Musicians Mary Lorson and Billy Coté are best known for their work in Madder Rose and Saint Low, but they have also pursued a career scoring soundtracks for film. The two are no strangers to the medium — self-professed film fanatics, Lorson and Coté’s music have been featured in a number of films and TV shows, including “The Real World,” “Felicity,” and “Alias” as well as Tariq Zalil’s documentary “A Galaxy Far, Far Away” and a number of Gabriel London films, including “Prison Rape (The Rules of the Game)” and “Some Other Son.” On her website, Lorson writes, “We love the challenge of collaborating with another breed of artist, and we really respond to this newfound liberation from the song format.”
Since they moved to Ithaca in 1995, Lorson and Coté have firmly established their roots here, releasing a number of later Madder Rose records, including Tragic Magic, Hello June Fool, and Overflow. But the move to Ithaca was also a perfect opportunity for Lorson to focus on her own project, Mary Lorson and Saint Low. Under the guise of Saint Low, Lorson, who is the principal songwriter, has produced an impressive amount of albums, such as
Tricks for Dawn, and Realistic, which was released in 2005.
For the score to Steven Cantor’s film “What Remains: A Documentary Portrait of Photographer Sally Mann,” Lorson and Coté recorded in their own home studio, frequently touching base with Cantor, who lives in New York City (he also co-directed “loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies,” which screened at the Cornell Cinema last fall). This Friday, the Cornell Cinema will screen the Ithaca premiere of “What Remains.” The film will be followed by a live performance by Lorson, Coté, Hank Roberts, and Richie Stearns.
I recently spoke with Lorson about her move to Ithaca in 1995, making the transition from Madder Rose to Saint Low, her love of film, and the special bond between musicians and photographers. (Read the article that appears in the Ithaca Times here.)
Ithaca Times: How did you get involved with the “What Remains” project?
Mary Lorson: Well, Billy and I had been doing music for a number of years when we started pursuing work doing film scores. We amassed a resume of smaller projects, such as graduate students’ thesis films, and among the people we sent our music to was the director Steven Cantor. He recognized our names from having liked Madder Rose, and then hired us even though our qualifications are not what the conventional film scorer’s qualifications are. (Laughs)
What kind of qualifications?
It’s an entire discipline you can go to school for exclusively, it’s a whole system of practice and protocol. Actually, more and more filmmakers are working with people who are original musicians, who do their own thing.
Was he expecting something that sounded like Madder Rose, or did he already have a specific vision of what he wanted it to sound like?
Well, I think the understanding was that we would give him our interpretation of his ideas. They edited the film on the fly because he’s been making it for a very long time and it’s had several different potential versions. Basically, it discusses her early career, but then it also discusses her later phase, especially regarding the concept of decay. So he had a lot of old and new footage, and it has many different moods. There’s a bit of a spectrum, so once they had their footage, they kind of knew what they thought might work, but in terms of sequences, they changed that a bit.
It ended up being about mixing and arranging and lots of instrumentation. And then we would highlight one or another instrument, depending on what version of it we were going for. We made a lot of different versions, and he did have some suggestions.
How do you feel about Cantor’s body of work?
He’s done a lot of different interesting things. It’s funny, because he’s definitely a documentarian, but there is some highbrow and some lowbrow stuff. (Laughs) He produced a really good feature “Devil’s Playground” (2002), and it was about Amish kids who had kind of gone astray. They’re offered one year in which they kind of sow their wild oats, and some of them get so into the alternative lifestyle, they get all screwed up and they end up losing it. Some get it back together and go back to their communities, but some just can’t handle the freedom, and it destroys them.
He did a really good job with that, but then he made this really kind of hard to wrap your brain around show called “Amish in the City.” (Laughs) It was kind of like “The Real World,” only they took Amish kids and they got them some kind of glitzy apartment in some big city and they had tattoos and piercings — and it was kind of hard to see the point of that. (Laughs) And he did another one, a show for HBO called “Family Bonds,” about people who hunt down people who have skipped bail, and that was pretty interesting too.
Does scoring films pay the bills the best?
Well, we don’t really do anything full time anymore, so basically it’s great work when you can get it. But to pay the bills, we have jobs. (Laughs) The nice thing is that when you do a film, once it’s broadcast, you get royalties. . We’ve had songs in films and TV shows for many years now and we’ve realized that it is something that doesn’t go away. That even includes DVD rentals, so it’s kind of nice. So that can build up as time goes by … But it’s still not enough to make us quit our jobs. (Laughs)
Do you feel a connection to Sally Mann’s work?
I didn’t know her newer work, but I was familiar with her older work, and I do like it and I think it is admirable. There’s a cool relationship between musicians and photographers. Photographers spend a lot of time alone in the dark and a lot of them are serious music listeners, and I’ve had a lot of friends who were photographers who took me out to good music and showed me how to explore my mind, so it felt great to be involved in this particular film.
