Argh it’s Monday again! Sneaky little toerag, Monday, isn’t it? Can’t be trusted. You can show Monday who’s boss by getting stuck into today’s delightful chat with U.S. Girls, aka Meg Remy, who tells us about her brilliant new record and will get your week started right.
It's a free edition, as is every Monday, but if you want to receive access to our Friday delivery too, you’ll need to upgrade to a paying subscription. It costs £5 a month and is “worth every bloody penny!!!” I’ve put that in quotes to make it look like someone said it, so it’s officialised now, what you gonna do about it?
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… U.S. Girls
In a few weeks, Meg Remy will release her eighth album as U.S. Girls. Titled Bless This Mess, it feels like a landmark release for the Toronto-based, Illinois-born singer, songwriter and producer, as if everything she’s done along the way has been building to it. Bless This Mess is full of disco flourishes, sleek pop hooks, swaggering funk, and is likely to be the only record released this year that dissects the socio-economic climate in the form of a soul-pop anthem told from the point of view of a tuxedo.
Remy’s early work saw her melodic croon planted in the middle of lo-fi sonics and experimental, Motown-gone-psychedelic grooves but Bless This Mess concludes a run of increasingly pop and increasingly excellent albums, feeling very much like the completion of a trilogy that takes in 2018’s In A Poem Unlimited and 2020’s Heavy Light. A few weeks ago, Niall spoke to Meg over Zoom about why now was the time to make pop music that wasn’t sneaky, how giving birth to twins informed the album and much more. Meg doesn’t own a smartphone but she still managed to sent us the above selfie to go with the chat, cheers Meg!
Hello Meg. I see in the last hour you’ve just announced the new record. Did you pay attention to the announcement or distract yourself?
I was doing the dishes and making brown rice for the next meal, things like that.
Do you get nervous ahead of putting out a new album?
I haven’t ever before but this time around I had a few nerves. I have more at stake now, it’s a job so it’s a different feeling. I like the record though, I like it a lot.
So do I! It’s fantastic. When you started U.S. Girls, did you have any idea that you’d make an album this overtly pop?
Yes and no. When I started out, I didn’t think I’d be alive at this age. I really didn’t think I was going to be, but that intention was always there. I was trying to make this music way back then with the means and the skills that I had at that time, so it’s kind of a yes and no. But it all makes sense now.
Take me back to where this record began. Do albums start in the same way for you or is it different every time?
It’s different every time but usually there’s something similar where I’ve been working on songs and then all of a sudden I realise, ‘Oh, there’s a whole bunch of songs here.’ But I wrote two songs, Futures Bet and Bless This Mess, with Basia Bulat, for a Hollywood brief that was sent to me. I had never done anything like that and so I took up the challenge of it just to try it because it seemed interesting to me.
I really liked the process. The songs weren’t chosen for the movie but that got me to thinking in a different way about making some songs. I used to dress up unconventional themes in a pop disguise hoping to sneak them through and I wanted to not do that, like, ‘why am I sneaking? There’s no need to sneak!’. Also, it’s kind of rude to the potential audience thinking that they’re too dumb to handle it or something, so I tried to be more open and work with a form of music that’s joyous and wants to make you dance and it doesn’t need to be this hidden thing. That also combined with me and Max [Turnbull, aka Slim Twig, Meg’s husband and collaborator], due to the restrictions of the times, working more with MIDI and falling in love with it. It’s a really incredible thing, anybody can make a string section or good get tones.
And at some point during the making of the record, you had twins too…
Yeah, and that informs the entire process of this record. I got pregnant the week that I wrote those two songs so I found out a few weeks later that I was pregnant. The whole album was made with Max and I going through all of that, no longer just being partners and working collaborators, but parents now and preparing for that and then seeing it come to be. The record is greatly informed by my body, my body dictated a lot about it.
Let’s talk about one of my favourite songs, Tux (Your Body Fills Me, Boo), a brilliant track sung from the perspective of a tuxedo.
