Diamanda Galas turns melodrama into intense, ambitious melody
By Greg Kot/Tribune music critic
October 19, 2007
It's been a rough few years for Diamanda Galas, who is practically a musical genre unto herself. A 2004 tour collapsed in miscommunication, canceled tour dates and litigation. Her parents were both hospitalized. And a long personal relationship ended in a verbal bloodbath.
Fortunately, she had music to help her tunnel out.
"Music is really about the instinct to survive," she says. "You're going through something that is dangerous and the only thing that keeps you alive, keeps you sane, is constantly working on music...I was at the piano all day and all night. I actually overdid it. Not because I was trying to be creative but because I had to do it. And I ended up with a lot of material, a lot of songs. But physically I ended up exhausted."
The lacerating love songs that she recorded over this recent period will result in two albums, "Guilty Guilty Guilty" (Mute Records) due out next year, and "You're My Thrill," to be released in 2009. They also will provide the basis for the second of two concerts next week at the Museum of Contemporary Art, her first Chicago shows in more than a decade. The first show will focus on "songs of exile," featuring her interpretations of East European composers. For people accustomed to her boundary-pushing extremism, Galas is playing it a bit straighter this time by sprinkling her sets with a few relatively well-known melodies.
Galas is a singular performer, a singer with a prodigious vocal range who is a classically trained pianist. Over two decades, her albums have blurred the lines between genres while addressing immense subjects: AIDS ("Plague Mass"), mental illness ("Vena Cava"), torture ("Schrei 27") and genocide ("Defeixiones"). She has ventured into rock while working with Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones, and explored Middle Eastern, East European and classical music. Her live performances are riveting. She was initially so shy on stage that she wanted only footlights, to prevent her from seeing the audience and help her focus on the songs.
"I wanted the person on stage to look like she was beheaded, like she was about to be dropped into a hole, executed," Galas says with a laugh. "It was my way of saying, 'This is not about Diamanda. This is not a star trip. This is about the song.' The lights end up taking me there."
Immersing herself in music helped Galas out of her latest rough patch.
"I didn't want to do 'The Thrill is Gone,'" referring to the devastating Chet Baker ballad written by Ray Henderson and Lew Brown that she recorded. "I was facing the end of a horrible, very intense love affair. I said to myself, 'I don't want to sing this song,' because I knew the song had the answer to what was going on in my life. But I started playing the [chord] changes, and then I looked at the words and there it was, and it was horrible. I didn't want to sing it. But I had to sing it. It was as if I were on Sodium Pentothal, and every single song I did was about what I was going through. I couldn't not do it."
It's in keeping with a career that has always given voice to the voiceless, expressing what is so often suppressed. Horror is her great subject, and her performances are an attempt to dramatize it. But her music is also defined by empathy, an embrace of the abused, the underdog.
"The type of music I get involved with is usually dictated by seeing that something needs to be said," she says. "In the case of the love songs [on the forthcoming albums], I would call that self-defense. But some of it was absolute joy, and the glory and mystery of it, the sheer ecstasy of it. I'm an only child, and my parents were both in the hospital for two months. I saw how they handled it. I would see them holding hands watching the light go down at the end of the day. It reminded me of some of the old songs I learned in my father's band: 'All the Way,' 'Autumn Leaves,' 'Love Me or Leave Me.' And I used to complain having to learn all these old songs. But when I needed them, they came back to me. They got me through."