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One of the most powerfully fun bands to come out of the 00s, GOSSIP are back with their first album in over a decade. Read our latest Dork Mixtape cover feature now.
Words: Liam Konemann.
Photos: Cody Critcheloe.
It’s Valentine’s Day, and things are off to a chaotic start. There has, perhaps, been a misunderstanding between Dork and Gossip. A slight timeline tangle regarding the events of the twelve years between the band’s last album, ‘A Joyful Noise’, and their newest, ‘Real Power’. One of us has got our maths wrong.
It’s not Beth Ditto.
“What if I was so mad?” She asks.
That’d be fine. We’d just claim connection problems and end the call. Beth laughs.
“Just run into the street screaming.”
It’s always good to have a backup plan. So what has actually she been up to in the intervening decade, between Gossip albums?
“You know what’s so funny to me?” she says. “We’re such old friends, and we’ve gone through so much shit together that it doesn’t feel like any kind of reunion.”
Making music with Gossip again, Beth says, is like riding a bike. They’ve been together in their current iteration on and off since 2003, and you get the sense that even after they formally ‘disbanded’ in 2016, they were never truly broken up. Their official split lasted just three years, ending, at least temporarily, when they embarked on a world tour to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their fourth album ‘Music For Men’ in 2019. Just over a year later, Beth shared a picture of the three of them together in a studio. They officially announced this particular reunion, or at least ‘reunion’ to everyone who isn’t Gossip, in November last year.
The time away hasn’t worn down any of their edges. ‘Real Power’ is unbridled Gossip. From the Motown-infused ‘Act of God’, through the contemplative ‘Peace and Quiet’ and the art-rock love song ‘Give it Up for Love’, the album shows off the many faces of a band fully in control of their powers.
“Hannah and I are six months apart, and I met her when she was 17 and I was 18. When I met Nathan, I was 13 or 14. When you’ve known people that long, you know each other inside and out, so it doesn’t feel any different,” Beth says.
What’s changed is the world. The music industry, constantly in flux, is drastically different than it was even five years ago, let alone in 2012 when Gossip last released an album. “The business has changed,” Beth says. “I think that’s the weirdest thing for all of us.”
It’s not that the band have no idea what’s going on or how things work. It’s just that the difference is so pronounced, and things change so fast – especially, Beth points out, when we’ve all essentially been hidden away for about three years in the middle there – that it can make your head spin.
“I ran as far away as I could as young as I could”
Beth Ditto
“Post-Covid, we all kind of crawled up to the surface and looked out, and we’re like, ‘This is not the same’,” she says.
Not long after that great resurfacing, Beth started trying to put together a second solo record. Writing and recording in one blended process out in ultra-legendary producer Rick Rubin’s Kauai studio, it soon became clear that what she was actually trying to make was a new Gossip album. She called in bandmates Nathan Howdeshell and Hannah Blilie, and things got a lot easier.
Of course, say ‘studio in Hawaii’, and it might conjure a luxurious image. Not quite the case in real life, Beth says.
“Kauai is one of the smaller islands; it’s more rural and has more of a small-town vibe. It’s very different than you would think,” she says. “So a lot of the things we were doing in the studio were very piecemeal. When I got there, we had to build the vocal booth.”
She sounds, it has to be said, absolutely delighted about this.
“One of the things that would happen often is that the electricity would go out. You couldn’t run two things at once,” she says.
To get around the issue, they had a backup generator that could kick in as needed. It also led to a sort of writing prompt.
“Rick hollered up to me and Dylan, the engineer, and he was like, ‘Is that the real power?’ And I was like, oh, ‘Real Power’ could be nice,” she says. “I don’t usually work that way – not to get like, ‘Listen, honey, my process is very serious’ – but I don’t usually start with a thing and write around it, but I was like, oh, I can work with this.”
The spiritual sequel to ‘Standing in the Way of Control’, ‘Real Power’, is a tenacious dance-punk song about collective action and agency, stamped all over with Beth Ditto’s trademark belting vocals. Loudly defiant, classically Gossip, the song was born out of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and particularly the events that were unfolding in Beth’s home city of Portland.
Looking at the news coverage, you’d have thought the whole city was on fire. Particularly in the US right-wing media, the reports made it look like the world was coming to an end. At the time, Beth was in Atlanta on a job that should have taken three months. It ended up taking nine. The extra time meant that not only was she away from home for longer, but that she could witness in real time the way that events were being portrayed in other parts of the country.
“When I would go outside the city and talk to people, they really thought it was Mad Max ruins,” she says. “I had that reaction more than once. I had it from a woman I was ordering funeral flowers from. When she heard I was from Portland, she literally gasped and was like, ‘Are you okay?’ and I was like, ‘Are you okay?’ I didn’t realise what she was talking about.”
“I felt really proud to be in a place where people gave a shit”
Beth Ditto
The vilified image on the news wasn’t one that Beth recognised. When she returned to Portland, she could hear the chanting in the street and helicopters flying over her house.
“I grew up in a place where I ran as far away as I could as young as I could, and I’m proud to be in a place where if push comes to shove, we’re gonna get angry. I was just like, don’t come for my city,” she says.
“I felt really proud to be in a place where people gave a shit enough to go out in a lockdown and to get mad enough or be hurt enough to make themselves feel heard.”
The sentiment echoes throughout the album – there’s a reason that ‘Real Power’ is the title-track. Through songs about love, chosen family, collective power and letting go, the album reaches out a hand and pulls the audience close. Straight down the centre of it all, there is a deep seam of gratitude. Despite the fact that Beth is an atheist, the album opens with the lines, “Every beat of my heart is a merciful act of god.”
There is anxiety there, too, of course – based on the fact of being alive in the world right now, and especially in being a queer band in a world where hard-won victories are less assured than they’ve been in years. But Beth is prepared to take the fear and the gratitude as two sides of the same coin.
“With change, there’s always going to be turmoil. It’s always going to feel frightening because we do have something to lose,” she says. “And I think that should be fuel. It definitely is for me. We have everything to lose and everything to gain.”
“We’ve already seen what they’re capable of. We’ve already seen people being treated like shit. We know that fight is hard. That’s nothing new to us. We already fucking know that. So it’s like, let’s go.” ■
Gossip’s album ‘Real Power’ is out 22nd March. Follow Dork Mixtape on Spotify here.
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