FAITH COHEN
Syd Straw with her dog Mossimo.
Syd Straw — a singer-songwriter who delivers her haunting, evocative lyrics in a fierce and elegant way — sips coffee, like me, at 6 a.m., while our neighbors sleep.
“It’s all ours,” she says. “I read, think and look around the world, let (her dog) Mossimo out, walk around the yard … look at the moon.”
Her home in rural Vermont, surrounded by trees and a vegetable garden, harbors memories of her parents, film and TV actor Jack Straw (“The Pajama Game,” “Don’t Drink the Water”) and songwriter Barrie Jean Garvin. The quiet of the early hours heightens her senses and enables her to do some creative thinking.
“Thoughts come to me that have been lurking in the hidden recesses of the cranium, in those early darkened moments,” she says. “I think of things that have been there all along; it’s great to consult your inner workings. I do write a lot in those morning hours.”
Do these writings become songs?
“I don’t even think of what it might become when I write. It’s more about an expression of my friendship with words.”
Straw will perform at a sold-out show at 503 Social Club in Hoboken on Sept. 21, accompanied by Don Piper (whom she has been playing with since 2001) on guitar, Dave Schramm on guitar, and Gary Langol on keyboards. She will also perform in New York, in the fall, at a venue TBA.
What should we expect in Hoboken?
“It’s all going to be heavily scripted,” she joked. “I would say that one thing my shows are noted for is a certain abundance of spontaneity. And I’m going to do a few songs to honor our departed good friend Anton Fier from Golden Palominos. I’m definitely going to do a few new songs and a few worldwide mega hits as well.”
REGAN KELLY
SYD STRAW
Straw performed on the Golden Palominos albums Visions of Excess (1985) and Blast of Silence (1986), after launching her career as a backing vocalist for Pat Benatar. She also has sung on albums by artists such as Wilco, Rickie Lee Jones, Marshall Crenshaw and Freedy Johnston.
In 1989, she released her debut solo album, Surprise, which featured Fier, Richard Thompson, Ry Cooder and others. She recorded her second album War and Peace (1996) with the band The Skeletons.
In 2008, she released the majestic Pink Velour on her own label, Earnester. Showcasing her depth and direct, poetic storytelling, she shares her heart on songs about family disharmony, romance and loss. Several of these songs make me teary, including the title track, which is about her fractured family, and “About to Forget,” in which she imagines life after she loses her beloved dog.
She sang it recently at a neighbor’s party honoring a friend who loved dogs. “It was good because people came up to me and said, ‘You made me cry,’ ” she said. “I like it when a song hits the mark and has its purpose. I want my songs to be useful because I’m fairly useless. I want my songs to circulate in the world and come in handy.”
She said her song “Unraveling” is useful “because we all lose our dads and that song came to me line by line by line. It floated up the river to me while my dad was dying of lung cancer and I was taking care of him.
“His illness and his need for help brought me from my home in Chicago back to Vermont and it was such a strange, beautiful, fraught, unforgettable, important period of life, helping him through his primal unwinding.”
When people are moved by your songs, I would register that as a sign of success.
“This is the truth,” she said. “I think that’s what it’s all about, Alfie.”
The cover of Syd Straw’s 2008 album “Pink Velour.”
The song “Pink Velour” captures the feeling that there is nothing quite like going home.
“I like your thought of ‘nothing like home,’ ” she said, adding that “we fall in love with the people we associate with those places at least as much as we fall in love with the actual geographical places.”
Her song “Storm Warning” makes me sit up, struck by its Beatles-influenced sound and lyrics and lessons I could have used when I was 22. In it, she asks a suitor to “give me back my kisses,” describes falling in love with his intellect and crossing the sea to see if he was the one for her.
“Years and years ago, I got a letter in the mail,” she said. “This man who had intellectually compelled me over the years said, ‘Would you ever consider coming here for New Year’s Eve? What if I send a plane ticket?’ And I was just lonesome enough to do it.
“It was pretty calamitous. Even before I left, I was run off the road by a bad driver and my car skittered off to an icy field, and I thought maybe I shouldn’t get on a plane. But I am a romantic seeker.”
