Magical Mystery Tours

By Ron Forbes-Roberts | Acoustic Guitar magazine, January 2000

The unpredictable narratives of Annie Gallup's songs take you on journeys whose destinations are never clear until you reach them. Even her most straightforward lyrics possess a fantastic, almost subliminal quality that brings to mind the magic-realist fiction of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. For example, in "The Truth About Disguise," from Backbone, her second CD, an ex-lover appears to a woman as a crow, a tree, and finally a Dodge van. Gallup's songs are delivered in a vocal style that relies more on hypnotic cadence than complex melody and are accompanied by her fluid and intricate fingerpicking. She began performing in the late '80s and was soon recognized in a number of major songwriting contests (she won first prize at the Napa Folk Festival in 1988). She has recorded four CDs, including this year's solo effort Steady Steady Yes, which was recorded live at a century-old ex-vaudeville theater in New York City.

Though many of her songs have a dark, mysterious quality, Gallup's music can also be breezy and playful, much like the early musical influences she happened upon in her local library. "I found a Mississippi John Hurt record, a Doc Watson record, and a Dave Van Ronk record, which I checked out, took home, and just obsessed on," says Gallup. "Guitar came really naturally to me. At first I really wanted to be John Hurt, but after I got the fundamentals down I had a lot of freedom to just explore. " This exploration included writing songs. "It never occurred to me not to write my own songs," she says.

The creative process behind Gallup's songs is as enigmatic as the lyrics themselves. "It's all very intuitive," she says. "It'll start with a single word or rhyme, a chink in the wall that gets me in far enough to be inspired to figure out the rest of the song. I'm so curious to find out what happens, I have to continue." In "James" (from Steady Steady Yes), the narrator describes a love affair she had with a magician who earned a living making unwanted junk disappear until he became ambitious, joined a prosperous circus, and finally dispatched the narrator herself into the ether. The song began with a random thought about magic. "Initially I thought that as a writer I could talk about magic and not have to prove how it works." Gallup recalls. "I came up with the first couple of lines: 'James became my lover on the day when he refused to saw me through the middle / "Whoever thought of that trick," he said, "had a sick mind"'—and then I was in there. After that it just came line by line and I had no idea where it was going to go. I then tried to set up a structure so that you couldn't anticipate the rhymes. I wanted them to be surprising."

Usually Gallup's lyrics are well underway before she comes up with the guitar parts, a process that often involves a unique technique she laughingly calls "a dark little secret." "If I have a lyric that I don't have a melodic idea for, I will invariably sing it to the tune of 'The Wabash Cannonball, '" she says, laughing. "Then I have something to go from—a point of reference to index off of."

Gallup has used open tunings to back her songs for about six years. "First it was D A D G A D, which got boring right away," she says. "So I started dropping the G string to F# (open-D tuning) then to F (D-minor tuning). Now I use D A D E A D exclusively, which I call my drop-dead tuning. I've written 40 or 50 songs in that tuning, mostly in the key of G or A. It's a fascinating tuning with all kinds of different color possibilities."

The pressures of playing 150 shows and releasing a CD every year allow Gallup less time to write than she had in her pre-performance days, but there is no danger of her lapsing into expedient, formulaic writing. "I write to crack myself up," she says, "to make myself laugh or cry. I object to giving up before I find the right way to say what I want to say, and I'm not interested in taking the easy way out. I believe in breaking the mold every time I sit down to write." | Back to Features | Top