Twisted Sisters

Getting to the roots of the Sisters 3's mutant folk music.

by M.J. Fine

3-PART HARMONY: The Sadler sisters started singing together as kids. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Sisterhood is powerful. From the Weird Sisters who doubled Macbeth's toil and trouble, to the Sagal twins who dominated Double Trouble, to the Williams sisters who dominate in tennis doubles, women have always had strength in numbers.

There's Anna Christie, 23, who made a solo album with bluegrass stalwart Bob Harris while still in her teens. On the surface, she's a Joni Mitchell-esque singer-songwriter. Inside, sometimes she feels more like Karen O.

Cassandra, 26, is a classical composer, Chopin junkie and backup singer for hire. Her move from piano to electronic keyboard — she packs a Yamaha S90 — turned the Sisters 3 from Anna Christie's guitar showcase into a real band.

At 20, Beatrice is the baby of the group, but she's not the youngest Sadler by a long shot. (They've got an older brother and four little sibs.) Grunge opened her ears to music and Minor Threat keeps her going. After a vocal stint in the Naughty Naughty Nurses, she picked up sticks and fell into percussion.

Three bodies, three sensibilities. But when it comes to the Sisters 3, they're of one mind. Chalk it up to a close childhood and a home that was more like a womb than a castle. "I totally feel like we were meant to be each other's sisters and it was kind of like fate that we would do this together," Anna Christie says.

Their dad, Dennis, calls them "the indie Partridge Family." Sitting at her sisters' house in West Philly, Cassandra sums up their sound even more succinctly, as "mutant folk music." They can get away with a lot of weird stuff because of how beautiful their voices sound in combination.

Take the melancholy "Counting Footsteps," from the Sisters 3's new album, Star Spangled. It starts as fragile as a single hair but gathers strength as the Sadlers braid their voices together. "The end of the song is, like, harmony extravaganza," Anna Christie says. "I know it sounds weird, but it feels like we're flying when we're singing that."

They certainly cover a lot of ground, from the girl-group precision of "Heart Disease" to the paranoid synth of "The Soldier Song" to the socially conscious title track's stoned soul panic.

The three started singing together as little girls in Downington, and their showbiz dreams go back just as far. "As kids, we always talked about going on these big adventures, playing music, going onstage," says Cassandra.

But as they got older, Anna Christie took the lead, and it was her 2005 CD, Elixir for the Human Heart, that opened doors. Most importantly, it bought the Sisters 3 credit with Glen Marshall, who worked on Feist's fabled debut. The Sadlers made Star Spangled with the Hamilton, Ontario-based producer and his partner, Michael Keire, in three short sessions spread out over a year. By the end, Cassandra says, the recording team and the collective that provided their eye-catching album art had become like family.

Says Beatrice: "We'd be in the middle of practice and it would turn into, 'I don't like this, I don't like that. Can we change this? And what the fuck ever happened to my necklace?'"

Encroaching maturity eventually helped get them over that hump, they agree, as well as the realization that they were onto something special. As Cassandra puts it, "We all became fans of what we were doing with each other."

Just as important was learning from the things they do without each other. For Cassandra, who spent June and July backing Sharon Little on tour with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, being part of something so big only upped her commitment to the Sisters 3. "Getting such a close glimpse of something that great made us realize what we want to do," she says. "Whatever we need to do to work up to that, let's do it."

With Star Spangled, the sisters are doin' it for themselves.

(m_fine@citypaper.net)

Fri., Sept. 12, 9:30 p.m., $10-$18, with Hezekiah Jones and The Extraordinaires, Johnny Brenda's, 1201 N. Frankford Ave., 215-739-9684, johnnybrendas.com.