She's the Boss

In life, Rachel Flotard’s father provided the New Jersey native with the grit and determination to grab the world by the ear. In death, he has given her the inspiration to write and release the record that might just make that happen.

Some call Rachel Flotard the Red Feather. It’s a fitting superhero-like name, bright and spirited and a little ridiculous, just like the woman with the bottomless cache of one-liners and vibrant pile of unruly red hair who is sliding into a wood booth at Café Presse to talk about her recent reinvention. Her band Visqueen’s  first full-length album of the decade just shot past the Beatles on Easy Street’s sales chart. “I just whupped me some White Album,” she says, eyes wide, brow wrinkled in delighted disbelief.

Visqueen’s new album, Message to Garcia, is named after an 1899 essay (which became a plucky 1936 Barbara Stanwyck movie) about pressing forward, no matter the distractions, and getting the job done. The album is a homage to Flotard’s father, George, who moved in with her in Seattle from New Jersey after he got cancer, so she and her sister could take care of him. Despite seven years of diligent care, he died last year.

It’s a tough story — certain, as Flotard jokes, to “tug on some heartstrings…boost some sales. My dad would be the first one to laugh at our proverbial boat with the hole in it and say, ‘I hope you make it, little goil.’ He was such a hardworking person and my best dude, period.” A zillion articles about the album have stressed the grief angle, she says, because everybody has parents, and “nobody wants to watch them hop a rainbow.”

Photo by Ray Gordon

But it’s not a sad record. Its only blatant reference to Flotard’s experience taking care of her dad — the stirring, stripped-down ballad “So Long” — is not so much a sob story as one of hard-knuckled determination. It channels all the complicated armies of emotion one cycles through watching a loved one die: sadness, yes, but also regret, confusion, fear, attachment, detachment, resentment, loyalty, denial, anger.

“I can’t even listen to that song,” she says. “I went for a run when I was living with Dad in Ballard. I was running and running, so pissed, and I just said to myself, ‘I’m gonna live after you’re gone.’ I wrote the whole damn thing. I felt so bad for him and I felt so bad for me…that song just came out.”

But that’s just one song. There are ten others, such as “Ward,” which builds steadily against deliciously thick harmonies and tempo changes before dropping out to let Flotard’s powerful vocals carry it back to its catchy chorus. Like the disc’s numerous other strong points, especially “Hand Me Down” and “Forgive Me,” it’s a deliberately rocking tune, in all its longing, unrequited, lustful ways. These are not the kind of songs someone writes about her father.

“It’s not like my dad died and I retreated and scrawled a fucking opus,” she says. “But I lived with this person for seven years. I’ve never lived with a guy — a boyfriend. I’m totally left back a million years in real lady life. A lot of those songs are about having ridiculous half-relationships. At the end of the day, who could possibly be more important than that guy to me? Not a lot of guys want to hear that. Not a lot of guys are built for it, and I’m not really built for a lot of guys, I don’t think. So I’m alone a lot because of that, which is fine.”

“Alone” is a subjective term, of course. Flotard is as popular as ever in the Seattle music world and has just upped the ante by joining the indie revolution full force, grabbing the reins away from labels so she can chart the future of her career on her own. Visqueen’s first two albums — 2003’s King Me and the following year’s Sunset in Dateland — earned glowing reviews and a loyal fan base. Response to those albums was so positive, fans and critics wondered where album number three was. Had the creative well run dry? What they didn’t know was that, while Flotard was touring with alt-country superstar Neko Case and working on other projects, her personal life was taking precedence. And she was writing new material. Now that the reason Garcia took a little longer to finish is clear, her audience is finding it well worth the wait.

She picked the wrong five years to be off the circuit, though — five years of crisis. Shopping this collection of recordings around was tough. After several labels passed, Flotard decided nobody would be a better advocate for Visqueen than she was. Enter her fledgling startup, Local 638 Records, named for her father’s steamfitters’ union back in New York City. She’s the first to admit she doesn’t know everything about running a label, but she’s bent on figuring ways around what press and execs often call the demise of the recording industry.

