Baby’s Day Out

[July 30th, 2008]

Though it was released over a month ago, you can’t buy the new Babydollar$ album on CD. If you bug band leader Toussaint Perrault long enough, he might give you a burned copy—but he won’t be happy about it. Perrault, the quiet, long-faced former trombone player for spastic party-punkers Ape Shape and current member of indie-cabaret tribe Tu Fawning, recorded the songs for his first-ever album using analog equipment, and he always knew he wanted to release it in the most pure way possible—on thick, black vinyl.

Audiophiles and music snobs have long extolled the virtues of the vinyl record: its warm, rich sound quality, its tangible presence (huge artwork!), the pops and hisses that make the music sound more real than on a pristine compact disc. Vinyl, lovers say, forces the listener to really listen to a record, to engage with the music they are hearing. That kind of intimate listening experience is just what Perrault had in mind when he sat down to make his first record, the endearingly titled If You Were My Homegirl, You’d Be Home by Now, Girl. (Note to local musicians: One way to grab attention for your debut record is to give it a ridiculous title.)

“I knew that I always wanted to make a record—something that would work on both sides,” Perrault says over iced coffee outside North Portland’s Albina Press. But neither side of the Babydollar$ record is very conventional—the project’s charm lies in its shambling, sweetly mellow tone—one that never stays on the same course for very long. Dubby, psychedelic vignettes rub shoulders with playful backporch jams; a marching-band tuba and trombone fight for room with clumsy drum machines and Corrina Repp’s (Tu Fawning) wordless croon; serious pop songs are imbedded with simplistic rhymes, inside jokes and borrowed lyrics.

Homegirl’s pacing is deliberate, and it clocks in at a compact 12 tracks. It’s hard not to notice how the record’s most spirited and silly moment, the banjo-led girl-gone-wrong ditty “Babymama”—which includes the opening mission statement “You can’t play me like an old banjo/ You can’t play me like a sad song on the radio/ You can’t play me like a game of domino”—nestles next to the nearly six-minute slow dirge meditation of “Sparklers,” built on autoharp and the Jens Lekman-like discovery of misinterpretation: “And when you said let’s take a break/ I could use the fresh air, too/ No, no, you silly boy, I need a break from you.”

Perrault’s musical background is a little more focused than his wandering muse. He left Oregon for Orange County, Calif., to attend film school, but quickly ventured back north when he discovered that the arty types he was seeking out were just into Star Wars and Pulp Fiction. It wasn’t until 2005, though, that Perrault came to join the ranks of Portland’s music community—and even that came on a complete whim, convincing Ape Shape’s Ralf Youtz to let him play trombone for the band, though it was “an instrument I hadn’t picked up in a while,” Perrault casually mentions in his hazy, laid-back drawl.

Performing original compositions for the past three years, live incarnations of Babydollar$ have run the gamut from a full five-piece psych-rock band to trippy solo shows in which Perrault plays an acoustic guitar accompanied by tape loops. So when it came time to record, he did the best (and most fun) thing possible—he brought all his friends in to help.

“Everyone that I had play on the record are all really close friends of mine that I would have been hanging out with anyways,” he says of the Babydollar$ family, which includes Youtz (former member of much-loved indie-pop band the Feelings as well as the original drummer for both Built to Spill and the Halo Benders), Repp, Larry Yes and Nathan Langston (the Maybe Happening, Nick Jaina Band) on violin. “I mainly just picked people to play on there whose energy I really liked and wanted to be around.” That energy comes through on each of Homegirl’s disparate tracks. But for the uninitiated, Perrault does have one warning: If you hear a pause after 20-odd minutes, just flip the record over.