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The Lies Don't Want to Hurt You By Cory Peipon The Lies began about two years ago after moving from Olympia to the Bay Area. Through the Kill Rock Stars label in Olympia, Washington, The Lies have released a seven inch record as part of the KRS Mailorder Freaks series (collect all five: they printed five different covers one for each member of the band) and one CD entitled Underdogs and Infidels. On record, the slickness of synth-y New Wave sounds seep through, while in the live show, The Lies' sound belies their love of simple garage riffs. Overall, though, The Lies will take you through a lot of ecstatic lows on Underdogs and Infidels, with its droning keyboards, grinding dual guitars, and dirge-y beats, all topped with Dale's pleading vocals. While Casey Ward set up her drum kit and Tracey Sawyer (keyboard) caught up with visitors Frenchie and the German Girls from Olympia, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dale and Sadie Shaw (vocals and guitar, respectively) and Sarah Reed (guitar) at Kimo's here in San Francisco for a little chat. C: When did you all meet and decide to form the band? Dale: We were in another band, me and Sadie no wait you asked me to be in that one band years ago, remember? Sadie was in a band in Olympia with Sarah and Tina. I was just in town passing through on one of my many wanderings, and I just sat in with them for a short set. Then I moved to Olympia, and while I was there we formed a band called the Bonnot Gang that put out a tape and one single. It was me and Sarah and Sadie and one of the girls in one of the bands tonight, so we could have a little reunion... C: Which band is she in? Dale: Frenchie and the German Girls. Right, right? And then, me and Sadie were in a band called On the Take which played one show and never released anything. And then we all moved to San Francisco. It just seemed to make sense to all be in a band together. Me and Sadie and Sarah had been in bands before, and they knew that Casey wanted to play music. Sadie and Casey lived together. Tracey moved here, and she is quite musically adept, so. C: How did you name the band? Sadie: We were trying to come up with one-syllable, ambiguous names. I liked The Cheats but everyone misunderstood what I was saying. They thought I said The Cleats, The Cheeses I don't know. We just kind of fell on The Lies. Dale: What other band names did we come up with? Sarah: The Shivs was a good one... Dale: Wasn't there some gambling one? Sarah: Didn't you want to be like, 13 Mile-High Haystack or something? Dale: No! Giant Haystack. He was a wrestler. Sadie: I wanted us to be The Disaffectionates. Nobody liked that one... Sarah: Basically, The Lies was the only one that everybody didn't hate. C: What were the conversations like when you decided to become The Lies? Was it pretty organic, deciding what the music would be like? Sarah: It was me, Casey, and Sadie first. Sadie: It was totally unplanned. We do try to figure out the mood for a song, but we never said, "Let's be a garage band, let's be a goth band". We just discussed it per song. Sarah: We all knew we liked relatively simple garage riffs, but we like to make people feel really bad... Sadie: We like a lot of synth sound. Sarah: Yeah. We like a lot of the Magnetic Fields and Echo and The Bunnymen, the more produced music as well. Dale: We like misery and pain. C: Yeah, that would show through... Dale: Not me though. I'm not like that at all. I like happy things. Pixies, kittens - I don't like pain.  C: Garage is not a term I would ascribe to your music, so that's interesting to me to hear. Sadie: Well, if you listen to the riffs, especially my guitar riffs, if you were to just speed them up and put them to different drums, I think you could see the derivative. If you listen to the Bonnot Gang, it was definitely like that. C: Do you still have Bonnot Gang recordings available? Sadie: The seven inch is available through Decomposition, and a song from the Bonnot Gang is on the "Slice of Lemon" comp which was Lookout and Kill Rock Stars. I am pretty sure that the "Bumpidee" cassette which Tobi from Frenchie and the German Girls put out is out of print. C: I'm interested in knowing about cover art on your album... Dale: The album cover art is a picture someone took of me and Sadie right before or after we got married? Sadie: Before. Dale: Right before we got married someone did a wedding portrait of us, and I think we have always liked that picture. It was hard coming up with something to put on the cover, as I seem to remember. That was kind of the last, the final straw. Sarah: I think we had some good ideas, but all of them seemed like a lot of work. Dale: We just wanted to make it look classy. Class was in the forefront of our minds. Sadie: It had to be bleak. Dale: We didn't want to fool people into thinking they were buying some doo-wop record or something, and they would listen to it and feel tricked and betrayed and upset. C: When is a new recording happening, tours, etc... Dale: We don't have any plans... Sarah: The "No Love" comp is happening. There is a compilation coming out of a bunch of really great San Franciso bands. Subtonix, Erase Errata, The Knives, the Little Deaths... We are hoping to do a record in January to come out in the spring. Sadie: May 2001. Sarah: We are hoping to tour next summer. C: Will the record be on Kill Rock Stars? All: Yeah! Sadie: We hope to tour with the Subtonix. C: They're awesome... Sarah: Yeah. A mini-tour down to Southern California... C: The one other thing is, I can't think of any other band that is all women with a guy out front on vocals. Dale: No, we've thought of that too. C: I don't know if there is anything you can actually say about that, but it's great. Dale: I didn't even realize it until quite late into The Lies' career, when someone else pointed it out. They're like, "Isn't it really weird that you're in a band with all these women?" And I was like, "No, I never really thought about it." It had never crossed my mind! I am happy with it. I've been in bands with boys, and it's always been a nightmare. Sadie: I think we have really good chemistry. I don't think it has anything to do with gender - it's just luck. We just have good chemistry. Dale: Yeah, I can't think of another band like that... The Breeders were three women and one man, but he was the drummer. We are trailblazers. C: It's true, it's true... Dale: One day in the future all bands will be like that. C: Until then, thank you so much for talking with me! All: Thank you... _____________________________________________ Cory Peipon is Editor in Chief at withitgirl. Photos by Maya Hayuk http://www.withitgirl.com/ 
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