Ambrosia Parsley of Shivaree
By Alex Teitz
Shivaree is an amazing, creative band releasing their debut CD, I Oughtta Give You A Shot in the Head for Making Me Live in this Dump , on Capitol Records. Shivaree is Ambrosia Parsley on vocals and guitar, Duke McVinnie on guitar, bass and vocals, and Danny McGough on keyboard and a number of other instruments.
FEMMUSIC was honored to speak to Ambrosia about the band, the music, and where Shivaree is now. For more information visit Capitol Records website at http://www.hollywoodandvine.com
Shivaree will also be The Soiled Dove on June 13, 2000 as part of a national tour. For more information visit http://www.soileddove.com
FEMMUSIC: Describe your songwriting technique.
AP: Well basically I try to make sure that everything can be on its own before it’s a song. If I don’t feel comfortable, if I feel stupid speaking a lyric then it doesn’t get a melody. If I can’t sing a lyric just a cappella and it doesn’t sound great that way then it doesn’t get music underneath it. If the music doesn’t great all by itself then it doesn’t get a lyric and a melody. Then there’s Duke and Danny in the mix who are involved with the me and then the music comes in. We don’t really put anything under anything that can’t be alright by itself first. That’s basically the rule.
FEMMUSIC: Tell me about I Outta Give You A Shot In The Head for Making Me Live in this Dump. I see that besides Joe Henry you had a number of other producers?
AP: Well Duke and Danny and I originally recorded the record with a friend of ours we promised would get to produce it because he gave us a lot of spec at one point, years ago. And that didn’t work out. We recorded the entire record it was the right thing to do, but musically it wasn’t the right thing to do. It ended up in the trash. So Joe Henry, he’s also from LA, we lived in LA, he had just built a studio in his backyard, and said, “C’mon over here and we’ll see what we can’t do over here.” So we got a big chunk of it done over at Joe’s house. And then once we got that done we’d written a bunch of new stuff and also wanted to remix some of the things that we did with Joe so we remixed and went over to our friend Mickey P’s house and went up to his bedroom and got a bunch of stuff done over there. We got done doing that, we remixed a bunch of stuff again and then we had some more songs. And then we worked with the the Rothrock guys who are Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock on one song and then we our friends in NY, the Elegant Two who are Chris Maxwell and Phil Hernandez on something we thought they would be good at understanding. We did a bunch of stuff at Danny’s house. Danny produced things too. We goofed around with people we thought would have an understanding of a particular group of songs and then we took some other songs to other people we knew and sort of crossed our fingers and hoped it sounded like everything belonged on the same record. And it did and it was okay.
FEMMUSIC: How long did it take to make the CD?
AP: Three years but it wasn’t three years of straight work. There’s a lot of reasons for it. We all have a lot of life going on. We were also pretty neurotic and also we came together in such a bizarre kind of faded way and we thrown together so fast we really needed to stop in our tracks for a little while and just evolve as a band before we delivered something cause we wanted to be a band then, and now we are. (laugh) The next record won’t take that long. We won’t need for it to.
FEMMUSIC: How long has the band been together?
AP: Duke and Danny and I have been together over four years.
FEMMUSIC: What was the biggest challenge making the CD?
AP: Walking away from things. It’s hard for me anyway. I don’t like pictures, you know what I mean? Especially, really of myself (laugh). Pictures of other people, pictures of other things that’s sometimes what a recording feels like to me. It doesn’t change. It’s always exactly what it is. Sometimes I have a hard time dealing with that. I keep wanting to rearrange things and move things around. Learning how to do that was probably the hardest part for me. The thing that helped me through it was to make sure that the live show was different every night.
FEMMUSIC: Tell me about the song, “Arlington Girl.”
AP: Well it’s the most serious song on the record for sure. The reason for that is that it’s the oldest song on the record. I get sillier every year. I wrote that when I was nineteen or twenty years old which is loooong time ago. I’m twenty-eight now. It was sort of a redemption song.
FEMMUSIC: Tell me about the song, “Goodnight Moon.”
AP: I lived in a haunted house in Hollywood for a couple of years. I know that sounds crazy but it was really ‘Amityville Horror.’ It was wild. It was completely out of control. I had gotten paranoid to a point where I was also paranoid of people breaking in. It was secluded. There was nobody around it. So I was like constantly afraid of like ghosts and robbers and I never slept at night, only during the day when the sun came up and the house boobytrapped. I was just completely paranoid. I started to go a little crazy and Duke came over one day and we pressed the mambo button on the drum machine and out came “Goodnight Moon.”
FEMMUSIC: What would you like to see changed most about the music industry?
AP: (pause) Ah. Gee. There’s so many things. (laugh) It would be nice to see people paying more attention to music.
FEMMUSIC: How so?
AP: Just basically paying attention to the music. That was one of the things that amazed me most when we started…when we signed with a record company was how much of making a record had absolutely nothing to do with music. I realize some of it is necessary, but, I don’t know, it seems overboard to me at times. And kind of sad. You have your few people, you sniff out your gems and try to work with them. As far as the business end, there’s a few of ’em that really just like music, and there’s a few of them, well actually a lot of them that just like money. Try to work with the music people (laugh).
FEMMUSIC: As a woman in the music industry, have you been discriminated against?
AP: Well (pause) Nothing that I haven’t figured out how to use to my own advantage. Nothing really insulting. Some of it that happens, you know, of course it happens but some of it’s just so stupid and old and boring that you…I don’t really get insulted by it anymore. I don’t even…I’m almost not even aware of it, sometimes. I have a pretty small community that I operate in and very few people that I just kind of have around all the time. In my universe, in my world I am queen. So no. Fuck that! No. I’m fine.
FEMMUSIC: What advice would you give to an emerging artist?
AP: Try not to suck. Try really hard.