Eat Shit and Die – featuring Grant Lee Phillips

August 17th, 2010

Sometimes you are just so heartbroken you just don’t know what to do. This is a dangerous moment in what seems like everyone’s life. It doesn’t have to be a romantic heartbreak, but this is usually what it is. It could be some other catastrophic disappointment, caused by the carelessness and selfishness of another. People are awful. I hate them and yet I cannot stop loving them. My primary addiction is probably people. I turned to drugs and alcohol and food and shopping and this and that and whatever in order to endure the pain of people. Fucking people. When will I learn? Others will break your heart. Disappoint you to no end. Steal your future and wreck your past. And they can eat shit and die. Hey – that would make a good song.



When I write songs, usually, I am at my wit’s end. I can do nothing else. Nothing is going to make me feel better. There are no drugs that will numb this ache, this burning sorrow. You cannot have an epidural on your heart. There’s nothing else you can do, but write a song. I was so angry I just put on the page “EAT SHIT AND DIE” because that was what I would have liked. That would have satisfied me. Not the literal – but what the statement means. I just want to stop caring about you. I want to stop caring about you right now. This is how I am going to do it. I am going to write this song and magically I will start caring about the song and stop caring about you. And it works. The song is like a spell, cast over the heartbreak – banishing it forever. It worked for me so well, and continues to work, and it will work for you too. I promise.



I have known Grant Lee Phillips for as long as I have been going to Largo, so since the very early 90s. He’s an incredible songwriter and possibly the best singer I have ever heard. His voice is rich, deep soulful pure Americana. I hear the great plains, the frontier, hyperion, witchcraft, GOD, tumbleweeds, the life and death of glam rock, buffalo, the desert, the mountains, everything everything – every time he opens his mouth. I was starstruck by him for about the first 7 years I had known him, but then I got to know him better, and he’s a terrific and funny guy, full of smiles and jokes and smarts and niceness all around. One time I went to his house for a Halloween party that was me and only five other guests, myself (dressed as Bridgitte Lin from “Chunking Express” – that is blonde wig and trenchcoat),Aimee Mann and Michael Penn (not in costume – they are magnificent enough), the amazing E from The Eels dressed in a very elaborate pink bunny costume complete with big bunny/hare haunch legs and ears all self contained and probably very hot inside, and the hosts of the party, Grant and his wife. Grant answered the door and I didn’t recognize him at all as he was attired in a very dramatic witch outfit with hat and nose and as I recall he was also green, but then my memory may be exaggerating this. He seemed green at the time.



I returned to the same house now many years later to write the song “Eat Shit and Die.” I had sent Grant the lyrics ahead of time and he played me what he thought the song should sound like. We had discussed earlier a song of his that I am obsessed with, “The Whole Shebang,” which is from the soundtrack to “Velvet Goldmine,” which is probably my favorite rock and roll film, and how I wanted our song to have the same type of rhythm and cadence. Something rollicking – something that could take the pain of the situation, the sadness of the words – and make it overcome. We shall overcome. We shall get through this. We had lost and now we shall win. I was asking for some witchcraft, and Grant was to be my perfect warlock. Writing with Grant is tremendously organized, as he prints everything out very meticulously and records demos that are so good that they could go to radio play right from his computer – but it’s also a lot of fun. His terrific family – with new baby Violet always ready to be held and fawned over during breaks – made our sessions an absolute joy.



I practiced the song on guitar until my fingers bled. I think that “Eat Shit and Die” did more for my guitar playing than any song I have every played before or since. It forced me to use all my fingers, even my deformed pinkies which are 2 inches shorter than most peoples. I feel like Django (one of the greatest guitar players of all time who only had 2 fingers) when I play this song. It’s a lesson and a triumph upon every completion. When I get to the final chords when I am onstage, I think silently, “Oh thank god. Thank Grant. I did it.”



We recorded it at Ryan Freeland’s studio – the amazing engineer responsible for Aimee Mann’s terrific sound as well as Crowded House, Brett Dennen, and of course Grant Lee Phillips – with the incomparable Alexander Burke and many of Aimee Mann’s band – Paul Bryan and Jeben Bruni included! This was the perfect situation where I could pretend I was Aimee Mann all day, which is what I did. Ryan Freeland’s studio is awesome because it is many small rooms – one for vocals, a little upstairs cubby for Grant’s guitar and banjo, a larger one for bass and drums and yet another for keyboards and piano. We all got to play and sing at the same time which I know now is a rare luxury of modern recording. The song sounds grand and full and sweeping. It’s epic – just like the feeling of conquering your own sadness is epic. This is a testament to Grant’s incredible skill as a producer as well as a songwriter. The song makes my heart soar. On these chords and verses and choruses I am Rising above. That’s all I want to do. That’s what I want this song to be. You can rise above it all. You can leave behind your sadness. You can chuck your heartache and write and record with Grant Lee Phillips and he will be the wizard of rock and make a song like a spell that will make others happy too. Many many many thanks to grant and to the alchemy that is music. It will save us all.



