July 02--Mary Timony is a ferociously gifted guitarist, and her two-decade career in bands ranging from Helium to Wild Flag offers ample evidence of her kaleidoscopic command of the instrument. On tour with Wild Flag, she and her longtime friend Carrie Brownstein played nightly games of hide and shriek with their jousting or intertwining guitar lines, an assault that wasn't just sonic, but physical as the two jumped, jostled and bumped on stage.
Wild Flag's run was relatively short-lived, however, and now Timony's got a new band, Ex Hex, that last year released its debut album, "Rips" (Merge). With bassist Betsy Wright and drummer Laura Harris, a couple of friends from the music scene in her hometown of Washington, D.C., Timony turned her focus to something new in her career: writing concise, fat-free pop songs driven by guitar, bass and drums.
There's not a lot of room for solos or showing off, though Timony still finds space to bust a few cool moves on her guitar amid the tautly constructed verse-chorus tunes.
"It was really a way of challenging myself to do something a little bit differently," she says. "On this album, I became more of a producer, less of an artist. I pushed myself to write a lot, but also to edit a lot. I had to be really tough on the songs: What's working, what's not working. There's so much stuff we left out. In the past, I was more precious about the songs, and I didn't do a whole lot of editing."
Timony's schooling as an aspiring musician included formal training in jazz and classical guitar. Her work in bands such as Autoclave and Helium and as a solo artist underlined her love of more complicated chord structures, unconventional tunings and non-linear songwriting, even as she maintained an appreciation for melody and rock dynamics. Though her projects aren't best-sellers, her talent hasn't gone unnoticed by her peers.
"She is the consummate musician, someone I admire and look up to as I look up to Joe Strummer and Jimmy Page," Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss once said of Timony when they were together in Wild Flag. "She can create mystery, fantasy with her guitar playing and singing. She's a rock star."
Wild Flag's four-year lifespan produced one knock-out studio album, and some galvanizing shows. But the band dissolved when Brownstein and Weiss turned their attention to a Sleater-Kinney reunion with Corin Tucker.
Timony says there was no ill will in Wild Flag's demise. "Carrie quit the band because she wanted to do Sleater-Kinney," Timony says. "It was definitely a really fun project, and I'm really glad I did it. For them it was only a one-record project, which is fine. It started as an experiment to see if it would work, and it did, but there were no expectations that it had to continue. I'm glad, because I wouldn't have done this band (Ex Hex) if that one hadn't ended."
The guitarist's Wild Flag experience informed her Ex Hex songwriting. "I knew I'd have to make things really poppy (in Wild Flag), because the songs would get deconstructed and sound less poppy once the band got finished with them," Timony says. "I kept writing songs that way, and that turned into this band, and we didn't deconstruct them."
Equally important, she says, was the guitar lessons she was giving between tours to her 20 students in recent years.
"That was definitely an influence on my songwriting, taking apart so many classic rock leads, thinking about the tone of the guitar, where your hands are on the neck," she says. "It prompted me to go back to standard tuning."
Though Timony has been writing evocative songs for decades, she hasn't become more confident in her ability to meet her standards each time she begins a project.
"For every 200 ideas, only one is usable," she says. "I don't know if I'm different from other songwriters that way, but it's harder for me. There are a lot of more natural pop songwriters out there. I get bad writer's block and think I'll never be able to write another song, ever. You constantly try to feed the artist side of you. It's tricky. I'll record an idea on my iPhone or go downstairs (to her basement studio) and get something down on Pro Tools. But it isn't until I listen back to it the next day that I know if I have something worth keeping. I need a little time to forget the idea and then listen back. Then you go in and get to work on editing the idea. Or sometimes you just erase the whole song because you realize, 'That sucks.'"
Yet there's no hint of anxiety in Ex Hex's debut, which sounds in the same lineage as Cheap Trick or the Go-Go's -- the songs and bands that dominated her formative radio listening in the late '70s and early '80s. "Blondie, Rick Springfield, J. Geils -- it was a time in my life when melody was what made you like a song or not," she says. "We wanted an album full of songs that would make you move around, nothing slow or sad. I've done slow and sad throughout my career, so I saw no reason to go back to that this time."
When: 9 p.m. July 17
Where: Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western Ave.
Tickets: $15; emptybottle.com
When: 3:20 p.m. July 18
Where: Pitchfork Music Festival, Union Park, 1501 W. Randolph St.
Tickets: $65; pitchforkmusicfestival.com
Also worth hearing
Taste of Chicago: The lakefront tradition has raised the ante with stronger musical lineups in recent years, and the current lineup is no exception with power-pop quartet Weezer on opening night, followed by soul singer Erykah Badu. 5:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday at the Petrillo Music Shell in Grant Park, $15 to $50 for pavilion seats, free on the lawn; tasteofchicago.us
Greg Kot cohosts "Sound Opinions" at 8 p.m. Friday and 11 a.m. Saturday on WBEZ-FM 91.5.
greg@gregkot.com
