Murdertits! and the Death of Subtlety
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The first time I saw Marge Osborne perform was last March at Tasche de la Rocha’s garage in the 7th Ward. She was playing first on a three-band bill, for an audience of no more than six. Her setup—a cello, a small Casio keyboard and a modest loop station—was unorthodox. Her set, which flowed from psych country oddities to slow, melodramatic ballads, was confounding. In the weeks and months following that show, I couldn’t shake her haunting harmonies, her darkly comic lyrics, or the cloud of morbid self-deprecation that hung thick above her head.
The four members of local art rock outfit Primpce, who shared the bill with Marge that night for the first time, reacted similarly. “What attracted us to her was the immediacy with which she draws the listener into her particular universe with a natural, disbelief-suspending authenticity,” says Primpce drummer Alex Brownstein-Carter. “Her lyrics contain humor and pathos, and sometimes feel like a righteous spit in the face of good taste.”
“It was months before I even saw them again,” Marge says. “Every time we were on a show together, I was like ‘This is such a good combination!’ But after everything else, I think it was their idea that we play together. It didn’t even occur to me to follow through on it at the time because I was going through a breakup or something. I’m kind of old, so I don’t really look for those opportunities very much. I just go with whatever happens, and then I’m satisfied with my mundane cleaning houses bullshit or whatever. But then, a couple weeks later, I was like, ‘You know what? I remember them saying that. Maybe I’ll take them up on that.’”
Marge is not an optimist. She can be disarmingly shy, and her self-deprecating performance style feels much rawer in one-on-one conversation than it does onstage. She seems resigned to a bohemian existence and suspicious of those interested in her art. “Are you the media?” she asks during our interview (the first she’s ever given), glancing down at the table between us, where my phone is recording a voice memo.
Unlike many of the artists I talk to, Marge is not a pop culture enthusiast, or even a culture enthusiast. Before the interview begins, she warns me she’ll “fall short on references.” With some badgering, I manage to glean that she’s a fan of Tim & Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job! and other absurdist, Adult Swim style comedy. But when it comes to music, she remains tight-lipped on any artists that may or may not have influenced her. “I told you, I’m gonna fall short on references,” she reminds me. “I’m very self-absorbed.”
Marge started out on a more traditional musical arc than one might assume watching her today. She was born in San Antonio, where her mother, a piano teacher, had her playing keyboard before she spoke her first words. She picked up the cello around age three, but she’s always been a keyboardist first. “I had a pretty hardcore classical piano teacher once I passed the level my mom was teaching,” she says. “She was really intense, and she didn’t want me taking cello lessons. She didn’t even want me touching another instrument.”
She continued her formal education in piano performance through a semester of college at Indiana University, honing her cello chops on the side. Thus, she gained a strong understanding of harmony from a classical pianist’s perspective but developed her own distinctive style as a cellist. “I honestly never learned the notes on a cello,” she says. “I still, to this day, don’t know half the notes I’m playing. I’m strictly going by ear and making minor adjustments in a split second, trying to find the right note. It’s all ear training.”
Onstage, Marge plays the cello like a country fiddle, bowing animatedly, with none of the traditional gravitas of a classical concert cellist. She brings the same spontaneity to her songwriting process. “I’ll have a little ditty, a few notes that get stuck in my head,” she says. “I’ll come up with a couple words, and then I’ll come up with some more notes and then some more words. A lot of the words come from journals. I have endless pages of drunk ramblings, and I’ll refer back to those pages to find lyrics that go together. It’s like a puzzle. I put everything together from whatever I have.”
Her classical piano training still comes in handy when she’s arranging the dense, sometimes baroque harmonies that go behind her warbled vocals. “I always lay everything down on the keyboard,” she says. “It’s the most fundamental instrument, the easiest to work with when I’m putting everything together.”
After leaving college, Marge moved back to Texas and settled in Austin, where she joined her first band, Attic Ted. “It was so fun,” she remembers. “We would tour constantly, just short little one-week stints out to Chicago and back. I fucking loved it. That was the best time, just being able to do something that’s not mundane. [Bandleader Grady Roper] was a big influence on me because he introduced me to the loop pedal, which is essential if you’re playing alone.”
