dirty linen

Singer/songwriter Annie Gallup is a woman with a vivid imagination. Her music is full of stream-of-consciousness narratives, often populated by a cast of lonely characters who emerge with stories to tell from late-night streets, desperate romances, quiet countrysides, and second-rate circuses. On stage she's a wide-eyed woman who sings with a mischievous smile and sideways glances, sometimes with a breathless urgency in her voice, sometimes with an audible grin, her guitar pulsing like a racing heartbeat, with bursts of spoken-word poetry at points along the way. Her music can be both sensuous and raw, gentle and edgy, dark and yet filled with a life-affirming, ironic humor.

Gallup grew up in the university city of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Talking about her music last February at the Folk Alliance conference in Cleveland, she described Ann Arbor as "a lively place to be in the 60s. It had a great folk scene, and I really did grow up at The Ark." She started playing guitar at the age of 10, trying to copy licks from Doc Watson and Mississippi John Hurt records. "John Hurt was kind of my pivotal moment — for some reason that old blues stuff really grabbed me when I was learning to play," she recalled, and added with a smile that her songwriting career began at the same time. "I played seriously! I made stuff up. I grew up in a really creative family — my folks were artists and craftsmen — and it never occurred to me that songs were something you had to think about writing. I just picked up my guitar and there they were." At the same time, she kept her music to herself. "I played since I was 10, but most of the time it's been just secretly for myself in my room. And even though I was writing the whole time I was a teenager, I never played those songs for anybody. It never even occurred to me."

She did, however, find a more public creative expression in dancing, studying both ballet and modern dance, and working with a local dance company as both a choreographer and a performer. An art major in college, she then worked for about 10 years as a metalsmith, specializing in intricate little sculptures whose structure probably foreshadowed the detailed nature of her songs, and she also held an assortment of odd jobs, including sailmaking, baking, and working as a massage therapist. She finally started playing music for others in 1988, while living in Seattle: "I started traveling a lot for work, and that's when my guitar became my main creative outlet, because it was portable and my studios weren't."

Gallup attributes her distinctive style to her late start as a professional songwriter. "The style that I do, the sort of spoken stories, it kind of grew out of isolation. I wasn't really listening to music or interacting with songwriters; I was just kind of doing this thing in my own little isolated culture. I was reading a lot. I think my style is influenced by novelists rather than musicians — Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Michael Ventura, Margaret Lawrence." Her word-rich narratives often take the form of glimpses of emotional moments in a character's life that draw listeners in like the best short stories, and often leave the outcome unresolved.

Her guitar playing alternates between percussive fingerpicking and spare, careful, almost minimalist accompaniment. "That's probably the isolation thing, too," she explained. "I was pretty good at the John Hurt stuff when I went underground, and I started just running with it. And I had a lot of fundamentals; I knew the thumb and finger thing. So it was probably just not thinking about anybody listening, and exploring." On stage these days she usually performs solo with an electric guitar and utilizes a lot of reverb and tremolo effects. "I've been sort of dying to hear that sound for years, and I finally found the system that works — it's a vintage 1959 Epiphone electric and a vintage Fender amp."

Although Gallup's narratives often take strange twists, they always have the ring of truth, which inevitably leads a listener to wonder how much is real. "I think I work like a fiction writer," she said. "Everything is fair game. Sometimes there'll be a real life story that I want to tell, but I'm not faithful to the facts whatsoever. I'm trying to tell a story. I'm using a lot of information that I get firsthand, but I'm composting it. What I usually do is just write pages and pages of prose and let my brain run on its longest possible leash. Then I use that as my encyclopedia. I go back and I find things, little internal rhymes, interesting phrases, interesting ideas, and edit them out.

"I do spend a lot of time writing fruitlessly. I do sit down to write in the hopes that when inspiration comes, my pen will be actually on the page. I think the more time you spend with your pen on the paper, the more likely you are to catch it when it comes by." But some songs come to her in a sudden flash. " 'Three Photographs' was one of those. I was out for a walk and the whole song sort of unraveled as I walked."

Some of her songs feature plot twists so non-linear that part of their fascination comes from figuring where they're going. "I think it's sort of in the process," she said. "A lot of times when I start a song I have no idea where it's going to go. I'll have just some little chink in the great wall that I start with, and then I just pick away at it. The song 'James' is pretty meandering; I had no idea where that was going. As a writer I just had the first two lines, and I was so curious where the story went that it compelled me to stay with it."

In 1994 Gallup released her first CD, Cause and Effect, originally on her own Flyaway Hair label. A second disc, called Backbone, appeared in 1996 on Prime CD, followed in 1998 by the complex, mesmerizing Courage My Love. Her latest album, Steady Steady Yes, was recorded solo in a New York studio, and it radiates an informal intimacy.

"Having done a really produced record inspired the next one," she explained. "When I perform live, I have a lot of latitude for interpreting as I go on. I play with the phrasing, and songs will take on a completely different meaning to me night after night when I play them. A song like 'Circle' — some nights it's funny and some nights it's really sad. And I just wanted to do that with a live recording. I wanted to have that kind of latitude to interpret. Where when you're doing a band record, it has to be pretty rehearsed and arranged."

Last year Gallup moved back to Ann Arbor, after having spent the previous few years living in North Carolina and Massachusetts. "I moved back to my home town mostly because my dad was there," she explained. "He was kind of the 50s dad who worked too hard and never got to be home, so I just didn't want to miss out on getting to know him."

Her next big project is theatrical, which seems like a natural outgrowth of her expressive stage personality: "My project for the last year or so and ongoing for the next year, probably, is to put together a piece for theater, basically do what I do, but arrange it so that it's a piece, rather than a sequence of songs, so that it segues. Put together a performance piece that I can perform in theaters, like a one-person show.

This is the full text from Dirty Linen #89
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