U.S. Girls on Bless This Mess, Motherhood and Leon Russell

“It was unbelievable to me that I got to make the record in a studio with a band, and it was a really good fucking band,” she says. “I had to really look at how far I had come in my ability to be able to collaborate on that level, considering I had started this project just recording all by myself. And I would have never worked with anyone else, because I was too embarrassed to reveal I had no musical talent. I had things to say; I had a knack for a performance. I don’t even know if it was a knack, it was just an ability to seek oblivion in a performance. To see that I had come all this way where I could sing in front of a band in a studio and not crumble from embarrassment—and saying ‘No, I don’t want it this way, I want it this way’—it was amazing that I had made it to that point and that I had a label support that.”

Remy put out Heavy Light in 2020 and a memoir, Begin By Telling, in 2021—and both projects are, as she calls them, “exorcisms.” Both created this visceral, anthemic tapestry that told stories through body language and tilted a focus on gospelizing radical empathy. In a lot of ways, they are this interwoven, definitive statement—as if you could’ve looked at the two projects as the end of U.S. Girls, or at least a chapter of it. And, for Remy, it almost was. “COVID happens and I’m at home in this time of pause, and what was revealed to me—after completing these two forms, which both really seem to be like doors closing on my work—was how do you carry on after that? And then, the stoppage of COVID and all of the things that were revealed about our world during that time very much opened up to me that there’s no rules and I could whatever the fuck I wanted to next—which is something I’ve always known and lived by, but it just got more juiced up.”

For Remy, it became urgently obvious that the next chapter she wanted to explore in her life was having children. She and Turnbull began trying, and she got pregnant with twins pretty quickly after. Heavy Light and Begin By Telling saw Remy exercising a lot of anger, as did In a Poem Unlimited. “I still had a big belief in politics, which has completely evaporated now,” she says. “I still was trying to really tell people what to think and do and I was angry and pointing lots of fingers. I don’t have much anger anymore, other than at myself. I’m in a period now where, from Bless This Mess on, I’m making work as a mother. And that is a completely different paradigm, not just in the details of how I work and the time that I have to do it and the brain space and the physical space but, having grown two beans in my body and then giving birth to them and then feeding them from my body for two years—in the midst of so much change on this planet and in culture and the ways of living—to be a mother at this time, it’s a very specific lens to have on the world. I will never not be a mother again. Even if my children died, God forbid, I’d still be a mother. So that’s where there will be a delineation in my work, pre-mother and postpartum.”

The impact that motherhood had on U.S. Girls and on Bless This Mess arrived immediately. The cover brandishes a very pregnant Remy cradling her own stomach. She’d gone from being 150 pounds to 230 pounds, because she had three-times the blood and three-times the hearts in her body. We joke that if you give Bless This Mess a bad review, then you are—by proxy—giving her two children and her changing body and mind a bad review, too. “They’ve only just now started to do the research on what happens to the brain when you give birth,” she adds. “Your brain actually, physically, changes size. There’s so much that happens to you physically, which affects cognitive emotion, your parasympathetic nervous system, all of these things. I made a record in those conditions, it’s kind of the ultimate vulnerability to do something like that. I have an addiction to being vulnerable publicly.” As you would expect, Remy samples the sounds emanating from her breast pump on “Pump”; she nods to the bond of living through bodies, births, deaths and machines on “Outro”; there’s a call to breathing exercises while labor that juxtaposes with the insurmountable weight of climate chaos and internet dependency on “Futures Bet.”

But becoming a parent—especially a mom—is a huge sacrifice that changes your voice and your movements and your musicality, as you begin taking care of yourself so you can then sacrifice that part in order to create a life for someone else. When Remy’s kids were in-utero, in the early months, it was a joyous, novel thing for her that quickly turned into emotional turbulence and a struggle to just keep up with rigors of making a record. “It was like, ‘We’re recording and the babies are here! They’re on the record.’ and then, being pregnant with twins, it becomes a very real physical limitation very early on. By six, seven months, I was pretty full and my body was working really hard. I didn’t know where my diaphragm was; my breath, I had no connection to it. I couldn’t stand for long, I had to sing sitting down. I was extremely emotional and hard on myself about how my voice sounded and about my stamina. Sometimes, I would have a studio day booked and I couldn’t get through it, because I was so self-conscious about how I sounded. I would just dissolve into tears. It was really difficult conditions towards the end, plus a pressure I had on myself to finish it before the babies came—because I was like, ‘I’m not going to have time once they’re here.’ Of course, if you put a deadline like that on yourself, you’re not meeting it. I did not get the record done before.”

