Loucey Stands for Creative Moms on "Participation Trophy Wife"

Loucey, by Katie Sikora

Loucey’s Participation Trophy Wife has a simple message: “I’m still here.”

Cherie McCabe played indie rock and wrote songs before she became a wife and a mother, but the demands of those roles forced her to put music to the side for a while. She didn’t lose interest in it or the excitement that accompanied writing songs, but the space to pursue them became harder to find. When the children got to an age that McCabe could carve out some time for herself, she returned to music, and Participation Trophy Wife says that the person inside the wife and mother never went away.

Loucey plays an album release party Tuesday night at Gasa Gasa with Amelia Neville and a Jeremy Phipps DJ set.

As McCabe says in the email interview below, she loves women singer/songwriters, but Loucey and the new album are very much band projects that started with beats by Ben Lorio, and were fleshed out by Jeremy Phipps on keyboards and her husband Sam on guitar. The songs sound woozy, as if someone’s coming out of a dream, but that wooziness is familiar and pleasant. Trip hop was one of the reference points for the album, but there’s none of Tricky’s dread in the songs. Participation Trophy Wife suggests that McCabe is moving from good place to better place, working through the stuff necessary to confidently add “musician” to her string of roles..

What started you on the path to the songs on Participation Trophy Wife? Did you know you wanted to make being a wife and mother the center of the album?

No, I didn’t set out to make an album like this. I think that’s the magic of making a record and discovering something about yourself, or discovering something that needs to be said, along the way. All that I ever wanted was to get out of the house and work on music again, for me. 

A happy home life and marriage has always seemed, to me, completely and utterly uninteresting, from a songwriting perspective. But there’s no mother that doesn’t go through those early years and feel the weight of expectations. They stare you down everywhere you look. So I began to unpack that, unintentionally at first. There are these emotions I move through as a wife, a mother, and I could blow them up, super-sized. 

About a year in to working on the record, I was reading this book called The Baby on the Fire Escape by Julie Phillips that discusses the lives and challenges of mother-artists, over the last century.. It gave me added clarity around this idea that we’re still making up for lost time in giving mothers’ a voice in art. The simple act of caregiving and nurturing makes it so difficult to do so.

When I wrote the title track for this record or not long after, a cohesive theme for these tunes we’d been tinkering on began to really take shape.

There are two starting points to almost every song on the record. Ben was digging around in a crate of records and making beats with his samplers in his spare time, and I was starting to carve out time in my mornings with my guitar, writing again. We’d get together in the evenings after I’d put the kids to sleep and figure out how to pair his beats with my melodies and we’d world-build around them with the other guys as we went.

What were the challenges involved writing these lyrics? I’d imagine that the way children and motherhood are fetishized in our culture, it might feel weird to assert that you have an identity outside of service to the marriage. 

There were lines I’d write, and then think to myself, “Wait, do I want to say this? Do I really want to say this?” But I think we’re in a new era of marriage and mothering where many of us want to be honest about what we’re experiencing, that it’s never quite so simple, that it’s okay to take the rose-colored glasses off.

I had my first when I was 25, which is very young by most standards. I always wanted to be a mother; it took me some time to understand that I still want to be an artist, too.

Songs always tend to feel so personal, but what emboldened me along the way was that I wasn’t always writing as myself, for myself. There’s a broader narrative I wanted to point to, especially when you consider our current administration and world where women can be looked at as cogs in a childbearing machine. I wanted to write the antithesis to that, to give more depth to that experience.

What were some of things you were thinking about how to turn these thoughts into music? 

We were sampling a lot of ‘60s soundtracks and the aesthetic of the mid-century housewife was on our mind. We fell down the YouTube rabbit hole of mid-century school films educating on how to be a perfect wife and a perfect mother, which is just mind-blowing to realize these were things women were expected to watch not even a hundred years ago.

On your Bandcamp page, it mentions that project sprang in part out of love for vintage synths. Is that your fascination? 

We all love synth sounds. Jeremy plays most of the keys on the album and there was a period during the process where we brought in stacks of vintage synths and let him have at it. Some he owned, some he borrowed. 

I wouldn’t say that synths are the cornerstone of the project, though. More so, vintage sounding 12-bit sampler/drum machines, the sound of ‘90s boom bap and trip hop. One of the things that kickstarted this entire album’s sonic exploration was Ben buying an E-mu SP-1200 knock-off. He built up an entire Google Drive folder of beats that I would write to.

What brought you back to playing? I’d imagine that while pregnant and while the kids were little, it was harder to get out and play.

I played a few solo shows under ‘Cherie Louise’ during that season, as loucey was working on material and getting its act together to do some live shows. We released a first EP in 2017 and did play a handful of shows to support it. 

Realistically, as we began to grow our family, there was a season where music felt impossible. It could not have happened the first year or so after giving birth, where both of mine were attached to my hip. And because I had two kids two years apart, that year or so turned into several years.

What brought me back to playing is the sheer joy I find in music and in writing, and the desire to reconnect with something I’ve loved ever since I was a little kid, as I’m raising my own little kids. I sat on my dad’s lap and watched him write songs. There are photos of me as a toddler banging on a drum machine, and It felt wrong to abandon something that has felt so intrinsic to me. Sam and I both were down to bring our kids along for the ride.

What’s different about playing now as a mother of two?

You’ve got to line up the babysitter, and you’ve got to fit band practice into the calendar alongside t-ball and ballet lessons. In a way, everything feels different, but our kids get to witness us doing something for ourselves alongside their activities. I think that example is important. It makes us better parents and better humans, and they are our biggest (little) fans.