Mary Janes
Record No. 1, the long-delayed debut album by the Mary Janes, begins with an ending: “Shooting Star,” the seven-minute opening opus, is a love song to main Mary Jane Janas Hoyt’s former band, the Vulgar Boatmen. Hoyt starts slowly, delicately, with her own tentative guitar and vocals, adding watercolor washes of cello, violin, piano, and more guitar, until the orchestration is as dense with ideas as it is spare in execution. She whispers, then stretches her voice thin to a rocky edge, then opens up into her clear pop contralto, and for all the longing inherent in the lyrics (“All of our old days / They fall away”) she closes with a triumphant expression of autonomy: “Days that came and went all the time we spent / I will make it last.”
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Hoyt made the Vulgar Boatmen her life at a time when she felt she’d lost her previous one. Single motherhood had required her to shelve her dreams of a singing career to pay the bills, but in 1990, in an awful twist of fate, her son went to live with his father in the northeast. Hoyt followed him, but before long, financial realities forced her back home to Bloomington, Indiana. (These travails are heartbreakingly hinted at on Record No. 1’s second track, “Wish I Could Fly.”) Upon her return a friend referred her to Dale Lawrence, leader of the Indiana-based touring version of the Vulgar Boatmen, who wrote songs by mail with Florida English professor Robert Ray. (Ray had a version of the band that played in Florida.) Lawrence was looking for a singer to go on the road in support of the band’s second release, Please Panic.
She says now that it was a rare show when a fan or critic didn’t ask whether she’d recorded anything of her own. The more she thought about it, the more certain she became that she had something to say, so she began secreting herself away with Lawrence’s guitar. She was daunted but inspired by his songwriting–he claims she hesitated even to call her efforts songs. Soon, though, she was imagining arrangements as well as melodies, and invited fellow distaff Boatman Kathy Kolata to play cello with her. The pair named their project the Mary Janes, after the opening track of You and Your Sister.
All the instruments were used with such economy that each one counted, but they also added up. At one point, despite the discount, recording was stymied until Linn could pay for what had already been done. A year and a half after the process began, there were only rough mixes, but those were impressive enough to land the Mary Janes a slot at South by Southwest in 1998, where they also performed their version of “I’m Not Ready Yet” for Delmore’s Tom T. Hall showcase. It would still be another six months until the final mixes were done, and more than a year until the record came out: In an effort to make amends for the fits and starts of the recording and to prevent a recurrence of the Vulgar Boatmen’s experience with You and Your Sister, Linn had negotiated a distribution deal with ADA through Steve Earle’s E-Squared label. But for all its potential, the deal cost Linn dearly for promotion, effectively postponing the record’s release until this month.
