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Baby I’m with the Band – featuring Brendan Benson

Tuesday, 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!



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Enemies – featuring Jon Brion

Friday, 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!



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Hey Big Dog – with Patty Griffin, Ben Lee, Fiona Apple

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

I didn’t make my first writing session with Patty Griffin. I was on a 6am flight from LA to Austin, and I hadn’t slept at all the night before. One of the reasons I got into show business was so I wouldn’t have to get up early, but what I didn’t realize, is in show business, you have to get up earlier and stay up later more than anyone else ever has to. Whenever I had to get up for a flight I can never sleep the night before, my eyes popping open every hour on the hour to check to see that my nightmare of oversleeping and missing my departure time didn’t come true. It’s the true dark side of rock and roll. I did get up in time – 3:30am – urgh, and I made it to the airport ok, but I had to check my beautiful new chocolate brown Guild with a ‘vintage’ tweed hard body case which stressed me out so much I didn’t need coffee to wake up.



I got onto the flight and waited and waited and waited with all the other passengers to take off. We never did. We rested on the tarmac for awhile, the captain’s communications sounding more and more apologetic until the final apologia of the jet’s return to the terminal and everyone having to deplane due to mechanical failure. This is always followed by the passengers with ‘flexible travel plans’ – one of those people who volunteer to give up their seats for travel vouchers on overbooked flights – saying, “Well, at least it wasn’t while we were in the air!” I disagree. I prefer we just take off and deal with the mechanical issues in flight. I would rather be dead than late. It’s one of the truest things about me, if you knew me.



So the flight wasn’t going to Austin, and we were hundreds of passengers without a plane, and I was so exhausted I called Patty and told her I wasn’t coming. It was too painful, too early and I was too mad. I got my guitar out of the cargo hold as I rescheduled with her on my beloved blackberry. About a month later, there were no delays. I made it to Austin and Patty’s beautiful lime green and bougainvillea home without incident. Her two dogs, Lotte and Bean presided over our session. Bean seemed to love sitting on my guitar case. “She always tries to sit on black things.”



I had not met Patty before this, but I had been a huge fan for many, many years. I had been introduced to her music by the wonderful and sadly missed Kevyn Aucoin. Her music reminded me of him, the bright light of him, the beauty of him always. Patty’s manager said, “She is obsessed with her dogs and country music.” So we wrote a country song about dogs. My dog in particular. My dog Ralph. The greatest.



There is a wonderful album by Ane Brun called “Duets” and in my mind, when I sing along to this record, I am usually Ane and my duet partner is one of my dogs. My dearest wish is that humans and dogs could actually speak to each other and then the one next to that is that we could sing together. As I wrote the lyrics to this song, I sat with my big boy Ralph and imagined what he would say to me if he could speak, what he would sing to me if he could sing. I stared in his root beer eyes, as he cocked his butterscotch blonde eyebrows one then the other and tried to decipher his thoughts. He was a very large dog, intimidating to new people, but as gentle as a giant could be, with an irrational fear of the wind. Every time the Santa Anas would start their engines, Ralph could be found in the very bowels of the house, hiding far away from where the wind could find him. He absolutely hated the sound of the breeze slapping the trees together. He would shake and whine and salivate and refuse to be petted or held. I couldn’t understand it as much as he couldn’t understand why I checked my messages constantly – never hearing from the person I wanted to hear from – feeling destroyed by nothing at all. It was going to be a song about people problems versus dog problems, and the idea that maybe we could solve these problems together “Oooooooo-ooo! Oooooooo-oooo!”



I pulled out the words from out of my guitar case, weighted down by little Bean. I gave the dog warmed, wrinkled notes to Patty and she set them down in front of her. I left the room, returning moments later to Patty singing, “Ooooooo-ooo. Ooooooo-ooo!” and the song “Hey Big Dog” was born. We put on shawls and had dinner outside that night to celebrate. I played the song incessantly to practice, and had a rotating cast of dogs who would sing it with me at shows, sometimes Ian Harvie, sometimes John Roberts and sometimes Ben Lee. I sang the song many times while Ralph was dying. I sat alongside him in his massive dog bed, his big body fighting the eventual, the inevitable. The comforting chords would elicit great sighs accompanied by stinky farts, which would make the whole room smell like a hot springs. Very relaxing.



