What the people want

Music
Freakwater brings quirky, dark alt-country to Portsmouth

Janet Bean and Catherine Irwin, the vocalists and founders of the alt-country group Freakwater, admit that their music is a little dark. It’s not for lack of trying, though. Take the first track on their latest album, “Scheherazade.” Titled “What the People Want,” it was, Irwin says, an honest effort to write the sort of catchy, pop song audiences love. It just got Freakwatered.

“A friend of mine said, ‘Why don’t you write the kinds of songs people actually like?’ I don’t know what that is, so I did some research and came up with several theories about what makes music popular. And I was showing (the song) to Janet, and she pointed out that the song is on a banjo, which is definitely not on the list of what people want, and it’s about a woman being raped and thrown down a well,” Irwin says.

“We just take the most painful, most horrible song … and that’s our model,” Bean says, laughing.

But Irwin insists it was an honest attempt. “I got there by studying … that this is what people want: repetition, being in A-minor, a sing-along. And that was just filtered through my internal processor.”

That exchange — the banter, the carefully considered songwriting, and a fondness for roots music’s dark valleys — is Freakwater in a nutshell. Irwin and Bean are long-time collaborators, and part of the joy of discovering Freakwater is stumbling across a friendship that’s played out across 10 albums and almost three decades. “Scheherazade” is their first album in 10 years, and to celebrate, they’re hitting the road. One of their first stops is in Portsmouth at 3S Artspace on Monday, Feb. 13, with openers Jaye Jayle and Drunken Prayer.

“We’d always been planning on getting back to the studio,” Bean says. “It’s not like we had decided not to; it’s just that our process has grown a little more complex over time and takes a little bit longer.”

Freakwater’s sound is best described as working-class gothic roots music — impressive harmonies from Bean and Irwin, mournful fiddles and banjos, and lyrics that find the light by digging through darkness. There’s a sort of black humor hidden in their songs, and it’s no surprise that when Bean and Irwin are on the phone together, the self-deprecating quips flow freely.

“There’s always a thread through the things I write, this weird strand of DNA that completes them.” — Janet Bean of Freakwater

In the 10 years between albums, the band toured frequently, Irwin says, and both she and Bean worked on their own solo projects. “We don’t feel that bad … we were just giving other people a chance to make records,” she says.

“We wanted to let the kids have an opportunity to get in there,” Bean jokes.

Irwin and Bean have been singing together since the 1980s, when they made their debut at a venue that was a “strip club in the day and a punk rock venue in the evening and had an open mic in the twilight between those two,” Bean says. The first song they sang together was, possibly, a Tammy Wynette song, or maybe “Pistol Packin’ Momma.”

“I wonder if we really played it, because neither of us really know that song,” Irwin says.

“It’s in the legend,” Bean replies.

Irwin lives in Louisville, Ky., and Bean in Chicago, where she writes, sings, and plays drums for the rock band Eleventh Dream Day. They have their own solo careers and other projects, but Freakwater remains a constant presence.

Bean says that some of the songs she writes are specifically for Freakwater, while some are intended for various other projects — except sometimes they end up being Freakwater songs anyway. “The Asp and the Albatross,” the first single off “Scheherazade,” was originally written for another project, Bean says. When that collaboration didn’t work out, she repurposed it.

“It’s a really strange little waltz kind of thing, and I thought, I’m just going to see if I can put this in a different form, and it worked for Freakwater,” she says. “There’s always a thread through the things I write, this weird strand of DNA that completes them.”

On “Scheherazade,” Bean and Irwin cover a wealth of strange territory. “The Asp and the Albatross” is straight country rock, while “Bolshevik and Bollweevil” is a mournful number about a lost family farm. (“That song to me, in my delirium, I think should get us to FarmAid,” Irwin jokes.) “Falls of Sleep” is a slice of twang-tinged noir and “Skinny Knee Bone” is a bit of mellow pop, insanely catchy and surprisingly laid-back.

“I think ‘Take Me with You’ is a really sweet song to sing,” Bean says of one of the album’s tracks. “It’s such a beautiful, perfect melody and it just works really well with the two of us singing.”

At the center of the songs are Bean and Irwin’s harmonies. And though they write for each other and sing together, they definitely don’t write songs together. When the Wall Street Journal hosted a stream of “Scheherazade” this month before it was released, Irwin was quoted as saying that she’d rather have Bean hold her hair back while throwing up than be in the room writing a song with her.

It’s a joke, of course, but it’s an apt metaphor for their friendship and collaboration. “When I’m writing a song,” Irwin says, “I hear Janet’s voice on it, but I never know exactly what she’s going to sing. And to me, that’s a fun process, much more fun than writing a song with somebody else.”

Freakwater performs Monday, Feb. 15 at 7:30 p.m. at 3S Artspace, 319 Vaughan St., Portsmouth. Jaye Jayle and Drunken Prayer open. Tickets are $16, available at 3sarts.org.

photo at top of page by Tim Furnish