, and that she was unusually subdued. Only in retrospect does it shows up in her language: “I’ve got sand in my brain,” she had said, frustrated.
Suddenly her song choices make sense. She has long turned up with a sparkling reimagination of somebody else’s song (the Clash’s “Should I Stay Or Should I Go”, the Who’s “Baba O’Riley”, Brian Wilson’s “‘Til I Die”). This time it’s a pair of slightly psychedelic songs, Moby Grape’s “8:05” (offered as a duet with Alvin) and, more telling, Jesse Colin Young’s “Darkness, Darkness”.
“I like that song for a number of reasons,” she says. “Not the least is that I don’t sleep. I’m not a sleeper. I mean, I have trouble sleeping, so, lyrically that’s really a true song. For someone who can’t sleep, that’s a great song. It’s a great song anyway.”
Darkness, darkness
Take away the pain of knowing
The emptiness of right now
And that’s where the songs come from. “A lot of my songs come through just lying in bed with nothing to do,” she says. “So you work on songs to keep your mind amused while you wait for the time to get up. I write the music first. I do it backwards, it’s really hard. Melody comes in my head, and then I try to fit the words in, so I’m doing crossword puzzles.