Cho Dependent hits stores 8/24. Pre-Order Cho Dependent from Margaret’s site for an instant download of the album!





Eat Shit and Die video premiere at Buzznet

August 16th, 2010

Check out Margaret’s brand new video for “Eat Shit and Die” featuring Grant Lee Phillips and directed by Liam Sullivan. The exclusive premiere is today at Buzznet.





Cho Dependent (featuring Tegan & Sara, Ben Lee, Tommy Chong, Grant Lee Phillips, Ani DiFranco, Andrew Bird, Garrison Starr, Meghan Toohey, Jon Brion, Rachael Yamagata and Fiona Apple) hits store 8/24 but is available for pre-order and instant download HERE. If you need a live dose of Margaret, check out all of her TOUR DATES.



Durham, NC Tour Date Added!

August 13th, 2010

We’ve added a new tour date to Margaret’s Cho Dependent Tour, sponsored by Logo:



11/19 Durham, NC – The Carolina Theater



Tickets go on sale Saturday, August 14 at 10am local time, but we have a limited number available to Margaret’s fanclub members today at FrontGate Tickets.



If you’re not a member of Margaret’s fanclub (mailing list) join here for the pre-sale password. It’s free!



Cho Dependent Tour



Come Party with Margaret in LA Tomorrow Night!

August 11th, 2010

Margaret is throwing a exclusive Album Release Party, celebrating the launch of Cho Dependent, this Thursday night (8/12) in Los Angeles and we have a very special offer for fans!



We’ve reserved a very limited number of spots on the guest list for fans who have purchased tickets to the upcoming Cho Dependent Tour, kicking off on August 26th. If you would like to come to the party on Thursday and you already have your tour tickets, send an email to cho_team@margaretcho.com and include proof of purchase. If you’re one of the first 50 fans to write in, we’ll confirm you for the guest list email you back with the secret party location & details.



- The Cho Team



PS – If you don’t have your Cho Dependent Tour tickets yet, you can grab them HERE.





Baby I’m with the Band – featuring Brendan Benson

August 10th, 2010

I have this weird problem of leaving food in my car. The worst was when an already finely ripened piece of bleu cheese fell out of my Trader Joe’s shopping bag and lodged itself underneath the passenger seat of my blue Mini Cooper. I didn’t smell it at first, and didn’t for many months. I often go on the road and leave my car at home, undriven and undisturbed for months at a time. During those empty days, that cheese blossomed and rotted inside its plastic packaging. The thing blobbed, swelled, got bigger, got smaller, got its own life, got a fucking job, got married, had kids, got divorced, lost custody then regained it – all within the safe, quietly parked ecosystem of my vehicle. By the time I got back, I was like – “who shit in this thing?” because dear reader, it smelled like straight up shit. Not farts. Not stepped in dog shit and then got in the driver’s seat – I am talking about straight up shit in the car. Took a shit in it. I mean shit in it. Can I be any clearer? “Had to take a shit, so got into the car and then did it.” I mean seriously.



I had no idea at this point what was causing the shitness. I didn’t know it was an escaped Trader Joe’s blue cheese. I thought there was something wrong with the car. Possibly an animal had crawled into the manifold and just died. Perhaps it was haunted by a shit ghost. I don’t know what. I took it to the dealership and they couldn’t find anything. Then one day, I pulled the seat back and a very shrunken plastic package came flying out from underneath. It was unrecognizable at first, but then slowly, I came to realize that was where the smell was coming from. As soon as I removed the remains of the cheese, the shit smell was gone. This did not change me. No lessons were learned – I still leave food in my car.



In April of this year, when I drove to Nashville for my recording session with the fantastic Brendan Benson, I bought some jalapeno cheese potato chips, a small but substantially salty and delicious bag. They were special chips to me, mostly because I had enjoyed my recording session so tremendously, because I was recording with someone I absolutely idolize, because we were recording in Ben Folds’ lavish and impressive studio – the chips became sort of souvenirs and like a subject in A&E’s “Obsessed” – I just couldn’t part with them. I kept those chips in my car until late July when I had to actually return the car to the dealership.



