\You've heard Juicy?"" Kendall Meade is genuinely surprised that I had heard of her first band. Now the songwriter and lead singer of the variable lineups of Mascott, she is much more warm over the phone than most-joking and laughing, self depricating and far more understanding of her interviewer calling later than he should be. Even the name Mascott comes out of modesty.
""My original plan was to use the French spelling of mascot 'mascotte,' but I thought it was a little pretentious to have a French band name. So I dropped the 'e' and took a little bit more individualized version of the word.""
While Cat Power uses singer-songwriter music to brood and Nina Nastasia uses long plodding notes to play up the desolation and Aimee Mann broke through into the mainstream focusing on isolation Mascott's songs mix sadness with hopeful and open melodies and emphasize the harmonies and dreamy atmosphere. The result is music that is optimistic enough not to be pessimistic, music that is smooth and pretty.
She wrote most of on the road over most of last year playing keyboard for the distortion-rock band Sparklehorse, using soundchecks to craft songs. ""I think there is definitely a little bit of Sparklehourse on the album,"" she said ""I was playing primarily keyboard with them and I was using many different keyboard sounds and vintage samples. I was playing a lot of different keyboard harmonies with [Alan] Weatherhead, who is in Sparklehorse, and he was in the band. He and I were used to playing a lot of keyboard layers together and I really liked the way it sounded. We did that on the Mascott album too.""
Sparklehorse wasn't the first band who used Meade to play with them for a tour. Juicy was hip enough to play with bands like Chisel and noise-pop Helium. After Juicy broke up, Helium invited her to play on their world tour.
Kendall Meade is a professional ringer.
""It was a great way to spend my twenties, I think. Traveling the world, getting better at playing, playing in front of groups of people, and just seeing the world. It was a cool way to spend my time, but then I started getting interested in doing it with my own band and I started taking Mascott more seriously""
While Juicy was wry and boisterously funny, Mascott is somber, with songs about love and lost love and ideal love. But even with more sober music, she stays true to irony. Sensing a theme in her music, Meade released on Valentine's Day and stuffed press kits with candy hearts. But she always had the more honest and less silly direction in mind.
""Juicy was my first band, and it was with my girlfriends from Boston. We were just having fun and goofing around, and if I brought one of my more serious songs to rehearsal, they would inevitably end up teasing me and calling me Lisa Loeb. It really wasn't the platform for it, nor should it have been. Juicy was all about fun. And when Juicy ended I found myself writing more singer songwriter stuff that had a little more of a personal bent to it.""
Meade explained that the name Mascott itself is response to the shift. ""I think [going by the name Mascott] was sheer insecurity. Mascott was so radically different than juicy , and I was so tentative about the project that it was easier to hide behind a band name. But I like the name, and I like the idea of music being a project. It doesn't mean in the future I won't do stuff under my own name.""
is the first release of Meade's own label Red Panda records. ""When I made the record I wasn't planning on releasing it myself,"" she said. "" I decided to do that later in the game. I think because I spent so much time on it that no one was going to care about it or work as hard as I would on it.""
But if a label wouldn't, it would be a waste of a good album.
