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An interview with Lovers

The hazy electronic dreamworld created by Portland’s Lovers is a perfect soundtrack for late night car rides thinking about how scenarios could have played out differently in life. It’s for when your feelings need to be sober enough to listen to your head — and even the sadness of each passing note leaves you with hope.

The three talented and out musicians creating this melancholic tapestry of sound are Carolyn Berk, Kerby Ferris and Emily Kingan. We had the chance to speak with them about their fantastic album, Dark Light, Tom Jones and how small the lesbian world is. AfterEllen.com: Can each of you give a little background on yourselves? Where did you grow up and when did you recognize your inner musician?

Emily Kingan: Sure I’ll start. I grew up in a small town called Bolton, Massachusetts and I lived there until I was 17 and then I moved to Portland to go to college. That’s when I kind of discovered music and the whole thriving North West music scene. I ended up going on a field trip with my college’s queer alliance group and I went to see Team Dresch and I was totally blown away by that band. I just got super inspired and started uncovering how immense the queer music scene in Portland and the Northwest is. Then I started playing music and just sort of started joining bands and it just snowballed.

AE: Growing up in Massachusetts and going all the way to Portland? What made you make the cross-country journey for college?

EK: Well, I knew I wanted to find a small liberal arts college. Everywhere else I was looking at was in a really small town and Reed was sort of the only place in a larger city and I liked that.

AE: Carolyn, do you prefer to be called Cubby or Carolyn?

CB: Either way. You can call me Cubby, if you want.

AE: OK. Tell me a little bit about your background.

CB: I’m also from Massachusetts and I moved to Athens, Georgia once I finished with high school because I knew there was an arts and music scene there that I wanted to explore. It was kind of a weird place to come of age as a gay person because it’s the South and there was a cool community and there was a lot of mainstream and conservative energy there too, so it was confusing. Eventually I moved to Portland as well and I met Emily and Kerby there. Well, Kerby I met in Brazil, actually.

AE: You touched a little bit on the conservativeness of Athens. Did you go to Emory College?

CB: That’s in Atlanta. I went to the University of Georgia.

AE: OK, maybe I’m thinking of the Indigo Girls. Even though there is a great music scene did you feel uncomfortable there? Was there homophobia?

CB: Yes, yes there is. It was harder to explore. I never felt really comfortable just walking down the street or something like that.

AE: Portland seems like a very free and artistically engaging place to live.

CB: Yes, it really is.

AE: So the formation of your band sounds really interesting, even on paper with the near fatal van explosion. What was that about?

CB: Mia, Kerby is now in the car with us too.

AE: Hey Kerby! I was just asking Carolyn and Emily about their backgrounds and where their musical careers started.

Kerby Ferris: I’m the only one in the band who’s actually from Portland. I feel like I’m from technical Portland but emotional Beaverton. I went to a Catholic high school and felt like the only gay person on the entire planet even though I was only like 15 minutes away from the global queer core. [Laughs] But I was really into folk rock and the Indigo Girls and when I was 17 I had some horrible job working at the US Bank but the best part was I worked around the corner from a lesbian. [Laughs]

AE: From a lesbian?

KF: [Laughs] Yeah. She worked at the coffee shop. I saw her at an Indigo Girls show and she had hairy legs and I thought, “Oh my God, I know the lesbian!” It was an experience that changed my life. She was a saint and took me under her wing, even though she was so much older [Laughs] She was 21. She did this amazing thing; I drove over to her house in my mom’s station wagon and she just filled the back seat of the car with all of her records and she told me to borrow them for two months. It was amazing! She started taking me to shows that Emily went to like Team Dresch and Sleater-Kinney and it completely changed my life.

AE: Wow, she really was your lesbian fairy godmother.

KF: [Laughs] Yes, Jill Jones. Jill Jones, thank you, where ever you are.

AE: That’s hilarious. Going to Catholic school and feeling like the only lesbian growing up, was Jill Jones introducing you to this music like your first outlet or was it something that you were interested in before that?

KF: No, my first musical outlet was Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls. That was a spiritual experience. That was the floatation device throughout high school.

It wasn’t that cool. I was in high school but I just really wanted to go to the 30s punk shows because for me that was what made sense. The queer scene in Portland made a lot of sense to me. The Indigo Girls and their music were like going to church but I also wanted to go out, you know? AE: I totally understand. Like every lesbian when they are just coming out they are like, “OK, where can I go to see more lesbians? I should go to an Indigo Girls concert or Lilith Fair.” It’s not even necessarily that you are into that music it’s just that you want to be around people that are like you which makes it interesting.

KF: Yeah, totally. The whole scene of girls in short pants and a tank top and a snow hat all year round I was like, “Oh my god, take me with you. Anywhere, I don’t care, I don’t care.” I’ll just water ski on your wallet chain wherever your boat is taking you.

AE: We were just getting into the formation of your band and that near fatal van explosion. I haven’t found information anywhere online of what exactly happened.

CB: This is Cubby speaking. That was just my first tour ever and we were just really young and foolish and we bought, the bandmates at the time, we had this really old RV and it just totally broke on the freeway and it had this propane tank that just totally exploded. It caught on fire and we lost everything.

AE: Oh, wow.

CB: But we just kept going. We were nuts – we were 21 and we got dropped off by the police at some roadside café and we took a cab in Roanoke, Virginia and we rented a mini van. We just jumped in the mini van and kept driving. The next day we were like, “I guess we’ll get some instruments.” It was pretty gnarly but it was something I did when I was 21. [Laughs]

AE: Wow, that’s one hell of a rite of passage.

