U.S. Girls - Lives (2023)

U.S. Girls, the experimental pop project of North American multidisciplinary artist Meg Remy, releases its first-ever live album entitled Lives digitally. Released on the eve of the band’s European tour, the album showcases the last five years on stage non-chronologically.

The musicians on this 14-song album represent three distinct versions of the U.S. Girls live band; the “Poem Band,” a jam-oriented outsider jazz-funk unit that often stretched Remy’s deep-pocketed groovers and plastic soul ballads out the nether-regions of abstraction, the “Heavy Light Band,” which reigned in the chaos and placed emphasis on harmonious sounds of stacked female voices, and the current iteration of the U.S. Girls band that utilizes synthesisers and samplers to bring a new dimension and depth of tone to her catalogue. At the centre, throughout, is the timeless timbre of Remy’s distinctive voice. Featuring members of the Badge Époque Ensemble and the Cosmic Range along with some of the brightest Canadian singer-songwriter talent in artists like Geordie Gordon, Dorothea Paas and Carlyn Bezic, Remy largely pulled from a pool of Toronto-based musicians active in the seemingly disparate worlds of jazz, funk, pop and the avant garde.

In the tradition of live albums including Alive! By Kiss, Cannonball Adderley’s Mercy, Mercy Mercy! Live at “The Club,” or Frampton Comes Alive!, U.S. Girls' Lives presents recordings across different performances as a single concert, produced by Remy’s husband and long-time musical collaborator, Maximilian Turnbull. It’s a marriage of rock and roll theatricality and undeniable funk that recalls mid-70s Bowie in all of his Dionysian glory–it’s a show not to be missed.

“I cannot fathom all the rehearsals hobbled through, miles travelled fast and crawling, enough coffee cups to build a bridge (from where to where?), dismantled and rebuilt floors & stages, feedback fever and ringing ears, blind hangovers, laughter til peeing pants and spitting out whatever is in the mouth, professional-level passive aggressive bickering, singing with no voice left, questioning what to wear as a way of holding the self together. All this happening in the background of forever war…

Sometimes I can’t remember much before starting bands, writing songs, recording music, making artifacts, performing, traveling to perform. Its a dreamy way to approach life but its a raw way to live.”