“We’ve been singing together since 1982,” says Janet Bean of her musical partnership with Catherine Irwin in Freakwater. “And what we do now is no different than what we did then.”
For the new album Bean and Irwin, along with longtime bassist Dave Gay, brought in members of Califone to help reshape and color their music, and those additions help make the album arguably the strongest in their already impressive catalog. But it took a while for Irwin and Bean to get to the point where they could record together again. Following their 2000 tour in support of 1999’s End Time, Bean had separated from Rick Rizzo, her husband and bandmate in Eleventh Dream Day. (They’ve since divorced, and share custody of their son.) To make ends meet Bean dialed back her musical efforts and took a full-time job as a project assistant at a local law firm.
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“The idea of writing a song with someone is almost confusing to me,” Irwin says. “You see it in the movies where one person is sitting at the piano and the other person is leaning over with a highball in hand, and all of a sudden they’ve written a hit. But we’ve never really been able to do that. Usually when we write it’s more like each of us on our own kinda crawling on the floor of our apartments weeping. It’s not like a group activity. It’s pretty ugly.”
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