The first thing that Remy worked on postpartum was, actually, “Superstar.” There’s a picture on her Instagram where she has a baby in her arms and she was wearing a big button-up shirt she was practically living in at the time and she was tracking the song’s vocals. In that photo, Remy was still battling with swelling and fluid retention, having to continue sitting to sing. Her kids were born in April 2021 and she’d had shows booked for that August, all of which she had to cancel—because there was no way she was getting on stage. “I was nowhere near prepared to be confident on my pins. My legs were shaky; my ankles, my feet, everything was all messed up,” Remy adds. “Although I’m an artist and that’s in my DNA at this point and I don’t really put it second to too many things, my kids are really the most important thing in my life right now—because I’m their caregiver. It’s not just about physical closeness, either. Emotionally, intellectually—I need to be there for them, because the experiences they’re going to have right now are what will form them for the rest of their lives. And I want to do the best job I can—not just for them, but for every other person that they’re going to come in contact with. Because, we’re basically walking around just meeting everybody’s parents.”

The standout song on Bless This Mess, “Only Daedalus,” taps into Greek mythology—especially the story of Icarus and his father. Remy was drawn toward that kind of storytelling because she was experiencing something epic in her body. “[Because of[ the grandeur and the bloody chaos, life-making stuff, I needed those stories to make sense of my own life,” she notes. The story of Icarus and his fate of flying too close to the sun is a well-understood myth—as is the moral interpretation of it, to not be too ambitious and to listen to your parents’ guidance. Remy didn’t know about Daedalus, how he created Icarus’ wings and the labyrinth. She drew parallels between her being a musician and him being an inventor, as they both pull things out of thin air and fashion them into something worthwhile—and that snowballed into her thinking about dating and having partners and being a parent, about how she no longer wanted to live in the frustrations that plagued her last few records.

“What really stuck with me with Daedalus was reading this story about him where he was exiled and he was lost,” Remy says. “A king wanted to find him, so he sent out his messenger with this riddle, which was ‘How do you get a thread through a shell?’ The king says, ‘Go out with this riddle and whoever can answer it, that will be Daedalus. That’s how we’ll know it’s him, because he’s the only one that can solve this riddle.’ The messenger finds Daedalus, because he solves the riddle. What he says to do is tie the string to an ant and lure it through the shell with honey. There’s something beautiful about that, it’s a very evocative image that stuck with me. Daedalus’ life story is just full of metaphors at every turn. That’s what myths are, right? Myths are to help us make sense of our life. You may be faced with something where you’re like, ‘Fuck, how am I going to do this? How am I going to thread this shell?’ I think it helps to visualize metaphors. All of this is connected to radical empathy and critical thinking—these things that are, I think, skills we inherently have as human beings but are buried right now.”

The Daedalus piece really stuck with me after I got off of my call with Remy. I think back to what she said about Leon Russell, about the ways in which the energy of brilliance can supersede credit. When Icarus flew too close to the sun, everyone forgot about his father. When the Carpenters turned “Superstar” into a #2 hit, everyone forgot about the kooky-dressed, bearded guy who wrote it. There’s something to be said about whether or not Bless This Mess will be remembered as this crystalline, grieving and nakedly beautiful portrait of Meg Remy’s time as a pregnant woman in a post-COVID, chronically online world—or whether it will be remembered as only a great U.S. Girls project. You build the wings, you birth your children, you write songs that other folks will turn into smash hits. It’s a cycle of humanity turned aglow by the splendid romance of pulling magic out of thin air.

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Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.