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When you name your band after a song by a very famous, nearly legendary band like The Smiths, you’re bound to suffer from endless comparisons. If I were going to make comparisons between Girl In A Coma (GIAC) and The Smiths it would probably be something along the lines of, smooth sounds, passionate, ironic lyrics, and Morrissey-esque vocals. Let me say right now, I’m not a huge fan of Morrissey, what with his famous bouts of diva-esque behaviourfrequent displays of arrogance and attitude, and his apparent disregard for his fans.  You won’t see me making comparisons lightly. However frontwoman Nina Diaz has the kind of voice that makes you think of a young Morrissey, addictive to listen to, creamy smooth, warblingly melodic and alt-rock rich. GIAC’s retro cool sound has shades of The Smiths, with the attitude of Nirvana, and the smell of Elvis; ultra cool, laid-back punk with alt rock sensibilities, and that 1950’s aw-shucks style charm.

Sisters Nina (vocals, guitar) and Phanie Diaz (drums) and high school chum Jenn Alva (bass) from San Antonio, Texas have been playing together, writing songs, and developing their retro-cool, unique sound over the last eight years; and now, signed to the queen-of-rock-cool Joan Jett’s label Blackheart Records, they have released their debut album Both Before I’m Gone and are embarking on a tour of the UK, opening for none other than Morrissey himself. Unfortunately their recent tour schedule means I had to conduct this Band of the Week interview via email, something I hate doing. However with a band as exciting and talented as GIAC I was willing to make an exception. Below are the questions as answered by Phaine, and beneath that I have attached the video for GIAC’s hot single “Clumsy Sky”. Enjoy!

How did Girl in a Coma come together?

We came together in 2001. Jenn and I [Phanie] had been playing in punk bands around San Antonio through the mid '90s. Then we decided to stop for a while since we could never find the perfect chemistry with anyone. While we were playing I had shown Nina (my younger sister) some chords and she kept at it. One day she asked to show us a song she had written. When she was done we were completely blown away with her writing skills and voice. We immediately started a band with her despite our eight year age gap.

Tell me about Both Before I'm Gone. What kind of sound are you going for? What are you currently listening too and what effect does that have on your current sound?

Both Before I'm Gone is a collection of what we consider our stronger songs over the eight years we have been together. There is not specifically any sound we are trying to go for. When we get together and write, it either works or doesn't. We definitely grew up with different influences which now obviously come out in our style. I grew up with a lot of punk and riot girl, Nina loves old jazz and singer/songwriters and Jenn is a huge Elvis fan.

I think my drumming style is definitely more towards punk and simplicity. Nina has the crooner type voice that she picked up from singers such as Billie Holiday and, of course, Moz [Morrissey]. Jenn just loves to go all over the board. She has a wide range, which spawned off of bass players such as Peter Hook, to bass lines from older Elvis songs.

What is your song writing process? Do you write the music and lyrics as a group?

It usually starts with Nina. She likes to sit alone and write a main hook. Once she shows us, Jenn and I will start writing out parts and helping her guide the songs along. Nina always writes the lyrics. They’re usually based on observation of either our lives or other peoples. Lately she’s been into a lot of musicals, so she’s been writing little tales as lyrics now. Sometimes the best songs come out of us just jamming together. At practice we will start knocking off and just flowing, that’s actually how we wrote
“Race Car Driver”. Once in a while, I will pick the guitar and try to write since I used to play guitar in my earlier bands. I got to write the music for “The Photographer” and the main guitar line for “Mr Chivarly”.

You're about to tour with Morrissey, how does that feel? Are you nervous?

It's definitely an amazing thing. I mean, whoever gets to tour with their main influence?! We feel very lucky to be on tour with him and we’re just amazed that he likes us. He could have easily been “Girl in a Coma? What a stupid name! I am not listening to this.” But he did listen and he liked it. It’s obvious we are fans. We really do respect him though and try not to be fans while we tour. We are there to do our thing and to show our music. We do get nervous because the people are not there to see us, and we’re just another block to the main show. We never know how the Moz fans will be, they are definitely fanatical for him. But overall, we have been well received and always have a great time playing for them.

Where are you hoping to be in five years time? What do you want for your careers/music?

We hope to still be doing the same thing. Touring and making albums. Look at Sonic Youth, what they’re doing is amazing, still making albums, still touring. It’s great. We plan to be around for a long time.

To listen to more tracks by Girl In A Coma you can visit their MySpace or their website. I suggest you just buy their fabulous debut album Both Before I'm Gone, from either Amazon or iTunes, as quickly as you can.

“Clumsy Sky” by Girl In A Coma from their debut album Both Before I'm Gone.

