FREAKWATER DUO GOES THE DISTANCE FOR EACH OTHER
Kevin McKeough * 03/26/99
Chicago Tribune
(Copyright 1999 by the Chicago Tribune)
Who says long-distance relationships don't work?
Janet Beveridge Bean and Catherine Ann Irwin mostly have lived
apart since a 17-year-old Bean left their hometown of Louisville,
Ky., to follow a visitor back to Chicago. (He was Rick Rizzo, now
Bean's husband and partner in the band Eleventh Dream Day).
TD That separation hasn't kept Bean and Irwin from maintaining a
musical partnership that began with the two singing old country songs
together in Louisville and has continued with their singing old-
sounding country songs together in Freakwater.
"One of the reasons it's able to be ongoing is that we live
apart," Bean says. "It's nice to see each other, but Catherine has a
life down in Louisville and I have one in Chicago."
Distance amid unity also is a characteristic of Freakwater's
transfixing harmonies. There's an exquisite tension in the way that
Bean's sweet, crying soprano and Irwin's cracked, drawling alto don't
quite mesh, something haunting in the space left between them.
Those harmonies, coupled with Freakwater's Appalachian melodies
and old-timey instrumentation -- acoustic guitars, fiddle, steel
guitar and upright bass -- have drawn comparisons to country legends
the Carter Family, which Bean thinks are misguided. "Our references
include the Carter Family," she says, "but they include a lot of
things since the Carter Family."
The Carter Family didn't sing much, for example, about religious
skepticism. Or drug addiction. Or the decline of organized labor.
Or Muhammad Ali. These subjects all crop up on "Springtime," the
most recent of Freakwater's five records.
Although Irwin has been the group's main songwriter, Bean provides
her own input. The collaboration "takes place with Catherine and I
just sitting and playing the songs. We have a sense of each other's
styles and where we're going with the song."
Having released its first record in 1989, Freakwater can claim to
* be at the forefront of the alternative country movement, a thought
that makes Bean shudder. "I'm sorry if we've dragged anyone down
with us," she protests. "It wasn't a trail anyone should have
taken."
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