Bossy Shouting: Bad Bad Hats
A midweek treat for you, Dames Nation!
I was lucky enough to catch and advance screening of To All The Boys: P.S. I Still Love You last week and it left me incapacitated with delight. I may have cried, I certainly applauded when Holland Taylor’s name appeared in the credits, and my eagerness to livetweet the movie with you all on Sunday grew by leaps and bounds. Amongst all the particular delights this sequel presented, there is one I was particularly jazzed about and can discuss here without spoiling anything: much of the film’s score consisted of instrumental versions of songs from one of my favorite up-and-coming bands, Bad Bad Hats. Thinking that you, our readers, would enjoy being as in-the-know today as I was this past Wednesday, I’m re-sharing a slightly modified version of the paean I wrote to Bad Bad Hats upon first discovering their work in February of 2016. Four years and one more album later, my heart belongs only more completely to Kerry Alexander. I hope some of you end up feeling the same way.
Impossible not to be charmed by this.
A simple truth about me is that I am to spring what shopping malls are to Christmas: I begin to celebrate its arrival almost criminally far in advance of its actual appearance and it sometimes feels like celebrating it is my entire reason for existence. As at least once this week, I was able to leave my winter coat at my desk while going out for my afternoon coffee, Dame Margaret’s Spring Anticipation Season has officially begun, likely snow storms next week be damned. In my heart, I’m already documenting the arrival of the season’s first snowdrops and, as a result, my musical appetite demands handclaps, jangly guitars, and, where possible, wryly wistful female vocalists. SO, it just happens to be the perfect moment for me to have discovered Bad Bad Hats, a female-fronted Minneapolis band whose cheery-sounding romantic fatalism matches my aesthetic preferences so well that I feel like they were grown in a lab just for me. How do I love them? Let me count the ways:
Lead singer and primary songwriter Kerry Alexander shares a (pretty rare!) name with my best friend and makes entire music videos based around the stock image of Women Laughing Alone With Salad.
She writes songs with lyrics like “Can’t get you off my mind, babe, so I bought this dress to spite you” and “Someday, I’ll call you back/Because I want you more than I want the things you lack” which, FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, really speak to me.
Recorded, their sound reminds me of early Rilo Kiley. Live, they felt like the weighted average of Alvvays and Waxahatchee. If you can catch them on tour, YOU DEFINITELY SHOULD!
And, best of all, by signing up for their mailing list at their label’s website, you can get their first album for free!! For keeps!!
So skateboard (laughing alone, with salad!), don’t walk over to Afternoon Records, Bandcamp, or Spotify to check them out.
XOXO/ Dame Margaret