Photo credit: Chris Doody
Tell us about your tour vehicle.
We have two different vehicles we’ve been taking out on the road these days. One is a hilariously small van, like a micro van. It’s about the size of a car, with two sliding doors on each side. I take all the seats out of the back, and it makes for a really easy load in, load out experience. It’s typically a two-seater, but sometimes I’ll leave the uncomfortable back seats in.
When we go out with more than two people, we’ll take the other vehicle, an orange Subaru Crosstrek. It was in the orange Crosstrek, nicknamed ECQUINB (“ex-queen”) after its custom license plate. ECQUINB (the b is silent) is a word my bandmate Ben Boye heard in a dream, meaning ‘of or relating to a specific place at a specific time in world history’ like milieu or zeitgeist. Ben also named the first guitar pedal he designed Ecquinb. They use it in Ty Segal’s band, Ben’s main gig. It’s a pedal with four different effects in it, an agent of beautiful chaos, available at boyetoyes.com.
We like to play radio baseball while we’re on the road. It’s the great way to make the hours disappear. It’s also a way to redefine the experience of being subjected to awful music. It takes something painful and turns it into a game. No matter how much you think you will suck at radio baseball, I swear everyone has their strengths. The first time I played it, two hours disappeared so uncannily that I really thought we had driven through a time zone.
If we’re not playing radio baseball, we are typically listening to friends’ records, experimental chamber music, or friends’ experimental chamber music.
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
think we do a pretty good job. We try to cook if we have a day off and we’re staying with friends. I was bestowed the street nickname Soup Kitchen by Vanessa Veselka, the great author and union organizer, because I cook for the household when I stay at her place. We choose co-op grocery stores over gas stations (though we are not above trashy snacks) and we are more likely to hit up a taco truck than a fast food place. We developed a schtick on tour, based on the excellent road snack of an apple with some sharp cheddar. We were finding brands labeled “extra mature” and started joking about how the cheese would never break up with someone over text. It listens to its friends’ problems, but also expects its friends to listen to its own.
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
I play heavy flat-wound guitar strings, 13s, that almost never break. I’ll splurge on some nice violin strings here and there. They run about a hundred for a good set. Breaking a piano string is a huge pain in the ass. Luckily, Ben Boye is a piano tuner, and always travels with the tools of his trade.
Where do you rehearse?
No ghost stories from the studio. It’s a space I share with my favorite cousin, Miki Jackson. She is a true badass, one of the West coast founders of ACTUP. She’s still a rabble rouser in her 70s, working to help secure permanent housing for hundreds of unhoused people in Los Angeles. She’s a jazz head, and the space is lined with her records.
I have a Velvet Underground tribute band called Velour Sewer, where I play viola and the drums. Every time we rehearsed “Sister Ray”, it was so hypnotic and grand, I would completely blank on recording us, every time. Luckily, my neighborhood is so loud– the neighbors love fireworks– no one minds us rehearsing practically any time of day.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
The first songs I wrote were instrumentals, but here’s a lyric I remember from a song I wrote when I was 13, the first one with words: “Does the rabbit in the moon look to the north or do his ears point to the south?”
Describe your first gig.
When I was 16, my friend Tess Wiley invited me to play songs in an ensemble she put together for the Westheimer Arts Festival. I knew Tess from the school orchestra, where she was first violin and I was first viola. Her brother Gabe was on drums. We played my songs and Tess’s.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
Twenty one years ago I quit working as a cocktail waitress because it was starting to conflict with gigs. Shockingly, I’ve made it without another day job since, though that may change. I was actually good at both sales and waiting tables. No one was more surprised than me. I do a little bit of political organizing sometimes (unpaid work) and that’s been extremely satisfying.
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?
Music is my calling, and the thing that has occupied me for the past 21 years, but it is not some massive money making endeavor. Most musicians make about $30,000 a year. Unless we work to secure better pay for musicians, curtail artificial intelligence, aka weaponized plagiarism, we will keep seeing this trend of only people who were born rich will be able to afford a career in music. Musicians need to keep fighting, as our forebears did, to secure royalties, to work collectively for our own interests.
Probably the biggest thing that has changed for me in the past few years is that I now run my own label. That’s a lot of work, but it’s freeing in some ways. Once the pandemic hit, I put out records online, arranged covid-safer private shows outdoors, and started a Patreon. I’ve enjoyed that medium, even though the company takes a steep cut.
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
I dunno. I have conflicting visions. I wish I had more selfishly guarded my dreams, because I too easily let unimaginative managers and business people shape the first few years of my path. I overestimated their authority, and I took it too seriously when they told me no. On the other hand, I do wish I had listened to some of the ideas I heard from them then. It’s a very mixed bag. I got disastrous advice from some business people, but I was also offered some really amazing opportunities.
I think the path that I have chosen is particularly difficult, because I have always been aiming for a creative, undefined sound. I stepped away from the safer career path that genre will give you. That said, I really haven’t had much of a choice in that matter. I am sincerely uninterested in genre.