Growing up in the late 70s and 80s there was a serious lack of female role models – particularly in Utah. Oh sure if you wanted to be a timid, naïve, gullible Mormon housewife my sheltered, religious world was awash with that type of flower-print-dress-wearing woman. But that never felt right to me, it never looked appealing. I hated those women for being so weak, selfish and stupid. On TV were the feminists, severe, angry, intentionally unattractive women who looked like they were no fun at all, nor did they look particularly happy. I certainly didn’t want to be one. Also on TV were women who seemed to me a bizarre mixture of the two, women like Mary Tyler Moore, Rhoda and Charlie’s Angels. Characters who seemed unsure what to do with themselves and uncomfortable in their own skin, or maybe TV didn’t know what to do with women.

There were few examples of the kind of woman I wanted to grow-up to be; strong, beautiful, desirable, intelligent, passionate, sexual and brave — unless you counted Princess Leia, she was the embodiment of most of those things, but she wasn’t real and a bit of a girlie girl, I was more rock chick. Lucky for me there was one woman who fit the bill perfectly, Debbie Harry – or as I knew her then Blondie. When I found out that my idol, this goddess of pop-punk, was, like me, adopted I knew I wanted to grow-up to be Deborah Harry.

This icon of pop-culture and feminine power got her big break as frontwoman for the legendary band Blondie. The band’s name got attached to Harry and many thought it was her name, and with her shocking blonde hair it was inevitable. It was partly due to that hair, those fabulous cheek bones and sleek boyish figure that Blondie got noticed.

You can’t help but think that being a pop-icon must come with a lot of pressure, but Harry seems to have a very healthy attitude. “I do actually feel that the image, the Blondie image… is more iconic than I actually am. That visual has carried on because it was so strong. I don’t know if I feel myself an icon, more that, that image is iconic.”

However there were a lot of tensions surrounding Harry’s status within the band. The Blondie break-up was caused as much by Chris Stein’s — Harry’s romantic partner and band mate – diagnoses with the rare and usually fatal genetic disease, pemphigus, as to acrimonious feelings surrounding the attention she got from the media and public. When Blondie broke-up, Harry put her career on hold to nurse Stein through his illness and although Stein survived their relationship didn’t – Harry and Stein split in the mid 80s. Harry tried to return to singing but, weary of the Blondie persona she died her hair, and took on a rougher tougher image. The record label balked, Harry herself once quipped “they wanted Debbie Harry not Dirty Harry”.

All of the stresses of life led to a depression of sorts in the mid 80s, she won’t talk about that time except to refer to it as “the ice-cream years”. Harry became a recluse, put on weight and gave up, at least temporarily, the notion of pop stardom. However eventually she came through it.

Most recently Harry released the new-wave/pop/semi-experimental album, 14 years after her last release. It seems a long time to wait between albums but Harry is blasé about the gap.

“It was just something I felt like doing. I had the urge to get back into the studio. I had some ideas I wanted to put down and I just had the time. I didn’t have any pressure or a contract or anything. I wanted to do it.”

But surely with that long to consider the project she must have had some grand scheme or ultimate plan for how the album should sound.

“No. I was doing it in bits and pieces, dribs and drabs, spread out over such a long period of time. It’s really just a loose thing. If I had an idea I could just go with it and try something out.”

With this new album, I asked Harry if she thought she had finally separated herself from the Blondie image.

“Well I am that [Blondie]. I mean, it’s a combination of things. I think for a while I was kind of upset by it, thinking that somehow or other the rest of the band was short changed. But I think that we have all learned to live with the reality of it, that it has become the image that people associate with me, but we are really lucky that it stuck.”

Slow Runner is what happens when Star Wars or AV geeks grow up and form a band. The retro-swish sound of their first album, No Disassemble — released in 2003, then re-released in 2006 by Sony — with its funky late '50's/early '60's beat poet with a bit of Johnny Number Five thrown in, has established them as a favourite in my music collection. Their mature, hot-buttered-toast sound, with its interesting twists and the electronic odd-sounding bleeps, blips, and bloops give No Disassemble a funky sound and unique charm. Think Grandaddy’s grandson; all of the smooth, seamless indie pop but without the over-the-top quirkiness.

Slow Runner are renowned for the lyrics of frontman Michael Flynn, who won second place in the 2001 John Lennon songwriting scholarship contest and came first in the Flat Rock Music Festival songwriting contest later that same year. Flynn, a graduate of the Berklee College of Music in Boston, is set to do for geek-rock what Zach Braff did for television sitcoms — re-define ultra cool and super smooth. With the release of their newest LP SHIV! I think they have a real chance.

And how did it all begin for this South Carolina-based band? Well, according to their bio it happened on a bright moon-lit night, in the woods when two friends, Flynn (singer-songwriter) and Josh Kaler (multi-instrumentalist), went for a walk and found a large stone with a sword jutting from the top. They climbed up this mountainous stone and together pulled the sword from it when suddenly the curtains of heaven opened, accompanied no doubt by a herald of angels singing, and they realized simultaneously that their musical destinies were harmoniously entwined and would involve a Casio, loud drums, and short pop songs about girls.

