girls in trouble
PopMatters Loves Girls in Trouble
PopMatters is running a great Girls in Trouble review! You can read that HERE. Full text below the cut.
“Girls in Trouble’s simple, folk instrumentation is ripe with influences from around the world, including Jewish and even Venetian-sounding tapestries of sonic bliss.”
Sana Krasikov Talks to Alicia Jo Rabins on Largehearted Boy
Girls in Trouble’s Alicia Jo Rabins is once again over on lit-minded blog Largehearted Boy, this time in conversation with author Sana Krasikov (One More Year). You can find that HERE, though I have included full-text below the cut. Enjoy!
What We Did With Our Winter Vacation
Well, we’re back from vacation, and it’s time to catch you all up on what you might have missed over the break. Here ya’ go:
- The Faster Times included The Sway Machinery and Girls in Trouble in their Best of 2009 Music list.
- The Boston Survival Guide chose Girls in Trouble to include in their 2009 Band Roundup.
- Made Up Disease (MUD) posted a really nice and very thorough ode to JDub, including a whole bunch of our artists, like The Macaroons and Balkan Beat Box.
- Music magazine Blurt included Alicia of Girls in Trouble in their The Artists Have Spoken: Best of 2009 feature.
- JTA’s The Fundermentalist shed a little light on the recent Jdub/Nextbook partnership.
- The Forward listed Soulico and The Sway Machinery as picks on their 2009 Forward Fives list.
- The University of Oregon’s Oregon Voice had a great writeup on Soulico’s Exotic on the Speaker.
- DJ Anjali listed Soulico’s Exotic on the Speaker as part of his Top 5 of 2009 in the Portland Mercury.
- Digital City has a fantastic interview with Dave Schneider of The Macaroons — conducted by Corn Mo’!
- The Sway Machinery is one of LimeWire’s Best of 2009 Staff Picks!
- Jeremiah Lockwood, of The Sway Machinery, published an op-ed in The Forward about the band’s trip to Mali.
- Our friends over at Tablet Mag talk up The Macaroons in a podcast dedicated to the best family-friendly music of 2009.
Last but not least, I’ve posted more photos from Jewltide 7 under the cut! All credit goes to Dan Sieradski.
Girls In Trouble: “Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah”
The Hanukkah videos continue this week with a rendition of ”Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah” by Girls In Trouble.
Girls In Trouble’s debut CD is available in the JDub store.
The New York Times Does Hanukkah With JDub
Yesterday, JDub, The Sway Machinery and Girls in Trouble all got some great mentions in The New York Times’ T Magazine blog. You can check that entire article, “Not Your Bubby’s Hanukkah Music”, out HERE. Full text is also included after the jump.
“Alicia Jo Rabins’s tender version of the “other” dreidel song “Sivivon Sov Sov Sov” should be a Hanukkah standard. Her plucked violin and gorgeous voice could be a Jewish “Silent Night.” “The great thing is that even Hanukkah songs are in minor keys,” says Rabins, “which makes it easy to cover them with a creepy twist.” Rabins also plays in the great klezmer punk band Golem and has her own project, Girls in Trouble, which chronicles women in the Old Testament.”
Urban Outfitters Loves Girls in Trouble
Girls in Trouble is included in Urban Outfitter’s Best of 2009 series. You can check that out HERE!
Girls in Trouble on Largehearted Boy
Largehearted Boy just posted a great conversation between Alicia of Girls in Trouble and author Diana Spechler. You can check that HERE, though I’ve posted the full text below the cut. Enjoy!
Diana: That’s really interesting. Do you think of yourself as a poet first and a musician second, as a musician first and a poet second, or neither? Or does it change all the time?
Alicia: It changes all the time. You know, it’s not so different from the “Jewish artist” question; in a roomful of poets, I’m a poet. In a roomful of musicians, I’m a musician. Or, at any time, in any room, I can explain that I’m both. By the same token, I’m both a Jew and an artist. At Yom Kippur services, I may be a Jew first and an artist second, but at a show or a reading, I feel like I’m an artist first and a Jew second. I’m not talking order of importance, just of relevance. Maybe it’s easier to keep things in their categories, but that doesn’t work for me. It’s like a kind of bisexuality of the arts. Categories be damned!
Alicia Jo Rabins Talks to David Bazan for Magnet Mag
Today, Magnet Magazine posted a really wonderful conversation between Alicia Jo Rabins of Girls in Trouble and David Bazan (Pedro the Lion). You can read that HERE. I’ve also included full-text below the cut. Enjoy!
“You know what I’m saying; Do you think the more exploratory open-ended artist model ended up pushing your spiritual practice or interior life a little more toward the artistic model?
I don’t know if that’s directly where it came from or if I even got it from a third place that I can’t think of, that influenced both of those spheres simultaneously. Because I used to write songs a lot differently, too; early on, I was a little more deliberately didactic with the music I was making, so I feel like those shifts might have happened in the religious sphere and the artistic sphere at the same time. But it’s hard to know. I mean, is your religious identity one that’s really conflicted, or is there a religious expression that you engage in that you’re not particularly conflicted about?”
Girls in Trouble on Feminism
Alicia from Girls in Trouble is currently featured on Undomestic Goddess discussing her relationship to feminism. You can read it HERE. Full text after the jump!
“Part of the reason I started writing “Girls in Trouble,” these songs about women in the Bible, is because their characters are so complex and awesome. Some characters are deeply loyal, and others don’t hesitate to betray those closest to them. Some are meek, and some are totally out there. They all experience these crazy things in their lives, just like we do. I love that the Bible is actually so bloody and messy when you really read the stories…it’s really great literature, and although the society in it is obviously patriarchal, the women are intense, complex, and often quite bad-ass. I wanted to bring their stories to life and make sure that people hear them - not in a religious way but as great stories that can inspire us to fulfill our kick-ass potential!”
Who Else Speaks to You?
[Editor's note: a while back I asked Alicia of Girls in Trouble a series of odd questions about the new record, and the GIT vision at large, and this entry is the 2nd installment of her responses. Enjoy!]
Which other ladies speak to you in the way your characters do? What modern women inspire you musically? What about the ladies of the New Testament?
I’m still influenced by the books I loved as a child - Ramona Quimby, Little Women (which is where my parents got the Jo in my name), and especially Anne of Green Gables. They were also these amazing stories of strong girls who had real problems to deal with and had to kind of sync their own magical imaginations with the conflict and toughness around them. I feel that same energy from Lilith and Judith and Sarah. I think a lot of that spirit continues into adult womanhood, people just don’t always see it.
So real women in history, like Joan of Arc and Amelia Earhart, inspire me. And modern women who continue that spirit, for example, Tania Aebi who sailed around the world alone at age twenty and wrote an incredible memoir about it that I’ve read twice; or, musically, someone like Laurie Anderson or Meredith Monk; or MIA doing that Grammy performance on her due date; or recently travelling with Golem (I’m in the airport on my way back from a short European tour right now) and watching Annette bring her baby on tour.
My mom always taught me and my two sisters to say what we believe and not be intimidated by other people’s ideas of how we’re supposed to act. That sounds easy but for me it’s a constant process of finding the courage to really think for myself and do things my own way. So I’m inspired by people, both women and men, who refuse to accept other people’s ideas of how things are supposed to be done.
As for the New Testament, actually, I tried to write a song about Mary Magdalene for months. I really fell in love with her, but I couldn’t quite make the song come to fruition. Maybe for the next album.