When he died, the song moved from guitar to banjo, where it could sound truly mournful. I cried as I tried to sing it to myself alone and it didn’t make me feel better but it did make me lose my voice for what felt like a dog’s age. Some time after I had regained my voice, at Largo, Fiona Apple was in the audience. She loved the song instantly, and said to me that she had been thinking of a song like this, one she wanted to write about her dog – and she said – which is the ultimate compliment for any songwriter – “You sang it for me.” I had the perfect duet partner! Fiona’s dog was also irrationally afraid of the wind and we traded dog pictures and many dog stories in anticipation of recording. I love Fiona’s voice on this song, and Ben Lee’s pitch perfect production makes it sound like pure Nashville meets Animal Planet.



I hope that this song will become an anthem to animal lovers all over, and a blessing for them and their beloved pets. We are not alone in this world ever. We have them. The hardest thing for me when Ralph was gone was facing the fact that he was not there anymore, but this song made me realize that this was not true. Now, Ralph is everywhere. Fiona said, “He’s on the wind now. And now, the wind will always bring him back to you.” This is so true.



Pre-Order Cho Dependent here and receive an immediate download of the album!



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I’m Sorry – Featuring Andrew Bird

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Many days I have spent on the road, locked in a silent communion with my ipod, and listening, exclusively, for days and days on end, to Andrew Bird. Of course, it’s a toss up to what my favorite album is, but the one that gets the most overall plays is Armchair Apocrypha. When I start it, the opening riff of “Fiery Crash” begins, and the vibration of the Bose headphones on my face makes me feel like I need to start organizing my mind, that the next show is coming at me fast. I am kicking the back of John Roberts’ seat, I am drinking the hottest water that can be spilled and sometimes drunk in the back of a crowded van that wishes it was a tour bus and I am in love with the sweet formality of Andrew Bird’s whistling, the tender application of violin and guitar, the lyrics reminding me more of Keats or Shelley than indie rock, gramaphones spinning in my mind as fast as wheels can turn.



When Andrew agreed to write a song with me for my new album, I put on makeup before calling him on the phone, as if my carefully applied mascara would somehow blunt my nervousness. He was very nice of course, and gave me an email address to send lyrics as soon as they were ready. I truly had no idea what to write, but I decided to try to empty my mind completely and trust that something would come.



Something did.



Some days later, I was thinking about someone I once loved, and how so many years had passed and how this person still made numerous appearances in my dreams. Usually the actors in my dreams retire after short, frenzied careers, presumably to play outlying dinner theatres in my psyche, but this guy had stamina. He was like the Martin Landau of my dreams. Or like the John Travolta of my dreams. He was featured a ton in his heyday, and then continued to have much success later in life, maybe even more so, because irony was involved. Anyway, this man I loved, I realized I still loved, and I had no idea how he was doing. Where he was. What his life was. I wanted to know. I had resisted googling him for years because my feelings for him hadn’t yet faded. I didn’t want to know he was successful and happy and living in a renovated lighthouse with his beautiful wife and many children. I typed his name into the little box, fully expecting to be made instantly, painfully jealous of the charmed life I would never share with him. Instead, his Wikipedia entry came up. His name, a list of his credits and then this, “in 2007, was convicted of the murder of his wife.” Apparently, my dream lover had bludgeoned his wife to death, then stuffed her body in the attic of their house, where she lay for nearly a month, until her body had partially mummified.



So, I had a song. And a murder ballad at that. I wrote the lyrics when I was up late at night, unable to sleep, thinking about that poor woman’s body, dead between the walls like a character in an Edgar Allen Poe story. She was me. She wasn’t me. She could have been me. She couldn’t have been me. He had lost his considerable looks in his mugshot, his face bloated with alcohol and domestic violence. No one is flattered in that orange. He was no longer a dream lover but a nightmare monster. He moved from a place in my heart to hiding under the bed, lurking in the shadows, waiting for me in the closet, so when I pushed the door closed, he would push back. I thought about the details of the murder, how he had lied to her family and told them he had sent her to rehab, so that they would not come looking for her, to buy him some time to figure out what to do with the body. They had just had a son together, he and his murdered wife, and the boy’s incessant crying gave him away in the end. When they caught him, he never expressed sorrow or remorse or even guilt. It somehow still was her fault, because he loved her so, because he couldn’t control her, because money was running out, because because because.



The song is called, “I’m Sorry” because he never said it. He didn’t say it to her because he killed her before he could say it. He didn’t say it to her family because his lawyer probably advised him not to. He didn’t say it to me because I will never go visit him. I don’t think he is sorry. But I am, for loving him. For having the capacity to love someone like that. What is wrong with me?



I sent the lyrics to Andrew and he liked them. He went to his farm and 3 days later I had a demo. It was funny to hear him sing these words, which sounded so different than what I had imagined. His deep and assuring professorial voice made my swirling thoughts concrete and comical, and the last line of the song was the best punchline I had not delivered yet.



This song was the first one to be recorded, and we did it in Nashville at summer’s end. I was recovering from a catastrophic case of laryngitis, where I lost the use of my voice for a very long time. When I talked to Andrew on the phone the day before our session, it was the first time I had made a sound with my throat in nearly two months. My voice sounded odd in my head and I kept commenting on how absolutely strange it was. Andrew said he was honored. We worked on it over two days, with a crack band of Nashville’s and Chicago’s finest. The city was good to us. I bought a combination 6 string guitar and mandolin at Gruen. Andrew made scrambled eggs. We talked a lot about Tim and Eric and Mr. Show. I couldn’t believe how good I sounded. I premiered the song at Zanies, a comedy club only about 50 paces from the recording studio, using backing tracks, because Andrew had already gone back to Chicago. In the audience I could hear someone say “listen to that voice!” I thought I sounded good. I kind of couldn’t believe it.






Pre-Order Cho Dependent here and receive an immediate download of the album!



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Pre-Order Margaret’s “Cho Dependent” Album Today!

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Margaret’s brand new album, Cho Dependent, featuring comedy songs with Ben Lee, Tegan and Sara, Fiona Apple, Brendan Benson, Jon Brion, Garrison Starr, Meghan Toohey, Ani DiFranco, Tommy Chong, Grant Lee Phillips, Rachael Yamagata and Andrew Bird, will be available in stores August 24th!



You can get an immediate download of the album today by supporting Margaret in her online Album Pre-Order between now and August 24th.



CHO DEPENDENT
1. Intervention – feat Tegan and Sara
2. Calling In Stoned – feat Ben Lee and Tommy Chong
3. Your Dick -feat Ben Lee (written w/ AC Newman)
4. Baby I’m With The Band – feat Brendan Benson
5. Hey Big Dog – feat Fiona Apple & Ben Lee (written w/ Patty Griffin)
6. I’m Sorry – feat Andrew Bird
7. Lice – feat Ben Lee
8. Enemies – feat Jon Brion
9. Asian Adjacent -feat Grant Lee Phillips
10. Gimme Your Seed – feat Garrison Star & Meghan Toohey
11. Eat Shit and Die -feat Grant Lee Phillips
12. Captain Cameltoe – feat Ani DiFranco
13. My Puss – parody of Mickey Avalon and Dirt Nasty
Bonus Track: Lesbian Escalation – feat Rachael Yamagata



Margaret’s Cho Dependent Pre-Order includes a number of package options from $8 – $100, depending on how much Cho you need. Every package option includes an immediate download of the album, before it hits stores!



Pre-Order the Album or Stream one of the Songs Here!



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Review of Cho Dependent Album – The Huffington Post

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

Margaret Cho Is Just Plain Awesome (She’s a Friggin’ Rockstar SuperHero Bitch* on New Album Cho Dependent)
The Huffington Post
by Holly Cara Price

Personally I love the whole record and foresee it living on my CD player for quite some time. 
-Holly Cara Price, The Huffington Post
____________________________________



Margaret Cho gave me some of her time recently to discuss the August 24th release of her new album Cho Dependent. News Flash: Girlfriend can sing, and really really well. The thirteen songs here cut across quite a few genres; hip hop, girl group, country music, rock & roll, singer-songwriter, dance-pop. Margaret enlisted a stellar group of compadres to help write and perform the tunes — Ben Lee, Tommy Chong, Tegan & Sara, Grant Lee Phillips, Ani DiFranco, Andrew Bird, Fiona Apple, Brendan Benson, Garrison Star, Patty Griffin, Jon Brion, Meghan Toohey, Diana Yanez and Kurt Hall. Rachael Yamagata also appears on a hidden Easter Egg track.



Cho had been wanting to do something like this for a long time. “I wanted to create a comedy album with really great music that would endure beyond the jokes, so the songs would have some value after the fact… something that was not just comedy music but also great music.” Admitting she needed some help in the composition department, she explained, “… I’m a musician but I am not a great composer, so I don’t really know how to put notes together. I just enlisted people I know who did do that really well and those happen to be some of the greatest musicians out there.”



Everyone she approached was interested in the project and some (Ani DiFranco, Grant Lee Phillips, John Brion) were long time friends. “It was the desire for me to do something with comedy that is more expansive and I’m really excited, I think all comedians want to be musicians and I think all musicians want to be comedians. It’s a natural desire and affection that they have for one another so this was a wonderful manifestation of that desire and it was really great.”



Personally I love the whole record and foresee it living on my CD player for quite some time. I admitted to Margaret that for me, the stand-out track (pun intended) was “Your Dick.” It recalls the best of 60′s girl group records with a lavish, glittery, dreamy Righteous Brothers-y production. The lyrics include lines like “your dick, your dick splits the wheat from the chaff, its like a giraffe – especially the neck part” and winds up to a big finish (pun intended, again). “Oh that’s a good one, it was quite a production,” Margaret told me. “That one I wrote with Karl Newman from the New Pornographers, and it was produced so beautifully by Ben Lee.”



She plans to mix live performances of the songs along with stand up comedy on a three month tour of the U.S. and Canada starting in late August. “I’m kind of into the process of deciding what it will sound like live. Ultimately I’m doing a stand up tour – I don’t want to jump out of being a stand up comedian, that would be really jarring for me so I really think it’s still comedy…Hopefully some of the people who wrote songs and performed songs with me will do it on the road.” She is quite adamant about maintaining the integrity of the recording, “… So I’ll probably do it to track or have a very small band.”



For “Baby I’m With The Band,” a track written and performed with Brendan Benson, Cho recently shot a video at Bonnaroo. She issued an open invitation to all the musicians at the festival to participate in cameos. “Quite a lot of people jumped into it. I had the Gossip in there and of course Brendan Benson, and Jack White did something and Conan O’Brien did something and OK Go was in it. We did a big thing with GWAR, who I love.”



One of the songs on the record, “I’m Sorry,” is a country ballad about a classic country music subject: murder. The tune is actually based on a true story from Cho’s life, or more accurately, her past life. “When I was very young and I was doing the television show All American Girl, I really fell in love with one of the writers on the show and he did not like me back. It was not a good thing, it was an awful situation like when you have a crush on somebody and they don’t care, and it’s horrible.” She held a torch for 17 years, one of those ‘what if” situations we all have tucked away. “I always had him somewhere in my heart, like I think when you’re really young you sometimes idealize a person and I really loved this guy. But I never thought to find him because I was sure that he was married and living in a lighthouse somewhere with five kids and super successful — I just envisioned this perfect life for him.”



When she turned 40, Cho decided she would look her old crush up and just see where he was and what he was doing. As one does. “…So I googled him and his name came up and it said American screenwriter / producer and worked on All American Girl with Margaret Cho, and in 2007 was convicted of the murder of his wife. He bludgeoned her to death and then stuffed her body in the attic of their house for a month until it had partially mummified… Finding this out I was really destroyed by it — it was a very complicated thing because, OK, it could have been me but then it couldn’t have even been me — it was so awful and I felt so bad for this woman that he killed and I felt so awful for her family.” In a catharsis of sorts, Cho decided to write a song about the pure selfishness of domestic violence, an all too common topic in country music.



Cho also noted that singers like Billie Holiday and Etta James were famed for this theme in their music, “You would consider these women very powerful people but their songs are often about dealing with domestic violence and their acquiescence to it… Sometimes the only way that we can endure some of the darkness in life is through a very dark sense of humor and so it was me trying to exercise some kind of control over what happened.” She called the song “I’m Sorry,” “…because he never said he was sorry. Because all these people do not say that they’re sorry when they commit these crimes and commit them in the name of loving somebody, it’s really just disgusting to me. So the song turned out to be very much a kind of classic murder ballad, you know, it’s a very sort of Americana staple of country music. I’m proud of the song, something that came out of it that was creative and helped me deal with the very complicated emotions that I had towards this person and this situation.”



