Drone Butch Blues
Your Heart Breaks
Sofaburn Records
The title comes from Leslie Feinberg’s groundbreaking novel, Stone Butch Blues, and the concept is simple: get a drone going and layer acoustic guitars and other folk instruments on top. Quiet, understated, but still enough in the foreground to be more than accompaniment, this isn’t a typical folk music album or a typical women’s music album. It’s more like Ferron, who was women’s music at its most straightforwardly punky, not quirky like Two Nice Girls, and like Ferron, wonderful to listen to.
Trans/queer musician/filmmaker Clyde Petersen is Your Heart Breaks, with an all hands on deck cast, including Kimya Dawson, Karl Blau, Lori Goldstein, Dylan Carlson, and on "Our Forbidden Country," Kelley Deal, who sounds terrific. The others are equally terrific. Lyrically, this is angrier, darker, and punkier than Ferron, but punk at its most liberating best. It's also sweet, loving, friendly, sincere, heartfelt, unironic, and on the love songs like "Wanting To Stay," bittersweet. Anthems like "Keep On Living" and "Our Forbidden Country" coexist with love songs like "Stay" and autobiographical songs like "Late Nights In The Lab," and it all sounds great, and better than most women’s music.
The lyrics are inspired by a bibliography of queer writing, all of which I recommend for what the past was like and where the future may lead. The one I recommend the most is the book which helped me come out, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, the first lesbian-themed best seller, the first lesbian-themed book to have the attitude “yes I’m a lesbian, and if you have a problem with that, that’s you’re problem, not mine.”
If you’re just coming out, buy this album. If you are out and want something adventurous, buy this. If you’re straight and want to know more, buy this. And just anyone who wants a great album, buy this.
Andrea Weiss
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