Their newest album SHIV! has more guitar rock than their previous release, helping them to achieve a much wider appeal, with less Star Wars electronics and more straightforward indie rock. Recently the uber-talented Flynn was nice enough to sit down with me for a quick chat. We talked about the failed contract with Sony, his love of the Iron Giant and of course SHIV!.

I’m confused. Slow Runner isn’t like a regular band, is it? It’s you (Michael Flynn) and your friend and a revolving door of musicians?

Yeah, it’s basically me and Josh Kaler who plays… well between us we play all the instruments on the record and then we have a regular band that we play live with. We add two other guys Scott Baumil and Jonathan Gray who play guitar and bass respectively. We have lots of really talented friends in Charleston… the band is basically Josh and myself and then whoever else we can talk into recording with us, we’ll get them on the song.

Do I understand correctly that SHIV! is actually two albums, with another part still due to be released?

After No Disassemble — we recorded that and put it out ourselves then it was re-released, so we toured on it for about three years. And all that time I was writing and by the time it came time to put out another record we had plenty of songs so we recorded all of them. And then we ended up just putting all the rockin’ ones on one record and the more mellow stuff on another record. So SHIV! is the rocking record and then the other record is going to come out this spring or late winter. Because No Disassemble had both, it’s really a wider scope.

So what is the second album going to be called?

It’s called Together We Will Out Sleep The Night.

SHIV! and Together We Will Out Sleep The Night are two very unusual titles.

Well, that (Together We Will Out Sleep The Night) comes from a line in a poem called “Insomnia” by Galway Kinnell. SHIV! is based on an inside joke. I do this thing where I like to attack people and say what I’m doing as I’m attacking them, like if I’m going to slap you I would say “open-handed slap” or “back-handed slap”. Sometimes I like to shiv people, I’ll just kind of get up in their grill and just whisper shiv in their ear and poke them in the stomach.

A shiv is a something that is sharpened into a weapon that they use in prison, is it not?

Exactly. And it worked on several levels because we feel like we got shivved by the record industry/label; and we wanted to shiv the listener.

SHIV! is a big departure from No Disassemble isn’t it?

Yes, but I think you can tell that the songs come from the same place.

Yes, because they are all written by you.

Right, but the songs are kind of the same. They are a little weirder in some ways but… it’s a little different.

So tell me about your major-record label experience.

There were about three months when it was just lovely. There were things happenin’ and music was getting in TV shows and we were on the road all the time and everyone was doing their job and it was cool. That was three months out of a two year experience. All the rest of the time it was basically us sitting around wondering why they weren’t doing what they were supposed to be doing, or waiting for them to do something they said they were going to do, or something they said was going to happen falling through and “ah, here’s plan B”. It was just a constant experiment in disappointment.

The label we were on, J records [part of the Sony BMG umbrella] is mostly American Idol type stuff, there was nothing on it remotely like us and so I don’t think… It was never a huge deal to begin with, we had no illusions that we were going to be a huge priority for them. I just figured “we’ll do this and see what happens, and get what we can get out of it”.

Okay, so now what? You’re not with them anymore?

Nope, now we are free agents again. So it’s good and bad. I miss the tour support, that was pretty nice – knowing you would at least break even on any tour, that’s a real luxury.

It got to the point where they were clearly wanting a certain kind of record from us, which wasn’t anything like No Disassemble and that I was… I went up to New York for a week this past spring and co-wrote with some people that they wanted me to write with. They were like “Oh yeah we got all the songs, we’re just missing that one radio smash”. So I went up there, and I knew it was going to feel bad but I was like “I’m going to go up their and I’m going to do it. I’m going to put my immature little holier-than-thou…. I’m going to ignore all that stuff and I’m going to try and do what they want me to do. And I just couldn’t do it. I tried. I wrote some songs with these guys and I hated the songs and they really liked them and they hated that I hated them…. And I think that pretty much spelled the end of our relationship.

You’re not a cookie cutter band…

If we are, we’re a complete failure.

Where do you hope that SHIV! will end up?

I hope that it will end up in the CD player of a car, with a guy and a girl in it, who are looking at each other amorously while driving down the highway.

Shouldn’t they be looking at the road?

Yeah well, I hadn’t finished my analogy yet. Just as they go over the cliff and fall to their death, they look at each other and say, “God I love this CD, I’m so glad it was playing at our final moment together.”

I mean that’s what it’s all about.

If you would like to listen to a few track from SHIV! and celebrate this fabulous music you can visit Slow Runner’s MySpace space. You can also visit their own website to learn more about what makes Slow Runner tick.