“I can tailor the label however I want,” she says. “That was the thing. Okay, no one’s signing me — wait, I’m signing me. I wrote ‘I’m the Boss’ on my hand when I applied for my business license.” She pushed her project forward one step at a time. Step one: make sure the world knows Visqueen exists. Step two: tour extensively in 2010. “I need to raise awareness, ask folks to listen to the album, and pray I don’t get hit with a pie. Unless my mouth is open.”

Photo by Christopher Nelson

Garcia — and Flotard’s music in general — is not about the tragic pursuit of pure artistry, or a quest to save the world. It is simply something that has expanded her world. Also, it’s fun. “If there were a harmony treadmill, I’d be running on it,” she says. Her creative process is all about relationships and adventures — like her visit next month to Southeast Asia, where she’ll “teach some English, visit some schools and village orphanages, deliver supplies, hug the hell out of people who look at me like I’m insane, and generally make myself sob with joy.” Then she’ll come home and rock as hard as possible, and maybe beat the Beatles again.

For now, though, the focus is on Message to Garcia. It’s her job, like a steamfitter’s, and she ducks the widespread impression that she’s on some profound mission. “It would be presumptuous for me to say that I’m trying to do this grand thing,” she says. “I’m only a girl that lives in Seattle, that grew up in New Jersey, that loved her dad. That’s just where I was. Oh, and I shat out a record.”

In fact, that record is one of the best rock records to drop from Seattle’s storied scene since Visqueen played its first gig at Capitol Hill Block Party in 2002. Flotard’s point is that there’s nothing special about her struggle, the time she spent caring for her dad. “Everyone has struggles and hills to climb,” she says. “Why should anyone give a shit about me? They shouldn’t. They should give a shit about flipping the script on the music industry itself.” That’s the real message of Message to Garcia. “I just really want to do a good job, to work creatively so that people know, when they come to a Visqueen show or buy our records, they are directly contributing to a more artist-driven music industry.”

A week before our Café Presse chat, she flew home to New Jersey to surprise her mother on her birthday. As the plane taxied to the gate, she heard familiar music coming over the speakers. The song was “Pharaohs,” a track from Neko Case’s latest album, Middle Cyclone, with Flotard singing backing vocals. The moment stopped her in her tracks. “I’m singing at myself in the plane, waiting to get off the plane.” After the surrealism sank in, she quit thinking like a performer and started thinking like a record exec, researching how to get Visqueen’s music on airline speakers. It’s the kind of “Why can’t I?” attitude that might just carry her sound to the biggest audience of her career.

“I’m just one guy,” she says. “And, as one little person, I can take chances. I don’t have a staff. I don’t have other people to feed other than me and my band. I can take risks that corporations and people who put out a big roster can’t.” She’s tried a string of risky ventures: pursuing licensing to airlines, placing her songs in Converse commercials in Mexico, getting a tune on NPR’s Song of the Day and a Visqueen feature on CNN, and following Case’s footsteps by scoring a guest spot introducing films on Turner Classic Movies. Maybe she should have hired herself as boss a long time ago.

“Even if I wind up at the Red Lion SeaTac singing ‘Vaxxine’ in a Whoopi Goldberg Sister Act Vegas flapper gown, fuck it. Ben Hooker will most likely be in the audience, and he can drive me home.” The point is the payoff for the audience and the artist. “As long as it makes me feel needed and useful, then that’s where I’ll head. If it incidentally causes a party, then bravo.”

So, while critics riff on the artist’s sad story, Flotard is charging ahead with a band that’s been her dream for the better part of this decade, powered by a solid rock record that’s bound to reach more people than its two predecessors. That her father isn’t here to see her hard work pay off, she says, “is just what happened. I’m here. I don’t have cancer, and my father is with me every single minute. My dad lived an amazing life. Now I just have to make him proud.”