An American in Paris:
In Conversation with Ambrosia Parsley of Shivaree
by Adam D. Miller

A few songs into the first of two Toronto performances by Shivaree, lead singer Ambrosia Parsley greets the audience.  “Toronto… we were here once.  I think we played to eight people.  This...” she said, her arms outstretched to the audience, “…is much better.”  Parsley was referring to a May 2000 performance at the Horseshoe Tavern, where the lack of attendance was merely an extension of the lack of momentum surrounding their 1999 debut.  Although well received in Europe, I Ought To Give You A Shot In The Head For Making Me Live In This Dump came and went with little notice on these shores, serving as a haunting reminder that even then, image was much more important to us than substance. 

That’s not to say that Ambrosia Parsley, and by extension Shivaree, has no image.  The woman is very attractive, and her stage presence is evocative of a young ingénue.  Her hands are tucked away in her pockets as she sings, eyes closed, though occasionally her hands break free and her eyes become shifty as she becomes immersed in the grooves of the music.

More important, however, is the substance.  In Shivaree’s other two core members we find two immensely talented musicians.  Guitarist Duke McVinnie and multi-instrumentalist Danny McGough craft ethereal soundscapes around Parsley’s a cappella-influenced melodies and top-notch lyrics. 



Yes, let’s talk about Parsley’s lyrics.  “Wagers,” the opening track on Rough Dreams, opens with couplets worthy of Tom Waits.  “70 bucks on Congaree/That you’d end up with me/At a rumble in the jungle/Like Muhammad Ali/That a full house you’d find/But your queen lost her mind/Now you’re stuck at the table/With three of a kind.”  On Who’s Got Trouble? she dreams of offering up U.S. President George W. Bush her own brand of revenge.  “I can make you sorry when I want/Find some other house for you to haunt/Carry out your sentence in my head/All I have to do is go to bed”  (At the show, Parsley told us, “There’s only one thing I hate more than [people who] kiss and tell: Republicans.”)  All this delivered by a girlish intonation.   

A lot has happened in the five years since Shivaree played their last Canadian dates.  The band now has three full-length LPs under its belt.  Shivaree’s second album, Rough Dreams (2002), never received a proper North American release, but improved upon the group’s distinctive sound and Parsley’s innovative lyrics.  Meanwhile, the great Quentin Tarantino, a director who is known for his conscious use of pre-recorded music in his films, decided on “Goodnight Moon,” a standout track from Shot In The Head for the closing sequence of Kill Bill, Volume 2. 



I spoke to Ambrosia Parsley before Shivaree’s second date at Toronto’s Lula Lounge in February.  Having driven from Virginia to Montreal and then down to Toronto with no breaks, she appeared exhausted, despite having had a day to catch up on sleep since their performance earlier in the week.  I welcomed her to Toronto and apologized for the weather, which had been consistently crummy since their arrival earlier in the week.  She smiled and commented on the “friendly” stereotype of Canadian culture: “It’s like a strange religion up here.”

The Shivaree story begins long before the group’s core members met in 1995.  Like most singers, Parsley’s interest in music extends into her childhood.  “I think that singing is something natural to children, because they all do it.  You know?  You always hear them; my nieces, my friends’ kids, they’re always singing, humming, and just making things up.  And then I think somewhere along the line most people stop, and some people just keep doing it.”

Ambrosia kept doing it.  Her maternal grandmother, a performer in her own right called Da Uke Lady, lived in the Parsley’s backyard in an airstream trailer.  “She was a big, big woman, and she wore big sequins, muumuus, and little gold slippers, and she had a big silver wig, blue eye shadow, and big thick eyelashes, and she’d sort of scrawl red lipstick all over her face, and she had those red Lee Press-On nails; and she played this thing called the aero-uke, and it sort of looked like an airplane, had big wings on it … She had fans, and she played out and she was a riot – she actually had a biker following, strangely enough.  The Hell’s Angels, they loved her.” 

After being taught dozens of 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s songs by her grandmother, Ambrosia felt confident singing in front of a crowd.  “There was this pizza parlor across the street called Shakey’s Pizza where my family ate like three or four nights a week.  My parents were young, they worked really hard, and there wasn’t a whole lot of cooking happening.  We’d trek over there and my dad would get a pitcher of beer and a pizza.  Shakey’s is like a chain, like a cowboy saloon eatery, and when I was a little girl they always used to have a live musician that worked in the Shakey’s.  And we had a piano player and a banjo player, and they played all the same songs that my nanny played.  So I would get up and I would sing with them, and people would give me quarters for the Ms. Pac-Man machine and the Dig-Dug machine.  And one day that old banjo player, who was an old man, he said, ‘You know, you’re pretty good kid.’  I was probably seven years old or so.  ‘There’s a bigger, fancier Shakey’s about twenty minutes away, and every other Sunday, I play there with a 99-piece senior citizen banjo band.’  And so for a couple years, every other Sunday, my parents would bring me over there and put me on the table and give me a microphone and I’d sing with them.”

