BeatRoute Magazine AB Edition - March 2020

SHINE
A LIGHT
ALLOW U.S. GIRLS TO
REINTRODUCE HERSELF
If Heavy Light, the eighth and latest studio album by
U.S. Girls, had a thesis, it would be that you can’t move
forward without first looking behind. The 13-track LP by
Meg Remy’s acclaimed experimental post-pop project
plays like a shifting gaze between the person Remy
was on past records, and who she’s evolved into on her
newest release.
The nostalgia infused in the sounds and messages of
each track is refreshing. More often than not, the swift
emergence of adulthood sweeps in before you even realize
that your adolescence has been left behind. Instead, Heavy
Light chronicles Meg Remy taking the time to share a fond
goodbye with earlier iterations of herself, all while stepping
into a new era of her artistry.
“A lot of the record is about looking back,” Remy explains
at a Bloor West coffee shop on a chilly February afternoon
in Toronto. “People always say, ‘If I could go back, I would
do this,’ or ‘if I knew what I know now, here’s what I would
do.’ I don’t think that’s really true.” While peeking from
beneath her shaggy, flaxen bangs, she speaks softly, but
with comfortable conviction.
But despite acknowledging that you can’t go back, she
spends much of her new album looking back.
If Remy’s last project, In a Poem Unlimited (2018), was her
meditation on anger, then Heavy Light is her reckoning with
the past–before her abbreviation and her alias were born.
Before she was U.S. Girls, she was Meg Remy, and
before Meg Remy, she was Meghan Ann Uremovich. “I
come from a really specific (background),” she says of
her upbringing. “I’m American and I’m white. I was raised
Catholic and went to private school.” Having recognized
that elements of her identity afford certain privileges, her
storytelling has changed. “I can’t speak to anybody else’s
experience. All I can do is present mine and listen when
others present theirs.”
In 2011, Artforum’s Andrew Hultkran concluded that
Remy was “a woman who clearly spends a lot of time in her
apartment with the shades drawn.” But a decade later, this
assertion is less true than ever. “I wouldn’t have finished the
record if I was alone,” Remy admits. During our chat Remy
explained that she chose to record the album live with a full
band and backing vocalists. She even tapped her husband,
musician Max Turnbull, to do the mixing and mastering.
The collaborative spirit on Heavy Light is a true sign of
how Remy’s approach to her craft has shifted. “To make
something with 15 amazing people, to hear what they want
and incorporate it into my thing so that it’s not just about
me, is so different from being alone in a bedroom.” Though
her creative process still “always starts there,” over a
decade into her career as a solo artist she’s comfortable
letting other people in. “Now I can turn away from [the
bedroom], or let other people be reflected in there.”
Other voices are reflected on the album too — literally.
Tracks on Heavy Light are woven together by interludes
that Remy likens to sonic collages, where she and her
collaborators answer deeply personal questions. Between
tracks, they serve as palette cleansers, where Remy’s
personal narrative is interjected by voices sharing advice
that they would give to their teenage selves, the most
hurtful thing that they have been told, and the colour of
their childhood bedrooms.
The revelations on the interludes and the tracks were
intentionally cathartic. The writing and recording of Heavy
Light aligned with Remy’s introduction to somatic therapy,
which she describes as “a body-based therapy that is all
about clearing the nervous system of trauma.”
Her eyes widen as she explains that “in nature when an
animal gets scared, they freeze, flee or fight. Once they’re
safe, they shake and shimmy to get the tail ends of that
traumatic energy out of their system,” In contrast, Remy
says that “human beings store it.” On Heavy Light, we hear
the release. “The kind of therapy that I was doing opens
you up to pull that out. It helps you so that you don’t store
things going forward.”
One of the things she held onto was “Red Ford Radio,”
one of Remy’s hallmark singles. To close the album, Remy
chose to re-record a reprise of the song and, ironically, it’s
one of the most vivid markers of her metamorphosis.
“My voice has changed,” she reflects. “I have control
over my voice but I don’t have control over the emotion. It’s
about figuring out how to sing these songs without crying
but knowing that it’s ok if I do cry.”
In spite of this, ending her new album with a rerecording
of an early hit was Remy challenging herself. “After working
on this project for 13 years, to go back to these songs that
I wrote and see if they’re sturdy or not; to see if I relate to
them. I wrote that song when I was 22 and I’m 34 now. Do I
still relate to it? Can I stand behind it?” She can.
While the message is the same, her relationship to that
song has grown. “I think I was hiding behind that song
then,” she says. “Now I’m saying, ‘No. This is me.’” STAR
By SUMIKO WILSON
10 BEATROUTE MARCH 2020