Sarah White has served as a sort of de facto first lady of Charlottesville rock & roll since her first record, 1997’s All My Skies Are Blue. It sometimes feels like there’s not much around town that doesn’t in some way, shape or form, draw on White’s contributions since. But over the past few years White’s local appearances have slowed to a trickle. The rare sighting of White onstage came in the form of the (All New) Acorn Sisters, a duo she formed with Sian Richards, a local actress and founding member of the Performers Exchange Project.
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Sarah White and Michael Bishop’s respective musical backgrounds make them an unlikely pair, but White’s new band is headed in a direction her earlier stuff only hints at: punk. |
Through 2008’s Sweetheart EP, White has waited for perfection while being the first to admit that it’s the imperfections—the rasp to her voice, the punk gallop beneath her songs—that make her music so…perfect.
It begs the question: What is Sarah White waiting for?
The answer, as it turns out, may have something to do with GWAR. Or, rather, Michael Bishop, who spent six years playing bass as Beefcake the Mighty in the Richmond-based band, and another half-decade in Kepone. The unlikely duo joined forces last summer, along with a whole new cast (more on that later), when “I loaned you my nail clippers,” White said to Bishop when we met last week.
“That’s right,” says Bishop, straight-faced.
“And we started hitting it off, chatting and stuff. That’s how it started really.”
As it was with GWAR, you have to fight to get the real story: White picked up Bishop and new drummer Stuart Gunter (also of Richmond’s Wrinkle-Neck Mules) as a sort of package deal. The pair played together in Tom Peloso’s band the Virginia Sheiks, who shared a stage with the Pearls on a few occasions. But The Sheiks isn’t an all-or-nothing deal—Peloso is busy playing guitar for Modest Mouse—so White invited Bishop and Gunter to join her band.
Bishop agreed, saying, “I liked her stuff a lot.”
“My aura,” White corrects him.
The occasion? Peter Agalesto, founder of Nelson County’s Monkeyclaus music hub, and bride-to-be Sarah Pope invited the Pearls to play at their wedding party. White’s recent guitarist Ted Pitney was out of town, so she asked Swiss Butler (also of Vevlo Eel) to fill in. There was some magic. “I never really thought of the Pearls as wedding party music,” she says. “But they loved it. From 9-year-old girls to 90-year-old women, they were all screaming ‘Fightin’ Words,’” a song from 2006’s White Light. “I was in heaven.”
When Pitney came back, Butler already knew the songs. There was no reason not to have two guitarists, so the new Pearls started the long process of honing their three-guitar attack, which is the hallmark of the new lineup; Bishop says the electric guitar overkill helps to foreground Sarah’s punk influence. That punk influence belied the formal attire the full band wore at its first proper gig, at Birdlips’ farewell show at The Southern last month. Sources say that Bishop looked as nice in a suit as he did in the colossal legionnaire costume he wore in GWAR. With two electric guitars to contend with, Gunter, at the drums, hammers out the soft strokes that characterized the Pearls of the past.
Encouraged, they packed up a couple days later and brought their act to Richmond, the second with a full lineup. It was “a tough gig.” “Partly because we are who we are now,” Bishop says, talking about feeling old—not having been in a famous band. “It’s a little bit hard to go do shows where you provide the P.A., and you’re playing at a restaurant,” he says.
White agrees. “I hope we make a record and we hit it, but I’m not going to do it in a stinky, disgusting way.”
“We’re kind of—I don’t know if I would use the word ‘spoiled,’” says Bishop. “Let me put it like this. If we do it, we’re going to have some style, and we’re going to be comfortable.”
So that’s in a sense what we’ve been waiting for. “We’re just trying to get our mechanisms in place, for one thing,” says Bishop. “First you have to kind of articulate what you are.” White and Bishop both seem reinvigorated by the process of polishing the new Pearls. “Everyone’s caught up on all the old songs, and we’ve got some new ones in the hopper,” White says. “Which is exciting, and a long time coming.” They’ve also been recording. Bishop points his finger at an electrical outlet and says the early stages have been like “taking your finger out of the plug.”
While White’s songs don’t at first listen have much to do with the kind of music Bishop made with GWAR and Kepone, he says that he’s got plenty of space to “stretch out his legs” in the Pearls. “This is the first thing I’ve done in six years with any momentum, where I feel like I’m putting my foot back into this pool that involves talking to people, and conceiving of myself as a musician.”
Whatever the finished product sounds like, there’s fresh confidence in White’s voice. “I change from record to record, and it might be some quiet, creepy solo stuff, or it might be some total pop jewel nuggets with this great band,” White says. “I think that when people are fans they like it all. Maybe because of the heart it’s coming from.”