Still, four months later– I had a moment where I had to make an actual decision whether or not I should throw them away. I didn’t want to eat them at that point, because not only were they months old by now, but also because the bag had not been properly closed. I didn’t have a chip clip or anything in my car, so I had just kind of folded the top, and tried to weigh the fold down with the car’s manual in the overstuffed glove compartment – which, as any chip lover knows, is not an adequate way of storing chips; the deliciousness of them will fade in just minutes. I had left them this way for MONTHS. Anyway, the chips had sentimental value. They had accompanied me on this tremendous rock and roll journey – from Atlanta to Nashville and back. I thought that one day they would be in the rock and roll hall of fame. I thought these chips could be special legendary rock chips that would be as recognizable as Elvis’ pink pants or Robert Johnson’s guitar. I was having delusions of potato chip grandeur. They were jalapeno, after all! And they were from a Brendan Benson recording session!!!



I wrote the song with Brendan without actually meeting him. I had been a longtime fan of his solo work as well as The Raconteurs, and so I was thrilled when he said yes to this collaboration. I wanted to write a kind of a Pamela Des Barres groupie jam – and I had just read Pattie Boyd Harrison’s book ‘Wonderful Tonight’ which is all about her life in the rock and roll 60s and 70s and her marriages to George Harrison and Eric Clapton. I have spent my own time on a tour bus, and I have a pretty good understanding of what it feels like to be a rock wife. Did you know you can’t shit on a tour bus? Interesting fact! You have to hold it till you get to a gas station. It’s from a Ben Lee Noise Addict song – “The Rigours of Rock” – I’ll say! Anyway, I know what it’s like to be holding with your sweetie in his bunk trying to be sexy with a bullet in the chamber.



So this is the song, “Baby I’m with the Band.” I wrote the chorus and emailed it to Brendan and he loved it. In days I had a demo and we were ready to record. This song fell together easily as we both somehow knew how it was supposed to sound before we even met. I absolutely love singing it. Brendan pushed me to take my voice further than I have ever gone, and it sounds amazing. It’s a hot, GTO-styled rock and roll confection and when I sing it live I need to put a long scarf on the mike stand to emphasize the 70’sness of it all.



Chips and bleu cheese notwithstanding, this song is the shit. Thanks much to Brendan Benson and his genius!!!



Cho Dependent hits stores 8/24. Pre-Order Cho Dependent here for an instant download of the album!



Intervention – featuring Tegan and Sara

August 9th, 2010

I went from Fez, the dusky 9th century city in the ancient kingdom of Morocco, to modern, sparklingly jeweled Vancouver in bright bright British Columbia, continuously flying and laying over and flying again for nearly 36 hours to make my recording session with Tegan and Sara, nursing slowly dying intestinal parasites along the way. It was a long journey, but I couldn’t sleep at all, because I was so excited that I was going to be hanging out with Tegan and Sara and their extended family, both biological and rock, for two days. I have been a rabid longtime fan of their music, and had even got to meet Sara once backstage at a show of mine in Montreal years ago. “The Con” is the song I go to when there is nowhere else to turn, when I have exhausted all my auditory options and I am all “a million hours left to think of you and think of that.”



I love going to see them live too. Tegan and Sara play for thousands of fans every night and they make their fans feel like they are important, that they exist, that queers and girls can be rock stars too, that it’s about them and about their lives and about the guitars and as they are defined by the music, they are made real in the world. Tegan and Sara make more than music. They make a whole generation of queers and girls feel like they matter. It’s powerful and profound.  When I look out into the crowd at a Tegan and Sara show, I feel a kind of elation, like together, in the music, we can do anything. It’s the way rock and roll makes us invincible. With Tegan and Sara we can overcome anything – homophobia, sexism, even heartbreak. I love them. I love them so fucking much.




Photo by Lindsey Byrnes



I couldn’t have been more excited to be working with them in the studio, after several months of juggling our mutually hectic schedules and finding time to make the song that perfectly opens up this record, “Intervention”. It’s the first track on the album because it’s the first one I want everyone to hear. It’s so hilarious but also deeply sympathetic and truthful and also, just fucking rocks. Incidentally, the lyrics were not written to satisfy my own obsessive relationship to the television show “Intervention,” as the culture of addiction and recovery has fascinated me way before reality TV was a thing, but I dig the show. I still can’t believe the alcoholics and addicts featured don’t figure out right away that they are on “Intervention” and that there’s going to be one soon. They must be really fucked up. And I must be really fucked up because often I find myself slightly jealous of the people on the program because they seem like they are having a good time, at least before they get all intervened upon. That is where my jealousy ends. I think having to have an actual intervention would be a true nightmare, and so writing the words to the song were a kind of prayer, a mantra against it ever actually happening to me.



Preview “Intervention – featuring Tegan and Sara” at Spin.com



Cho Dependent hits stores 8/24. Pre-Order Cho Dependent here for an instant download of the album!