On your website, you say, “We’re also film enthusiasts who strive always to enhance, never overpower, a scene.” Does your work for “What Remains” stand on its own?
Well, that’s interesting. I might need a little more distance from it to be able to tell. We’ve done a bunch of other projects since we finished the film, and although I’m hopeful, I’m not sure if the whole thing would stand up. Once it’s out and finished, I only check in with it once it a while. When you’re making a recording with a project such as this, it’s all you listen to for a really long time. (Laughs) You have to set it aside because you want other things.
But the fun thing is that in preparation for this performance, Hank, Billy, Richie and I really had fun playing the songs. We were all fondly remembering these songs that we played a couple of years ago.
Is the score mostly instrumental?
Yes. In some cases, there is a voice, but it’s an instrumental voice. And there’s one song that has lyrics.
This Friday, you’ll be playing at the Willard Straight Theatre. As a musician, does a change in venue affect your own performance?
That’s always my favorite type of venue. In my years of touring, there have been theater gigs with a real piano, and that’s always my favorite. Any kind of area or a set up where people are meant to listen, that’s always going to be my favorite. There is just something comforting for me about having a real acoustic piano. I’ll bring my electric piano if I have to, but I always prefer playing a real one that’s in good shape. Bars are fun too, but it’s not the only place a person can play. The focus is more on the music, which is not to say that people aren’t into the music when you see a band at, say, Chapter House, because they are.
Plus, I am a film lover, so I just love being in a movie theatre. (Laughs) … I just love Cornell Cinema. The people there are great, and it’s such a lifeline here. They’re a real link for us to the rest of the world.
You moved to Ithaca in 1995, and you were still releasing records as Madder Rose?
Yes, we were. We were in between our second and third Madder Rose records when we moved here. So when we moved here, we were just starting production on our third record, “Tragic Magic,” and the first thing we did when we came here was set up in the studios, but then we ended up not continuing with the producer that we had started with and we finishing the record in Louisiana. That was only released domestically on Atlantic, and then we switched to Cooking Vinyl label and then we released “Wallblind” a couple of years later, and then we made “Hello June Food,” so we were still Madder Rose, definitely.
Why did you decide to move to Ithaca?
I went to Ithaca College for a couple of years, and I always really liked the area. I didn’t end up graduating from IC, but I did live here for a couple of years as a non-student, and I thought it was really laid-back and beautiful. We were in New York and touring like mad, and we were exhausted and beat. New York was getting expensive, and I was like, “Let’s go see if Ithaca is as nice as I remembered.” And Billy was cool, he was really open-minded. So I got the Ithaca Times (laughs), and found this house on the lake for really cheap, and we got in the bus and just went for it. And it’s been great. I miss the urban thing, but it’s nice here.
How would you define the success you’ve found here in Ithaca?
It’s such a great town, but it can also be a little confusing in certain ways because you have an abundance of talent, and the parameters are very sharply drawn. On the one hand, it’s been incredibly liberating for me because I’ve gotten a lot of creative work done. In New York, the cost of living there is so rough. It’s a really hard lifestyle, and yet I do miss the stimulation of being down there. But luckily we can go down there a lot. (Laughs) It has worked out really well for me, and I have amazing friends here. I guess after any stretch of a decade, you think, “Hmm, it’s a big world and life is short, and it would be nice to explore other areas.” But I see us as definitely staying around here.
Could you talk about your experiences within the local music community? How did it all coalesce?
Well, it’s funny, because Ithaca is a small town, and the people who do play music are pretty dedicated, so it’s not too hard to figure out who the other ones are. So when I got here, I started working at the Rongovian Embassy and got to know everyone, and I fell in love with Plastic Nebraska, and at one point heard Jennie [Stearn]’s first demo. I didn’t know Jennie then, but it really blew me away … Jennie’s music is so different, it’s mysterious to me how she writes the way she does. So then we cautiously kind of checked each other out, and became friends really pretty quickly. (Laughs)
In a way, there’s something that’s pretty natural when you meet someone who’s doing what you’re doing, you already understand things about each other. Once you locate those people who you get along with and who are doing work that you like, it’s not hard to build that friendship.
And I also like that it is a place where people can actually be really different from one another. There’s no pressure to conform to anything, which I actually did feel when we were in New York. We were playing post-punk Manhattan in the early 90s, and we definitely had friends who thought Madder Rose was not hard-edged enough. I remember feeling, “That sucks. Don’t pressure me to be anything that we aren’t!” But here, people are interested even if you’re trying something that they’re not doing. They’re not threatened by it - everyone is just quietly doing their own thing.
There is a lot of collaboration that goes on here, and to me, that seems quite unique to Ithaca.
