| DANBURY NEWS-TIMES 4/11/03 |
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Danbury News-Times April 11, 2003 Guillorn to play moody brand of rock in
Danbury by Laurel Tuohy I was relieved to find out, while interviewing Guillorn on Tuesday, that it was a joke and that the multi-talented musician’s humor is a sort of understated, ironic brilliance. Lys (it’s short for Lysbeth) Guillorn plays moody, interior rock that’s a little twangy and a lot melancholy — tempered with a pinch of hope. She releases her eponymous debut CD Saturday at Danbury’s Coffee Please. The disc features sparse arrangements on which Guillorn sings and plays rhythm, lead, and slide guitars, organ, bells, fuzz bass, melodica, and does drum programming duties. The low-fi/high-fi masterpiece was recorded on 16-track digital with a four track aesthetic, said the singer. Guillorn’s low, rich, confident voice doesn’t seem to try too hard and is built for the introspective songs she writes. “Know Thyself” would be a good tattoo for her to consider. My favorite track was the twangy, rambly alt-country “Impossible,” which opens “Sometimes I want what you can’t give/ You open up all the doors and leave all the lights on/ Excuse me, when it all settles in and there’s nothing on TV/ Will we ever watch reruns of “Chico and the Man?” Her weird and ironic turns-of-phrase definitely had me hitting the back scan button on my CD player. Another standout is the lone cover song on the disc. Guillorn belts out Johnny Thunder’s “You Can’t Put Your Arms ’Round A Memory.” The poignant ballad has a message so different from her songs that it’s jarring. “Feel so cold and all alone/ Baby you’re not at home/ And when I moan/ Big deal I’m still alone.” Though Guillorn said her favorite track on the 11-song disc “changes all the time,” “Little Wren” is always up there. I saw the raven-haired songstress perform a few months ago and “Wren” was the song that stuck with me, too. It’s a simple charming melody about a bird feeding her baby, but with more human undertones. She said that one and “Steel Pier” are the most often requested at her shows. Guillorn’s been playing music “her whole life.” She’s taken guitar and banjo lessons since she was 3. Though always musically inclined, she got her degree in English from Fairfield University. The singer’s musical tastes run to The Velvet Underground, Nick Drake, Patti Smith, Cowboy Junkies, Nina Simone, and Tim Buckley. But she credits her music’s signature “twang” to two things: her family and early exposure to greats such as Patsy Cline and Hank Williams I. As for her family, she says they’re “spaghetti western.” She laughingly recalls her Italian grandfather, a fisherman, having a penchant for bolo ties and Stetsons in his off-time while serenading Lys’ grandmother with Western love songs. Guillorn even named her record label “Little Cowgirl” but admits it’s a sort of romanticized notion of the West that attracts her. The “mythical appeal” of cowboys and cowgirls as opposed to the reality. She said when actually visiting Nashville a few years ago, it was disappointing. In addition to music, Lys makes visual art, such as the wonderful tea-stained quilt squares that were featured in Danbury’s Thirteen Gallery’s December show “Small Works.” The delicate silk-and-cotton wall hangings incorporated her love of music by featuring pictures of idols such as blues legends The Carter Family. By day, Guillorn prints black and white photos for Connecticut Photographic. The Trumbull native moved to Danbury after college to be a part of its music scene. “The Gasball (music festival) was a big influence, as was (the coffeehouse that is now Coffee Please) Seattle Espresso.” She mentions Bruce Wingate (of International Brunch Mummies) and the now-defunct Pac-Men (of which her fiancée was a member) as favorite local acts. Before going strictly solo, Guillorn was a guitar player for Danbury’s chamber-punk group Jargon Society from 2000-2001. JS was a cool, experimental, mostly-female quartet that broke up for geographic reasons. When asked about the pervasive sadness in her music, she said “it just comes out sad” and “different shades of melancholy are my motivating factor” to create. She likes performing the song “Throne” live because “it’s devastatingly sad and I like to create those sad spaces with other people — it’s an acknowledgment of our humanity and of the fragility of life.” She even admits to being a bit gothic in high school — well, as goth as one can be while wearing her grandfather’s hand-me-down bolo ties. Also on the bill is Boston’s The Ryan Affair, a
one-man band which Guillorn calls “art/funk/rap/rock,” the project of
children’s book author Ryan SanAngelo. |