Music: Golightly Into That Good Night

One doesn’t amass the kind of catalog that Holly Golightly boasts by deliberating over writing and recording for too long. Golightly recorded a number of albums in the early ’90s under the banner of Thee Headcoatees, the all-girl Garage Rock counterparts to Billy Childish’s Thee Headcoats, just one of Childish’s many band personas.

Since embarking on her solo career more than a decade ago, Golightly has turned around about an album a year on average (including her last, 2003’s Truly She is None Other, with local faves the Greenhornes lending an integral hand) and toured fairly regularly, a challenge considering she has maintained a day job as a manager for social housing projects in England.

But even by Golightly’s fairly breezy time standards, her latest album, You Can’t Buy a Gun When You’re Crying (credited to Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs), took an almost impossibly brief amount of time to conceive and execute. She and longstanding touring stand-up bassist Dave Drake, known as Lawyer Dave, had long wanted to make an album of spartan and atmospheric Country/Folk ballads.

But for all their plans (“We use the word planning in the loosest sense,” Golightly laughs), the album never came to fruition.

“Well, Dave lives over there (in the U.S.) and I live here in the U.K., which doesn’t make it easy to start off,” says Golightly from her London apartment. “Then the only time we really see each other is when we’re on tour and there’s never time. The usual stuff … it goes on and on and on.”

After years of kicking around the idea of the album, the time and opportunity presented itself over this year’s New Year celebrations, so Drake flew to England and he and Golightly wrote, recorded, mixed and mastered Gun in four days.

“We didn’t play (live) when he came over,” says Golightly of the whirlwind schedule. “He wasn’t working and I had some time not working. Dave had songs that I’d heard before that we hadn’t recorded and I had some that weren’t anything really solid and I had a lot of lyrics left over from other stuff. We had a very short space of time to do it in and we didn’t really know what it was going to be like. We were surprised at how it turned out.”

Considering some sessions wind up with four days spent on little more than microphone placement, to write and record an entire album in that time is, to say the very least, astonishing. Gun‘s sonic texture, a cross between lo-fi Country/Folk living-room recording and Tom Waits-like atmospherics, makes it all the more extraordinary.

“It sounds like we spent a lot more time on it than we did,” says Golightly in a textbook definition of understatement. “We obviously have a lot of the same reference points. We know what we like and we like a lot of the same stuff, so it’s not that difficult if you’re that like-minded.”

Although Golightly’s general musical output is more electric and Rock-based, she insists that the writing of Gun did not require her to draw on any influences other than the ones she normally utilizes.

“I don’t really think about writing songs in those terms,” she says. “I’m always writing songs. It just depends what the end result is like to whether I think they came out the way I wanted them to or not. But with these I didn’t have any preconceived ideas about what they should be like because we just didn’t know what it was going to be like. I was just thinking on my feet and so was Dave.”

Golightly notes that Drake had to push aside his tendency to spend a lot of time in the studio to get things exactly right in favor of her desire to capture the immediacy of the performance with equal amounts of speed and spontaneity.

“Dave could spend four years in the studio and I like the instant gratification,” says Golightly.

That’s quite a compromise on Drake’s part — from four years to four days.

“Dave didn’t get to do what he wanted to do to it, but I am glad that he didn’t because the way that it came out couldn’t have been a better record really, under the circumstances.”

While there is a sparse, latter period Tom Waits/Johnny Cash feel about Gun (the cover art’s antique sepia toned look even lines up with Waits’ Orphans package from late last year), Golightly says that wasn’t necessarily her and Drake’s intention at the outset.

“I know Dave quite likes Tom Waits and we both like Johnny Cash obviously,” says Golightly. “I don’t think we were trying for anything in particular in the space of time we had. We weren’t aiming in any particular direction, we just thought, ‘We’ve got a lot to do — let’s get on with it.’ In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have hoped for it be as good as it is, because we didn’t dedicate months of songwriting to it. It exceeds all my expectations, really.”

When all is said and done, there is not likely to be a better lyric written this year, nor a better album title than “You can’t buy a gun when you’re crying.”

“Yeah, well, that’s another highlight track on the record. For an album title, I think it’s great,” says Golightly. “I think it captures everybody’s attention. You read it and you just think, ‘Oh, can’t you?’ I don’t know, that’s what I think. If there are any prizes for the funniest album title, I think that goes hands down.”

This article appears in Sep 19-25, 2007.