Yes. If I ever had to move away, that would be something really, really hard to give up because it is just great. (Laughs) We love to be involved in it. When I was putting together Saint Low, and I just felt so lucky to have met everyone and I thought, “Wow, I could not have asked for better musicians.”
Could you briefly describe the beginnings of Madder Rose? Were you involved in anything else at the time?
Well, I had been playing solo for a while in New York. And I had just finished some demos that I liked a lot, and I had a friend who knew Billy and said, “Hey, my friend is looking for a female singer for a project that he’s looking to put together.” So I went and met him and I think he had all of the tracks done. He just needed the vocals added, so it was very, very simple. It wasn’t very social, I just went and I sang and he thought about whether he liked it, and I thought about whether I liked it. At the time, I thought that I was going to really do my thing primarily, and have Madder Rose be this side thing. We weren’t kids at the time — we really knew how hard it was to get a record deal, and we knew that the odds were really good that we wouldn’t succeed. (Laughs) I just did everything that came my way.
I did [Madder Rose] for a while, and I realized that it was getting in the way of my own stuff. So I quit Madder Rose and they were auditioning other singers, and then we were offered a record deal. And so he was like, “Well I’m not really finding any other singers that I like,” and at the time I was 29, and I thought, “Well, I’d be a fool to turn down this deal with Atlantic Records, when I could actually go on the road.” I wasn’t the singer that I wanted to be at the time, and I wasn’t as proficient a player as I intended, so it was kind of nerve wracking when we got the offer. But I was also like, “I can’t turn this down. That would be stupid.”
You don’t know if it’s going to come again. So I recommitted to Madder Rose, and we had a pretty good run. We were not million [record] sellers, which is why we didn’t keep our record deal longer, but we learned a lot. We had some great experiences touring and recording in really great studios with great
producers and I learned tons and I had a lot of fun.
Who have been some of your other musical influences over the years?
Well, with Madder Rose, it was primarily Billy’s writing project, and he really loves Rev. Gary Davis, Jorma Kaukonen and Hot Tuna, and also the great bands that everyone loves, such as The Stones, The Who, and The Band. [Billy’s] songs are very emotionally clear and articulate and have nicely crafted, beautiful melodies.
I was really the singer, I did about one-third of the songs. That was part of my beef when I left Madder Rose, and when I came back in I was like, “Okay, I’m coming back, but you have to let me play some of my own songs, because I’m a songwriter.” So the deal that we struck was that one-third of the songs would be mine.
I was kind of going for something a little more off-beat. I was really into Throwing Muses back then, and I grew up on Joni Mitchell, but I think that I was a little more influenced by Chrissie Hynde and Lucinda Williams - sort of alt-country but also a little edgier.
Madder Rose was great and I learned so much, but I did find myself writing a bunch of songs that weren’t getting played in Madder Rose, and that pile was just getting so big. I thought, “I want to do something with these,” and [Billy] said, “Yeah, you should go for it.” So we were still doing Madder Rose when I first assembled Saint Low here and did the first Saint Low demos. I even put out a single in England, and then I got a deal for the albums. So that was that how that started to come together.
When we came out here, while we were still in Madder Rose, we were long distance from rest of the band, but since Saint Low was here, so it was easier to work on. Saint Low is my baby. (Laughs)
So what do you have planned this year?
I’ve written a batch of songs that have been quite different and I’m really liking it. With the first three Saint Low records I was definitely pursuing a certain thing, and I feel like I’ve done that now, and I want to explore other types of music that I like. Steve Gollnick from Hubcap has joined, and he’s going to play on the guitar. I write for both the piano and the guitar, and when I play live, I have to do one or the other and I miss having the rhythm strum, and so Steve is going to be there to lock that down.
In the meantime, Kathy Ziegler and Billy Cote and I have made a record together, a side project that we’re calling Piano Creeps. I do most of the singing, but they do all the really hard work. (Laughs) Usually with Saint Low it’s hard to be the one in charge, and this time I’m not.
Did you how to play the piano before the guitar?
Yes, the piano was first. I started playing the piano when I was really young, and singing too. But I let it go, actually. I was a rabid piano player, and I did nothing else until I hit adolescence, and then it was this classic thing where I just put it aside in order to hang out with my girlfriends and talk on the phone. (Laughs) I wish I hadn’t done that but I did. I also did a lot of theatre in high school, and a lot of dance and sing. I’ve always loved all of that creative stuff, it’s so much fun. (Laughs)
Mary Lorson will also be featured on Tish Pearlman’s interview program, “Out of Bounds” on WEOS-FM (88.1 in Ithaca). The live broadcast will begin at 7pm on Thursday, April 5.
The show begins at 7:15pm on Friday, April 6 at the Willard Straight Theatre. The performance is cosponsored by the Cornell Council for the Arts.