Ten years ago, Illinois-born and Toronto-based producer, film composer, and author Meg Remy began her collaborative relationship with 4AD, starting with the release of her fifth album under the U.S. Girls moniker, 2015’s breakthrough Half Free. Now, celebrating ten years of Half Free and commemorating the evolution she has experienced over ten years with 4AD, Remy returns today with a brand-new U.S. Girls two-track project entitled “Running Errands (Yesterday)” b/w “Running Errands (Today)”.
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In the last decade of songcraft, Remy has taken U.S. Girls to many different places, from the DIY loop-driven sensibilities of 2015’s gritty and vivid Half Free to this year’s Scratch It, a “shapeshifting country soul” (MOJO) album recorded live-to-tape with a new Nashville-based U.S. Girls band. Celebrating Remy’s ever-evolving approach, “Running Errands” is a “musical ouroboros experiment”, incorporating tonal and technical elements from Half Free, Scratch It, and everything in between — “[it] is a song that consumes its own tail, never wholly free (Half Free, you could say…), never wholly bound, forever changing as it repeats”. By design, it was vital to release two different versions of the track at once, to make space for its multitudes — where “Yesterday” (co-produced with Maximilian Turnbull) builds from fragments, echoing the collage/tape loop method of Half Free, “Today” expands into the sample-mimicking live performance by the Nashville players from the Scratch It band.
The interpolation at the core of both versions of “Running Errands” (Annette Snell’s “Footprints on My Mind”, a nearly forgotten Nashville-recorded soul track from an artist lost far too soon) also pays homage to Scratch It’s Nashville roots, and harkens back to the soulful deep-cut samples found amid the eclectic and uninhibited Half Free (Gloria Ann Taylor’s “Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing” sampled on striking breakup anthem “Window Shades” and Yvonne Carroll’s “Mister Loveman” woven into the resentful cry of a sister scorned on “Sororal Feelings”).
Together, the two versions of “Running Errands” (also feature backing vocals by Torontonian singer-songwriter Dorothea Paas) present a full-color illustration of the process of going from sampled composition to live playing translation, a process that has become a U.S. Girls calling card. Here, Remy’s deepened craft and confidence found over the last decade is put on display, solidifying and emphasizing her obsession with music itself.
Later this month, Meg Remy also takes her Nashville-born U.S. Girls band — Dillon Watson (D. Watusi, Savoy Motel, Jack Name) on guitar, Jack Lawrence (The Dead Weather, The Raconteurs, Loretta Lynn) on bass, and Domo Donoho on drums — to Europe and the UK for a second leg of the Scratch It tour. This forthcoming leg follows a lengthy tour throughout the US earlier this year (including a date opening for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard in Queens, NY this summer), as well as a run of Canadian dates on which Remy was joined by a special Canadian band. All upcoming U.S. Girls shows are listed below, and ticket information can be found below.
October
26th – Stereo, Glasgow, UK
27th – The Grand Social, Dublin, Ireland
29th – Band On The Wall, Manchester, UK
30th – EartH Theatre, London, UK
November
1st – London Calling, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2nd – Bedroomdisco, Darmstadt, Germany
3rd – Bumann & Sohn, Cologne, Germany
4th – La Hasard Ludque, Paris, France
6th – L’Usine, Geneva, Switzerland
7th – Bogen F, Zurich, Switzerland