Paula Frazer
About
Folk music has been at the heart of Paula Frazer’s music since her days as an Arkansas teenager recording Joni-inspired cassette demos in her bedroom.
Yet when she arrived in San Francisco at the age of 18 on the cusp of a new decade, the singer initially gravitated towards the city’s rabid punk scene, helping form the legendary feminist punk group Frightwig and playing a brief role as a momentary vocalist for an incubatory version of Faith No More. However, Frazer was more interested in the local music scene that existed beyond the parameters of the Bay Area’s thrash and punk communities.
“I really gravitated towards local bands like Toiling Midgets and MDC than the punk and metal stuff in San Francisco,” she admits. “I did love Flipper as well. And the band The Sleepers, who started out as punk but were much moodier on their later albums.”
But it was when Frazer formed Tarnation when she truly staked her claim in the pantheon of modern rock as one of the architects of the “alternative folk” sound. And when the group, off the heels of their painfully out-of-print 1993 debut I’ll Give You Something To Cry About, signed to the influential indie label 4AD, so too did the singer establish herself as a voice as essential to the imprint’s distinct feel as her cosmic sister Elizabeth Fraser had been as the captain of 4AD’s flagship act the Cocteau Twins. The release of Tarnation’s 1995 masterpiece Gentle Creatures cemented such sentiments.
“I loved the Cocteau Twins and the Pixies,” she remembers. “But I wasn’t going around looking at labels. I knew musicians, but I didn’t know enough about labels. But 4AD were pretty different from most labels in the way that people would just buy whatever they put out, and not necessarily even know the music all that well. There are fans to this day of the whole 4AD and Ivo Watts thing. And Mark Kozelek, when he was on 4AD as Red House Painters, liked my music and got me in touch with some people there, who agreed to go ahead and put out Gentle Creatures. But at the time when I was first talking to them, I didn’t really know about the mystique they had.”
A year following the group’s second 4AD LP Mirador, Frazer opted to drop the name Tarnation and venture out for the first time as a solo artist. And since the release of her 2001 solo debut Indoor Universe, she would switch off intermittently between adding and subtracting her famous handle, releasing two more album as Paula Frazer with 2003’s A Place Where I Know and 2005’s Leave The Sad Things Behind and another two as Paula Frazer and Tarnation with 2007’s Now It’s Time and the 2014 In Some Time EP.
And for her eighth album, the singer’s first full-length in a decade, Paula continues to keep the Tarnation name alive with What Is and Was. The product of a five-year process filled with stops and starts including dealing with health issues, the singer’s eighth studio endeavor is not only a labor of love but also a statement of survival. Working alongside a solid lineup of collaborators that include longtime friends Patrick Main on keyboards and Greg Moore of West Coast folk outfit The Moore Brothers, What Is and Was is by far the most realized work of Frazer’s 35-year career in music.
“I like using the name Tarnation when I have a band,” she said. “I always liked doing that. And I have a band now who I’ve played with for three or four years with the same members. But it’s also nice to use the name Paula Frazer, too, so I can play solo if I want. I’d feel too weird to do that under the name Tarnation.”
What Is And Was, on the strength of such haunting, evocative songs as “Western Star”, “Like A River” and “North Wind”, signifies a strong new direction in the dark, foreboding country rock Paula Frazer has been perfecting since 1992. In many ways, one can consider this album a late career comeback in the vein of Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road or Black Cadillac by Roseanne Cash, a collection of songs that boldly reaffirms the artist’s place as one of the great change makers in her craft. Yet in spite of the layers of heart and electricity which have been added to the music of What Is And Was over the course of its five year journey, the genesis of these new songs is very much parallel to the way by which a Young Paula first began recording her music living on the edge of seventeen in the American South.
“I did all the songs at home on my eight track machine,” she reveals. “It's an old one from the mid-1980s. And then it was downloaded into a digital format, which was where all the other parts were added. But I wanted the heart of these songs to be rawer sounding and give it some real earthiness.”
What Is And Was is out now on Red 180g Translucent Vinyl wrap in a Gatefold cover on New High Recordings.