The music of that song was sent to me by Roger Manning Jr.
From Jellyfish?
Yeah, he’s amazing, an incredible songwriter. I know him, he is a supporter of U.S. Girls and he heard I was making a record and he got in touch saying, ‘do like this song? It reminds me of you’, basically. I loved it instantly, it was so bombastic and over the top, particularly the bass playing on it. As I started working on lyrics for it and melodies for it, it needed something with a cartoon-y feel to it, it couldn’t just be a regular pop song. I was kind of thinking, ‘what would Sparks do with this?’. We were in the middle of lockdown and I’d been meditating a lot on clothes. Because I wasn’t seeing anybody or anything, I just wore the same thing every day and I was thinking a lot about people with these wardrobes full of designer clothes and custom clothes and nowhere to wear them and all these objects that we amass. I was thinking, ‘what is definitely sitting in closets right now?’, and I landed on the tuxedo. I felt for sure that tuxedos were just hanging in closets and I decided, ‘what would it be like to personify a tuxedo?’. It was so much fun.
Yeah, you’re a natural tux.
Taking an inanimate object and giving it a voice, there’s no rule for it, there’s nothing to follow, you’re entirely inventing it so it was just a blast and it came out very quickly.
Are you ever surprised with how many great pop hooks you’re able to come up with?
No, because I listened to the radio non-stop as a kid and watched MTV and BBC all day long. I’ve been indoctrinated with the hook!
How much is everything you do informed by your early days as an underground artist?
All of it. It’s like saying how much is your adult self informed by your childhood, it’s all of it. It was very healthy for me to come up in a very punk, doing it for myself way, I was able to really get some strong roots in ‘why do I make art? Why do I want to?’. I had such incredible experiences and also such awful experiences that it really set me up. I’m very settled in what I’m doing and it’s been so important to me in navigating the industry. It’s also meant that I’ve been able to do a lot with very little money. If I’m having a recording session, I’m making the food for the players, it’s way cheaper than ordering in and it saves a lot of time because you’re not having everybody looking at some menu, it’s “here’s your food!”.
What do you make?
I make all kinds of things. I was just making some food for the rehearsals on Sunday. I’ll do quinoa quiche one day, the crust is made of quinoa with eggs and vegetables in it. I do a lot of salads, pick up samosas from the place down the street and make a salad with that. Simple things like that. It’s more effort but it makes more sense and you have more money to pay somebody for their skills or rent something. If I’m making them healthy food, I’m showing them that I care for them, it’s not just me and my project, I care about their bodies and I do, I wouldn’t be talking to you right now if it wasn’t for all the musicians that I’ve worked with, I get to sit here and act like I made everything but I didn’t.
On the album closer Pump, you’ve sampled a breastfeeding pump. It makes for a surprisingly banging rhythm track.
Yeah, the machinery sound had a warm pulsing, as soon as I heard it, I knew I was going to sample it. And I know I’m going to be saying that a lot in interviews over the next few months, but it’s true. The sound is incredible, I love it.
Did you have a single favourite moment making the album?
My favourite moment was being very pregnant and Max and I were in the studio trying to get some work done before the babies came, we knew they were going to be coming in the next few weeks at that point. We had three days booked and I got one song done, we got through two days and I just burst into tears and said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’. I remember going into the control room and sitting on Max’s lap and he was just holding me and saying, ‘it’s fine, let’s go home, we’ll cancel the last day’. It was all the elements of Max and my lives coming together, the music, us as a marriage, a family that was just about to begin and it was great to have someone who was a collaborator but could also tell me, ‘it’s ok, there’s nothing wrong with just stopping’. I was already doing so much with my body outside of making music, I was literally growing two babies and having to eat 3000 calories a day.
When they’re old enough, are you going to get the kids involved in U.S. Girls?
Oh shit... yeah! We’re taking them on the road when we go on tour in April so they’re gonna be already involved, they don’t have a choice!
ND
