Junebug versus Hurricane

Everything That Rises Must Converge

A Queer Conversation With Amy Ray

Following Amy Ray’s all-too-brief stop through New York supporting her new album Lung of Love (DaemonRecords.com), she was kind enough to sit down and speak with Junebug vs Hurricane, two faithful and always talkative listeners who, as you may already well know, live and breathe for Amy Ray’s music. 

The following piece summarizes our interview with Amy Ray and was first published for Velvet Park  (www.velvetparkmedia.com), so many special thanks to them for helping this come together. 

Amy Ray is a harmonizer. She sings to get along. She even agreed to sit down with two fast talkers called Junebug and Hurricane – one a bitter old Yankee, the other an original Southerner young enough to know better. With these two it was good thing Amy Ray has what we call “a listening voice.” We nearly talked her ear off.  But that rich, calm and ever-yearning tone — the butch voice of Amy Ray — kept it all together.

We started late on a too-hot and blistering day in downtown Manhattan. Amy Ray was exhausted, on the road, just finishing an interview for WNYC public radio: a perfect venue that suits Ray’s call out into the wilderness of the nation across the radio waves, those waves mixing with her presence on Youtube and, most recently, on vinyl. Her new album Lung of Love, reviewed here, has been in our ears and on our tongues for some time now. It was, for us, a relief to finally sit down and hash out some of our ideas and inspirations with our faithful co-conspirator.

“Do people call you ma’am?”

Amy Ray: “Really polite southern boys, always.”

Imagine the three of us seated in a deserted deli called “Jazzy’s” on Manhattan’s lower west side: a menopausal Hurricane, a dumbstruck Junebug and our dear Amy Ray: three queers who know what it feels like to be out of time, who know something about lives of humidity, futility and queer belatedness.

Amy Ray says she’s always been “a little behind.” She recalls how meeting the members of the Durham-based band The Butchies in the late 1990s radicalized her, helped her figure out “where [she] was coming from, but didn’t even know it.”

She describes this consolidation-through-community as active intuition: becoming aware of herself, overcoming a more staid, middle-classness by learning how to join in and move in step with queer community.

Amy Ray shuttles between going out–the road–and sticking to her place. A resident of a rural north Georgia town–an expatriate Atlantan–she has dreams of hosting queer salons on her own turf. Migration, a journey, every-changing formation across boundaries, is the main theme in Lung of Love. This latest formation picks up flight from songs like “Birds of a Feather,” with its plaintive,”If we are birds of a feather//Why can’t we migrate?”

Ray loves community–being in a band, if not being the leader of one. She says that she’s not interested in being the sexy rock star; she wants her audience to feel sexy, to be inspired by her grooves. In songs from the last two albums, like “Bus Bus” and “When You’re Gone You’re Gone,” Greg Griffith, producer, and Melissa York, drummer and instigator, add a certain r and b swagger, a timeless and sexy sound that Amy hadn’t quite put her finger on in previous self-produced work.

Community requires solidarity, but Amy Ray fights stolidity. Transformations–of gender, politics, ethics–fascinate Amy Ray. In “She’s Got To Be” Ray asks “Is the body just a cage?” The answer is always yes and no. In Ray’s vision, people come apart and they come together: in butch/femme relationships, through bodily transitions, anti-racisms, in moments of encounter between species and in the notes and harmonies of the songs she sings.

Of the people in her life who are, as she says, “changing form,” Ray is sympathetic and attuned to their processes. Transitioning is a path Ray “might have chosen . . . if [she] were in another generation.” She “loves the trajectory” of these new men who must “go back to learn to hang on to their feminism” or, she warns, “they’re going to become one of the privileged gate-keepers of the world who we fight against.”

For Ray, change sometimes comes in the form of not-changing, of, as she says, “waking up in the morning and saying, “this is you,” or recognizing “I don’t want to be in this body but at the same time I don’t want to change it.” The refrain in “She’s Got To Be” (“She’s got to be with me always// To make sense of the skin I’m in”) sings of and, ultimately, through this quotidian dilemma of managing self-love with her responses to and responsibilities in the outer world. “A partner,” as she says, to the title song on her new record, “She’s Got To Be” is, as Ray puts it, “both a love song to my partner and to myself,” she says that the meanings of the song morph every time she sings it. Like a form of Christian Mysticism, this song weighs and balances the mutually defining processes of Ray learning “to love myself and my partner.” It is as if the song becomes the body it talks about; the creation of an experience brought forth by her voice.

