Audio By Carbonatix
Sandeigh Barrett never understood the Holy Trinity. Just six years old and she was already causing trouble by asking too many questions. At the time, Barrett’s devoutly Southern Baptist family was living in a trailer park in a tiny Texas village called River Oaks. While most kids her age were wrapped up in games of make-believe, Barrett was concerned with more spiritual matters, such as trying to reconcile how the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit could be encompassed in a single being. How can He be in three places at once?, she wondered. Her Sunday school teacher was no help. “Because He can,” the elder answered. Barrett, unsatisfied, persisted in her doubts, rousing the other children into a near mutiny. That was the day she got kicked out of Sunday school.
Still, the precocious girl was obliged to attend weekly services. And it was there, in the ranks of the church choir, amid the sweeping gospel hymns and the reverent verses of the congregation, that Barrett’s faith was renewed.
“I would sit in the front pew at church,” she remembers, “alone, because, you know, no one sits in the front pew — and I would listen as hard as I could to try to make out all the tenors and the altos and the baritones. I would hear all the different vocal parts.”
This is where the rhythms first romanced her, where those small vibrations in the air tickled her youthful pink ears. This is where Barrett fell in love with music.
At ten, she begged her parents to buy her a banjo because she had seen Roy Clark pick out his heartstrings with one on television. By seventeen, she was playing bass and singing in local pop-punk bands, one of which, Jenny Dick, was eventually signed to Dallas-based label Last Beat. Skipping ahead past the Dick and college years, Sandeigh then found herself chasing a boy — the boy, as she and her badpenny bandmates, drummer Sean Bryant and guitarist Dave Womer, ambiguously refer to him — all the way to the dry climate of the Rocky Mountains.
The relationship with the boy didn’t last, but it was through him that Barrett met Bryant and Womer. The three fit together like pieces of a puzzle and, although Womer was not the first badpenny guitarist, it wasn’t until he came along that the lineup really felt complete. And it didn’t even matter that Bryant lacked in technical stick-handling skills.
“I was in California and on the phone with the boy,” Bryant muses. “And Sandeigh got on and was like, ‘You know, I’m starting a band, and you’re the drummer. I can’t wait for you to get here!’ I tried to backpedal and was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, I’m not a drummer.'”
“Well, you are now!” Barrett interjects with a laugh.
The three have formed a familial bond and sibling dynamic that often gets ignored by the press. Barrett, a statuesque brunette with a high-fashion model’s body and a femme-forward stage presence, has become the media darling of badpenny — a situation that has at times stirred some dissent within the group.
“I think it’s like that with any band,” Bryant says. “That’s part of being in a band; you have a frontperson. There were times when I felt bad for Dave, because Dave has written a lot of stuff, too, but it seems like a lot of reviewers forget to mention him. He felt like some of the reviews didn’t reflect his input, but the thing is, it wasn’t Sandeigh’s fault. She had nothing to do with it. Sandeigh doesn’t try to promote it as, ‘Oh, this is my band.’ That’s just the way music is portrayed, and it sucks.”
“I’m never going to get on stage and writhe around and throw my legs in the air,” Barrett adds. “I’ve played with bands that are like that with other women, and it breaks my heart. It’s like, what are you doing? And I don’t want to judge them — I mean, that’s their thing. You’re either a hard-core bitch, a tough girl, or you’re a tool, a weepy singer-songwriter type. I don’t understand why that dynamic has to happen, because both are equally wonderful and good, but they’re extremes. There’s no middle ground.”
As of late, at least, being pigeonholed as some bawdy chick band has probably been on the back burner for badpenny. Barrett lives with ovarian cancer, which has been an on-and-off battle since her late teens. Earlier this year, the fight intensified. It came during a thunderstorm time for the band: Womer had decided to move to Minneapolis, and Bryant was getting married. The act was forced to cancel a number of shows while it focused on its uncertain future. Barrett herself was detached from any musical aspirations.
“It was a pretty emotional time,” she confesses. “Both of my grandmothers — two of the most important ladies in my life, who have made me into who I am — died within months of each other while I was sick. It was a really stressful time.”
“But you know what?” she adds. “Beautiful music comes from stress.”
If that’s true, then Barrett should be stocked with enough songwriting fodder to last two lifetimes. The lanky thirty-year-old has survived domestic turmoil and heartache; she’s braced physical ailments and mental shakeups. And she’s channeled it all into bass lines and profoundly personal lyrics laced with words that are sometimes too hard for her to even sing. But badpenny songs have a silver lining, an underlying optimism buried in countrified rock and subtle pop enchantment.
“She’s handled a lot of adversity with extreme grace,” Bryant asserts. “It certainly shows in her music. Maybe if she was a happy-go-lucky person who always had a silver spoon up her ass, she wouldn’t even bother. I mean, I don’t know — maybe she’d turn into a Britney Spears-type person. Even in our little venues, in our limited number of people that show up, people look to Sandeigh as a very good role model. She’s gone through hard times and handled it well and made it into a positive.”
“You know what makes me still get up and do it?” Barrett confides. “To see one girl come up to the stage — and I say ‘girl,’ because this happened — and sing every lyric. I had no idea who she was, never met her before, but to see her sing my lyrics and to know that she got what she needed, it almost felt like a responsibility. Like you’re supposed to do this. It’s not so much about you anymore when you’re on stage.”
As for that brawny butch image that Barrett is often tagged with, she can only sigh about it and brush it off as an odd misrepresentation. “I don’t feel tough,” she says, articulating in her slow Texan drawl. “I feel weak every day. Every time I pour emotional crap into a song, I feel weak. Honestly, how tough-girl is that?”
“When I write and it’s so personal,” she goes on, “it’s like I’m puking it out. I don’t know a better way to say it, but it’s like” — she pauses and twists her mouth into a fake retch — “blecchh! You have to get rid of it. It’s all relative, you know? The hardest thing you’ve ever been through is just as hard as the hardest thing I’ve ever been through. It’s the same pains.”
As psychologically difficult as it may be to play a stark confessional set night after night, Barrett couldn’t imagine doing anything else — or, especially, with anybody else. Even with Womer residing in Minneapolis, the bandmembers contend that badpenny could not continue to function with a different lineup. For better or worse, music is therapy for all of them, and it’s the only thing that pushes Barrett, still grappling with stage fright and leers from boorish guys, to keep moving forward.
“I get sick to my stomach every time we play,” she confesses, “but I know how much more sick I am when we don’t play. It’s my saving grace. It’s my church. I can tell you now, I would have drunken myself into an unfixable demise had it not been for that.”
“That’s it. That’s all I have. And thank God for that,” she adds with a teasing grin, “or whoever is out there.”
