“When I was in Come, before we did a show I’d say to the band, ‘We’re going to be as loud as shit and people will have to pay attention to us,” says Thalia Zedek, legendary underground singer, songwriter, and noise guitarist. “They won’t be able to talk ’cause we’re going to be deafening.” She pauses, puffing on her ever-present cigarette.
In the last few years, Zedek has mellowed somewhat—which is not to say she’s less intense, but it’s a focused, subtler intensity. In 1998 and ’99, as Come was winding down, Zedek did a couple of “cabaret” tours. The first time she sang Come songs with cello and acoustic piano; on another tour, she crooned old-fashioned torch songs as well as material by Alex Chilton and Leonard Cohen. It made her rethink her approach to music. “It was enjoyable to sing when I could actually hear myself singing,” she says with a trace of sly humor. “It’s fun to belt it out, but if you do it for too long, all the nuances in your voice disappear. When I listen to my favorite singers, I value those subtleties. It’s hard to improve when you can’t hear what you’re singing.”
Zedek’s solo albums, starting in 2001 with Been Here and Gone, may not be as loud or dissonant as the work she did with Come, Uzi, and Live Skull, but it’s no less passionate. The same holds true for Liars and Prayers (Thrill Jockey), Zedek’s “political” album that blends electric and acoustic instruments to produce an ominous, orchestrated sound that’s as unsettling as it is rewarding. The songs, delivered in slow, solemn tempos, build slowly and continue building without ever releasing the tension. Zedek’s lyrics suggest moods rather than tell straightforward stories, and her singing, as always, is fiercely compelling. Her language plays with words, pulling them apart and mutating them, finding hidden meaning in even the most mundane phrase.
“I’m trying to refl ect the times we’re living in,” Zedek explains. “Our government has brought us to a dangerous place, and while it’s impossible to understand what all the implications of their actions are going to be in the future, we know they’re going to resonate for years to come and not in a good way. If you look outside your own little world, you know a lot of stuff is up in the air right now. It’s like watching an idiot juggling a bunch of chainsaws. You know something horrible is going to happen—you just don’t know what or when.”
As she began working on Liars and Prayers, Zedek decided she wanted to play with a full band again. By bringing in some old friends, she expanded the trio she’d been using since her second solo effort, Trust Not Those in Whom Without Some Touch of Madness, which had Zedek on guitar, David Curry on viola, and trumpeter/drummer Daniel Coughlin. Mel Alderman, late of Victory at Sea and a contributor to Zedek’s solo albums, handles piano and Winston Braman (Consonant, Shepardess, Fuzzy) adds bass, which helped her expand her parameters. “I was writing songs that were heaver and more rocking, and I wanted to loosen up on guitar. In my trio, the guitar had to hold down the rhythm. Without a bass player, if I didn’t play chords, the whole bottom dropped out of everything. If I wanted to play a melody that wasn’t rhythmical, it was difficult. So I wanted to loosen up and play less, or more, depending on the tune. With a band you get a deeper, richer sound. I was able to let the songs stretch out a little bit.”
Zedek said the new band really freed up her creativity. “These guys can play anything. Any kind of song I bring—punk, country, or metal—they can do it. We’ve all played together in other bands and lineups over the years. There are a lot of ties between us. I enjoy playing with them and I love what they bring to the songs I write.”
Zedek produced Liars and Prayers with the help of engineer Andrew Schneider (Unsane, Cave In) in glorious analog sound on real tape.
“It was recorded live, all of us together playing at the same time. We’d sometimes give a tune more than one try, but there’s not a lot of overdubbing. The basic tracks were done at Mad Oak in Chicago. I did the vocals at Andrew’s studio in Brooklyn using ProTools, and then the final mix went back onto tape. Analog has a warmth to it that’s hard to get with a computer. I don’t know if it’s the machinery moving the magnetized tape, but analog has something that’s missing with digital. It’s like looking at the refection of a person in a mirror instead of the person. The image is the same but there’s an intangible quality that’s missing in the mirror image.”