More than three decades after Heavens to Betsy last released new material, the feminist punk duo of Corin Tucker and Tracy Sawyer are opening the archives.
Following their first concert together in more than 30 years this summer, Heavens to Betsy have announced baby’s gone, a 16-track collection arriving October 16 via Kill Rock Stars. It is their first project since 1994 and brings together recordings from the earliest years of a band whose brief existence left a lasting mark on the American punk underground.
At the centre of baby’s gone is a previously unheard demo tape recorded in February 1992 by Bratmobile’s Molly Neuman, who also contributes liner notes to the new release. The collection adds recordings from 1993’s These Monsters Are Real and the 1994 Direction 7-inch, pulling together material from a period when Tucker and Sawyer were finding both their sound and their place within Olympia, Washington’s fiercely independent music community.
The first track to emerge from the collection is ‘ain’t never goin’ back’, a wonderfully rough-edged blast of lo-fi punk that catches the pair in their formative years. There’s little polish and no reason for there to be. The recording has the immediacy of two musicians discovering what they can do together and enjoying the freedom that comes with it.
Finding the original cassette more than 30 years later was itself something of a stroke of luck. Its survival provides a window into Heavens to Betsy before 1994 debut album Calculated, when the band was using music to confront subjects including sexual violence, body shaming, politics, queerness and the importance of female friendship and community. Three decades later, much of what Tucker and Sawyer were writing about has hardly been packed away as ancient history.
“I wasn’t sure if I would ever revisit Heavens to Betsy,” Sawyer says. “Then when we started talking more about it, and feeling how relevant the subjects are today, almost even more so than they were back then… it just seemed like the perfect opportunity to be doing this.”
There is another dimension to the reunion too. Tucker and Sawyer are no longer the college-age musicians who made those recordings, and returning to the songs has meant getting to know each other again from a very different point in their lives.
“Just to know each other again as adults and as mothers, it’s really cool,” Sawyer says. “Once we started playing again, it was like muscle memory.”
Tucker also remembers Neuman’s role in getting those first songs onto tape, simply checking out a Tascam recorder from Evergreen’s AV library and getting on with it. That DIY practicality feels entirely appropriate for music never intended to wait 35 years for another audience.
Before Sleater-Kinney, Tucker had Heavens to Betsy. The band released three 7-inch records and just one full-length album, Calculated, before calling it a day. Now baby’s gone fills in some of the gaps, not by rewriting that history but by letting us hear what was sitting on the tape all along.
Baby’s gone will be released on October 16 via Kill Rock Stars on two vinyl variants, CD and cassette, with a limited recreation of the original demo cassette also planned.
