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Torn & Frayed: Frygirl
By Shel Desormeaux
In a vaulted room, the ceiling dripping with Christmas lights, one woman stands in a quivering spotlight. To everyone in the room, she is known as Frygirl. Her dark eyes pierce the crowd, a diverse and tittering lot of youngish people more than familiar with her music. She scans them, takes a breath, and heaves a bolt of sad outrage at the swaying shadows.
Frygirl is Rosina Tassone, a Toronto native who’s found herself back home after touring and traipsing across the country. Her debut album, Someone Please Kill Me, is worthy of careful attention and the result of a lot of hard existance crammed into a few short years.
Rose was only four years old when her father bought her a piano. She was enrolled in piano lessons and by the time she was 12, she’d gotten her Grade 8 at the Royal Conservatory of Music. She started writing her own material, as well as teaching piano to new students.
Not yet into her teens, Rosina served as a back up singer for Rocco del Sud, playing large audiences all over the area, including the CHIN International Picnic and the Miss World Italia Pageant. In 1984, she sang an eighteen-second Latin chant solo at the mass for the Papal visit. Then, at 13, she discovered rock music. Rosina found herself drawn to darker music, and sought solace in Ozzy Osbourne and Pink Floyd.
Throughout her teens she was fronting different bands, and managed to tour all over the country. She was in a band called Numb when she decided to go solo. She taught herself to play the guitar, then she hit the road and found herself in Vancouver, a city that has made astounding contributions to Canadian music. Over a short period, she met an alarming number of incredible, enthusiastic artists, and they repeatedly invited her back out to the city to play shows. She fell in love with it (“different people, different attitudes… lots of really good pot”), and realized just how good the response was to her sound. Having met all of these musicians and built up a rapport with them, Frygirl realized that Vancouver was the place to start recording her CD. She saved up some cash, packed up her stuff, and headed to British Columbia.
She suffered a number of setbacks, one of them being having her guitars stolen. But soon she had started an open mike night at the Piccadilly Pub. Those ritualistic Monday nights went on for about three years, and they became very, very popular. As for Frygirl, she played at the end of every night, and she met hundreds of musicians that way, some of whom would, without fail, show up every week.
Rosina met up with Devon Townsend (Strapping Young Lad) and wanted to work with him immediately. He was almost always busy, so she took any of the time that he could spare. This laborious, on and off production took almost two years. During that time, she dabbled on a couple of his projects, including singing backing vocals for Legion of Flames by Zimmer’s Hole, whom he was producing.
Her first album, appropriately entitled Someone Please Kill Me, is a dark and insistent study in loss, a view at past lives, and yet a picture of someone hopeful of less pain at the turn of the next corner. She is both cynical and pleading, unwilling to let things go but almost secretly hoping that someday, they will.
There was no shortage of musicians to work with on her album, because of her Mondays spent onstage with the musical multitudes. Some of the songs on the album were written as she worked, while others were pulled from old notebooks of the past, accounting for some of the obviously painful recollections. “Kiss the Sky” was the first song wrote in BC, about falling in love with the area, while “I Dream”’s riff was written in Toronto, and the lyrics are consequently about how much she misses her home. “In the End” is an intensely personal song, hard for her to sing even now. It is the song that spearheads the loss that runs through all of the songs on the album. Epipheral is not a dictionary entry, but it’s her word for a spiritual epiphany, the ultimate personal enlightenment.
Someone Please Kill Me is refreshing in its harsh folkie darkness. Frygirl was ready to really get into playing in support of the album, until the threat of personal loss beckoned her home. In 2002, she returned to Toronto, and suffered through the sickness of someone she loved. But with meeting her future-husband Gary and settling back into the city’s booming scene, she knew it was good to be back home.
Her next record will be much different, she says; less acoustic, more electronic, like the final remix on her album (mixed by Johnny Morgan of Hair Factory). She had originally wanted three more remixes, but Morgan had a full schedule, so she has made that sort of sound the focus of her next album. Many of the songs will not even be what you could call ‘structured.’ The album will feature her and her husband Gary as the main musicians. She just wants ‘crazy ass beats’. “I’ve got more DJs on it than musicians,” she declares.
In terms of her actual songwriting, or even performances, she claims she is a singer and a pianist but not a guitar player. “I only play the guitar because I have to,” she says. “The only reason I ever learned the guitar was because no one else could ever write what I wanted.” Until Gary came along, that is. She is more than willing to give a lot of leeway to musicians she’s working with (spouse or no), because of her deep appreciation of so many different styles of music. She is always willing to let people working with her improvise, even play it completely fast and loose, and like a true musician’s musician, she has never refused to play with anyone who wanted to play with her.
Gary’s influence and presence is on the new album are huge, even while he didn’t have anything to do with the last one. Gary’s heart lies in heavy metal, but he’s a gifted interpreter with a wide range. Frygirl admonishes that her husband is a ‘guitar god.’ When he plays with her, he plays his own thing, she says, alongside her, with her, picking away at his interpretation of what she’s singing. As she talks, she looks serene, as though thinking about the comfort his solid presence and her life in general, brings to her.
Her lyrics, in the meantime, are coming from a very different place. “I’m married now. I have a kid. A lot of stuff was written in between these things,” she says. They are still, perhaps, a little on the dark side; the songs are retrospective, they do look back, maybe with incredulity, at what she and her life used to be. Her push now, her motivator is her tiny son Damian, about as good an inspiration as anyone can get. She’s a musician, songwriter, businesswoman, booking agent at The Big Bop, a wife and now a mother. As she rattles off these titles, she looks astounded. And then dumbfounded. And then she breaks into a great big grin.
For more about Frygirl, including samples of some tracks from Someone Please Kill Me, please visit www.thefrygirl.com.
Visitors from Canada:
