by Taylor Ruckle (@TaylorRuckle)
“Ever think you’d be an asshole in high school, then be appointed to the highest court of law?” Shilpa Ray asks, her voice low and husky, conjuring the ambiance of a smoky, after-hours piano lounge. “Beers and bros, basketball and hoes, sweetheart’s blacked out with your claws over her jaw.” The song is “Straight Man’s Dream,” and it’s the first track on her fourth LP, Portrait of a Lady. Throughout her oeuvre, Ray–a New Yorker through and through–draws on everything from old-fashioned soul to the spirit of CBGB, and that timeless sweep is especially potent here, where her allusions to institutional misogyny ring as true as they would have in the midcentury rock and R&B she pastiches.
Portrait of a Lady stems from Ray’s own experience as a survivor of abuse and works outward through the larger cultural context. Donning a caricatured 50s persona called Doris Daydream, she leaves no deserving ass unkicked, from the powerful and abusive themselves to the women who throw other women under the bus (“Bootlickers of the Patriarchy”) to the exploitative media that fails those in search of justice (“Cry For the Cameras”). In wry, slow-burning ballads and synth-laden scorched-earth rockers, Ray comes on unfiltered and unequivocal (especially on “Manic Pixie Dream Cunt,” all pounding keys and righteous, snarling guitars).
After the release, Ray spoke to Post-Trash about the struggle to be heard among her fellow musicians and the troubling political landscape her Portrait was painted on.
photo credit: Ebru Yildiz
How have you been? If I have my calendar right, it looks like you just had a show in Brooklyn with MC5.
Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I've been busy, I guess. I've just been traveling and working out all the logistical things to tour that I totally forgot how to do in three years. [laughs] We did a tour through the States in the west coast, and also the east and the Midwest. Then I went back out to the west coast to do some solo dates, and then did the show with MC5, and now I'm home for a bit until the fall.
How has it been touring the new songs?
It's been alright--the shows have been going really well, and the band's super tight, and that part's really good. I think it's the brain work that goes into logistics and making money and making sure everybody's healthy and safe. That part's kind of daunting. If anyone in any touring party gets COVID, you have to cancel things, and it's such a pain 'cause no matter how you want to do it, airlines and van rentals and all that stuff, they don't care. They're still gonna charge you what they were charging you before, and also the fees for rescheduling and stuff. Everything is, like, double the cost of what it used to be, and gas prices are astronomical. It's crazy. It was, like, seven dollars a gallon in California.
As if it wasn't enough trouble trying to tour before the pandemic.
Yeah, I know, so it's even harder. Everything has to get scaled back. I've always been somebody who's up to touring whenever, but I've had to think about it in a completely different way now. As hard as it is, I'm also relearning how to do things, so that's been kind of fun, figuring out the puzzle.
What kinds of things have you been relearning?
That I can play by myself and still hold an audience. [laughs] I don't really need to spend money on being in a band. I don't. They can just have me instead. 'Cause you think about having to take care of a four-piece on the road, it's just so difficult. Knowing that I can actually play solo and still make things work is a huge comfort. 'Cause I started as a completely solo artist, and then formed a band, and I have to admit, the band stuff definitely has its rewards, but it's really difficult to keep a lineup together when the finances are so bleak. That's where a lot of the turmoil and the fighting starts, because the money isn't there.
I know that you went into the making of Portrait of a Lady with this very clear concept about writing a rock album about being a survivor. What allowed you to take that plunge?
You know, I had a really crazy moment. I was singing these duets with Andrew Bird at Carnegie Hall back in 2016, and I was preparing to release Door Girl at the time, and I think with any album at its stages of getting finished, you go through a period of "what am I doing with my life" kind of depression. I was chosen to work with him on two shows in the New York area at the time, and it was wild. Never in my life did I ever think I was gonna even be on stage at Carnegie Hall or working with Andrew Bird. It was kind of all nuts, and he had me sing this one song where I had to do, like, an octave-and-a-half jump with my voice, and I wasn't getting it in rehearsal at all. It was really difficult for me to hear it, and I was so ashamed of myself, because everybody there was top notch, you know? I was like, "I cannot be the worst musician here." I had a huge complex about that.
I had taken myself on a walk after soundcheck to get my head straight--you know, when it's show time, I definitely didn't want to ruin the show either. [laughs] Like, "You better get this straight, you have to sing it in your head, you gotta figure this out, how you're gonna do this so it's foolproof." I stumbled into MOMA, and Nan Goldin was having the photo exhibit for [The Ballad of] Sexual Dependency, and I just stumbled across it by accident. The first portrait I saw was her healing-but-beat-up face after her boyfriend at the time had beat her up. She had taken a picture of herself healing, and the energy of that–I felt like I had never written anything in my life. That moment just kinda clicked, like, "What am I doing with myself," you know? "Where am I as a writer? Where am I as an artist?”
I had gone through something really terrible in my mid-to-late-20's that I just--like a lot of survivors, you just survive. You don't even acknowledge that things ever happened, or you don't talk about it. You just sort of get by. I felt like looking at that piece of work was such a freeing entryway into talking about things that were real for a change and not being cynical or sarcastic about the experience. I mean, I have a very dry sense of humor, and it's still apparent in this record, but I'd never written about actual things of serious nature that have happened to me before. Even though Door Girl was based on experience working the door, it's still very removed from who I am as a human being. It's very observational.
After seeing that exhibit and going back to Carnegie Hall, I totally nailed what I was supposed to do. [laughs] I'll never forget the look on his face. He was so proud of me. He was like, "I don't know what happened between rehearsal and this, but I'm glad you got the part right.” I dunno, there's just something about the impact of seeing another artist go somewhere that you didn't even think was possible to go, and to communicate with me, of all people--that happened. Whether she knew she was gonna communicate with me or not, it happened, you know?
From there, what was the first thing you went and wrote?
"Same Sociopath" was the first song I had written for this record, and it kind of just snowballed into a lot. It was really difficult to write--it was just a hard album. Getting other people to understand the depth of it was really hard, and it always will be. I mean, people really don't get it. Unless you're a survivor or you have a great sense of empathy, or you're evolved in a certain way, no one cares. There's a falsehood to people universally caring about things that have become important in the news.
When you talk about the difficulty of working through this, on a song by song level, what was the process like?
Oh my god, I was working like a maniac, and I was basically--I don't know how far I want to go into this because I just didn't have a very supportive lineup at the time. A lot of the time with a band, there's a separation because all the material is coming from me, and they have to listen to me and do how I want the arrangements to be done. There's a lot of animosity and anger and fighting that goes with that, and a lot on my role as the band leader to hold things together and not dismiss people so quickly, but I definitely held on way too long with a lot of people in that lineup at the time, and it was really hard.
It still feels like that a lot of the time, and I've learned to maneuver in the most fair way possible, but it's incredibly frustrating. Sometimes I wonder why people even bother showing up. [laughs] Do they not know they're working with me? What do they want, you know? Is it a sort of tokenism that you really need to work with a woman of color at this point to get any kind of job? I don't know what the motivation is at all.
If they're not gonna listen to what you have to say, right?
Yeah, I mean, they don't really give a shit. I basically had to fire somebody for harassing a child on my stage, and that was the last straw for me. The sarcasm, the jokes about safe spaces, the jokes about things I was writing about. The constant levity I'd have to bring to the table to the point that it was exhausting. I was singing to the point I thought my lungs were gonna burst because I just couldn't get the message across of what I needed to get done.
Basically, my co-producer saved my ass. I did not know where this album was gonna go or whether I was gonna get the quality that I wanted for it. I feel bad saying this. I don't want to mention names or anything. I'm not interested in causing further fights, but I do like talking about the circumstances of reality, and that's reality. People really don't give a shit. As long as you're paying them or they're getting the accolades, or whatever reassurance that they need for their ego, they do not look at you as a person at all. [laughs]
[laughs] Well, obviously there are songs on the record that come to mind. "Cry For The Cameras" is a big one in terms of the hoops you have to jump through to get people to care about you. Can you tell me about how that song came together?
The title for it actually came after I went to one of my friend's storytelling events called The Tell. One of the stories was going really badly, but he did say one phrase–because he was talking about the news and the media in a very clinical kind of way, and he was like, "Well, you know how it is. You really have to cry for the cameras." I remember hearing that phrase and being like, "Oh, I totally get this part." And then wrote the song "Cry For The Cameras," which is about how in-detail and how harrowing your story has to be in order to get any form of media attention, which is like the new justice of [laughs] being a sexual assault survivor. I mean, you don't have to go through the court systems or anything, because that's impossible. Going to the cops? That's impossible.
All a foregone conclusion.
Exactly. That's your new justice, but you have to have a certain level of fame in order to have that even go on record, you know? There's a whole other system that rules with that. So essentially, if you're just an average working person, your story is never going to get heard, and you're still going to go through the cycles of whatever you're going through. It's never gonna change or get better because there's no system in place that's for you.
I don't necessarily have anything productive to add there, except to think about it.
I know, I don't have anything to say either. [laughs]
But I appreciate you being willing to unpack these things.
Yeah, I mean, it's bad! The times we're living in, it's really awful. The best I can say is it's good to have friends.
You alluded to how crucial your co-producer was in getting this record done--that was Jeff Berner, right?
Yeah! That was the upswing. It's like taking something that wasn't going well and having bad sessions and turning it into something great. I needed him to be the cheerleader. I needed him to have confidence in me as a creative person and fill the gaps of my knowledge, and also have me fill the gaps in his knowledge of what I wanted to do, you know? That was a very symbiotic and productive relationship. I mean, he really saved my ass. I was ready to throw in the towel and never make another record again, so yeah, I really needed him, and that was probably one of the greatest moments of making music with somebody, was just to know how to have fun again and be respected for what you can bring to the table. Because I was not feeling respected at all.
He was genuinely excited about what I was bringing to the table and wanted to make it great, and I hadn't felt that from people in the past. It felt incredibly dead to me. So yeah, the fact that I was writing most of it didn't affect him. You know what I mean? He didn't need to have that. There was no reason for him to put me down and make me feel like an idiot.
How far into things were you at that point?
This was when we were recording the album, and I'd just gotten off of an insane tour in the Balkans where this promoter--[laughs] this promoter basically robbed me of all the guarantees for this insane tour.
Oh my gosh.
2019 was not a very good year for me, and I was incredibly ill on top of it. It was just bad. You know, when it rains it pours. So yeah, it was towards the fall of that year, and he brings so much life into it just by supporting what I wanted to do without argument. Without me having to prove myself, or prove my idea to the point of exhaustion. It was cruising after that. That was the most fun I've ever had in the studio, and it was just me and him, so it was great. That was probably the reward for all the [laughs] painstaking bullshit.
You mentioned your sense of humor, and it is woven in, obviously, through very serious experiences and discussions. Is that something that people respond to, or that you find that they "get?"
I'm not sure. I mean, a lot of people do get it automatically, and a lot of people think I'm out of my mind, you know? I don't really know what to say to that. I definitely was very, very conscious and careful of not trying to represent any other survival experience. This is solely mine, with a full understanding that no survivor has the same story, or the same coping mechanisms. Everyone does this differently, and I'm showing how I did it and how I'm still working on it, and what was informing me at the time. That's why I don't think it's a political record as much as it is a personal one, for me to wrap my head around my experiences. I hope that's clear, and if it's not, there's nothing much I can control with that. Once you release a work of art, it's just out there, but I never had the intention of hurting or insulting anybody else's feelings about this, or their viewpoints. It's just my way of coping with life, is having a very dry sense of humor.
When there are other people who this record's jokes are at the expense of, it's very intentionally targeted. [“Straight Man’s Dream”], I think, is a pretty thinly-veiled Brett Kavanaugh slam.
Yep. That was a huge defeat. I remember the day he got sworn-in--it was a really bad day for survivors because the bad guy won again. I don't know how else to explain that, and I don't think most people were sensitive to that unless they were survivors, and that goes for men, women, nonbinary, anybody. If you haven't been through it, you have no idea. You're reliving the nightmare all over again.
We don't have to dwell on this any more than you want to, but--there's never been a point since its inception that this wouldn't have been a timely record. To have it come out right now though, it does feel all the more so.
You know, it's interesting. I was told when I was writing this album that my album would sound dated by the time it came out. It was one of the punishing or negative things that I was told, as if everything was gonna be wrapped up in a beautiful bow because [laughs] the Harvey Weinstein case happened. I'm like, "Do you not see the discrepancy between those who are fighting things like Epstein, Weinstein--like, the class and the race and all the stuff that's not getting addressed?" I'm really proud of all those women, by the way. It's not an insult to them. I think it's great, and the fact that it took that many essentially rich white women to bring this person down blows my mind. If it's hard for them, could you imagine what it's like for the rest of us?
People really do not know how bad this is and what to do about it in a productive sense. This issue is never gonna go away–the way we're handling it is just atrocious. It's never gonna be dated, and I couldn't believe that was the feedback I was getting, that, "Oh, no one's gonna even be about this anymore once Trump gets out of presidency. Your record's just not gonna matter." I'm like, "Oh, we'll see about that."
It's less eventful on Twitter, but it feels like that's about it in terms of seismic shifts in the political scene.
[laughs] Yeah, you know, I was one of the only people, I think, when Biden was running, who stated very clearly that Biden's pro-life. He's not pro-choice. It's a very dangerous way to go. And his past is also shaded with a lot of issues that have been covered up, and you were just so in the minority to say anything against Trump's opponent that all the mainstream democrats wanted to support at the time. It was insane. I don't know what to say to that, except this is the kind of world we live in.
On a lighter note, I do enjoy the video you did for "Lawsuits and Suicide," where you dress up like a judge--that's very fun.
Yeah! It is a fun video. That was the whole point for that, was to be as fun as possible. We had a small team of people, and they were all super supportive. I had met the dancers through working with them for Tai Lee, who is the drummer of Bodega. She did this noise performance piece in the fall, and she was working with dancers, and she had a little noise band that I was part of. We all just really liked each other, so I was like, "You wanna be in a video?" [laughs] It was a good time.
I like that there's sort of two poles of this record that you got to visualize with "Heteronormative" and then "Lawsuits and Suicides.”
