Peggy Sue Argue Over Whether Their Songs Are Happy or Sad

Posted on Dec 30th 2011 12:00PM by Eric R. Danton
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Anika Mottershaw

After an acoustic debut in 2010, English trio Peggy Sue plug in and turns up, a little, on its second record, 'Acrobats,' which is out now via Yep Roc.

John Parish, the guitarist and PJ Harvey collaborator, produced Peggy Sue's foray into the world of brooding, funereal electric folk-rock songs marked by unison vocals from guitarists Katy Klaw and Rosa Rex and anchored by drummer Olly Joyce. Parish also made the band a little nervous at first, until they got to know him.

"He was a calming influence on us, which you might not expect from someone who plays guitar like he does," Rex tells Spinner during a conversation that also touches on songwriting and the power of voices singing together.

What was it like working with John Parish?

Amazing. We were really daunted by it initially, because he's someone that we've had a longtime respect for, and both me and Katie have watched him play several times with PJ Harvey and also his solo stuff. It was a really exciting thing that he had heard us on the radio and heard of us and was happy to work with us. And then we got there, and he was really quite a normal, understated guy who was really great.

Was that not what you expected?

We had no idea. We went down and we met him in Bristol and we all kind of got on. We were trying to predict what car he might drive. He could have been a complete rock star, and it turned out he's quite a family man. How he was would definitely have shaped the recording process, and him being who he is, he kept it very calm.

Apart from the fact that he's John Parish, what made him a good fit?

We knew that we wanted to make this record and we had written the thing on electric guitars, and it sort of progressed quite significantly from how it sounded on our first record. As a result of that, we wanted to find someone who was good at recording those kinds of sounds and was good at recording those kinds of songs, as opposed to people we'd worked with previously who are more interested in acoustic instruments. He just helped bring our ideas out.

What accounts for the more electric sound this time?

The core of this record is two guitars and a drum kit, and obviously there's strings and bass, but that's the core of it. We were much more interested in the sounds that we could get out of one thing. With 'Fossils and Other Phantoms,' we were interested in sounds we could get out of instruments we didn't really know how to play very well. We've now experimented with lots of different instruments, and we wanted to explore it further.

When did you grasp the power that unison vocals can have?

That's always just been a really core element. We obviously experiment with the songs individually and sometimes we don't need it as much as others. It was just kind of a given that there were two voices. It's interesting in that there's often two voices singing lyrics that one person has written, and that's reassuring when you're singing about rather personal subject matters. And live, there is something really, really powerful about watching people come together and sing together, like gospel choirs. I'm not religious, but singing in church is something very powerful to me.

Do you gravitate to certain themes in your songwriting?

I think most songs, by anyone, are about love or loss or religion or death. On the whole, there's a few main themes that most songs are about, and it's about finding different ways to express them. I think it sounds slightly different this time because we would write lyrics slightly later, so they were more formed by the sounds of the songs.

How nerve-wracking is it to bring new songs to the other two?

Personally, I find it's very exposing, but it's funny: You ask the band to get on board, and there's something very cathartic about songwriting. You're expressing a feeling that might be current for a month, or depending on how fast you write, for a day, and you bring these songs to people who know you and are probably more familiar with what you're talking about than someone listening to the CD who doesn't know you personally. You give up the song and it becomes more than about just you. Frequently the three of us will think songs are about completely different things. Sometimes we'll have arguments about whether a song is happy or sad.

Watch Peggy Sue's 'All We'll Keep' Video