Lung of love, this failing breath//The compass of a heart that won’t rest

The murmur’s beat, the stalling gait//The compass of the heart that won’t wait

Every queer that rises must, one day, converge. The title song “Lung of Love” takes up a new approach to the organic expression of feeling.  The heart, now an over-determined and perhaps overly-cited, source of angst and joy, takes a back seat in this song that conjures up feelings that, like breath itself, make us and constantly fail us: “We are learning to breathe–we will pursue this trick our whole lives. And when we have finally mastered it we will become the breath–there will be no more separation.”

In her wisdom Amy Ray has produced a record that sings with confidence and that seems more self-assured than anything either of us have listened to in a long while: by her or by any other contemporary music makers. If there is a reason for this, though, it is not just age and maturity that give this record, and indeed its title song, its depth of meaning and of pleasure. Mysteries reveal themselves throughout the album the same way they do in nature: through the experience of time passing through and by our ever-failing bodies. In the end, Ray sings: “I pray that you get this tune//And that it don’t leave you lonely// This fruitless sorrow we feel//We come by it honestly.”

Her butch voice sounds so smooth, made up of vibrations we can hear come together. It’s a voice that tries to erase itself, saying “I guess I should have been listening.” And yet it still sings. The voice–that she has honed, that we all enjoy and that adds a sweet and sexy swagger to all of her songs–keeps it together for our ears that wait and listen.

Part of Ray’s new composure and more sure, deep voice comes through in her not being afraid, these days, of exhibiting a little grouchiness, or of demanding a little more. “Glow” is sarcastic about low blows and lower goals. As Ray says, “If that’s [my] best day, well then, I’ve got more work to do . . .” But sometimes Ray wishes people would just calm down, stop “trying to win.” Relationships, in particular, can seem like endless occasions for complaint. The road song that in “Bus Bus” (from Didn’t It Feel Kinder) had its “heart on vibrate,” still trying out the “lovesick troubadour” routine that in “Bird in the Hand” has worn out, the femme just saying “get in line// stop your wandering.” In Lung of Love‘s “I Didn’t” the road runs out and the butch-femme couple are “Just looking for a fight// to make all that hurt seem right.” And, yes, all these songs do make the hurt seem right.

With melodious complaints,”Do You Have to Be the Rolling Train// Do You have to be the wounded bird// Do You have to be the only voice I hear, crying in the wilderness?” Ray is building a trove of songs memorializing a relation of love that is becoming historical as we listen, as the tune fades. Butches and femmes. To the butch, femmes are women who categorically did not belong to us and yet give themselves to us. The femme in this song–Ray’s latest chapter in this unsung, and possibly dying, lesbian tradition–is always pushing: “we got this mountain we got to climb,” and Ray, riffing on her own song, laughs: “I’m weary!” She’s weary of having to play and replay the past in her own relationships and in our communities. “I Didn’t” sings of and camps the queer relationship: it reacts to the well-known form of processing with a kind of dismissal: no, I’m not your parent’s alcoholism or your ex-lover’s aggression. Amy Ray wants you to know: She didn’t.

In her own world and in our queer communities, Ray sings, observes and listens; she sings in order to get us to harmonize, in order for our experiences to collectively overcome their circumstances.  If she’s weary, it’s because she finds herself in a world she didn’t create. If her songs have any political import it is that they carry with them, and in their refrains, a utopian overcoming of our present circumstances,  a breath of something-else-to-come that may be somewhere off in the distance.

Amy Ray doesn’t like easy slogans. She didn’t even always like our easy reads of her songs, which trade on doubles–in theme, metaphor and intention. “Give It A Go” takes up the problem of gay suicides and the national ‘It Gets Better’ campaign, improving on that slogan with her way cooler, “stick around for the show.” But it’s the music from the mysterious past, and Ziggy Stardust himself, who returns to the jumping bridge. Ziggy, the glam rocker returns from Ray’s childhood, a “touchstone” from a time of innocence, when “we didn’t even know all the words.” But some breath returns, though it can’t save everyone. Ray admits that she’s had a hard time talking about what she perceives as a campaign that “square[d] out” with too much celebrity involvement and too little of a sense for the rich bestiary of loveable losers and freaks. Too little of what Flannery O’ Connor would appreciate as the sacrifice of the freaks, the way they are “a channel to the creator,” Ray says.

Everything that rises must converge. This is Ray’s migration, her movement and transformation. She migrates harmonies across borders, species, all sorts of bodies. When asked about her tendency to make deep connections, she explains that her father was a radiologist, a reader of X-rays, and that these images filled her house growing up, “It’s just the lens I see things through.” This lens, it seems, is about the body that waits to breathe; the world-to-come that lies, waiting to emerge in our very next breath.