The electric guitar quickly slinks its ways through the background.
After a moment or two, it gathers momentum under the whisper of a woman’s voice; a violin enters the fray, hesitant. A drum kit roils.
Now comes the sound that bridges. “Hold me tightly/ ‘Cause I might fall through,” the woman coos and with her resolution, everything falls into place – the drums, the ascending guitar, the moans of the violin – over a repeating measure of harmonic notes.
This is “Snow’s Cut Snapshot,” a masterclass in post-rock construction taken from Sonora Pine’s sophomore LP, appropriately titled II. The record, cut to lathe in 1996, is getting the remaster and re-release treatment from Ryley Walker’s Husky Pants Records. The release date, announced this week, is Nov. 11 – Armistice Day, a day to lay down our arms and remember.
Tara Jane O’Neil is modest to a T.
The California-based singer-songwriter, who first left her mark on the American underground with post-rockers Rodan in the early and mid-‘90s, remembers Walker contacting her out of the blue about the LP. She was game for the re-issue, though she remembers little about the period from which it was culled.
“Is this actually good music? I don’t know,” laughed O’Neil, in a recent conversation with Spectrum Culture from the Ventura County, California home she shares with her wife Jmy James Kidd, a dancer. “I think it sounds really good and the remaster is fun because I hear parts that make the whole compositions coalesce … I think the remaster has really opened it up.”
O’Neil has been doing the full-time musician/artist routine – writing records, playing and staging shows, subsisting off the byproduct of her imagination – for decades now, and has an inventive and eclectic solo oeuvre to show for it. But even she is prone to hindsight.
She joked that Rodan essentially played the same 10 songs every day for years – “It’s tattooed on my brain,” O’Neil laughed. But, with the Sonora Pine, the recollections are sparse.
That sparseness of memory seems to be a shared condition. When O’Neil called bandmate Samara Lubelski about it, she was stunned to find out Lubelski, too, harbored few memories of the period.
“Neither of us have any recollection of recording [II] or rehearsing it,” she laughed.
She does, though, remember writing “Snow’s Cut Snapshot.” “Any of the other stuff?” she added “No idea.”
O’Neil’s primary post-Rodan outfit, Retsin, was recording in the mid-90s and O’Neil also played alongside drummer Kevin Coultas in a line-up of Come, for whom Sonora Pine opened.
“I think I was just writing on the road, I don’t know,” O’Neil said. “In my 20s, I was such a road-hog, writing lots of music with lots of people … It remains this ephemeral thing for me.”
“It’s been cool to listen to [II] and say, ‘Yeah, this is good,’” she added. “It’s still a little mystifying to me – but I still stand by the music.”
O’Neil does remember the final Sonora Pine show, an opening spot for The Kelley Deal 6000 at Sudsy Malone’s Rock ‘n Roll Laundry & Bar, a joint rock venue/laundromat in Cincinnati. As they drove through the night from Ohio back to their native Louisville, bassist Todd Cook played a tape of Bjork’s Homogenic and O’Neil had fast food for the last time – or at least the last time to date.
The food in question? Taco Bell. “It was beyond disgusting,” she lamented.
The pandemic has been hard on O’Neil, who found herself putting down the guitar and relying on other modes of expression. This spring, though, she got back in the saddle, playing bass alongside Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Steve Gunn and playing five solo shows – including one with an acoustic guitar and no mic. In her words, it was TJO “just in a room.”
She has shows in NYC in the works now, and the beginnings of a record or new project with Marisa Anderson, a regular contributor. Since 2012 – shortly after O’Neil moved to L.A. – O’Neil and her wife have been seeking out parallels between music and dance; a collection of instrumentals O’Neil wrote for Kidd, titled Music for Movement Vol. 1, is out now.
O’Neil continues to grapple with her identity as a performer, producer and visual artist.
“’Okay, what does that mean? What does it mean for Tara Jane O’Neil to perform?’” she asked herself, rhetorically. “I wish I could come up with some kind of different moniker to capture that.”
And then, of course, there was COVID-19, which lead O’Neil to become a little self-reflexive.
“Things are still kinda getting figured out, in terms of how we musicians do our music,” O’Neil told Spectrum Culture.” For me, at least, during an imposed break, other breakthroughs came through. It’s just that the thread was lost during the pandemic.” — Justin Vellucci, Spectrum Culture, Sept. 6, 2022
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