There is no Queen of Jeans without Sisquó’s “Thong Song.”
“We were driving my brother to basketball practice, and he said to my mom, ‘There’s this amazing song that you have to hear,’ ” remembers Miri Devora, frontwoman for the Philadelphia trio. “She was like, ‘Cool, put it on.’ And it was Sisquó’s ‘Thong Song.’ ”
“I remember that vividly,” Devora says. “Really influenced me. Basically every song that I write is about a thong.”
Technically speaking, Devora is being facetious. And yes, Queen of Jeans’ music commands a modicum more nuance than Sisquó’s immortal ode to the G-string. The band’s sincere (or at least audibly obvious) influences include Camera Obscura, Fiona Apple, Jenny Lewis and Liz Phair; it’s dreamy, guitar-driven indie rock with big-hearted crescendos and the major-key brightness cranked high enough to border on pop.
By the time Devora started to assemble Queen of Jeans, she was already working on the songs that would become the group’s self-titled debut EP. She met Mattie Glass (who played guitar in the band early on, but has since moved to bass) on OK Cupid. It helped that both she and Glass were feeling creatively stagnant and tired of being the token queer women in their respective projects. Devora is personally relieved that is no longer the case. “It’s freeing,” she says. “As a songwriter it frees me to feel like I can say what I need to say, because our identity as a band is very focused now.”
Together with then-bassist Nina Scotto and a handful of drummers — they found longtime drummer Patrick Wall via Craigslist later on — the members made a New Year’s resolution to take playing together seriously. Most resolutions fall by the wayside pretty quickly, but Queen of Jeans stuck with it. The name came from now-closed South Philadelphia clothing store King of Jeans, whose kitschy sign depicting a couple kissing functioned as a beloved neighborhood icon for years.
Granted, it might seem somewhat clichéd to extol the virtues of the Philly indie scene in 2019, but the reputation exists for a reason. In the past decade, Philadelphia musicians who have earned national and international praise include folk-rock hippie Kurt Vile, dream-pop prince (Sandy) Alex G, soulful nu-bluesman Son Little, hard-rock revivalists Sheer Mag and manic art-punk weirdos Empath, to name just a few. In other words, if this were 1995, every A&R guy alive would be in the City of Brotherly Love, lurking outside the WXPN-FM offices and waving around exorbitant signing bonuses. Philly was good to the nascent Queen of Jeans.
“The music scene is so inclusive and people are just excited about new bands,” says Devora. “It felt really nice initially to be embraced by not only other bands but by the community. It’s a music city. I felt really happy to be a part of that and call it, you know, home.”
Plus, you know, their folks are there. Their friends are there. There is no stereotypical move to Los Angeles or New York happening in the near future. “I do love it,” says Devora of her city. After a pause, she adds: “The parking is a bitch.”
The group’s debut LP Dig Yourself arrived in spring 2018, followed by this year’s If You’re Not Afraid, I’m Not Afraid. Devora wrote the latter in the wake of her mother’s illness and death, her private grief compounded by the results of the 2016 election. She cites Mike Pence, his stance on conversion therapy, and the Trump administration’s assault on LGBTQ and women’s rights as uniquely terrifying and close to home. Grief permeates and powers the record — the intensity of it; the ubiquity of it; the messiness of it; the ways it intertwines with joy in queer life; Devora’s determination to find a way to either free herself of it or learn to live within it.
“I felt so withdrawn from everything and everyone,” she says. “Instead of being able to talk to people about it, I was just writing songs. … When I’m at my worst, I tend to find comfort in just playing music, so that’s how a lot of the songs came together.”
Giving up, fading away, blindness and breathlessness emerge multiple times across the album’s 11 tracks, although so do courage and quiet camaraderie. On “Only Obvious to You,” Devora makes a miniature mantra out of “Love will always fuck you over.” She notes how that song is particularly popular with audiences, “probably because I say ‘fuck,’ like, six times.” Album closer “Take It All Away” mixes self-imposed isolation — “And I don’t blame you for staying inside to lock things out” — with something resembling hope by its final crescendo: “Break down that sorrow / Rebuild things tomorrow.”
It still makes Devora nervous to perform those songs live, which, for the record, is OK with her.
“I don’t think that [nervousness] will probably ever go away,” she says. “But I hear that’s a good thing, too, because if you’re not nervous about something, you probably don’t care. And I care a lot.”