As a child, Ambrosia was content to jump on a table and sing at a pizza parlor, but as she grew up, she realized that songwriting was an outlet she felt more comfortable with.  “I grew into a pretty normal teenager, and I didn’t really want anybody looking at me or talking to me or any of that.  But I knew that I loved writing songs, and I had wished that there was like a Brill Building or a Tin Pan Alley somewhere that I could go in a little room with other people who liked to write songs too, and write songs for other people to sing.  Much more fun, much less pressure.  But that job doesn’t really exist anymore, cause people write their own songs unless they’re writing big pop diva songs, which I don’t have any idea how to do.  I mean, I’d give it a whirl and all, but it’s not what naturally happens for me, so I had to sing them myself.”

The name “Shivaree” comes from the French word charivari, which can roughly be defined as “a noisy mock serenade for newlyweds.”  At times, that sounds about right, although it is never a nuisance to listen to the great music that Shivaree makes.  Although the group released their debut in 1999, the beginnings extend much earlier.  “When I met Danny at a party about ten years ago, he was always a musician around town that I really liked a lot.  He’d been in lots of bands, and he was just a fun, weird player.  And we got to talking and I had a few songs lying around, and he had a friend with a studio … and so a few days later we went into this little studio… and Duke happened to be sleeping in the spare room cause he was in the middle of a move … and we all ended up playing together that night and writing another song and just decided that we liked playing with each other.  And it’s been ten years.”

Ambrosia, Duke, and Danny knew they had something right away.  After recording a demo tape over the next few days, their tape made the rounds.  “In a couple weeks we had… I think it was five labels, calling to ask if we wanted a record deal.  And we’d never played live, we’d just met, we were just hanging out one night and we did this thing.”  Shivaree had yet to exist.  “We were just a bunch of people making music one night; we made a tape over the course of four or five days.  You know, we immediately had something together, there was definitely chemistry between us.”

Ambrosia Parsley clearly has a lot of respect for the other members of her band.  Duke McVinnie adds his own brand of guitars and bass to Shivaree’s signature sound.  Seated on a chair and wearing sunglasses, he provides tasteful licks that work around the groove, as evidenced so well on “Goodnight Moon” and the more recent “I Close My Eyes.”  Danny McGough’s aforementioned “weird playing” is also a key part of Shivaree.  Aside from playing keyboards, he can be seen turning all sorts of knobs and pushing all sorts of buttons from behind his area of the stage.  It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that McGough toured with Tom Waits in 1999.

The group played live for the first time in Austin, Texas at the South by Southwest Music festival.  Of her early live performances, Ambrosia told me, “I was terrified, I did not want to go on stage for the first year and a half I was so scared I couldn’t even get out of the chair.  I sat in a chair on stage.”

Ambrosia said that she was “beyond flattered” when Quentin Tarantino’s people called her about the Kill Bill, Volume Two soundtrack.  She still has no idea about where he might have discovered “Goodnight Moon.”  “I have no idea,” she told me.  “I mean, I know that he’s definitely a man who pays attention to music and discovering things, and he’s just one of those guys.  Somebody called us one day and asked if we would like for them to use it in the movie.”  While the song didn’t have the same lasting effect on people as say, “Stuck In The Middle With You” in Reservoir Dogs did, it was used to great effect in the film’s closing sequence, with Uma Thurman driving her convertible as the film closes.  If you walked out of the theatre prematurely (after all, it was largely during the closing credits), you missed a very special moment.

A chance inclusion on a Tarantino soundtrack wasn’t the first time “Goodnight Moon” received some surprise exposure.  Soon after the release of Shot In The Head, Shivaree played extensively throughout France, where they developed quite a following.  For Parsley, success in Europe came as a total surprise, “We had some sort of momentum happening in France, because I think for some reason they liked the record and we were able to tour really extensively around the country.”  But it was in Italy where the group had their biggest spurt of surprise exposure.  As the promotion surrounding Shot In The Head winded down, an Italian watch company wanted to use “Goodnight Moon” in a television commercial.  “They called and said its a watch commercial for Brio watches and you know, we’ll give you guys a couple months rent, and I thought ‘oh yeah, I don’t have anything against watches, watches are a fine thing, they don’t hurt anyone, sure.’”

The watch commercial led to the increasing popularity of “Goodnight Moon” in Italy, and the track went to number one on the country’s pop charts.  “So we got that watch commercial and all of the sudden its number one; and they called us and said “you knocked Madonna out of the number one!”, and Duke and Danny you know, were sitting there like ‘you’re fucking kidding me.’  And then we got knocked out of the number one slot a few weeks later by J. Lo.  And then a week later we knocked her out.  So we knocked Madonna and J Lo out of number one (laughs)!”

Despite this European success, which has also seen sold out performances with audiences lining up outside the venues, Shivaree remains relatively unknown on these shores.  Meanwhile, popular British magazines like the NME have said that Shivaree are “a band to be savored... Ambrosia was simply born to be a star.  The only question now is how long it's going to take everyone else to realize it.”  Well, so far it has been six years since I Oughtta Give You A Shot In The Head For Making Me Live In This Dump, and most North Americans still seem to favor image over substance, much like they did in 1999.  The good news is that this time around, Shivaree are playing two shows in some large cities instead of one, and there are definitely more than eight people taking notice.

Shivaree wrap up the last of their scheduled North American dates on March 4^th in Boston.  Check out www.shivaree.com for future tour dates, news, and clips from Who’s Got Trouble.  You can also hear Ambrosia Parsley singing the news on Chuck D’s show Unfiltered on Air America Radio (www.airamericaradio.com/shows/unfiltered/).

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