“I am only happy when I’m sad… I am only gone when you come back…”
The song “I Ain’t Like the West” starts with many contradictions lyrically. It brings out the idea of uncertainty. It translates into the composition as it changes from a Grouplove-esque opening guitar buzz into the femme fatale rock style, all the while layering these contradictions softly. Vincent’s voice, to put it plainly, is beautiful. They can shape it and hold a vibrato. Let the tail ends of phrases flutter off like Nancy Sinatra. They can even mold to a dark tone like they smoke a pack a day even though their voice does not sound like that when you talk to them. They said they loved to sing jazz; you can tell by the way they sway their voice fully, jumping in-between notes, especially in their new single.
They love rock, though, which is dominated by men. “I boxed myself in, I didn’t see very many [women] succeeding in that genre of music,” Vincent explained “a lot of my influences are male vocalists, I love Jim Morrison, Robert Plant.” They clarified that these men are influences, but not role models. “They don’t provide any framework for what I can do.”
They made a comment that they like to ask people to name femme rock musicians and count them on their fingers 1-10. I don’t know if I could do that. I don’t even know if you would consider Mazzy Star rock or post rock or any other combinations of subgenres that have grown to encompass the non-Aerosmith voice complexities.
Vincent mentioned this encounter they had in high school where a teacher noticed her playing. He had said something like “Wow, I’m really impressed. most of the girls I know just know chords, and I’m impressed you can play that well.” “It really made me think you know,” Vincent said. “At first I thought, I have to be the best, I have to do better than all the guys. But then I realized that that idea was still centered around the idea that guys were the standard of what’s good,” they said, describing the epiphany of their new mentality. “If someone listens to my music and is like, that’s not rock, that’s fine. I don’t wanna try so hard to fit the standard that was set by them [men].”
“I had been looking at music in such a black and white sense—‘if you do this, people will like the song and listen to it, and if you don’t, people won’t,” they said. “It was the messaging that I got as a young person doing music.” Musical youth is just being pushed into constant structure for the consumeristic need for homogeneity in music, the popular.This kind of structure has broken structuralist creativity, if it doesn’t follow a mold it doesn’t happen, it seems.
Cora grew up in music; John Hays High School, playing solo, going to shows… their entire life was music. “Everything is the same, everything was boiled down to, like, a formula. I can’t stand, like, the way that they kinda broke down music into this equation,” they said. It led Vincent to what they call “the dark ages” where they quit it altogether. “I don’t want to do music. It’s a lot of work, but I need to do it to be sane.”
When Vincent came back to music, they wanted to do things differently. Experiment a little more. “I’ve been trying to [like] uneducate the unhelpful things,” they said. So what do you do as a mostly solo musician wanting to switch things up? You start a band
“I don’t know how to make a band, I don’t know who to ask,” they laughed. Coincidentally, Kade Weinmann found them at a house show and offered to be their band not long after. The band you will see at upcoming shows will be comprised of Daulton Yates, on bass, an old friend; Weinmann, the lead vocalist for Cellar Dwellar (get hip and look em’ up); and, on drums, Owen Cogburn, a friend from high school and drummer in the hardcore sweat hard Spillway band.
If you ever have the chance to see the femme fatale piece that is Cora Vincent and company, you should. And don’t forget to stream “I Ain’t Like the West” on whatever source you prefer.
I Ain’t Like the West on Spotify
Clearly, I am not like other girls and use Spotify.
Photo’s by KJ Showalter
