Photo via josiecotton.com
Josie Cotton - B-Girl
Josie Cotton’s outstanding latest release, Pussycat Babylon, features a song about Milwaukee. It’s not a happy song.
Cotton, who performs Saturday at X-Ray Arcade, says “Super 8” is a song about “rejection on a grand scale” that happened to take place in a motel room in Milwaukee that reeked of cigarette smoke and had a broken air conditioner, where she found herself on a long holiday weekend a few years ago.
“Absolutely every line in that song—in a Super 8 parking lot, Milwaukee on Labor Day in a yellow coat—it’s all in that song,” says the Los Angeles-based musician. “People are like it’s metaphor, no it’s literal. That was one of my worst weekends, in Milwaukee.”
She promises she doesn’t hold it against us. Cotton, who released the album on her own Kitten Robot Records, calls Pussycat Babylon one of her most personal.
“My heart pulled out of my chest and held up to my face really helped in terms of just having a lot of material to write from,” she explains. “I just didn’t feel like I had anything else to cover up and pretend wasn’t happening. It was a great freedom to be able to do that on a record.”
Cotton praises her co-producer Paul Roessler, also her business partner and close friend, for pushing her to continue when she thought she might be going too far. “He said, ‘Oh yeah, you can say that. That’s what an artist does,’” she says.
The highly personal approach goes against the way Cotton learned about songwriting from mentors like Larson and Bobby Paine, who wrote her most well-known song, “Johnny, Are You Queer.” Heartbreak was something you approached from a distance, she says.
“You talk about it and are clever about it, but you don’t really go in there and like be crying while you’re singing like I did on that record, on certain songs,” she says. “Some of it, it’s just so autobiographical it’s just so silly.”
40 Years On
Cotton, whose musical career stretches back more than 40 years, came to California via Dallas with a brief stay in an upper state New York reform school in between. “That says so much that I don’t even have to say anything else about it,” she says. “I was trouble.”
Over the years, Cotton’s music has incorporated garage rock, new wave, rockabilly and much more. On Pussycat Babylon, she favors an electropop sound but maintains her love of variety.
The album begins with the catchy, Michael Myers-referencing “Calling All Girls,” which Cotton says was a title she had picked up from another song long ago that she always wanted to use. The wild video for song is a total blast and continues Cotton’s love of sci-fi and b-movies, which also inspired her 2007 album Invasion of the B-Girls, an effort that saw her offer versions of songs from She Devils on Wheels, the Green Slime and other trash classics.
The dark but fun album-ending “Hi, I Like You” is another standout.
More to Come
More new music is still on the way from Cotton, who plans to release another full-length album next spring featuring collaborations with the likes of Clem Burke, Eddie Spaghetti, and Lee Rocker. Cotton says she holds back nothing again on the upcoming album.
“It’s way beyond heartbreak,” she says. “It’s desolation and the most absurd humor that I’ve conjured up on my time on earth. It’s a wild ride.”
Cotton is appearing on upcoming tribute album to the Go-Gos that will be released on Sympathy for the Record Industry.
She also keeps busy with her label, which in addition to releasing her new and previously unreleased music, has featured both established artists such as Mark Lanegan and Eddie Spaghetti and newer groups like the Velvet Starlings and Hayley and the Crushers.
Cotton, who has been highly active in recent years after disappearing from the spotlight in the 1990s, says she’s been encouraged by the enthusiastic reactions she’s received from fans.
After her ‘80s heyday of Valley Girl and “Johnny, Are You Queer,” a song which she turned down performing on SCTV after the song hit No. 2 on AM radio in Canada, Cotton says she never realized how many people liked her music.
“I didn’t know. There wasn’t the internet,” she says. “There was such an atom bomb of reaction to ‘Johnny, Are You Queer,’ All I heard was people not liking me, in the press and various people. Once you get banned in Amsterdam, all bets are off. It’s like, who else hates me?”
The rise of Myspace in the mid-2000s helped her realize she still had a fan base and one that was willing to not limit her to an ‘80s sound. “I think that the thing that helps me keep wanting to do it is that I can change,” she says. “I think if I had of stayed at Elektra (which released her first two albums), I would have been in an institution a long time ago. A Frances Farmer clinging to the floor of an insane asylum.”
Cotton’s backing band will include Melanie Vammen from the Pandoras and Muffs and Minneapolis music maven Travis Ramin.
Josie Cotton performs Saturday, Oct. 9 at X-Ray Arcade, 5036 S. Packard Ave., Cudahy, with Milwaukee’s Fun Bois and Minneapolis’ Beebe Gallini