She sings, in this song:
You guard your feelings so well.
In another language, I can see the damage.
You’d think that I would know by now
Men will say anything to get what they want from you.
To make the birdie sing.
You said that you like birds a lot; this one is flying.
I’ll be gone in the morning.
Why am I so good at ignoring a storm warning?
Are you still the same way or do you heed storm warnings?
“I am the same way, only much older,” she said. “I am far more reticent than I used to be with tossing my heart around. I used to always have at least one crush brewing. I feel like that’s just not what I’m thinking about now. I want to work. My passion is to work.
“My last relationship was very rough. There’s nothing very good about it. That was a while ago. I’ve reprioritized. It definitely made me anxious about men, which is a huge generalization. But it did. I’ve had dangerous, unwarranted encounters with some pretty powerful men and I don’t ever want to allow myself to be hurt again.”
The cover of Syd Straw’s 1996 album “War and Peace.”
Her song “CBGB’s” (listen below) from War and Peace is about an exuberant part of her musical journey.
“Living in New York was always a good time because I lived there when artists could afford to,” Straw said. “I always had fun at CBGB and that song has come in handy. It’s funny that a song can outlive the actual club. It’s a nice way to remember that club.
“I remember its grimy, decadent glory very vividly. I played there in the last week of its existence. They let me curate a night there. I asked a band called The Revelons to be on the bill and they were fantastic.”
Her song “Howl” (see video below), also on War and Peace, is intense, provocative and clever, with an infectious melody. I can imagine Lucinda Williams covering this song beautifully.
She sings like she’s telling a secret:
Sleep with me like a dog, you man
Sleep with me like a man, you dog of a man
Sleep with me, sleep with me, sleep with me, sleep with me
I want to make you howl
I want to make you howl
I gave you everything I had
I must say you took it just like a man.
If all men are dogs, what’s a dog?
If all men are dogs, what then is a man?
“The Stranger I Live With” from Pink Velour would be, she thinks, a good duet with Williams. “We used to hang out (in 1992). I love her. At my last apartment in New York on East 6th Street one night Lucinda Williams, David Mansfield, Gurf Morlix, Marc Ribot and I sat around playing music and that was such a great luxury. And I remember saying, ‘Does anybody still do this?’ ”
Pink Velour features a delicate love song, “Marry Me,” with lyrics perfectly describing the hopes and dreams of couples headed to the altar. The first line is: “What are you doing the rest of your life?/That’s how it starts, that’s how it starts.” This is a quintessential wedding song that I recommend for anyone planning a wedding.
“I wrote that song driving 80 miles an hour on the Taconic Parkway,” Straw said. “I was driving down to sing at the great writer Mary Gaitskill’s wedding to the great Peter Trachtenberg in Red Hook, New York. They wanted me to sing ‘Perfect Day’ by Lou Reed. I arrived on time to sing the song when we had champagne and cake. It was a miracle I got there. I wrote the lyrics on the directions and they flew out my truck window.
“It’s so pure and all true. I’ve sung it at several weddings now … It’s really come in handy. We should probably do that, too (in Hoboken).”
Pink Velour chronicles her parent’s divorce “and it wasn’t pretty,” she said. “I still feel the pain of both of my parents and I still feel their lonesome ache. I think that’s a big impetus behind some of my music.
“My parents were very talented, singular, lonesome humans. I sometimes wonder if that’s hereditary. My mother said to me when she was dying, ‘After I die, what are you gonna write about?’ And I said, ‘Mom, I’m going to write about the pain of leaving you and how it’s killing me to lose you.’ ”
Syd Straw in a ’90s publicity photo.
Though memories of their pain inform her music and life, she moves forward, enjoying nature and her dogs. “That’s the easy part of it,” she said. “This whole summer I’ve had a couple of big, wonderful shows, but apart from that I’ve just been holed up here, growing four kinds of tomatoes and two kinds of basil … and just lollygagging with my 14-year-old, increasingly blind, deaf hound Mossimo. Where’s my ambition? It’s hiding under a rock somewhere, but I’m enjoying the hell out of it. I appreciate every leaf and every bird. I’m surrounded by trees and I’m lucky to have this.”