Yeah, and "Heteronormative" was done by Amos Poe, whose screening I'm gonna go to later tonight. There's a screening of Subway Riders at Metrograph. That was an Instagram connection during the pandemic where I just went out on a limb and asked him if he wanted to help me make videos for this album, and he said yes. I was like, "I'm such a huge fan of yours," just to see what would happen, and we became really good friends after that. He's just such a cool person. We did "Heteronormative" with him, and then also "Manic Pixie Dream Cunt," which is the found footage. We had to work with those parameters 'cause we couldn't even be in the same room with each other at that point--the pandemic was so severe.
"Heteronormative Horseshit Blues," similar to the album cover, has this very distinct and deliberate way that you present yourself with the hair and makeup. Can you tell me more about that part of the vision?
Well, [laughs] something I think people didn't pick up on is that when I play Doris, I'm in whiteface. My skin is not that light, and that's me as a blonde. It was sort of a turn on Hitchcock or De Palma's theory that people will pay attention if you torture a blonde on screen, and I kind of took notes from that. I was like, "I wonder," you know? And it kind of worked. That particular video was probably the most press attention I'd ever gotten from larger sites and stuff, but it was using the idea of the Hitchcock blonde and that scenario of this trapped 50's woman who's a bit backwards, or getting in touch with that sort of character, or characteristics even within myself. I am a brown woman. It's a whole other game in terms of what happens to you in life–that's not a falsehood when people say that. You get received very differently.
There's definitely a stigma attached to being a woman of color where you have to be obscenely tough and unbreakable. It's a pain in the ass because it's sort of this impossible condition that you're put under, but that's how it is, and I think a lot of women of color would agree with me on that. You're definitely not valued in the same sense as other women are, and you just kinda have to take things and be very, very, very, very strong to an obscene degree. That I can write a lot of funny stuff about, because it's just absurd. [laughs]
Before we move on–I don't know if you had seen this, but I came across a website that had reprinted the press release for the record. I think there was some censorship gone awry because they listed that song as "Heteronormative Horses Blues," which I thought was so funny.
Yes, there's also been "Heteronormative Horse Poop Blues.”
[laughs] Oh man.
Oh, I've been busted by the FCC pretty hard throughout my career. It's been interesting. It's like, that's what you're gonna ban, out of all of life's atrocities? "You can't say horseshit!" [laughs] "Or cunt!" That's been quite the ride. I don't know, man, we live in a very twisted world.
This being a project that had such big ups and downs, what's been your biggest takeaway?
That people really like it, regardless of--you know, I don't feel like it's something that was going to hit a mainstream audience right away, and I knew this going into it, but none of my stuff ever has. Door Girl, now people are like, "Oh my god, that album!" I mean, I'm shocked at how many people know what that record is, 'cause when it first came out, I thought the crickets were chirping. I feel like this is probably very similar in the same types of circles, but the letters I've been getting, the emails I've been getting, people's reactions to it on social media have been really positive and cool.
So I'm okay with having a cult following, and I'm okay with people receiving my art and information the way they choose to because I know that it does indeed resonate with people, and there is a longevity to that, even though I'm never gonna be that person that's gonna blow up on the larger blogs. That's just not me as an artist. I don't follow trends. I just kind of do my own thing. It took me a while to feel proud of that because I was shamed for it for such a long time, but if you want me to change and sell out, what am I selling? [laughs] What am I selling out to? I don't even know.
Is it a fringe benefit that you get to fly under the radar, and not be censored, or not have to deal with those expectations? Or would you rather that more people listened, and you made more money from this?
It's a little bit of both. Like, I do make money from music. I don't make a ton of money from music, but I don't have to work a side job as much as I used to. I used to work seven days a week, like, 24/7, just trying to hit my bills and stuff, and now it's less than that, you know? And I still get to make records, so it doesn't really matter, 'cause I have an audience that wants to come out and see me play and enjoy themselves.
I think one of the perks to getting things on massive blogs and stuff is the money and the opportunities that come with it, and you know, it's faster. It's a short cut. You want the readership, 'cause that can help your audience, but I really have to ask myself, "Do I like the type of music these places promote?" And most of the time, no, I don't. It doesn't line up with what I'm doing at all. I'm a punk, for fuck's sake, you know? [laughs]
I don't make things that are friendly. I like to be on the edge. I want to talk about the world as I see it because that's what I think great writing is. There's definitely a disagreement between what is mainstream right now and what is underground, and it always has been that way. Learning how to steer a business and stick to your guns as an artist, that's quite the trick, isn't it? I think my whole life's journey is trying to understand how to do that.
It's not something you can do over a weekend or over one album cycle, right?
No, no. It's gonna take a really long time. But you know, I'm gonna be such a cool old lady. I can feel it, and that's what makes me happy.