Cracking Spines
originally published in Decider
When Decider recently stopped by The Bad Waitress to chat with the members of Black Blondie, it was a windy day, and fluffy white seedlings from nearby cottonwood trees blew down 26th Street. They stuck to everything: bike tires, canvas shoes, and egg sandwiches in front of outdoor diners. The fluff soon covered everything. When she was little, bassist Liz Draper used to make pillows out of it. Keyboardist Tasha Baron made art using the tufts to represent snow. If this all seems unnecessarily wistful and nostalgic, take into account the title of Black Blondie’s new debut album, Do You Remember Who You Wanted To Be?. The songs—flirting with rap, R&B;, jazz, and rock—have a childlike curiosity and earnestness to them. Still, it’s very much an adult compilation, as the group switches genres with practiced ease. The bandmembers, now together for three years, are relieved to have finished the album, if only so they can look forward to the next one. Black Blondie plays twice on June 26: first at the outdoor Uptown Pride Block Party hosted by Bryant-Lake Bowl, and later at Toki Wright’s CD release show at the Entry. Decider recently sat down with Draper and Baron to talk about what’s coming up, occasionally riffing on Internet porn.
Decider: How’s it feel to be done?
Tasha Baron: Really great and continually exciting. We had to get a new order of CDs because we sold out at our distributor. We got rid of a thousand. Some of them were giveaways—radio stations, journalists. But we’re on our second run. And we had our CMJ Independent Radio Top 200 debut, meaning that we’re charting at a bunch of stations all over the country.
D: And how about those modern sales platforms—iTunes and Amazon? To what extent has the Internet helped you guys out?
TB: We’re into the physical. Our packaging is all recycled. We did all the artwork ourselves. The actual CD was pretty important to us. But, basically, we would never have done any gigs or done anything without the Internet. Our Gmail’s all screwed up, though. I don’t know why. But it sends our stuff to peoples’ spam sometimes. So all these things I send out—when I announce that we’re on iTunes or when I announce our shows—sometimes end up in spam.
Liz Draper: Maybe because it sounds half-porno. It’s iloveblackblondie@gmail.com. If you type in “Black Blondie,” or “black blondes,” or something like that, weird things can come up.
TB: Blacks on blondes… oh, dear.
LD: Maybe we’ll change our e-mail to blacksonblondes@gmail.com.
D: Do playing shows, and just being a band in general, feel different since the album came out?
LD: We’re able to focus on writing new stuff. We can ask what, next time around, we want to do the same and what we want to do differently.
TB: All I really want to do differently is not take so long. We’ve been writing new songs. It’s nice to play new songs. I feel like the last show we did, I was able to play differently. I wasn’t trying to make the songs sound like anything—not trying to make them sound like the album—and that was nice.
LD: I still really feel a lot of the songs from the album. But we were working so hard and for so long on getting it out that now the weight has been lifted. Not that it was a negative thing, but it’s just kind of exciting to be able to say, “Okay. Now what?”
