1996 Guitar School Magazine Interview

From Guitar School, February 1996: Mary Timony

slack magic woman

”I just kind of spit out these images and stuff, but they’re always referring to a certain thing. But then afterwards I’ll look back at them and I can’t understand what I was talking about.”

“I went through this phase when I was 18 or 19 when I was really into Joe Satriani and Steve Vai and stuff,” recalls Mary Timony, Helium’s 25-year-old- singer/guitarist/songwriter, with an incredulous laugh. “And I was like, ‘Oh, man, they’re the only good musicians. Fuck all this other crap.’ I couldn’t listen to bands like the Velvet Underground, because I’d be like, ‘God, they’re terrible.’ I definitely went through the ‘rational phase.’ But what happens with people who go through that phase is that they eventually go, ‘The only musicians who really matter are the ones who can feel.’ And then they learn that Yngwie is not God.”

Timony’s current willingness to let her intuition be her co-pilot is evident in the fuzzed-out, almost reckless experimentalism of The Dirt Of Luck (Matador), Helium’s first full-length release after last year’s [sic] acclaimed EP Pirate Prude. Meticulously recorded over a period of six months at Philadelphia’s Studio Red, the album is a musical examination of death, depression and the sins of the patriarchy that movers sonically at some delicate midpoint between Pavement and My Bloody Valentine. The surreal, deeply personal lyrics, explains Timony with her trademark relish of the paradoxical, both are and are not descriptions of real-life situations: “I just kind of spit out these images and stuff, but they’re always referring to a certain thing. But then afterwards I’ll look back at them and I can’t understand what I was talking about. It’s kind of like having a dream or something.”

Timony, who first picked up the guitar in ninth grade and played jazz and folk while in an arts high school in Washington, D.C., reports that her bassist Ash Bowie and drummer Shawn Devlin are unperturbed by the sly venomous critiques of sexism she mounts in her songs. “They don’t really think about it very much. They know that it’s important to me, and they respect that, but since they’re guys they just have a ‘Go and do what you gotta do’ attitude. They don’t even see it.”

—Mallav Charters