The musician also shared the video for the album’s latest single “Like James Said”
I sat down with Meg Remy in Manhattan on a warm April day, the first of the spring after a fervent winter, to discuss her new album Scratch It. Remy — who you probably know as U.S. Girls — is leaning into her words, her poetry, her age, her motherhood, and herself on Scratch It. The record is as textured as it is smooth. It’s as serious as it is playful. It’s as relaxed as it is energized. And through its harmonious balance, it’s the strongest she’s ever sounded, and the most honest she’s ever been. All accomplished with the usual U.S. Girls signatures – merging genres, poignant lyrics, and rapturous vocals.
Scratch It lends itself to folk, country, beat poetry, even gospel music – unlike any other U.S. Girls record. Sonically, there’s a strong influence derived from the Tennessee band she linked up with to play on the record, who “play like they’re from Tennessee,” says Remy – though concurrently, those are the genres that fill Remy’s personal record collection.
“I think [this sound] is well suited for me as a person whose writing is almost 40 years old and who has two kids and who has had a lot of these experiences,” she shared. It’s a bit more of a mature – I don’t want to say mature, I don’t know if that’s the word – but I definitely wanted to do something that was bare that was almost in line with folk music, the tenants of folk music, which is performance-based, coming from the heart and soul, that is always thinking of itself in terms of lineage.”
She felt it was time to strip her music of the pop instrumentals and lean into her lyrics. “I think for a long time I thought, oh I’m doing something so cool by trying to put subversive lyrics in pop music. It was almost like I was trying to hide it, but now I don’t have to because this kind of music supports that. It’s not this trick. It’s not some sleight of hand.”
Remy decided to introduce the album with “Bookends,” a nearly 12-minute long journey that finds itself the same but different on the other side. The track meets us in a soft whisper, nearly spoken, a tale around the campfire inviting us to gather ‘round: “Riley was always going on about The Cross and breakin it,” she begins. Remy knew going into this song that she wanted to make an epic, lengthy one. Filling in the gaps, she was inspired by John Carey’s Eyewitness to History, a book that recounts eye witness testimonies. She began by underlining words and phrases she felt connected to, and when it was time to sit down and write, she and Edwin de Goeij meshed them together into a tale centered around her late friend, Riley Gale of Power Trip.
“How can you make a journey in a song that feels like you’ve crossed a distance physically or that you’ve moved through a set of emotional states, actually. And so the music reflected that by having a tempo change, an accelerando, and through that the vocal delivery and trying to move through the full spectrum of my voice,” says Remy.
Remy and the band recorded and mixed the entire record in only 10 days, quicker than any other record U.S. Girls have put out before.
When I asked Remy how the time limits affected the album she shared, “It affected everything. Because of the limitations of recording live to tape, a 16-track tape, there’s all these parameters. Everything has to really be thought out because you only have so much space, I only had two reels of tape. There’s these limits that really showed me that limits are freedom.”
There’s a cool, calm collectedness in both the instrumentals and in Remy’s vocals. She sounds in control, and therefore, relaxed.
“I was relaxed,” she said. “It’s the first time I had really removed myself from almost everyone I knew, and from settings that I knew to make a record… I was relaxed though because I think I’m at a point in my career, not even just my career, but my personhood, where [this is] just what I do and it’s not going to be the last record that I make. This is what I’m living for, to be in the studio and have this opportunity. And whatever comes out is good…I felt supported. And comfortable in my own skin, fully, for the first time making a record. I’m almost 40 years old and I wasn’t ever thinking about how I was going to be perceived after the fact – I was just very present.”
Scratch It features a funky nod to James Brown with “Like James Said,” as well as a letter to Patti Smith on “Dear Patti” where Remy recounts the time she played a music festival alongside her biggest muse – whom she didn’t get to meet. “Pay Streak” is like a tumbleweed rolling down a lone street telling its story. “Emptying the Jimbador” is captivating and rich. These songs fit together like passing days of summer months. They’re humid days next to the lake, they’re green bursting trees and brown patches of grass, they’re fireworks on the fourth of July. They’re full of life, they’re motherhood, they’re grief, they’re confessions.
As for the album title, Scratch It, there’s so many connotations with the word “scratch”; a cut, a cat, a lottery ticket, stopping a record, crossing something out, Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet’s plea after he got stabbed, “ay ay a scratch.” What I love about the word “scratch” is it doesn’t emulate the removal of something; whatever or whoever is scratched remains in its original form, but different. On the other hand, the title of the album “scratch it” is a verb, a statement, possibly an assignment.
Scratch It, according to Remy, refers literally to Scratch-It lottery tickets (the band played a lot of them while recording). “There’s a lot of hope in them and excitement and it is very entertaining. And that made me think of them again. I’m always talking about working in the music industry as gambling. It always feels that way to me. Not making music, that’s a whole different thing, but trying to put out, promote and sell is gambling. Someone may tell you that they have some answer but you just don’t know. But you keep doing that because it’s addictive.”
But in most ways, the record feels like the opposite of gambling, whatever that is. Not gambling, of course; but also staying put, being okay with where you are, what you have, and subjecting yourself to the unknown and being okay with it despite the discomforts. It’s refreshing to say: this is the art I made, these are the people I owe it to – including myself – and this is my life, the one that I love even in its imperfections. It’s felt all over this record and through Remy’s writing.
The record is out on June 20 via 4AD (pre-order HERE), and the new single “Like James Said” is out now. Watch the video below.
