Magnet Magazine Interview

Malice in Wonderland

by a.d. amorosi 
Even in her flights of lyrical fantasy, MARY TIMONY is a practical artist searching for sanity. The Helium leader's first solo album is a bitter emotional pill coated with dreamlike impressionism.

If Mary Timony does nothing from this moment forward, she can rest assured that she has been rage-intensive, ethereal, lyrically phantasmagoric and allegorical (yet amazingly blunt) in an era when choosing just one would have been quite enough.

Depending on which period of her career you examine--the neo-punk nihilism of the early 90s with Helium, the band's latter-day look at fractured fairy tales (as heard on 1997's the Magic City) or as a solo artist on the new Mountains(Matador)--Timony traffics in big issues (loneliness, a sexual self, the distance of romance, independance, death) with big dollops of mystical mayhem. Her lyrical flourishes--oceans of wine, ladies of fire, big peacocks, painted horses, and idiots with a capital "I"--move beyond mere metaphor. Still, Timony's most affecting lyrics are those chillingly direct ones that come out of leftfield on simplistic, heartfelt songs like "Leon" ("All of my friends in L.A. love me more than you") and "The Valley of 1,000 Perfumes" ("You are sadder than the setting sun/And more beautiful than anyone").

To paraphrase Woody Allen, Timony is Kafka with a touch of Charles Manson, a passive-agressive, smart-ass feminist/angular guitarist bordering on the existential beyond. Or maybe she's Elizabeth Wurtzel after the Prozac prescription ran dry. Mention this feminist edge and Timony is quick to agree. "Yes," she says, "I'm a feminist." Question her about it more, and she says, "Well what's it like to be a boy writer?" Talk about any existential tendency and she quickly disavows it:"Everything I make, actually, is an attempt to escape the existential quality of life...an attempt to find meaning, to explain."

Underneath the layers of vigilant spirituality, however, the music Timony makes is a solid mass of rock-hard, palpable emootion. "Mountains is very much attached to reality, to me," she says, "The imagery may not sound realistic to others, but it is very concrete. It is like the juice that comes out of an orange when you squeeze it, if I am the orange. I trust that it may make sense to me to come from a human place in me, and if it doesn't, well, I don't really care."

Timony flies in the face of fantastic writing, making dadaist texts that, rather than take the piss, seem to put it back into the ready-made urinal of her lyrics. Even in an interview setting, she seems to dance around the stark/silly maypole:

MAGNET: What sets of schemes in your head made Mountains? 
Timony: The evrlasting pit peopled with pilgrims, paved with dirt roads, dirt mountains, dirty rooms in which dwell demons. The green valley of 1,000 perfumes. The mind of someone you love.

MAGNET: How much of your musical past--that of Helium--is tied to your present? 
Timony: Interesting you ask. I have a copy of each record, artwork and all lyrics tattooed in succession across my back, numbered, with a chronological timeline of our press photos in thumbnail size.

MAGNET: By what record did you feel as if you had your own sound? 
Timony: I never lost my sound, so I never had to find it. Unless you count the time in Austria that someone stole my effects pedal off the stage. I never found it again, so that doesn't count. I bought it with my babysitting money in high school.

MAGNET: While recording the Magic City, did you feel a sort of stretching? 
Timony: No, I just felt stretching in my calves from running, the stretching of my guitar strings, the stretching of time into infinity.

MAGNET: Is anonymity a part of what you do? 
Timony: Anonymous, shannonymous, haronymous.

The history of helium--which Timony says is currently on hold--began in Boston in 1992 and proceeded to run fast and hot. Timony (a veteran of Washington, D.C., popsters Autoclave), bassist Brian Dunton and drummer Shawn Devlin united among a mutual love of brusque sounds and tightly wound rhythms. The band's debut seven-inch single, "The American Jean," was the sound of alternative music falling to its knees. By the time the band had--whose lineup had shifted to include Polvo member (and Timony's boyfriend) Ash Bowie on bass--hit its first album, 1995's the Dirt of Luck, there was a built-in lust for life that was nearly grungy with an acidic aftertaste. "I don't think it was punk, " says Timony of the Dirt of Luck. "But it was certainly angry and agitated, which makes it similar to punk music."

