About the album
A Letter of Intent Regarding the Creation
of Grand Duchy's Debut Record "Petits Fours"
by
Violet Clark
I'm an art geek, a writer, and a self-taught musician. Like my husband, I never took lessons. I have always been drawn to making music, with whatever I could afford to make it on. What gives me any sort of musical authority is simply my love of the thing. I love talking about music and I love creating it. I very much love the fact that I'm married to a musician.
You may know him as Black Francis. He is a complete and total character. And I imagine I probably am, too.
We are not one of those couples that says "yes, dear" to one another's opinions. We agree on a lot of things, have similar interests and appreciations. But we disagree on a lot of things too. We have our own convictions.
We do however, have one pivotal, mutually agreed-upon outlook which brings richness to our shared life together: Life is Art. Or rather, to be alive is a creative act. And, whatever it is that you end up doing with your life, THAT is your art.
With that in mind, we have, over the past six years, fairly vigorously created much "art" together: children, a home, music, videos, business concepts -- all kinds of stuff. Nothing we've accomplished, however, has been such a total coming-together of our Life = Art philosophy as "Petits Fours," our debut record as Grand Duchy.
A couple of years ago, after enjoying some studio collaborations together, we became compelled to toy with stripping down our operations, diving in and creating right there, in the studio -- unrehearsed and without a plan. Sort of a musical equivalent of the automatic writing experiments of the Surrealists. We set before us a vigorous obstacle course by erecting the limitation that we would have to play all the instruments ourselves (in the end we had two cop-outs moments: see liner notes). We didn't realize it at the time, but we were engaging one another in a game, like musical tag...a creative back and forth which allowed, in the end, each of our personalities to shine through intensely.
And as a product of two fairly staunch characters (to quote Little Edie in "Grey Gardens"), the end result - Petits Fours - can be best expressed as pairs of opposites: eclectic and consistent, raw and cooked, smooth and rough, punky and pop, guitar and synth, he and she...Dinner and dessert.