Our conversation was punctuated by her irreverent humor and candor.
“I was born in California in 1702,” she said.
That was a good year.
“Yes, and at 6 months of youth, I demanded that my parents buy a country inn in Vermont and get out of the Hollywood rat race,” she said.
You were forward thinking.
“Yeah, I was, and now I’m thinking in reverse. I am living in the house that I inherited when my dad died and I’m ever so grateful for it in this spot of woods and chalets.
“I know these little dirt roads a little too intimately — I have been here for a long time, bouncing away from here and bouncing back. I very much love Vermont, but in all my days I’ve never really sorted out much of a way to work here. I do my private work — my writing and thinking and existing — here, but (there are) not a lot of jobs here … I always have to bounce out to other places of interest, to work.”
There’s a unique feeling of peace to live in the place where you grew up, or to visit it.
“Yes, there’s comfort in knowing the trees and there’s comfort in being able to walk out the door and see the sky, but sometimes familiarity can be tormenting — depends on your mood. When you’re feeling really good and sunshiny, all the birds’ singing sounds so wonderful, but if you’re blue they can sound malevolent and you wish they’d be quiet.”
Do you find yourself missing what is no longer there from your childhood?
“I miss my dad tremendously and I miss my two dogs that were here,” she said.
She also misses neighbors who have died. “My whole town is about 300 or 400 people and about only half of them live here. I’ve watched everyone turn 90, 95, 100, and I’ve sung ‘Amazing Grace’ at all of their funerals. I’m hoping that some new vibrant, colorful, creative, artistic left-brain people move up here.”
The cover of Syd Straw’s 1989 album “Surprise.”
How do your new songs compare with those you’ve already released?
“My subjects have gone from being alive to staying alive,” she laughed. They focus on “the art of having a creative life and keeping a roof over your head even if it leaks.”
Straw also has been working on a musical called “Noah’s Dumpster.” “I have been working on this for the last six years and I’ve got some swingin’ songs for it and some of them are written with Marc Ribot,” she said. “I’m mostly doing it by myself. I’m really looking forward to playing them very soon.”
In June, she performed at British singer-songwriter Linda Thompson’s release party for her album Proxy Music at City Winery in New York, alongside a cast of friends who reconnected her with her music community, including New Jersey residents David Mansfield and Tammy Faye Starlite, and Linda Thompson’s son Teddy Thompson.
“It was a gorgeous show, one for the ages,” Straw said. “The audience was so buzzy and receptive. They were enjoying it so much.”
“I have loved Syd’s voice ever since I heard her with The Golden Palominos, and her song ‘Future 40’s (String of Pearls)’ still lives in my heart, as does Syd,” Starlite said. (Watch video for “Future 40’s,” below.) “She is a brilliant and sui generis artist, and one thing she once said (in an MTV interview) became my mantra: ‘You cannot stand over a rose and beseech it to unfurl.’ I love her.”
Straw recently collaborated on the song “Take Back the Night” with the artist The Dark Bob. It’s about the movement to make the streets safe for women. “People who started the movement are in the video,” Straw said. “I want safety. If we all looked out for each other, the whole axis of the world would tilt in a beautiful direction. It’s too bad that we have to be on defense our whole female lives. I don’t want to deal with any more bad men.”
Straw spoke about the many musicians lost during COVID years, as well as her close friend, KCRW-FM DJ Deirdre O’Donoghue, who died in 2001.
“I miss those days when you were pals with DJs,” she said. “She was my true sister and friend. I have lost people who have championed me. Now I have to champion myself.
“I think that entertainment is a dangerous art form. A lot of my bandmates have perished. My parents, a long time ago. I feel these songs acutely now. It’s great for anyone to find a way in this world to express one’s feelings in a viable way that other people can appreciate. I think it’s important that people keep listening and reading and I want to be a part of that. I want to put a lot more music out in the world.”
For more on Syd Straw, visit facebook.com/syd.straw or sydstrawmusic.bandcamp.com.
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