Every so often on KM UK we have the great pleasure of bringing our dear readers (that’d be you) something a little different. Today is another of those days.
Canadian (Halifax, Nova Scotia to be more precise) band Dance Movie has made an album of songs inspired by female detectives on TV called Ladycops. Olivia Benson of Law & Order: SVU, The Killing‘s Sarah Linden, Jane Rizzoli of Rizzoli & Isles, and, of course, our very own Lilly Rush are each the subject of their own song on the EP.
Dance Movie’s vocalist and guitarist, Tara Thorne, who wrote the four songs, kindly agreed to do a Q&A-style interview for us at KM UK. You can read the results below.
If you have any questions for Tara then please post them as comments on this article and we’ll see if we can persuade her to drop by and reply.
Ladycops, was released on the 1st of September. It is available free to listen to on, or download from, Dance Movie’s Bandcamp page. The band also has a MySpace page and you can follow them on Twitter.
Update: Tara has allowed me to add the Rush track and a copy of the lyrics to the Gallery.
What inspired you to make an album about female detectives featured on television?
We finished our first full-length but I don’t have the money to put it out right now, and I didn’t want to lose momentum, didn’t want to have a huge gap between records. I wanted new material out there, but I’d finally exhausted the heartbrokenness I’d been writing about for two years.
I used to be a television panellist on a CBC program called Q, we would discuss product integration, the evolution of the theme song, the Emmys, et cetera. But that gig ended and I haven’t gotten to talk about TV in a meaningful way in a long time. I think cop shows get written off because there are so many of them — they aren’t critical darlings, no one writes New Yorker essays about how they are allegories for Shakespeare or the Bible — but a handful have these really great women at the centre. Those women share a lot of characteristics, and character history in some cases, and they all have a profound sadness about them, and I wanted to write about someone else’s sadness.
(I also wrote and directed a play called Law & Order: Musical Victims Unit in 2007—TV cops are a long-standing theme with me.)
How did you pick the detectives? Were there any special criteria you used in determining who you wanted to include?
Rush and Benson are my all-time favourite ladycops so I started with them, and the songs came really fast, on the same day. The Killing was wrapping up when I was writing and I was obsessed with it and Linden, and I’d fallen for Rizzoli & Isles the summer before; I had no idea Angie Harmon was so funny. I could’ve gone on — there’s Eames on Criminal Intent, Mary Shannon on In Plain Sight, even Scully from The X-Files — but those four songs were the perfect amount for an EP. I decided to record it really fast, really cheap, and it seemed too crazy to make anybody pay for it so that’s why it’s free. I actually said to the band, “If you don’t want to be associated with this project I understand” but they were up for it.
What, specifically, was it about Lilly Rush that appealed to you and made you want to write a song about her?
I came to Cold Case really late, the Nirvana episode. In that season was “The Road”, one of my favourites — it has that great Lilly speech I almost put on the record, “She found herself” — and it made me want to go back to the beginning. It is one of the most underrated television programs ever — it had a perfect ensemble, great music and writing, it was funny and tough and socially relevant in a way that transcended the topical approach of Law & Order — CC ripped from old headlines and had the historical perspective to treat them however they needed to. Being a Jerry Bruckheimer show on CBS meant it had no chance at being cool, plus CBS always handled it badly, they didn’t even give it a decent send-off.
A lot of what appealed to me about Lilly has to do with Kathryn’s performance, which was a bit Clarice Starling-informed, how she was trying to be so professional but her lower-class upbringing would seep out and she’d drop a “g” — nothin’ — and how she is this tiny ethereal blonde but had an obvious strength, she commanded respect. I liked how funny she could be: There is a scene in the first season where Lilly is walking away backwards from Kite, flustered because she likes him, and she bangs into a garbage can. It is a tiny, perfect moment of physical comedy — that’s what made me a fan of Kathryn’s, that little garbage-can ding. I was writing a script at the time, and I couldn’t figure out one of the characters, and as soon I saw that scene I knew who she was.
I think Lilly has a profound sadness that she never beat, and not because she didn’t make out with Scotty or anything stupid like that, but because her need to save people eclipsed the need to save herself. That stuff with the serial killer, she got herself into it! I wanted Stillman to scream at her for being too reckless with herself for the sake of the case. (That pair of George episodes is amazing.) She was always bringing closure to people who’d lost loved ones, but she never got any of her own — she never knew why she was attacked as a child, her mother died, she never found love, she did find her Dad but it wasn’t great, she got stuck with her fuckup sister and a baby — that’s why the refrain in the song is “Why did you run.” She is asking her father, her mother, her sister, the men she loved, the perps she didn’t catch: everyone.
Cold Case was known for incorporating period music into its storylines – whether that be from the 1920s, the 1950s, the 1980s or the present day. Were there any particular musical elements you felt drawn to use in the Lilly Rush track? Were you inspired by any of the existing episode music?
The melody is from an old song, one of the first I’d written but didn’t finish, so it’s super simple, four notes, because I am a shit guitar player, really. I did tell my drummer to play the opening beat from “Be My Baby.” We actually have an old-timey-sounding song on the full-length called “ANAF” (you can download it for free on the same site as Ladycops) and I wish I’d written it when Cold Case was still on the air so it could’ve been in an episode about the 50s.
When do feel most inspired to write music?
As Jenny Lewis said, “No one wants to pay to see your happiness,” so: When things are awful.
Give us a little background on how Dance Movie came together?
I joined my first band in 2008, playing bass in a grunge outfit called Bloodsport (like the Van Damme movie). The bass, which I had never played, really opened up my understanding of music, so I started writing my own stuff and gathered talented friends from Halifax to help me play it. I’ve been an arts journalist here for a decade, I know a lot of people, and they were willing to take a chance on me.
Knowing the character of Lilly Rush, what do you think she’d say about: a) the album, and b) her track?
a) I think she’d dig the record, I bet Lilly is into indie rock, probably chills to Regina Spektor and St. Vincent on the weekends, blasts Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Rilo Kiley in her car to get her hyped for the workday.
b) She would be embarrassed that someone is paying her that kind of attention, and possibly offended by how she comes off — she is invested in her work and its importance, and I don’t think she would care to have someone point out how lonely she is.
What would you say is the unifying theme of both the album and the characters?
Cops on TV are seen as badasses, running and shooting and screaming in faces. But underneath the toughness, these four women are all soft and sad and they do not want anyone to know — it would actually damage their careers if people knew (that’s the impetus behind the line “Call off your heart, they said” in “Rush”). You know how in musicals people sing what they can’t say? That’s what these songs are, to me.
If you could sum up the album in three words, what would they be and why?
“Call a bus!” (Cop-speak for ambulance. An ambulance for their hearts! And my craziness!)
What’s up next for you and Dance Movie?
Trying to get this damn full-length out. If you know anyone who likes to put out records, pass them along!
Many thanks to Tara for contacting us about Ladycops and taking the time to talk to us, and to friend-of-the-site LillyKat for her assistance.
Very interesting and cool
Thanks so much for Sharing, I like how the inspiration for their songs comes from these detectives; including Lilly Rush 