Alicia Jo Rabins sings about the original Girls In Trouble

By Emily Savage
Published: June 16th, 2009 | 7:00am

Passionate sex, familial betrayal, abandoned children. No, it’s not another teen angst–driven nighttime soap opera: it’s the Torah.

“It's all so rich,” says classically trained violinist and fancy-fingered fiddler, Alicia Jo Rabins. “Sometimes ‘Holy Book’ sounds like something that should be full of examples for clean living, but the stories are just so… twisted. You can find anything in there!”

Rabins explores these themes — with a feminist twist — in her role as the mastermind, lead vocalist, and fiddler for the indie pop act, Girls In Trouble. With Girls In Trouble, the dark-eyed brunette gently plucks her violin and croons in a deceptively sweet voice from the perspective of different forgotten women of the Torah. And, instead of a Fiddler On the Roof, gloomy, violin-in-a-shtetl sound, she manages to seamlessly mix conceptual, biblical-based lyrics with poppy, Laurie Anderson–meets–Sunset Rubdown indie rock sounds.

Girls In Trouble fall somewhere in between a solo project and a group collaboration. Though it is Rabins’ baby, she had some help creating the lovechild. She is often backed by her soon-to-be husband, upright bassist Aaron Hartman (Old Time Relijun), drummer Tim Monaghan of klezmer-punk outfit Golem, and keyboard-playing, New York Times writer Jascha Hoffman. The idea for the project came about a few years back — and could quite possibly have been divine intervention.

As the story goes, Rabins grew up in a leafy suburb of Baltimore and began playing violin at the tender age of 3, when her mother saw a Phil Donahue special about the Suzuki Method, an educational mode harnessing the nurturing power of music in young children.

Later on, Rabins learned about the Jewish aspect of violin — the fiddling method used in klezmer music (traditional Yiddish folk) — when she stumbled upon a fiddle album by another female performer, Alicia Svigals. After tracking down Svigals, Rabins begged for and received personal lessons. Then, when Golem asked Svigals to recommend a fiddler to add to its lineup, she turned around and recommended Rabins. Rabins quickly made the move to NYC and spent the next five years touring on and off with Golem.

During this time, Rabins was also working towards her masters at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, enjoying the program but struggling with the work for her thesis. She kept procrastinating until a professor stepped in and inadvertently gave her the idea for what would eventually become Girls In Trouble.

“He said, ‘You’ve done all this research on music and women [in the Torah]. Why don’t you write songs about the stories?’” Thus began her descent into the deep, dark, and scary world of the Torah’s “lost girls.” She has since written songs from the point of view of women such as Judith, who cut off Holofernes’ head; Miriam, who was beseeched with leprosy; and Tamar, who seduced her father-in-law, Judah.

“I believe that a lot of beauty and strength is in the darkness,” she explains. “It is such a big part of being human; the struggles and mistakes and missteps — I find [the stories] deeply reassuring.”

For Girls In Trouble’s first album (due in September on JDub Records) Rabins tracked down recording engineer Scott Solter, whom she sought out due to her adoration for the production he’d done for the Mountain Goats. Rabins gathered up the troops and headed down to North Carolina to record using Solter’s completely analog process. The self-titled album was recorded onto two-inch tape and hand-mixed with razors and tape. “[The analog process] made it sound warmer, a little more imperfect in the way real sound is imperfect,” notes Rabins. “It made the performances sounds real.”

All the hard work seems to have paid off. They’ve only played a handful of shows, in small venues and at the JDub Records SXSW showcase, but Girls In Trouble have now been asked to perform on June 17 at the Best Emerging Jewish Artists showcase at the Museum Of Jewish Heritage in New York.

Still, Rabin’s recent success can’t quite be characterized as “overnight” — she’s been studying the women she sings about for quite some time. “It took me years to get in this deep,” she explains. “I feel like I'm taking what I learned and kind of crystallizing it. When I’m writing or singing about the women, I feel like I am entering their lives.”

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