Trailer Bride
w/Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter, An American Starlet
Fri Oct 3, Tractor, 9 pm, $8 adv/$10 DOS.

I've talked to many female musicians who've described how the birth of a child, a struggle with a chemical vice, or a passion for another art form has affected their creative drive, but I've never heard of all three factors colliding as cinematically as they did for Trailer Bride frontwoman Melissa Swingle. When her efforts to kick smoking during her pregnancy stymied her study of painting, she briefly panicked, but then became a self-taught guitar player.

"I got pregnant with my daughter Isabelle while I was an art major," explains Swingle in her amiable North Carolina accent. "I couldn't smoke, and I was a chain smoker when I painted. It was a total crutch. I couldn't smoke, and I couldn't paint either--I thought I would go crazy from nicotine withdrawals. So I got a guitar and decided to teach myself how to play, which would keep my hands busy so I wouldn't think about wanting to smoke!"

Like many self-taught players, Swingle had the circumstantial advantage of discovering unorthodox tunings and experimenting without the encumbrance of classical training. She began playing out around her hometown of Chapel Hill, meshing the spooky, warm warble of her alto voice with this exploratory guitar work. "There are so many musicians in Chapel Hill that I started out just playing solo, but soon found volunteers [to play with]," she says. After hooking up with a drummer, bass player, and additional guitar player, Swingle christened her band Trailer Bride and began taking music more seriously: "I realized that I didn't just love music, I loved making it. But I was a late bloomer--it took me till I was in my mid-to-late twenties to figure it out."

Trailer Bride soon found a natural home on Bloodshot Records, with whom they've released five records of country noir deeply influenced by their rural roots, a love of Southern gothic literature, and an obvious affection for melodic '80s punk outfits like X and even Flipper--a fusion that's eerily channeled through Swingle's ghostly-yet-spastic stage presence. I've yet to witness it, but anyone who's seen her perform immediately mentions the oddly seductive charm of seeing her eyes roll back in her head as she sways erratically about the stage.

The band's eclectic instrumentation, including generous swaths of slide guitar and prudent sprinklings of harmonica and accordion, pushes the David Lynch envelope further, while Swingle's saw-playing contribution is so ethereal it seems to add a second voice to the group's sound. "I started playing saw about four or five years ago, after I watched this movie where an old lady was playing the saw," she says. "It's like the singing voice I've always wished I had. I was so jealous of my sister Amy's voice because she could sing high and swoop into her notes--she was the star singer in the choir when we were kids--and I was always in the back row singing alto. Now, with the saw, it's like I've got a soprano in the band, too."

Haunting atmospherics aside, much of what makes Trailer Bride so enchanting is Swingle's talent for vivid lyrical storytelling, a gift handed down from her colorful relatives and nurtured by her day job waiting tables. "I wait tables when [the band] isn't on the road because it's basically the only kind of job I can get that will let me take off for three weeks at a time. I overhear snippets of conversations here and there and hear stories from the other waitresses that get me thinking. If I were sitting at a desk, locked away in front of the computer, I wouldn't be mixing with people and feeling the real pulse of what it means to be in the rural South."

Swingle's mother's side of the family also reflects her delight in mixing the morbid with the comical. "I've got a lot of storytellers in my family; my mom comes from a big family of women who talk nonstop and tell stories all the time. A lot of them are tragically funny, and they laugh hysterically over them until they cry--that's kind of in my blood. You might call it craziness, but I've seen my mom laugh at a funeral and people start shushing her... but that's how you get through tragic things sometimes--by seeing the dark humor in them."

editor@thestranger.com