The Roches: Laughing Through the Tears (1990 Interview)

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Katherine Dieckmann
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Read an archival interview with The Roches shortly after they released Speak in 1989.

The Roches’ cottage industry: making fun of pain.

It reminds me of being a little kid and there being a certain toy that every body had. I always had the toy
that was never quite that one,” says Suzzy Roche. She is explaining why the Roches’ most recent record, Speak, doesn’t fit any chart-ready trend, and why that doesn’t really bother her. “Right,” chime in her two big sisters, Maggie and Terre. Suzzy continues, “One of the great things about getting older is—” “You don’t care anymore,” Terre interjects. “Not only do you not care,” retorts Suzzy, “you rejoice in not caring.”

When their debut album, The Roches, came out just overa decade ago, the sisters’ guitar-strumming three-part harmonies led critics to dub them belated folkies—never mind the akilter sonic nourishes courtesy of Robert Fripp (who produced that record and 1982’s Keep On Doing). Or the way the vocals suddenly switched from airy’ sweetness to an angry minor key in mid-phrase. Or the
lyrics, written by all three sisters either solo or in collaboration, which clearly set them apart from protest singers and wispy female singer/songwriters. Smart-ass, shamelessly goony, obliquely lyrical and often profoundly moving, the Roches’ songs launched a side-angle attack on both the funny bone and the
heart. (How do you explain getting teary over the lines, “Be what you are/A goose”?) “Folk music purists would never call that record folk music,” offers Maggie. “But everyone else did, because we were using three acoustic guitars. That’s all we owned.”

“If you don’t let something be bad before it’s good, it’s never going to happen. I think it’s really immoral to screw with someone’s creative efforts.”

Suzzy Roche

“That was all we could afford,” adds Suzzy dramatically. The sisters are seated around the kitchen table in Suzzy’s apartment in New York’s West Village. All three born-and-bred New Jerseyites live in the neighborhood, spend a lot of time together and exhibit the propensity for thought-completion common to siblings who are close. One of the reasons why they’ve stuck it out for so long—insularity and blood ties aside—is that the Roches believe in being completely supportive of each other. When they bring
each other songs, there’s no “‘that line stinks’ or ‘that idea sucks,”’ explains Terre. “It just wouldn’t work with this group.” “If you don’t let something be bad before it’s good, it’s never going to happen,” states Suzzy. “I think it’s really immoral to screw with someone’s creative efforts.”

The laissez-faire policy is currently being extended to the cream cheese-and-jelly treats Suzzy is cutting into star and heart shapes for her daughter’s third-grade class. Suzzy frets that the snacks look too weird. Maggie and Terre assure her they look fine. This is a routine, by the way: Suzzy is, by her
own admission, “always acting.” (She played Amy Irving’s neurotic, lovelorn best friend in Crossing Delancey.) The theatrics are a key component of the Roches’ onstage banter; Suzzy exaggerates her moody quirks and picks mock fights w ith good-natured Terre, while Maggie seems to float above the squabbling duo on her own Zen cloud.

“Now we’re using synthesizers a lot more than before. We’re often following the beat of our own… drum machine.”

Maggie Roche

But when their voices mesh and soar— Maggie’s resonant alto grounding Suzzy’s forthright mezzo and Terre’s pure, dreamy soprano—the playful discord is nothing more than clever shtick. There is something
ineffably right about their blend of disparate, eccentric sensibilities; that the sisters always seem slightly misplaced in the present tense only adds to their charm. Everything about them exudes a faint air of time warp, and the new album is no exception. “Now we’re using synthesizers a lot more than before,”
explains Maggie. When informed that that sounds very … ’70s, she sighs. “Yes, well, we’re often following the beat of our own… drum machine.”Then she laughs an odd little laugh, as though startled by having made a joke.

It would have been easy enough for the Roches to trot down the folk-inflected trail they blazed in 1979. After all. what could be more strategic in the wake of the recent successes of Tracy / Michelle/ Natalie/ lndigo Girls et al.? But market dynamics aren’t a particularly pressing concern for this group, who see themselves as a cottage industry rather than a pop product. Typically their interest in synthesizers is for reasons more home ec. than aesthetic. “Ever since we started out, people wanted us to hire men to
play the instruments, so we could just stand up there and smile and sing,” explains Terre. “It used to he that you’d have to bring someone in to play a string harmony. Now you can hear it in your head, and just lay it down.”

Mind you, the Roches are hardly into throbbing disco beats or lush sweeps of sound. Instead, Speak is full of stripped-down and gently percolating rhythms, like the one that introduces the album’s title
track, with its straightforward pledge, “The time has come/For me to speak.”The plinkplink-plink synth line spells out “no nonsense” just as clearly as the lyrics do.

Released three-and-a-half years after their last of four albums for Warner Bros., Speak is remarkably of-a-piece; it has an evenness sometimes missing from the erratic post-debut records, Nurds, Keep On Doing and Another florid. Speak was recorded more or less like the live shows the Roches perform regularly to a loyal following all over the country. “We just went into the studio and set up the show and performed it, then went back and added and changed things,” explains Terre. Immediacy aside, the remarkable thing about Speak is how grown up it feels, from its burnished cover (a dramatic
shift from Another florid, w here the three brightly-clad sisters leapt out of a psychedelic fish tank) to the songs, which revolve around the desire for sincerity and the failings of romantic love. (Though no Roches
effort is without its bald ironies and way-out moments. Take a cacophonous little ditty called “The Anti-Sex Backlash of the 80’s.”)

The sisters agree that the tenor of their songwriting has changed, in part with the more sober spirit of the times, in part because they’re all in their mid-to-late-30s now. Maggie and Terre describe w ith some
amusement serving as presenters at this year’s College Music Journalism Awards, and standing at the podium with two members of Camper van Beethoven, who told them glowingly, “Oh, I loved your first record when I was nine.” Songs like Maggie’s “The Married Men” (from The Roches), full of wry
wisdom about infidelity, no longer come so easily. Love’s vagaries are treated with a darker eye, as in “Nocturne,” also by Maggie, which paints a sad scenario of an estranged couple. The gloom is offset by some deceptively tender “tra-la-la” background vocals, a hallmark of the Roches’ ability to balance
seemingly contradictory moods— which Terre attributes to their Irish heritage of “making fun of pain.”

“A lot of the time the things you need to write about are those devastating truths. That’s often what you need to relieve yourself of.”

Maggie Roche

“That’s a very brave song,” says Suzzy of “Nocturne.” “I think Maggie has a particular talent for talking about things that are really harsh and being very fair.” “A lot of the time the things you need to write about are those devastating truths,” says Maggie, quietly. “That’s often what you need to relieve yourself of.” There’s a pause, then Terre breaks the silence. “Wasn’t it Lionel Richie who said that when he sits down to write a love song, he just figures out what people ideally want to hear? Like, ‘You are the most beautiful gorgeous everything to me’?” Suzzy counters, “Maggie’s writing about situations so
difficult most people wouldn’t even admit that they exist. I don’t hear a lot of that these days.” Maggie blushes slightly and looks up from the table, where she’s been training her eyes: “At least not from Lionel Richie.”

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