CB: Yeah, tell me about it!

EK: This is Emily and I’m in charge of reigning it in for interviews. [Laughs] My band The Haggle played a show at The Eagle in San Francisco. And Kerby was our roadie and they asked at the show if it was OK that this band Lovers jumped on the bill because they were having a rough time and I was like, “Yeah, that’s fine.” So I guess that’s how we first met, although I don’t remember meeting Carolyn at the time. I guess I bought a CD from her of Lovers to send to my girlfriend at the time. We didn’t form a bond at that point – that was 2002. And in 2006, Carolyn was on tour with my girlfriend at the time, who was Mirah, and that was when I got reacquainted with her.

AE: Wait, Mirah?

EK: Yeah.

AE: That’s weird; she’s the last musician I interviewed.

EK: She just put out a record.

AE: Yeah, it’s great.

EK: It’s a small gay world.

AE: Yeah, very. So that’s how you met and got reconnected again?

CB: Emily reached out a little bit to me and we sort of became fast friends.

AE: Emily, you were in a feminist hardcore band before this and it seems like a very different experience than this current project, which is more dreamy. Actually your music reminds me of the band Warpaint. Do you think your current musical evolution came from your bandmates or coming from age?

EK: Yeah, I think it is just maturity. I played in a hardcore band for years but it wasn’t what I would turn on when I wanted to listen to music. It’s a really good release to get on stage and scream a bunch and, politically, that’s where I was when I was in that band. It wasn’t the type of music that I found – I definitely connect more to the music of Lovers but that was what I did when I was a young person, as more of a political outlet.

CB: This is Cubby. Can I interject one thing? When Emily and I first started hanging out her favorite band, and this might not be true, but I thought her favorite band was The Mice.

KF: Yeah, Emily I don’t know if you would identify with this but before this band, my projects have been punk or experimental metal genres. I feel like our music now is like a dormant condition or something. I feel like this music has been inside of me my whole musical life and I feel like it’s the right time to manifest. I feel like I have been through a bunch of different genres in my 20s but now that I get older, I feel like this is the music I want to hear and make.

EK: It’s also more complicated to make this kind of music. Hardcore bands are kind of simple. It’s raw – you need like drums and a guitar and your voice. But with this band, it’s a lot more calculated. It’s a lot more risk involved and a lot more painstaking. I think that comes with maturity.

AE: I totally understand. A lot of your songs seem melancholy. At some point do you ever decide to put on some Tom Jones to just dance around and shake it off a little?

CB: I was a huge Tom Jones fan for a while! I had a cassette and I would listen to it over and over. I definitely listen to some happy music to shake it off, definitely.

AE: From listening to your music I would assume that you three are big readers. If that’s true, what have you three been reading lately?

EK: That’s definitely not true of me. I try to read and I’ve brought many books on the tour but I have maybe read like a chapter. [Laughs]

AE: Maybe you have the wrong books?

EK: Yeah, I’d like to make reading more a goal.

CB: I just read Eileen MylesInferno. I loved it.

KF: I read almost entirely science fiction and computer manuals. Well, not manuals but computer programming books.

AE: Do you have a lot of time to do anything with the computer books that you’re reading?

KF: I’m an enthusiast in life so I always have time for linux. AE: Wow, OK. Well, maybe you can teach me sometime. You’ve been touring a lot lately in support of Dark Light. Have there been any interesting experiences from the road you’d like to share?

EK: We played a show in Houston on Sunday. I feel like a lot of the crowd – they were very supportive, but it just took them a while to warm up. Their scene – we were the only electro band on the bill and they were just thrilled to see us. All the other bands were punk bands. Afterward I would say we made a good impression on the audience.

KF: It was a very spiritual experience of energy and community in Houston. That night was one of those magical moments, a continued magical moment where you feel like you’re co-creating what you’re experiencing with all the energies in the room. I felt very engaged.

CB: That show was a great example of why I’m drawn to art. It’s important for outside energy to come to a space and for energies to intermingle. I think traveling art is really important so people can share ideas and update each other in what’s changing in their perceptions.

AE: Is there a particular song – a favorite song from the album? Or one that you love playing live?

KF: I think that the song I really enjoy playing is “I’m Alive” and playing it in small towns. Because that song drips of finding your own path in a place that is unfriendly. I find that playing that song I feel like we’re all believing in something together and it’s really powerful.

AE: I like that.

EK: We also played an open mic in Amarillo, Texas and it was a bunch of boys – actually all boys – reading their poetry and performing with acoustic guitars and they seemed skeptical of us at first but after the show they all wanted to talk to us and they all bought records.

AE: What’s up next for you all? Have you been creating new songs for the next album?

KF: Yep, we’ve got like three songs that we are exchanging between the three of us. I feel great because there is a lot of new inspiration to be inspired by and a lot of new stimulation so I’m really excited to sit down, once we have time, and work on some new stuff but we have like three songs already.

EK: We have a European tour coming up in the fall.

CB: And another one in the spring, actually.

EK: Yeah there have been two companies in Europe contacting us to play in the fall and spring and we’re also playing Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and I’m excited for that. And also in Seattle they have a Capitol Hill block party and we’ll be playing in that.

Obviously the ladies are busy bringing their music to the masses. I’ll actually be catching them in Chicago on Wednesday! Make sure you check out their album, Dark Light.

 

 

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