Tarnation

Fernwood at Big Sur
photo Danielle Rubi

Tarnation
What's with the who in Tarnation

interview by E.J. Iannelli

It's been a full ten years since Mirador, the third (or second, not counting the limited debut) and final (at the time) Tarnation full-length, but any excitement over Paula Frazer's decision to reform her melancholic folk-rock outfit is a bit misplaced. Tarnation, as Frazer herself will be the first to point out, can never be reformed because it wasn't a proper band to begin with. It's an abstract idea, a name applied – arbitrarily, you might say – to a shifting ensemble of musicians. The sole constant among the line-up is Frazer herself.

Tarnation isn't the only vehicle for Frazer's work. She has put out three solo LPs – Indoor Universe (2001), A Place Where I Know (2003) and Leave the Sad Things Behind (2005) – in the decade since Mirador appeared, and she's made guest appearances on projects ranging from a Bread tribute to a Cornershop album and even movie soundtracks. But the distinction between Paula Frazer as herself and Paula Frazer as Tarnation is slight, and any line separating them is one that is blurry at best. Even some of the band members who regularly perform in her solo act were the ones who came into the studio to record Now It's Time, the newest Tarnation release, which, to complicate matters still further, has been issued under the name Paula Frazer and Tarnation, as if the two were somehow separate.

" I didn't plan on it. I just wanted to use the name again," Frazer shrugs. "I've had so many questions about Tarnation and why they broke up and why they reformed. It's like they don't understand that Tarnation is a concept, it's not really a band. I just decided I'd use the name again, that's all." Though she's lived in San Francisco for years, her voice has retained the soft countrified lilt she acquired during her childhood in the tiny and colorfully named towns of Sautee Nacoochee, GA and Eureka Springs, AR.

St Malo, France Feb. 2007
photoby Cecile

"It went back and forth. For a while it was Paula Frazer. Then it was Tarnation. Then it was Paula Frazer and Tarnation. Whatever way you look at it, this is my third record as Tarnation but my seventh record overall. Makes sense to me," she laughs. "Yeah, some people might be confused about it being a band, but then I've always played with different people. I was trying to make a list the other day of all the people who I've played with. It came to something like seven different drummers, four to five different bass players. It's funny because San Francisco is a real transient sort of place. People come and go. People don’t stay around."

All the same, Frazer has managed to find a few people who have stayed on in San Francisco and she's invited some of them to take part in her music on repeat occasions, regardless of the moniker she happens to be using at the time. Oranger keyboardist Patrick Main, for example, a longtime Frazer collaborator, scored the exquisite string arrangements on Now It's Time and played pump organ on "August's Song," the languid and painfully beautiful Red House Painters-like opener, and "Bitter Rose" a mix of ragtime and sombre country. And Carrie Bradley, another non-transient Bay Area musician and veteran of Frazer's solo band (not to mention The Breeders and her own band, Ed's Redeeming Qualities), played violin on the album. But a hefty portion of Now It's Time was put together by Frazer acting alone.

" I guess it's a little bit of both. Lots of stuff I did myself," she says. "I recorded most of it at home on my Tascam quarter-inch 8-track. Some of the songs it's just me playing drums and everything else. But there are so many great musicians here. There's not really a shortage of people I could ask to do it. I'm lucky there are so many people. I don't have the money to bring somebody from out of town. And if somebody asks me to record, I make time for it."

The extent of Frazer's single-handedness in writing and recording Now It's Time might make it seem like more of a solo record than the last one that appeared exclusively under her own name. "I suppose it seems like a Tarnation record to me because it's sad," she says, though she isn't eager to name the specific causes. "It was a bad breakup. San Francisco is a city, but it's also a small town. So I can't say who or what. But it was in the summer of 2005 that I wrote a lot of the songs. I think they kind of go together pretty well. Hopefully they don't all sound the same. I chose a more hopeful song at the end because I didn't want it to end so sadly."

" It's kind of funny. My last record was titled Leave the Sad Things Behind, and then this one is so sad. But I just thought, 'Now it's time to record these songs and put them to rest,'" which partially explains how she arrived at the title of the disc. "I didn't want one that was too wordy or too weird, and that seemed kind of right. It's kind of a retro title. There must be hundreds of records with the title Now It's Time, especially records from the '60s, which is where I get some of my inspiration."

