Liner Notes: Miss Derringer, 'Winter Hill'

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SOMETIMES CLOTHES MAKE the band. The five members of Los Angeles' Miss Derringer dress up in costumes that mix western and military gear with gangland and juvenile delinquent accents, and singer Liz McGrath sports a wardrobe that resembles a goth-Weimar baton twirler/torch singer. In a city whose music scene favors milquetoast montage rock, Miss Derringer's a group that certainly stands out.

"Most of my friends are fashion designers," says McGrath, who's also a well-known artist and sculptor, "so I've been lucky enough to be surrounded by creative people who have great ideas for Miss Derringer. Of course we have an idea of how our 'look' should be, but talented people like our friends Adele Mildred, Winter Rosebudd, Aileen Duke, and Jared Gold have really helped us get things to the level we want them to be in that regard."

The band formed when McGrath met guitarist Morgan Slade at a going-away party. They started dating, and after he played her a song he had written, they made plans for a musical projects about a woman named Miss Derringer, who, Slade says, "was always in trouble with the law and on the wrong side of love."

The project soon blossomed into a full band renowned for its colorful and energetic live act, adding bass player Sylvain de Muizon (a lifelong friend of Slade's), drummer Cody James and guitarist Ben Shields.

"Visually, we try to have an evocative look," says Slade. "We want the live show and the images of us that are out there to all create a feeling or image that plays up to the themes we are dealing with and makes them bigger than they would be if we were all just up there in faded jeans."

Ultimately, Miss Derringer's unique fashion sense is just an extension of the music, which mixes and matches genres ingeniously. Their songs bristle with punk energy and old-school country sentiments, but the musicians add surf guitar licks, new wave melodies, girl-group vocals and Brill Building pop flourishes.

Their third album, "Winter Hill," is loosely conceived as music that might have been playing on the radio during the infamous Winter Hill Gang mob wars in Boston during the 1960s. So we asked the band members to give us a track-by-track tour of their most fully realized and accomplished record to date.

"Click Click, Bang Bang"
» DE MUIZON: I think it works perfectly as an opener. It grabs the audience right away.
» SLADE: We felt it really drives and sets the record off at a good slip. This record feels faster overall than our other two, and we thought it was good to establish that right away. It has a lot of elements that we like to draw on — Americana, roots music, blues, punk, and new wave. It sort of sounds like some cracked-out Broadway musical when the male vox come in on the chorus!

"Bulletproof Heart"
» DE MUIZON: This is the fastest pop song we've done to date. The funny thing is that we first worked on it in my loft downtown [where we rehearse]. It was a Saturday and my downstairs neighbor was having a big noise/experimental party, with a few bands playing long droning noise for hours. So we're rockin' out working on this super upbeat pop song and as soon as we stop playing, the slow ooze of weird, redundant noise would slowly start shaking the walls.
» EXPRESS: This song features Blondie drummer Clem Burke. How did you meet up with him?
» MCGRATH: We got lucky to meet him through our tour manager and even luckier that he wanted to play on our records. We toured with Blondie on the East Coast last summer, which was a huge thrill for me — Debbie Harry is a huge icon for me and is definitely a pioneer for women in punk and new wave.
» EXPRESS: Is the chorus — "He don't! He don't!" — a reference to the Shangri-Las' "Out in the Street"?
» SLADE: Ha ha, we didn't cop "Out in the Street" on this one, but the Shangri-La's are probably my all time favorite band. We ere lucky enough to meet Mary Weiss at a show we did in New York City and it was one of the only times I was too starstruck to talk!

"Black Tears"
» EXPRESS: Almost all of Miss Derringer's songs, including this one, deal with heartbreak and death.
» SLADE: The songs themselves are a sort of melodrama, but hopefully inside the pulp stories are themes and feelings that people can grab on to and agree with. Whether we like it or not, times of being heartbroken or sad are some of the most memorable moments in a life, and I think that being able to sing about these types of things while performing a show hopefully makes the audience sort of shake off any heaviness they might have going on. All of which sounds terribly grand and self-important, I suppose, but really we just want to rock people and we relate to darker themes better.

