Meg Remy of U.S. Girls birthed what might be her best album yet along with her twins

Necessity, as the saying goes, is the mother of invention. Well, motherhood necessitated the invention of the new U.S. Girls album and, frankly, perhaps Meg Remy should consider having another round of kids.

“Bless This Mess,” Remy’s ninth album under her endlessly evolving U.S. Girls alias, was written and recorded in Toronto while she was pregnant with — and subsequently adapting to life with — twin boys and, as has been the case with every U.S. Girls record since 2015’s head-turning “Half Free” and 2018’s smashing disco odyssey “In a Poem Unlimited,” one is tempted to call it her best yet.

It’s certainly the year’s smart-pop album to beat thus far, adding a welcome layer of gloss and future-R&B bump-’n’-grind to Remy’s ever-more-tuneful explorations of femininity and feminism, and her committed anti-corporate/anti-establishment convictions. It’s also brimming with the inscrutable sense of humour that’s been a large part of U.S. Girls’ charm since Remy started the project in her native Chicago as a deconstructionist, one-woman electro-noise assault weapon 15 years ago, featuring a ridiculously slick and tuneful should-be pop hit, “Tux (Your Body Fills Me, Boo),” sung from the point of view of a lonely, neglected tuxedo to match the cover portrait of a very pregnant Remy sporting the same.

The similarly inscrutable Remy, as usual, is leery of talking too much about the specifics of “Bless This Mess’s” creation because “the story comes to feel ‘not real’ anymore. The truth becomes marketing, you know? And that’s always strange.”

Essentially, the record — released in late February via esteemed U.K. indie label 4AD — was born out of being off the road during COVID lockdown in the throes of incipient parenthood, making music and writing songs at home with husband and frequent collaborator and touring bandmate Max “Slim Twig” Turnbull, and with friends over email for fun, “and doing some strange things I’d never done before, like writing songs to Hollywood ‘briefs.’”

“A big-time Hollywood movie was looking for songs and I wrote two songs for the movie,” Remy quietly recalled one recent evening after putting the twins, now two years old, to bed. “They didn’t get chosen, but they were good songs. ‘Bless This Mess’ was one of them and ‘Futures Bet’ was the other one. So I had a batch of songs going and then I found out I was pregnant, and then I was, like, ‘Well, I need my advance money now. I need my money now. So I’m making a record’ …

“It was a lot of fun to make a record like that. Out of necessity. Because then I wasn’t beholden to any idea or grand theme or trying to tie everything together. It was a free-for-all, in the best sense — especially because I was making it during such a time of uncertainty in not just the outside world, but my inner world. I was, like, ‘Am I gonna die in childbirth? Am I gonna have, like, a crazy blood-pressure situation and I explode? I don’t know.’ Maybe this was going to be the last record I’d ever make so it was done with a ‘Who cares?’ attitude.”

Pregnancy and pandemic stasis also contributed to keeping Remy and U.S. Girls offstage for three years, the longest she’d gone without performing in 15 years. But while Remy confessed at the time that it was “good to be a little nervous again” about hitting the road this month, she displayed nothing but unflappable confidence during a small-scale preview of the tour conducted with the aid of a versatile four-piece band before a small, doting crowd at the Drake Underground earlier this month.

Indeed, as she quipped dryly at the end of the performance: “This was our first show in three years. Lucky for you what a good show it was.”

She returns to Toronto Thursday and Friday, April 28, for a pair of shows at the Velvet Underground, with another scheduled for Aug. 20 at the more capacious Budweiser Stage opening for the National and Patti Smith. It would be wise to catch U.S. Girls when these opportunities arise, since being a mom has compelled Remy to rethink her past habit of hitting the road hard in support of a new recording for weeks on end.

“Once the kids were actually here and now that the record’s out, and through the lead-up to the record coming out and having to make decisions around touring and that kind of thing, it’s affected everything and I’m so grateful for it because I am responsible to these two people as their caregiver right now. It’s forcing me to make good decisions that I wasn’t able to make in the past when I was just mostly making them for myself, you know? Because then it was, like, ‘Oh, I can be miserable. I’m good with that. I can go on a tour with a totally inhumane routing and just get sick. I can do that.’ But I’m not gonna ask my kids to do that now.

“So I’m making better choices, I think. And also it’s just a perspective thing, as well. It’s just very grounding being a parent and it makes me feel a part of the lineage of human beings, which feels far more rewarding and nourishing and important than a review of my record or something, you know?”

With “Bless This Mess,” Remy has proffered to the public the most generous, tuneful and listener-friendly U.S. Girls album to date. Whether that trend will continue or whether U.S. Girls will take a turn for the arcane again is anybody’s guess, but that’s precisely why Remy’s catalogue is so compelling. Like a David Bowie or a P.J. Harvey or a St. Vincent, she’s one of those artists whose work is consistently exciting precisely because you have no idea what’s going to come next.

“We thought with this one we had really made something that would or could be digestible by most systems, you know? And it’s not. I mean, it’s not anywhere near pop. It’s just not. When you really listen to pop music, it couldn’t be farther from it,” laughed Remy, herself a fan of musicians who continually keep you guessing.

“I like that as well. Not everybody does. So it’s nice that there are as many kinds of artists as there are people out there in the world because you can find, like, the artists that your vibe matches with.

“Some people, they say you should read the same book over and over again and that’s how you really get to an understanding of the book. And maybe that’s true for an artist if you’re working in the same form over and over again … But I like to mix it up. I don’t know if my records quote/unquote ‘sink or swim’ out in the world, ever. As long as they’re swimming in my body of work, I feel like if they fit I’m pleased and then I’m just ready to move on to the next one.”

Ben Rayner is a Toronto-based journalist and a frequent contributor to the Star’s Culture section. Follow him on Twitter: @ihatebenrayner

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