Enemies – featuring Jon Brion

August 6th, 2010

Making this record had much to do with being a regular at Largo, which is now Largo at the Coronet. The legendary nightclub has now moved to fancier new digs on La Cienega, but I have a soft spot for the old place on Fairfax. I started going sometime in the early 90s, first to perform at their comedy night, which was Mondays, where the guy who would book the acts would tell everyone that he was dating me, Laura Kightlinger and Janeane Garofalo simultaneously – something that I was secretly proud of, not to be thought of as in any vague way sexually related to him, but because those are two girls with whom I would love to be in the same league.



All the comics started to venture out to other shows at Largo during the week, and there was much talk about the amazing Jon Brion who would perform on Friday nights. The night I went to see Jon the first time, a small fire had started in a garbage can outside the club. The flames blazed up quickly and I punched them out with my fist before going inside. I was a much rougher girl then and was the type to wear steel toe boots and men’s pants from Salvation Army and drove quite drunk and even at times picked fights with gang bangers. Neither a Blood or a Crip, I was still welcome in low slung vehicles all across the Southland. I think coming to Largo made me become a lady. I started wearing underwear and stopped wearing the union jack. I was a woman now, going to an Irish nightclub alone to listen to proper music.



The first thing I loved about Jon was his voice, which felt like an arrow piercing my heart. It was intensely emotional and intimate, especially within the soft walls of Largo, which cradled sound like it was a sleeping infant. His inventiveness as a musician and a performer inspired me to no end. When he lined up audience members and gave them each a bell and touched them each on the shoulder to prompt them to ring the bell, creating a kind of impromptu ‘people piano,’ I thought, “I want to make a record. I want to do this.”



It took a long time, but I did it, and with a lot of help from Jon. I wrote my first real song with him. I brought two sets of lyrics to his impressive loft filled with incredible and rare pianos and guitars and drum sets belonging to people like Gillian Welch – vintage, one of a kind Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-style instruments strewn about like cast off toys in an old fashioned nursery, paint slightly peeling but the decay enhancing the beauty and the value of the thing. I had been writing furiously for days preparing for this session. I have loved Jon Brion forever, and it was one of those open secrets that everyone knows about and nobody cares to keep. When I go to music stores, the clerks ask me what he is doing and where he is living. Guitar teachers ask me how his birthday was, if he is still at that Holiday Inn. I never know any of these things, but I like that they think I know.



The first set of lyrics I abandoned as I sat down – they felt too jokey to me in such a serious environment, as they were all about semen. I put that page of words on the bottom and the other lyrics on top, shamed by my own crass sense of humor and still so rough edges. Interestingly enough, later, they became part of another song I wrote with Garrison Starr and Meghan Toohey called “Gimme Your Seed.” Part of the alchemy of songwriting -nothing is wasted. No thought is ever too low or too high. Everything works somewhere. The lyrics on top were ones I had written the day before, along with lyrics for another song which would become “Eat Shit and Die,” both about an errant lover who had neglected to contact me on my birthday, something which stung so deeply that only writing poetry could help me recover. Jon made coffee and laid the words out in front of him and pulled out a pen. He asked me what chords I knew, and I dutifully made them. G, A, Em, slight struggle, then -D. And then as an afterthought, C. He showed me how to make a B7 chord and I drew the finger positions on my chord paper. He laughed at the chord paper. “I haven’t seen something like that in a long, long time.” We didn’t use the B7 in the song, but I showed Grant Lee Phillips later that I could make the chord and we used it in “Eat Shit and Die.” Learning these chords were like growing branches on a tree that I would eventually climb, and every time I pick up the guitar I am still amazed at the view.



Photo by Lindsey Byrnes



Jon made some marks on the lyric sheet, crossed out words here and there, apologized for crossing out the words, then tapped his foot and played his guitar and they were all chords I knew. He then sang the words and suddenly like magic my words were now a song! I pulled out my digital recorder and we made a demo. We played the song through two times and I lagged behind, trying to keep up the finger positions of the chords on my guitar. Sometimes my iPod Shuffle will unearth the demo and serve it to me cold in the car as I am driving and I am instantly embarrassed by Jon’s soft voice singing my words about being mad at some dude, my inability to play guitar with my fingers twisting up on themselves, my own shaky, insecure voice trying to keep up and the overall disbelief in the air that I was actually singing and playing with someone I had idolized for so long – so strong and palpable you can hear it via mp3. we performed the song at Largo that night, for Ian Harvie’s No on Prop 8 benefit, and we had to stop and start the song over because I forgot how the beginning went and I was so frazzled from nerves and excitement.



Pre-Order Cho Dependent here for an instant download of the album!