Photo by Megan Holmes
Mary Timony
Issue #23
Former Helium frontwoman gets back to her roots with a new solo album, Ex Hex
By Amber Drea
Published: March 1st, 2005 | 4:28pm
When I bought Helium’s 1994 EP, Pirate Prude(Matador), I listened to it every night for a week before I understood the genius behind the madness of Mary Timony’s songwriting. Raw distortion, grooves like molasses, and her breathy falsetto combined with cryptic lyrics like “I got a baby vampire in me / Nobody knows, nobody knows / I saw you put it in me like a seed that was as big as a stone / All I can do is watch it grow / … And it’s turning me into someone I don’t know.” I’d never heard anything like it before, and it changed the way I thought about music.
“That record was weird,” Timony tells me, more than a decade later. “I had taken so many music lessons my whole life, and I was into this whole thing of, like, destroying what I had learned or something. So I would write these songs and then when we’d play them with the band, I would be into destroying the songs.”
Timony spent her formative years playing viola, then took up the guitar around age 13, inspired by the intense Washington, D.C., ’80s punk scene. “It wasn’t even that I really was into hardcore music because I wasn’t. It was just more the energy and the excitement that was happening,” she remembers.
Attempts at starting a band with high school friend Christina Billotte (Slant 6/Quix*o*tic/the Casual Dots) failed for lack of a good drummer, and Timony left D.C. to study classical guitar at Boston University. Upon Timony’s return for summer break a year later, Billotte had found a drummer, and they formed the short-lived four-piece Autoclave, only releasing one full-length record on Dischord in 1991. “I don’t think we took music as seriously then,” she says.
Since the classical guitar department at B.U. turned out to be “really bad,” Timony switched her major to English literature, which she found interesting and intellectually satisfying. “I think I sort of entertained the idea of becoming, like, a high school teacher or something,” Timony recalls. “But then I just started playing in bands and that was what my world was.”
Thank god. Though Timony probably would have made a wonderful teacher, she’s been able to reach many more people through her music. The turning point came when Mary Lou Lord dropped out of an early incarnation of the band that would become Helium, and Timony took the helm. Consisting of drummer Shawn King Devlin and bassist Brian Dunton, who was replaced by Ash Bowie (Polvo) in 1995, Helium released two singles, three EPs, and two full-length albums of sprawling and complex lo-fi psychedelia.
While Helium’s influences seemed to progress by moving backward in time, from post-hardcore and riot grrl to ’70s classic rock, Timony dug even deeper into the vaults of music history when writing the songs for her first two solo records, Mountains (2000)and The Golden Dove (2002). Using Renaissance- and Baroque-era harmonic structures, the compositions were constructed with vintage keyboards, delicate guitar sounds, and various string instruments. The music is more precise than that of Helium, and Timony’s voice is clearer and louder than on previous recordings, though her lyrics are just as mystical and meditative, full of imagery, allusions, and word play — another benefit of her literary education.
With her third album, Ex Hex, slated to be released in April, Timony has stripped her sound back down to the basics. “All we did was guitar and drums on this record. We just wanted to make it really rocknroll,” she says. Additional instrumentation is minimal, even bass, which was added only to fill in the low register. “We were just trying to keep it more live sounding, to have the songs sound like how they sounded when we wrote them, rather than being like a studio record.”
The live feeling definitely comes through, especially with production by Brendan Canty of Fugazi. Timony’s boyfriend Devin Ocampo (Medications) provides drums this time around, and his performance perfectly compliments the big sound of her hard-hitting guitar riffs. “Playing with Devin was really inspiring because he’s just such a good drummer that it was just really fun to focus on, like, playing rather than composition,” she says.
Timony started writing the songs when she was still living in Boston, where she’d resided for 15 years. Until she moved back to D.C. in June 2004, Ocampo would go up to play with her at the Berwick, the old Whoopie Pie factory that was converted into an art and performance space, with practice rooms in the basement. “I spent a lot of time down [there], writing music,” Timony says. “I wrote a bunch of the songs there, and then Devin and I wrote some of the songs together also.”
Timony has not only returned to her hometown, but also to the guitar after playing mostly keyboards for the past two years. “I just got burned out on keyboards, which had happened to me like four years before with guitar,” she explains. “And suddenly [with this record], I was like, ‘I’m better at guitar. I’m just gonna play only guitar.’”
And the precision of her previous solo albums seems to have paid off. The guitar work on Ex Hex is some of the tightest she’s ever exhibited. This record has an energy that Helium never had; even when that band rocked, it was still always dreamy. Hand-clapping, toe-tapping, and head-banging are involuntary responses to songs like “On the Floor,” “Friends to J.C.” (as in Jesus Christ), and “9 X 3,” which features upbeat surf riffs. “Return to Pirates” and “Hard Times Are Hard” have moments that sound as if they were stolen from Creedence Clearwater Revival. But the rest of Ex Hex is classic Timony, with spacey prog jams, atonal dissonance, modulated chord progressions, and atmospheric vibes, organs, and xylophone. “In the Grass” and “W.O.W.” are the only tracks that directly recall The Golden Dove.
Her vocals are spunky, aggressive, and full of exclamations like “Hey!” Though the lyrics are as dark as ever, they are often delivered with joy rather than melancholy. The harmonies are richly textured, and the narratives are relatively more apparent than the fantastical scenarios Timony usually creates. Lyrics like “Something you just said / Hurts inside my head” and “I am an island / I do not like you at all” are straight-forward, while “Don’t give it to me / Nine times three / You’re out of control / Emotional symphony” and “Baby, I just want to be with you / Drawing cigarettes and drinking shampoo” are still riddles.
Timony gives her interpretation of that last line. “It’s like a way of saying ‘Doing things that are nonsensical.’ That’s what that means. It’s just a way of saying ‘Hanging out and doing nothing.’” Her words subconsciously form when she starts writing the guitar part to a song. “I think I’m just translating whatever mood is in the music with my lyrics,” she adds.
Like the title of the last track “Backwards/Forwards,” Timony moves forward by going back to where she began, physically and musically. But as always, Timony’s approach to songwriting is all her own. “I’ve never been a person that’s tried to sound like other stuff,” she says. And it shows.
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