"Don't Leave Me Now"
» SLADE: We wanted to do a torch song, one that Liz could really belt on.
» DE MUIZON: We can't forget our country roots. Our old lead guitar player, Jimmy Wilsey [who plays with Chris Isaak], used to throw these barbecues and would play all these old country songs on the acoustic and put on the stereo Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, and Loretta Lynn. Even though we went a little faster this record, I always thought we should have a song like those old '60s country pop songs. I think that style is just as popular as ever; it's just no one is playing it anymore.

"Death By Desire"
» MCGRATH: A lot of the songs on this record are faster than our other songs, and more fully recorded and produced. I was hoping to have a song to sing on that was more stripped down, so that I could try to sing more expressively, in the vein of singers I really admire, like Patsy Cline — though she is a legend and I could probably sing for the next 20 years and not reach her levels!
» DE MUIZON: This song took the longest — and most drinking — to finally nail down. Really happy it has so many influences. There's even a small emo twist in there. The spoken-word intro is very girl group. The build-up guitars are kinda like the Cure.

"All the Pretty Things"
» SLADE: We have a duet on the last record called "Tonight I've Got a Bottle", where the female in the song meets a shady man in a bar and they decide to go off together in the absence of someone better to be with, because they want to drink and forget. I wanted to write a duet on this record where that doomed relationship reaches its ultimate destination. They never should have been together, and the things that they thought brought them together end up being the things they hate the most about each other. Sean Wheeler actually sings on both of them. I kind of see it in the same tradition — but maybe not same league! — as love-gone-south duets like "Jackson."

"Tell Me So"
» SLADE: Love and murder — or love and death — are probably two of the most powerful forces in people's lives. It seems natural to write songs about things that affect everyone and that everyone thinks about on an at least semi-regular basis; even if we do write about them in a sort of melodramatic neo-teen drama kind of a way, I think the themes are still strong ones.

"Heartbreaks & Razorblades"
» EXPRESS: Is this song, about a lover who commits suicide, based on a real event?
» SLADE: A good deal of the songs we write are based in some part on things that have happened, usually inspired by Liz, who has experienced a lot of interesting and devastating things. Specific events may not have happened, but the germ of each song is a genuine feeling or experience or memory that has been experienced.
» DE MUIZON: We learned a lot working with John Kastner [producer of the "Black Tears" EP] on "Heartbreaks" and "Black Tears." He added the crash cymbal on this song, which is what a lot of emo/punk bands use in their choruses. That gives this song the cool mix of punk/girl group/teenage drama tragedy. It modernizes the songs without taking away all the other old influences that were already in there.

"Drop Shot Dead"
» EXPRESS: This song literally quotes Roy Orbison's "In Dreams."
» SLADE: We love Roy! I love the percussion in his songs as well as his voice, of course. He had some of the craziest arrangements, drums, and orchestration I have ever heard. I wanted to try my feeble hand at something like that as well.
» DE MUIZON: This was the last song that Morgan wrote. I felt that we needed another girl group song because the record was getting a little too slow and heavy. We also wanted a faster Misfits-style song. It's our first tempo change we've ever done, and the two parts worked really well together.

"Mausoleum"
» DE MUIZON: This song is almost folk like in it's simplicity. The key thing was to keep it stripped down and let Liz's emotion come to the forefront. I always saw it as a closer. We tried moving it around but it just naturally kept drifting back to the end. We had cut the long ending, but since it's the end of the record we put it back in. An album influenced by a 60s Irish Mob couldn't end anywhere but the mausoleum.

» The Red & the Black, 1212 H St. NE; with Girl in a Coma; Tue., June 16, 8:30 p.m.; 202-399-3201.

Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner
Photos courtesy Nickel & Dime Records/Triple X