Excuses For Skipping
create beautiful tension
by Chris Ohnesorge

It’s impossible not to develop a great big band crush on Excuses for Skipping as soon as you experience them live. They’re the kind of band you fall hard for and sigh wistfully over while waiting for their next appearance. I myself fell prey to the EFS charm when my own band had the pleasure of sharing a bill with them at The Hemlock Tavern in 2006. The members of EFS all look as if they should be in bands for sure, albeit not necessarily in the same one.Not knowing what to expect from them – especially after years of playing shows with so many bands that I inevitably tune them out a little bit before playing – I was more than surprised and definitely thrilled when they took the stage and delivered song after song of catchy, melodic, spacey-yet-spikey pop music. And I say “pop” in the best sense of the word – the kind of music that has you humming the chorus in your head for days but still manages to rise above formula and familiarity often associated with pop music these days. They’d fit perfectly on a label like 4AD alongside acts such as Lush, the Cocteau Twins or even the more sparse and experimental Throwing Muses, and recall criminally underrated 90s-era bands like New York’s Ruby Falls or Portland’s The Spinanes.

I met with Excuses for Skipping – Linda (guitar, vocals, Libra), Tammy (guitar, vocals, Scorpio – triple Scorpio!), Wendy (bass, backing vocals, Pisces) and Alison (drums, Gemini) - at quintessential Mission dive bar, The Phone Booth, to chat about the origins of EFS, recording, intra-band relationships, falling down on the job and discuss the dreaded women/queers in music question. Linda and Tammy began laying the foundation for what would become Excuses for Skipping, ten years ago when their musical relationship was born.

“Tammy and I have been playing for a long, long time together in different capacities”, Linda explained, “She played drums mostly and I played guitar mostly. But then one day our band broke up and in that band we all rotated instruments. So basically I was in New York and Tammy was in San Francisco and she called me and we had this conversation, you know, ‘cause we’re married and I said ‘Well we’re gonna play music but what instrument do you wanna play because now we’ve played all the instruments?’ And she said she wanted to play guitar and I was so happy because I really wanted to play guitars and write together.” Several years later Excuses for Skipping was born and, after a few line-up changes they snagged Alison (ex-Chi Chi Palace, ex-Vervein) and Wendy (ex-Leopold & His Fiction, ex-The Cartographers) for the rhythm section, whom Tammy describes as “the absolute right people for the band.” Given their relatively short stint in EFS, Wendy and Alison play integral roles going above and beyond the usual mirroring-the-rhythm-guitar or keeping-the-beat duties of many bassists and drummers.

But there’s more than mutual bandmate love and harmony in EFS. As Linda mentioned, she and Tammy have been married for nearly as long as they’ve had a musical partnership. Luckily they seem to have taken Sonic Youth as a role model for how to be in a long-term relationship while co-existing within a band. “I think it really depends on the people, because I’ve been in bands before where two people got together and it was really dramatic and ugly. But I think with Linda and Tammy there’s such an understanding and a free vibe for both of them,” Alison pointed out, further illustrating why EFS gas avoided the curse of band members dating. “I think that it works because they’re really individuals. It’s not like they’re a couple when we’re all playing music together.”

“When Linda and I first started going out she was such a hippie and I was such a punk rocker,” Tammy said with a smirk, “And my friends were like ‘She’s a hippie! Oh my God, you’re going out with a hippie!’ And I was like ‘fuck you!’”

Linda nailed how this dynamic comes out in their music as well. “She played in punk rock bands and I played in space rock bands, pretty much all the time, that’s where we came from musically.” And it shows with Tammy keeping Linda from completely drifting off into spaced-out meandering and Linda coaxing out melody from Tammy’s more aggressive, punk leanings. But Tammy’s punk rock spirit can only be dampened so much.

“When we get in the studio Tammy is a crazy person,” Linda explains. “She went into this isolation booth and she made a shrine to her grandmother who had passed away just the day before and her guitar…she just fell down and all her cables came out and explosions occurred and it was just totally insane but it created such a great sound. And she really did fall down and we kept it.” Or to put it more simply, there wasn’t enough room in the tiny isolation booth for her to rock out the way she normally does onstage.

“At one point my headphones fell off and it created a feedback into the mike that made almost like a laser sound and we actually used it on one of the songs. It’s all natural, all the sounds that you hear on the recordings that’s natural, it’s not tweaked or anything, it just happened,” Tammy said, taking a much-deserved gulp of beer.

Sci-Fi noises made from accidental guitar feedback aside, another one of Excuses for Skipping’s captivating qualities is how unexpected their sound is given the scene they come from and some of their regional predecessors like Team Dresch, The Need or Tribe 8. The questions asked of bands comprised of women and/or queer people are often so ham-fisted and obvious, with the interviewer coming off as if it’s some sort of miracle that a group of people born female or queer can actually play instruments, that it immediately places the musicians in a constricting pink box that is always more about their identities than the music they make. For Wendy, it is part of what she loves about playing in EFS. “I don’t think it’s conscious on our part, but being the newest member of the band I joined this all-girl group and I was like ‘Yes, we don’t sound like every other all girl band!’ I don’t think it’s limiting for us at all and I would just love for people to see us as people rocking out. And I don’t think we cater to just a lesbian scene like some all-women bands do.”

“Music is music and it doesn’t matter who you are or what your sexual orientation is. I mean, music is for everyone,” Linda insists. Her goals, and that of her fellow band members, are first and foremost to make music as much as they can. “I just wanna be able to play music and quit my fuckin’ job.”

Hopefully she won’t quit her job, where she works as a pre-school teacher, helping expand the musical minds of so many modern toddlers. “I brought a record player into the pre-school the other day and I asked the kids to guess what this thing is. And they had no idea! One of the kids thought it was something that makes a phone call!” Just think what they’ll learn when she brings in her guitar.

Excuses for Skipping are putting the finishing touches on their debut CD, Out of Work Early and plan to release it in 2007. For the latest band news, check their website www.excusesforskipping.com , or their myspace page www.myspace.com/xcuses4skipping