Somewhere in the middle of all the Helium activities, she found time to record with Stephin Merritt's 6ths project and the Shudder to Think offshoot Mind Science of the Mind. Yet, it was in EP mode that Helium seemed most comfortable. 1994's Pirate Prude is a scabby masterpiece, full of herky-jerky rhythms, taut guitar work and Timony's voice floating in Julee Cruise-like fashion over the din--singing, pleading angrily and demanding her freedom from whatever oppression was around at that time. "I never liked that record because it is so dark that it disturbs even me--it's too anxious," says Timony. "But it records where I was at the time, and so I'm glad that it exists, although I don't think I will ever listen to it again."

The metallic rhythms and gender jawboning of 1994's "Pat's Trick" seven-inch (recorded mostly alone by Timony) would soon give way to the complex arrangements and dry-as-dirt singing style on 1997's No Guitars EP. Which brings us to the Magic City. If anyone told you in '97 that an album jutted sonically between Faust and the Cars, Neu! and Blondie, Fairport Convention and Laura Nyro (and lyrically, around the same places), you would have said said, "Pass me the angel dust." Timony's willowy voice was still there and her goofball guitar work was still in place. But this was l;ilting Krautrock, as produced by Mitch Easter, yet like nothing before it. Timony sangf lullabies to moths and hung with ageless astronauts in a wondrous baroque setting.

"We just wanted to make the best record we could," says Timonyof Magic City. "There was an idea that I read in some reviews that 'Helium just wanted to be different than they sounded before.' I didn't feel that at all. I think we were just focusing on finding interesting and pleasing sounds, whereas before we liked aggravated sounds."

Then the bride stripped bare. Timony was listening to the Slits, Christian Marclay and Alice Coltrane around the time she recorded the plaintive, piano-pounded Mountains. Says Timony, "Mountains is written to the travelers throughout the mountains and valleys of life...those who have walked on foot, not ridden in trains. I wanted the record to sound more raw and the lyrics to be more real. I wanted them to stick out beyond the simplicity of the music." Mountains--which features contributions from Bowie, Christina Files (Victory at Sea), John McEntire (Tortoise) and others--has a realist film quality, a grainy, documentary point of view with big gulps of Fellini-esque grostequery that drift through carnival and numerology into an almost obsessive spiritual state.

"I'm not really very religious, but I am into religious imagery--eating of the flesh, devils, angels, saints and any kind of folk-tale imagery--because it seems to speak to a very deep collective place in people," Timony says of the "ancient forest of delight," the "rider on a stormy sea" and the "14 Bees" that waft through Mountians' musical mix of ambient winds, new-wave jerkiness, vintage synths and still-life piano. "I grew up Catholic. Of course, I'm into those pictures. I don't really care about eating the flesh, although, if used in the right way, it could be pretty interesting."

Timony very definitely feels her songs--the traveling pilgrims of "Poison Moon," the cold, incautious melody of time crawling on "The Hour Glass"--are deeply personal, reflecting a self she almost dare not speak of, even though she seeks meaning. As stated previously though, for all the ecstasy fantasia, it's the simplest, plainest emotions--the feelings of romance gone asunder--that stand out.

"It's sad and lonely--kind of negative and emotional and melancholy and all that kind of stuff," says Timony of what one might picture as an Ophelia-like lyricism dedicated to love and death on Mountains'"Painted Horses" and "Rider on the Stormy Sea." "But I think the lyrics are more up than on other stuff. I'd really have to listen to the record," she adds with a giggle.

When asked if the work, the peronal dispatch and "emotional stuff" of the very pointed "Tiger Rising" reveals a self like never befopre, Timony says it's more about the journey than anything else. "That's why it's called Mountains," she says, uncomfortably shying away from revealing exactly who "Tiger Rising" is directed at. "I can't tell you that. Just promise me you eon't make those references to mountainous highs and lows or peaks and valleys like everyone does."

from the June/July 2000 issue of Magnet Magazine, Number 45. reprinted without permission.