Hope for the Hopeless

Amy Pickard is happy. Her songs are not.

by M.J. Fine

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Published: Nov 7, 2007

Michael T. Regan ABOUT LOVE: "Maybe you would listen to the CD and think that the person that's singing would never, ever get married," says Pickard. "But my life ... has definitely been transformed by my relationship with my partner." (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Amy Pickard has no trouble distinguishing between how she feels when she's compelled to write and how she usually feels these days. "These songs are sad, sad," she says over tea at Chapterhouse Cafe. "But I'm happy, happy." She has good reasons to be happy, happy: She recently got hitched to Ramon Monras-Sender, who plays bass in her band the Cradlers, and this week she's releasing their first album, Cut from the Hopeless. It's too early to say how the union will affect their performances, let alone the songs, but Pickard sounds positively giddy thinking about the possibilities.

"Maybe you would listen to the CD and think that the person that's singing would never, ever get married," she says. "But my life and sort of my emotional state has definitely been transformed by my relationship with my partner." Maybe all those years of having a negative outlook will fuel several more albums. Maybe she'll start writing songs that aren't about herself. Or maybe she'll be totally dry. With each option, she laughs harder.

 

Listening to lovelorn songs like "There Lies Love" and "Ashes," you'd find it hard to believe Pickard wasn't born singing country music. But growing up in Kingsport, Tenn., a town of 45,000 people an hour and a half from Knoxville, she and her circle fancied themselves above the hick tastes of the small towns that surrounded them. "There's not any big, influential metropolis very nearby," she says. "So we thought of ourselves as a big, influential metropolis and we were far too sophisticated for the country music that people 10 minutes away listened to."

She didn't appreciate the sounds of the South until she'd been at Penn for three years. She went back home for a summer job, where the boss gave her mix tapes of Appalachian field recordings. When she'd gotten a guitar the previous Christmas, the first song she'd learned was Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here." By the end of the summer, she was crazy about the Carter Family.

Pickard and transplanted Texan Beth Case soon married torch and twang in She-Haw, which won fans in the U.K. "It's like world music to them, right? As opposed to, it has such a loaded package in America," Pickard says. "You know, like there are all of these negative connotations with country music. And some country music really sucks. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's some really unbelievably crappy, jingoistic, offensive country music."

She-Haw broke up in late 2004, and Pickard made a solo demo a year later. But buying a house in South Philly took time, energy and money, with little left over for recording. It took Pickard and her band, The Cradlers, two years to make the nine-song CD, which they recorded first with Pierce Backes in Hopewell, N.J., and then with Bill Moriarty at his Kensington studio.

Pickard says she and Case were so simpatico in their aesthetics that they didn't need to talk too much about what they were doing, and sometimes she misses that. But with The Cradlers, she wanted a flexible unit that could adapt to any circumstance, whether it's allowing her to play solo or calling in reinforcements for bigger gigs. Fiddler Aron Dunlap is a mainstay and a frequent foil for Pickard, who jokes around onstage to lighten the mood. Joshua Marcus sings backup and plays banjo when he's not busy with one of his own projects. Album drummer Claudio DePujadas is already gone, off to grad school and jazz.

Ultimately, everyone but Pickard is replaceable, including her husband. It took a while for them to figure out how to separate their romantic and musical partnerships. "It was weird because it's not a particularly collaborative project," she says. "It's sort of like, 'This is the song, this is how I want it.' And that was a little bit of a shift of a dynamic for us, right? Because our relationship is very equal. That's really important to both of us."

The whole gang will be on hand to celebrate the CD's release with a show at L'Etage. Pickard hopes they can play a few more gigs before January, when she and Sender leave for a six-month honeymoon that will take them to Asia, Africa and Europe. "It's not the greatest time to put out the record," she says, "but I thought it would be the end of me if I waited until after this happened and I had to come back and start all over again."

With that burden off her shoulders, Pickard plans to leave the guitar at home and throw herself into newlywed bliss. So will she soon serenade her husband with a batch of songs that's all, "And they lived happily ever after?" Fat chance.

"I think he understands that — he's not offended that that's probably not going to be the case." At that, she laughs and laughs.

(m_fine@citypaper.net)

Sun., Nov. 11, 7 p.m., $5, with Good Dust and Joshua Marcus, L'Etage, 624 S. Sixth St., 215-592-0656, creperie-beaumonde.com/letage.

 

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