Anna Fisher: Space mother via Mystic Medusa
A few stints in America ago, I met up with my friend Yvonne in San Francisco for a three day music festival called Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. I’d been squandering my savings in an apartment in New York that September and was about to experiment with an extended stint in Nashville, so I went via California because… Well, because my desires almost always over-run whatever might be the sensible option, geographic or otherwise.
Mox, as I like to call her, had been in Mexico writing songs in a style she calls ‘The Valium Blues’. Her voice is a lovely, seductive alto. When teamed with sad lyrics and slow twelve bar progressions – ah – it’s a wild combination. Later, in Tennessee I filmed her singing one of her low-fi heartbreakers in the yard of our vacation apartment in a pink jumpsuit, all sad and sultry. And she recorded me singing the Carter Family song, ‘I Never Will Marry’ in a vintage thrift-store wedding dress, heart-on-lace-sleeve. One of us is cool obviously and the other of us is nothing if not ridiculous.
They say that love’s a gentle thing
But it’s only caused me pain
The only man I ever loved
Has gone on the morning train
Enough. Back to the West Coast and to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. We made plans to meet just in time to see Cass McCombs play. It was early, perhaps 11. A long musical day ahead. But we both loved – still love – Cass. His record Wit’s End had come out earlier in the year and I had been playing it with enthusiasm, perhaps too much enthusiasm on my radio show in Sydney.
On my way to you
Old county
Hoping nothing’s changed
With the lovely California sun kissing our shoulders, strangely familiar eucalyptus leaves swaying in the trees, we watched Cass sing our shared favourite ‘County Line’, which in a moment of longing for another place and time last week, I found on the internet.
After this performance, we saw Jason Isbell, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, A.A. Bondy and a very special combined show from Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson. It was almost too much of good thing. But I kind of like that. Just ask Yvonne, who that day had to deal with my consumption of an entire hash brownie for the first time in my life. I am many things: stoner is not one of them. But it was a gift from a fellow Kristofferson lover! Sharing is caring.
A few months later, after we’d both returned to our island home, Mox and I found ourselves living together in a run-down two bedroom cottage in Sydney’s inner-west. It was here that we started our fantasy acoustic duo, Pheromones From Outer Space.
The concept for the duo was simple: babes with guitars with an obscure tribute set-list that only record store clerks would truly appreciate. So we covered the aforementioned ‘County Line’, as well as Dave Rawlings’ ‘Ruby’, A.A. Bondy’s ‘I Can See The Pines Are Dancing’ and Neil Young’s ‘Vampire Blues’.
As a band, it was mostly in our heads and in our living room. But just before I moved to the USA we started busking for vinyl money on the streets of Newtown on Saturday afternoons. Despite not playing a single hit, we actually made good change.
Good times are comin’
I hear it everywhere I go
Good times are comin’
I hear it everywhere I go
Good times are coming
But they sure are coming slow
Since I left Sydney, Mox has joined a psychedelic band called The Wednesday Night and a B52s meets Parliament type group called Beat Club. Vibe eclectic, babe. Me? I’m singing my twang songs in Tennessee and trying to work out my record and not spend too long over-thinking the whole damn thing.
I miss Mox a lot. We write often and have just started to Skype. But it’s not quite the same as co-habitation. I miss her harmonies and her sense of the absurd and the way we’d stand in the kitchen drinking gin and reading our horoscopes, charting how we’d navigate the week ahead: gigs, romantic misadventures and inevitable trips to Saray Turkish Pizza. I know we would have talked at length about beautiful Anna Fisher in her NASA gear. Pheromones From Outer Space!
A.A. Bondy – I Can See The Pines Are Dancing
Cass McCombs – County Line
Neil Young – Vampire Blues
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