The Roches

Kind of an odd rationale that because your name is important, than you’re important too, but I took the idea of this song to heart, especially the “your name will be the same” part. Which is why I could never understand people changing their name. Even (or, perhaps, especially) when they got married. I never understood why women were supposed to drop their history when they married. Or, rather, I understand why that used to happen, wives (and children) being property of the husband and all, but it just seems like such a strange, outmoded notion that I have trouble understanding why anybody would continue to carry it on. And the hyphenated name is just as bad. An understandable middle ground, it is hopeless awkward and leads to such potential pitfalls as Mary Yorkshire-Binsdorf marrying Stephen Piddle-Wicket and becoming Mary Yorkshire-Binsdorf-Piddle-Wicket. And what happens to her kids when they marry? It is a slippery slope people are trampling down.

But that’s last names. What I really don’t understand is people who change their first names. I understand that, in the forging of an identity, you need to try on different clothes and different hairstyle and different personas, but it just seems like your name is your name and, to some extent, who you are. You can’t just decide you want to change your name any more than you can decide you want to change how tall you are or who your parents are. I know this is an indefensible position, and I’m not saying people shouldn’t be allowed to do it, it just strikes me as strange. And somewhat pretentious. Because nobody ever changes their name from Joe to Bob, it’s always from Frankie to F. Jasmine, or from Gordon to Sting, or from Amy to Rio, or from Don to Dorian.

I first heard the Roches from a woman who used to be named Sue, when I knew her, but then changed her name to Sayer. She was a dancer at Interlochen, a year older than me, and she also turned me on to Talking Heads when she cast me in a piece choreographed to their version of Al Green’s Take Me to the River (the only cover in their repertoire). She also choreographed a piece that I wasn’t in to the Roches’ song, The Train. I must say, I hated both songs on first (and second and third) listening, but gradually began to appreciate their charms. I initially viewed Sue’s musical preferences with mistrust. On dance tour once, when the Walkman first appeared, she shared a headset with me for a moment while I was listening to the extended vocalese of The Great Gig in the Sky, the center-point of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. She recoiled in horror and pulled off the headphones and I overheard her tell one of the dance teachers that it was just some woman screaming and yelling. I could believe that she didn’t like it, but I couldn’t believe that she hadn’t heard it before. After all, this was Dark Side of the Moon, fer crissakes! I offered to let her pick the music, and she slipped in a Joni Mitchell tape that had me yawning and edging away. Screaming and yelling women bad but ululating and whining women good? Whatever. It was my first grappling of the difference between “boy” music and “girl” music. Sue was a girl and as Talking Heads said, the girls want to be with the girls.

With enough exposure, I came to love The Train (I’m not that much of a boy) and eventually was persuaded to buy the Roches eponymous debut. I had – have – never heard anything like it. The music is folky, but put together in a very idiosyncratic way. The harmonies, which are beautiful and, because they are sung by sisters, extremely well-blended, are, nevertheless, not the harmonies you expect. There is a tense, harmonic dissonance that runs throughout the album that clashes with the gentle strumming of their acoustic guitars. And the lyrics are not at all what you’d expect from a folk idiom. Hysterically funny, they deal with the tiny tragedies and small triumphs of modest, anonymous city life. The Train, for example, recounts in hysterical detail the minutiae of riding on a commuter train next to a fat, sweaty man drinking a beer and captures perfectly the kind of intimate anonymity that you are constantly subjected to in NYC. While many of their songs are screamingly funny, there is also an undeniable streak of loneliness and sadness running through them. Such as on this song, a plaintive plea from a woman whose dreams have been dashed – again – and who just wants her lousy job waiting tables back. It’s filled with all the trademark clunky lines and incongruous imagery and alternating sweet and sour harmonies that make the Roches such a unique musical experience. It is simultaneously exhilarating and heartbreaking and belongs next to Fountains of Wayne in the "tiny lives perfectly illustrated" file. You may not like them at first (as opposed to Fountains of Wayne, who hook you with their first note), but if you give the Roches a chance, they will crawl their way into your heart. If you’ve ever been disappointed or downtrodden or taken pleasure in the smallest possible trivial personal triumph, the Roches will raise a glass and toast you with their beautifully tarnished humanity. And their huwomanity, too.