Wild Ones: Three hot acts present a new breed of female songwriter

There's not much you can do to deal with a difficult woman. When she's not speaking her mind, she's probably refusing to make it up. She's playing nice one moment, misleading you the next. And in the meantime, she's likely doing what she damn well pleases. At best, you can only wish for a little advance notice. Luckily, Those Darlins—a folk-infused female garage-rock trio with affection for nostalgia—give fair warning. "If you don't want a wild one / Quit hangin' 'round with me," the group growls with a slur over a twangy pluck. "You knew right from the start / it's my personality."

The subject matter—a hard-to-handle (and hard-drinking) female narrator absolving herself of any wrongdoing with a you-knew-what-you-were-getting-into shrug—isn't particularly astonishing. Back in 1952, Nashville native Kitty Wells told Hank Thompson to shove it with "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels." The song was a response to his "Wild Side of Life," which admonished a wife who was better at leaving than loving. Wells admonished right back—how could you blame a woman for splitting, when, all too often, some married men still act like bachelors? (Thanks to fed-up wives, it became the first hit by a female country singer to reach No. 1.)

By today's standards, that's awfully polite dissent. Back then, the track found itself banned on radio and the Grand Ole Opry. And over half a century later, some female songwriters are still telling the menfolk they've got a few things backward.

Those Darlins, along with other local acts such as Caitlin Rose and Tristen, are still helping issue that corrective. They are songwriters who draw on decades-old traditional folk, country and pop to tell provocative tales from an unabashedly female perspective. Their subject matter is both retro—drinking, smoking and heartache—and distinctly modern—D.U.I.s, homework and even late-night, drunken overindulgences in chicken. The result is both brash and intimate and—miraculously—without the precious, baby-voiced femininity that plagues female-led indie folk these days.

"What's remarkable about all of these acts is that they actually pull it off," says Drew Mischke, general manager at Mercy Lounge. "A lot of people—not just women—that I've heard the last four years have tried to do this revivalist thing and it almost exclusively comes off as forced and trite. It's like doing a cover really well. If you're going to do a cover well you have to do it justice. There has to be a certain amount of genuineness that comes with it. And if you're trying to cover or evoke a style or an entire stylistic period in musical history, it has to be earnest and genuine and it has to be good. And they're all great at it."

Perhaps that's because each of these artists has spent the better part of the last two years shaping and pruning their music. Unlike the dozens of newly formed bands made up of guys who seem to play within weeks of their first practice, these acts have spent time incubating. And the oldest among them is a mere 26.

Take folk singer Caitlin Rose, a 22-year-old wunderkind who's been called a cross between Ellie May Clampett and Olive Oyl, and who, in a show of love for Marlboros, isn't afraid to suggest that the surgeon general "can suck on [her] dick." With her high-waist jeans, board-straight hair, makeup-free face and wide brown eyes, her foul mouth and confidence are all the more arresting.

Rose has been writing songs since she was 14. At age 22, she has a sold-out seven-inch and a staggering country debut EP, Dead Flowers. After a half-decade of finessing her act, she also has an expanding fanbase and a slew of breathless reviews. Rose has been called a brilliant young talent, a plausible example of what Loretta Lynn's first teenage performance was probably like.

The debut amazes not just for Rose's vocals, which have the kind of bold ache and fullness one minute that has drawn comparisons to Patsy Cline, and a comedian's slyness the next. But her subject matter and turn of phrase surprise, proof that, as a teenager, she was already preternaturally acquainted with a heavy heart.

The track "Shotgun Wedding" may seemingly just ruminate on the age-old rural mishap of teen pregnancy, but Rose takes it on earnestly. Instead of lamenting the young couple's misfortune, she asks the listener to consider that such troubles might arise out of true passion rather than carelessness, the sort that promises the same kind of staying power as traditional unions.

Rose's range on the EP is startling, even if it's a little unfocused. There's the impressive Cline cover "Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray"—a daunting task for any young vocalist, and one that Rose pulls off with utter ease. Moments later comes the goofy quirk of "Gorilla Man," a nearly spoken-word piece accompanied only by tambourine that some might argue covers up nearly all of Rose's vocal strengths. But instead, it establishes that she has the confidence to strike out on wackier avenues. The kid's got moxie.