:: BITCH | MUSIC ::

I was born 3.30.73 the youngest of 3 sisters, sun in Aries, moon in Aquarius, Leo rising.

Age 3 I saw my first episode of Sesame Street with a cartoon fiddler guy in overalls that fiddled while he counted to 12 and back down to 1. I wanted to do that so bad. My parents let me start lessons at 4. Not quite the dude in overalls—classical—til I was 18.

My mom ran a tap school in our basement with hundreds of students coming in and out of our house every week. There was a constant pulse of tap shoes coming out of our floor and I think my love for rhythm and drums starts there..

One of my violin teachers used to make me drink a glass of grape juice with a raw egg cracked into it ‘for energy’ before each lesson once a week.

In 1984 I was 11 and in 5th grade. My teacher made us read Orwell’s “1984.”

In 1985 I started writing poetry cuz I had to move away and leave my best friend. I start listening to Depeche Mode, and my mom starts another tap school in our basement.

I went to Depaul University, the former Goodman School of Acting. This taught me how to be in my body. How to speak from my guts. How to be alive in the world. When I went, I stopped playing my violin for 2 years. Then I met Animal, who was a freshman there when I was a junior. We took mushrooms on our first time hanging out, and she convinced me to take it out of it’s case. She played a hand drum and was usually carrying around a ukulele. Our musical collaboration started there, in my Wrigley-ville apartment, rediscovering my violin without the crutch of sheet music, just eye contact and a sense of connection to someone I had never known before. A wild child—a huge dreamer—an intellectual from New York City—a refreshingly over-confident woman who broke every rule.

I graduated from Depaul in 1995 and went on one audition and thought, “EFF this.”

Animal bought me a gift certificate for 10 lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music, probably after me telling her about that guy in the overalls on Sesame Street.

When I went to cash in my gift certificate I told the guy at the front desk my history with the violin. Because I had been classically trained, he set me up with Andrew Bird. Andrew got me right away, and began helping me to free myself up on an instrument I knew so well, but was so hard to feel free on.

After my 10 classes I shaved my head and went to Australia for 6 months with my violin and backpack and hitch-hiked around and played on the streets, exercising my new found fingers.

When I got back, I got asked to perform at a happening in Ypsilanti, Mi. Animal came up from Chicago, we camped out at my mom’s house outside of Detroit, planned out our 30 minute theater piece, named ourselves Bitch and Animal, and played our first show. A week later, I quit my job and we moved to Brooklyn together.

I loved it there. I fell into an amazing crowd of young artists. I met Murray Hill, who would become one of my best friends to this day. We started playing around town and then when it got too hot for the summer and our room-mate got a little too crazy, we had heard of some seaside town where there were lots of queers called Provincetown. We didn’t visit or anything, we just rented a truck and threw all of our stuff and our cat Comet in and went. We rented a shack on the beach, got jobs, and started saving for a van. We started playing a once-a-week free show at a pizza place. It was packed every night. People visiting from all over the country were coming to our shows, and we developed a small but furious fan-base from all over the US. So after we had saved up enough $$ for a van, we set up a tour and went. About 2 weeks into it, we got a call from Ani Difranco’s people asking us to open a show for her. Heidi, her merch girl, had come to one of our pizza shop shows and took our homemade cassettes back to Ani in her bus and played it for her. and so began my life on the road that has continued to this day.

Bitch and Animal released “What’s that Smell?” in 1999. We started our second album, “Eternally Hard” with Ani at her home studio in Buffalo. We finished it in NYC with our new friend who has been involved in all my albums since, Wayne “dutchboy” Schrengohst, and released it on Righteous Babe Records on September 11, 2001. We got named by the “LA Times” as one of the top ten new artists of the year.

For our last album together, “Sour Juice and Rhyme,” we set up a studio in our friend June Millington’s farm house in Massachusetts. It came out in 2003.

I began my ‘solo’ career in 2004. I started working on “Make This Break This” and released “Be-Sides” while I was in the middle of it. “Make This Break This” came out on Kill Rock Stars in 2006.

In 2007, I came off the road and had finally convinced Ferron to let me record her. I began a long process of my first attempt at producing a record all on my own. It was amazing and challenging and SO rewarding. “Boulder” came out in 2008, and Ferron and I toured all over together. When we play it’s kind of like a song-sharing thing, but most people are amazed at how comedic it is, mixed with super intensity.

Also in 2008, I released an ep of my band, Bitch and The Exciting Conclusion, called “B+TEC” and started my own label, Short Story Records, to release “Boulder” and “B+TEC”