Radio VPRO, Amsterdam Feb. 2007

Abadon Russian Radio Complex, East Berlin Feb. 2007
photo by Dana Schechter

Frazer's inspiration has been well documented in reviews, press kits and interviews. Her MySpace page features a list of influences larger than most people's record collections. On Now It's Time she steers closer to Mazzy Star and Madder Rose than she has before, though without pulling up her roots in classic pedal steel-tinged country – a sound that for better or worse has earned her countless Patsy Cline comparisons. But for all these referential touchstones, she has created a characteristic sound that, if not immediately identifiable as either solo Paula Frazer or Tarnation, at least bears her personal watermark.

" Well, I don’t sound like a lot of people because I'm influenced by so many different things," Frazer says. "I love Gene Clark" – she'll later go into a lengthy homage devoted solely to Clark – "and The Byrds, but I also love The Carpenters, Billie Holiday, Vashti Bunyan and newer stuff like Brightblack Morning Light and Greg Ashley. And there's the obvious stuff like Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, but I also like David Lynch movie scores and western soundtracks like Ennio Morricone."

The better part of her list consists of the staples of American music, and that general trend is something that's reflected in her own work. The regular use of pedal steel alone places Frazer somewhere in or around one very definite geographical region of the United States; that is to say, it would be hard to imagine a kind of music so steeped in Americana, so quintessentially American, coming from anywhere else in the world. Which is why it's odd, even disappointing, to hear Frazer speak of lukewarm receptions in the country where she was born and raised, and whose various forms of music she distills so well in her own.

"I haven't really had much luck in the States," she says. "Playing in Europe is tough, though, because it's so expensive to go there. I just get better shows over there, better guarantees. In the States there's, like, no guarantees, and people don't publicize shows very well. I don't know why. I remember one time we had a show in, like, Arizona, and people said, "Oh, are you playing tonight?" And then we see they have our poster sitting on the manager's desk."

It probably hasn't helped Frazer that she never took Tarnation beyond that club in Arizona. But even a West Coast tour didn't offer enough encouragement to bother going further east. "We went on tour, and just hardly anybody came out. We lost so much money. We went cheap, too. We stayed with friends and still came back $1000 in debt. When I was on Reprise, they had talked about doing a wider tour, because they had money to lose," but the label's talk was never put into action. So instead she continues to concentrate on Europe, having toured the festival circuit just a week before this interview, and with plans to return for dates in Germany, France, Belgium, Spain and England in late April.

The Make Out Room, SF MArch 2006

Seattle October, 2005
photo by Des Shea

"It's strange, but that's sort of the way it is. Maybe the association with 4AD (Tarnation's label for 1995's Gentle Creatures and Mirador) helps me out. It's more of a European label that people over there remember. I was with them for a certain time period, and I sang with Cornershop and that sort of stuff."

" I'm not really sure what's going on. I just don't think that there's that much of the kind of thing we're doing. I guess there used to be, but now people just want to party. In Europe people want to listen. The US is strange right now. We've had so many years of having this horrible president… I don't know. Maybe people aren't quite as romantic as they are in Europe. I guess that's a huge blanket statement. But, no, in Portland (OR) we do good, and in bigger towns, but it's still been tough. Everything's so widespread, so far away. Or maybe it's just that a lot of people who listen to my music aren't the ones who go out too much. Maybe people who listen to my records are homebodies."

When she does tour, whether it's at home or abroad, the Tarnation Frazer assembled for the studio won't be the same Tarnation she takes on the road. She'll be picking up ad hoc members in Berlin, Germany, for her next gig, but the months following her eventual return are as uncertain as her touring band line-up.

" I don't know what I'm going to do when I come back from Europe," she says. There's a hint of genuine worry in her voice, and she sighs at the tentativeness of everything. "I manage to get by. I do odd jobs, and I also make woven things for shops. I enjoy doing it but it's not a big money maker.

" I've been writing some new songs," she says. "Maybe I'll have enough for a new record in the fall." This appears to be the pattern in Frazer's life of late: another predicament, another album. But so far this pattern has yielded fine results, and besides, Frazer seems to prefer seeing how things develop rather than spend time planning for an unpredictable future. "I'll probably use the same name, Paula Frazer and Tarnation," she says. "But even that could change."