The Plague Garden artwork Photo credit: Michael Schoonmaker Photo credit: Michael Schoonmaker
“The Plague
Garden would
never have come to life in this incarnation were it not for the 2020 plague, which
is not to say that I am thanking the plague for the album,” smirks Ryder Cooley, self-proclaimed “Faerie
Queen” of New York-based dark carnival band The Dust Bowl Faeries. Their new album will be released
independently on November 20, 2020. “I am grateful that
something creative manifested out of this dark and dormant time.”
Birthed from the current
COVID-19 pandemic but sourced from music that spans decades, genres and continents,
the surreal and gorgeously intertwined vaudeville, cabaret, klezmer and Eastern
European music that this multi-generational five-piece presents is equal sprinklings
of Gogol Bordello, David Lynch, Dresden Dolls and Dead Can Dance. Mystical and ethereal
with enough chutzpah to keep the party going and adding to the air of fantastical
elements that surrounds the band, the Dust Bowl Faeries was founded by Cooley and
Hazel, a disembodied taxidermy ram who has become the band’s mascot/spirit
animal. Rescued from a salvage company in Albany, Hazel has become a muse of sorts
for Cooley and has been incorporated in performances. “Our breath mingles –
mine in life, hers in death. Through me, Hazel visits the living. Through her, I
travel into the cloven past. I feel Hazel’s death in my body as s/he becomes part
of me,” she explains.
Kicking the album off
unsettlingly with “Overture” (based on Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre (Funeral March)”, or more
commonly known as the creepy “Pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you”
song), The Plague Garden is a wild and raucous
ride through Eastern European rhythms, gothic folk, and indie-rock circus music.
Equally diverse and fascinating, the songs run the gamut of topics from New Orleans
Voodoo rituals (“Vampire Tango”), scientifically reviving
the extinct Pyrenean Ibex (“Ibex”), getting lost in an enchanted forest in the Czech Republic
(“Forest of
Breath”), and the #metoo movement’s
day of reckoning for the music industry (“Sirens“), among other esoteric and curious topics.
“I’ve always had one foot in the spirit world.
I’m a changeling,” explains Cooley about her spiritual inspirations. “I’ve lived
most of my adult life in subcultures where genders are fluid and ghosts are gods.
I’m also an empath and my love of animals has driven me to write songs about all
sorts of creatures, living, dead, mythical, and vanishing before our eyes. I can’t
bring the extinct ibex back to life with a song, but I can summon their spirit and
document their demise.”
One such song with a rather peculiar autobiographical and harrowing story is “Cyanide
Hotel.” “I was living in a ramshackle neighborhood in Albany NY when, out of
the blue, my housemate decided to poison herself with cyanide,” she reports matter-of-factly.
“Unbeknownst to me, her ectoplasma entered my foot as I slept in the bedroom beneath
her. Meanwhile, I got possessed with a project and slept in my studio for a few
nights, until the Albany detective department tracked me down as a homicide suspect.
The house was boarded up and deemed a bioterrorist site, and my foot grew to the
size of a watermelon. Finally I realized the foot was possessed and I asked my witchy
friend Sara Zar to perform an exorcism, which was successful. Soon thereafter, we
wrote the song together.”
Structured around a traditional Yiddish folk song that Cooley’s grandmother taught
her, the first single “Candy Store” is a fascinating and alluring Eastern
European immigrant’s tale with added lyrics to flesh out the story. “My grandmother
taught me the first verse of ‘Candy Store’ when I was a kid,” she reminisces. “I
have a good memory for anything morbid or morose, like twisted old faerie tales
and nursery rhymes, so when I got my first accordion, the song just sort of just
played itself.” Adding additional verses about jails (“written in support of the
prisoner’s rights movement”), brothels (“written
when I was living in a former red-light district”), and a madhouse (“I
wrote that verse because I was locked up in a psych ward as a kid”), Cooley
found the common element being liberation. “In all of the verses, the subjects break
free from the chains that bind them,” she explains. “It’s a very uplifting and liberating
song, even though it’s about pyromania.”
The soon-to-be released “Candy Store” video (which is being coined as
a “music novella”) was directed and produced by Film Faerie Lisa M.
Thomas. One of the first productions to take place after the onset of COVID-19,
the production team restored the historic Mayflower candy shoppe in Catskill,
NY to recreate the look and feel of the business as it was in the 1930’s when it
first opened. The efforts pay off with more than just eye popping candy, but visuals
that dance off the screen and pay homage to Cooley’s ancestry.
Starting in 2015 as an all-woman trio, The Dust
Bowl Faeries is committed to working with as many women musicians and artists as
possible, including their collaborative filmmaker Lisa M. Thomas (Thin Edge
Films) who documents and
adds visual flair to the band’s unique and arresting visuals. Now a multi-gendered
band, they have released two EPs (2018’s The Dark
Ride Mixes and 2019’s Beloved Monster) and a self-titled
debut (produced by music critic Seth Rogovoy and featuring Tommy Stinson of The
Replacements and Melora Creager of Rasputina).
Fascinatingly oblique
while retaining all of its universal appeal, the music of The Dust Bowl Faeries
escapes and embraces all genres of music. It’s music that’s anchored in time yet
timeless… a contradiction in theory but at the same time, an exercise in fluidity
and continuity.
The Dust
Bowl Faeries is Ryder Cooley
(Faerie Queen; accordion, singing saw, ukulele, lead vocals), Jon B. Woodin (Rocket Faerie; guitar,
castanets, vocals), Rubi LaRue
(Feisty Faerie; lapsteel, vocals), Liz LoGiudice (River Faerie; bass,
vocals) and Andrew Stein (Time
Faerie; percussion). The Plague
Garden was
recorded, mixed & mastered by Michael Schoonmaker
and will be released on November
20, 2020.
The Plague Garden, Song List
- Overture
- Dust Bowl Caravan –written at the beginning of the Covid 19 Plague, to cheer ourselves up!
- Vampire Tango – written after Ryder attended a Voodoo ritual in New Orleans, this song is about La Sirene, the Voodoo priestess of the sea and of music. (dedicated to Cameron Melville)
- Sirens – a #metoo song about misogyny in the music industry
- Serpentine Samba – a song about a mythical sea serpent, The Kraken, who the band has re-gendered as a belly dancing queen of the underwater world
- Cyanide Hotel – a dark cabaret song about a haunted house where Ryder once lived. Written by Ryder & Sara Zar
- Ibex – about the extinct Pyrenean Ibex who was resurrected for 7 minutes in a laboratory
- Polyester – a new arrangement of a song by Ryder, originally written for her band Corner Tour many moons ago
- Forest of Breath – written while lost in an enchanted forest in the Czech Republic
- Pandemic Tango – this is the second song written during the pandemic, as the plague continued. Ryder tuned the piano herself with a primitive tuning kit
- Candy Store – a traditional (Yiddish) folk song that Ryder’s grandmother taught her, modified with additional lyrics by Dust Bowl Faeries