Her time with Attic Ted gave her the confidence to produce her first solo efforts. In the early days, she went by Gardenella. “It was too subtle,” she says. “It sounds like a fairy princess or a hippy princess, which is not at all what I was going for. Gardenella is a vaginal infection, but nobody understood that. I wanted something more noticeable.” She cycled through a sample group of Facebook names, including Mudge Fudge Plopper, before landing on Murdertits Marge. She recently cut the Marge out of her stage name and added an exclamation point at the end of the Murdertits moniker for added emphasis.
On “Subtlety,” a track Marge put out two years ago on Soundcloud (her preferred medium), she cheers the death of nuance. “Subtlety, nothing’s subtle anymore / I don’t know if it ever was,” she belts over a simple Casio waltz, clearly ecstatic about doing away with decorum. Her name is the epitome of this philosophy, a middle finger raised in defiance of the superego.
Marge found herself in New Orleans four years ago, at the end of her rope. She’d been run out of her home state by the law (“My lawyer was like, ‘You know, if you wanna leave, you can just go. Just don’t come back to Texas.’) and disillusioned by a faux hippy commune in North Carolina (“a bunch of children on vacation”). She was crashing with her dad in Virginia when she started busking at the outdoor mall in Charlottesville. “I was making pretty good money, but I had to get out of there,” she says. “So I thought, ‘Why not New Orleans?’”
New Orleans took Marge in, as it does for so many, unconditionally and without judgment. “I think a lot of lost, fucked up people end up here, and that’s kind of positive because you come here with a blank slate,” she says. “By default, a lot of these people are looking for something new, anything new, maybe more than another place in the country where you move with a purpose. I always had New Orleans in the back of my mind as a place I’d move to if everything else failed. Like, ‘At least I can go to New Orleans and drink myself to death.’” Her first months here, busking in the Quarter with no other viable game plan, were bleak. But things are less desperate these days. She’s been teaching piano to kids, and now, her own musical path has taken an unexpected but welcomed turn.
Primpce became the official Murdertits! backing band this month. They played their first joint show on Valentine’s eve at the Hi-Ho Lounge. It was an intense, goofy, beautiful performance, and the band sounded improbably tight in their newly learned arrangements of Marge’s songs. “Rearranging her primarily keyboard and drum machine based compositions for two guitars, bass and a drum kit, we get to creatively reinterpret and breathe new, different life into these songs,” Brownstein-Carter says.
“It means a lot to be taken seriously by a group of people who have organized ideas and aren’t just sitting outside smoking every five minutes,” Marge says. “An actual practicing band that work on their music, not just half-assing their way through it. They’re serious guys. They’re so fucking awesome. And it couldn’t have happened at a better time for me. I’m lucky.”
Playing with Primpce releases Marge from the confines of the one-woman setup. She no longer needs to choose between looping over herself, which requires impeccable timing and leaves zero room for error, or using a backing track, which reduces the live experience (although, as she admits, “nobody knows the difference anyway”). Her only concerns now are her voice, her cello, and her Korg Kaossilator, a portable synth she attaches to the cello’s body, fingering its pad to produce theremin-like tones.
Most importantly, Marge can now stand stage center, with the force of a full band behind her. She rests her cello on a spindly stand, like an upright bass without the baggage. A quick “standing cellist” search on Google Images shows she’s not the first to unearth this technique, but she’s certainly the first I’ve seen try it. “That’s a new thing,” she laughs. “It’s a lot more difficult than I realized, but I like the power of standing up. Sitting down playing the cello is hiding behind it. I’m trying to get out of that. It has its compromises because it’s more difficult to play, but I think it’s worth it. And it looks cool.” She’s right about the last part. Cello held high, she casts a slender shadow over the crowd, a ghastly memento of the death of subtlety.Murdertits! with Primpce, by Sean MooreMurdertits! and Primpce play Sunday, 3/10 at Sydney’s Saloon and Tuesday, 3/19 at Poor Boys. Stream Marge’s music at Soundcloud.com/gardenella.