As we spoke, Cho was in the process of wrapping up the second season of Drop Dead Diva, the hit Lifetime TV show she co-stars in with Brooke Elliott. The show has been described by creator Josh Berman as “a cross between Freaky Friday and Heaven Can Wait.” Cho plays Teri Lee, the crackerjack legal assistant to attorney Jane Bingum. Teri is about to be revealed as a private eye, confided Cho. “It’s a lot of fun.” A recent episode had her introducing her family — mother and cousin — “wonderfully played by Aaron Yoo who’s a great Korean American actor, and Emily Kuroda, who’s awesome.” The episode included a helicopter, laughs Cho, “so it was these Korean people and a helicopter – it was real M.A.S.H.”



She also enjoys spending tine in Atlanta, where the show tapes. “I have a good time here, I have a lot of friends here now, it’s my second year here… it’s different to live in the South, it’s a different feeling. Although Atlanta itself is a quite liberal, it’s a very queer city. It’s always called the San Francisco of the south, because it is quite gay, and the neighborhood that I live in is really gay.”



Cho’s home base is L.A. and she grew up in the Bay Area, where her father had a bookstore near Polk Street. “It was in the early 80′s so there was a lot of punk rock and goth, the very beginnings of goth.” And lots and lots of tattoos. “I always wanted to be tattooed,” says Cho, who now has them pretty much everywhere. “I don’t think I can get anymore because I don’t have any space. It’s hard if you’re an actor, I can’t get them on my arm anymore and I can’t get them on my legs, so I don’t know where to go.” Ed Hardy was one of the artists who did some of her early tattoos, as well as Kat Von D, Chris O’Donnell, Mike Davis, and Nathan Kostechko.



We finished up our conversation by grousing about attitudes towards gay marriage and the Gulf Oil Spill. Regarding gay marriage, Cho is at a loss. “I don’t understand why people feel that they can dictate what is equality — to me it’s so cut and dried, I don’t understand what the problem is that people have with gay marriage. I just don’t understand why this needs to be fought over because it seems so plain…. it’s very frustrating.” I asked her why she thought Americans, for the most part, seem so subdued in their anger about the oil spill. “If gays were involved people would be angry, if the ocean was trying to marry another ocean, people would be angry, but now — nobody cares. Its really not discussed, it’s a major tragedy, it’s the worst environmental tragedy in history, and so I don’t know why people are not enraged about this. I don’t get it… I talk about it a lot, in my work, I’m so furious. The best thing that we can do is discuss it and talk about it and write about it, and not let it go, because I think so much time is spent on things that don’t matter, and this is something that really really matters.”



*Note: The lyric referenced in the title of this piece, “I’m a friggin’ rockstar superhero bitch” comes from “Captain Cameltoe,” Cho’s collaboration with Ani DiFranco on Cho Dependent



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Review of Cho Dependent Album by Sinister Girlz

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Review of Margaret Cho’s Cho Dependent
by Sinister Girlz



Margaret Cho, “Cho Dependent” (August 24th)



When it was revealed late last year that Comedienne and actress Margaret Cho was set to release an album I, like I’m sure many, figured it’d feature her brilliant stand-up instead we get 13 fully produced musical tracks. “Cho Dependent” is filled with witty and funny lyrics as well as delicious vocals and catchy hooks. The album was co-written by the comedian herself and features collaborations with everyone from Fiona Apple to Patty Griffin, Grant Lee Phillips, Ben Lee and Ani DiFranco among others. Her brilliance is showcased best in tracks like “Your Dick” a ballad that pays homage to a man’s southern region while the lyrics are blunt the melody is sweet and the harmonization is lovely enough to momentarily make you forget you’re listening to a comedic album, that is until the falsetto comes in proclaiming “I like your balls too.” The album tackles many issues such as “Lice,” “Calling In Stoned” and “Enemies.” If there’s one thing you’ll soon come to learn while listening to this album is that, “you can’t break up with [her]…[she’s] Margaret Fucking Cho!”



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