My wife and I have probably had more sex listening to Jill Tracy’s music than anyone else’s.
Through her piano, she’s been the other woman in the bedroom, and Paul Mercer, her sometimes collaborator – the other man through his haunting violin. They keep to their corner across the room, providing the soundtrack to that which you have no desire to read about. Nor I to tell. A gentleman doesn’t talk.
What first caught my attention about Jill Tracy was her voice, and those lyrics. At times they seethe through clenched teeth. She purrs, She menaces. In between she narrates some of the most chilling lines ever lain down …
Periling the nursery
It seems a tainted pastry
One bite, what a dreadful fright
She was such a delicate little dish
A pleasant parlor gathering
Quicksilver concealed in a ruby ring
Two lumps or three?
I have always adored bergamot tea
Nice and slow
Misfortune will flow
But who will know?
The Art of Poisoning, from the album Diabolical Streak
If PBS’s Mystery did a burlesque show, her 1999 album, Diabolical Streak could have been the soundtrack. From poisonings to spankings, Ms. Tracy and the Malcontent Orchestra brought back the circus tent combo. Peep shows and freak shows. It’s aural Edward Gorey. The album takes you back in time, to a time that only existed in black and white cinema, the early days.
So it was appropriate that before the album even ended I had already found Into The Land of Phantoms from 2002, her soundtrack to the film, Nosferatu, also with the Malcontent Orchestra backing her. That introduced me to her instrumental work, where you can see how she can capture a mood and hold you there till the end. The music becomes a gas that flows through your veins. You don’t have to listen, for the music infuses whatever activity you’re performing. Whether it’s cleaning the house or assembling a disarticulated skull. Or the aforementioned draping of black velvet in the bedroom.
I soon learned about Quintessentially Unreal, the raw first album which is just her and her piano. And was unfortunately out of print. So I emailed her asking two things …
- Where could I get a copy of the album.
- Was she aware the the intro to The Fine Art of Poisoning was almost exactly the same as the intro to the theme from the sixties TV show Dragnet?
She hadn’t, but once you hear it, you can’t unhear it. She offered to send me a copy of the CD she had laying around the mausoleum, and in doing so made a fan for life.
It wasn’t just me. I turned a friend of mine on to Diabolical Streak, and his wife and daughter were threatening to hide it if he didn’t quit playing it.
I always thought I’d ask her for an interview someday, but over time I realized I didn’t have any questions for her. “In the end, it is the mystery that prevails, never the explanation,” she once said in an interview, and she’s right. Jill Tracy spins a web of mystery and intrigue so perfect in itself, that the answers would lessen the experience. Because with music like this, where the artist leaves gaps, the imagination fills them. No truth can ever better the imagination.
Plus there’s a lot of interviews out there already, and they’ve asked and she’s answered, nearly anything I could think to ask.
2008’s The Bittersweet Constrain continued where Diabolical Streak left off, though a bit fuller in sound. She also helpfully released an instrumental version of the album.
We’re not used to the piano being a lead instrument in this day and age. So when you hear a combo like this, it takes you back. As I understand it, her piano skills are more instinctual than educated, which gives the performance a bite. As you can hear from the instrumental version, the mood is intact, for in her case, the vocals are an extension of the piano, where most music does the opposite.
Neil Young does that. His harmonica, his guitar and piano playing all carry the same feeling, the same emotion, the same instantly identifiable Neilness as his voice. Without singing a word, he can create a mood, a feeling – a moment, that’s already intact before he opens his mouth. The lyrics merely drape a story upon an emotion already created.
Jill Tracy does that. Once you’ve heard her voice, heard the songs, all you need to create your own stories is the piano. She creates the moment and you develop the plot.
2012 brought us her last album with lyrics, curiously enough a Christmas album, Silver Smoke, Star of Night. It works surprisingly well, and set the gold standard for gothic Christmas albums.
Since then she’s focused on her piano work, usually unaccompanied and without vocals. A series of singles and EPs followed, collected in the 2020 volume A Medicine For The Madness.
Capturing spirits with the piano in the Sonic Seance
Music is the division of time into little slices. The rhythm of the song determines how thick those slices are. The melody stitches the slices back together, and no other instrument can express this as clearly as a piano. Beneath the right hands, it becomes an extension of the person playing it. A wordless voice.
The office where I work and write has wood floors, wood panelling, wood furniture. A piano is an acoustic instrument, a big chunk of tree with metal strings pulled tight over it. It resonates in the room where it sits. The wood of my office, even with the music played through speakers, causes the environment to vibrate. You’re within the piano, within the voice.
My favorite track of hers would be Under The Fate of the Blue Moon. I realized this the other night when I came back into the room just as the piano started playing, and I had to turn my head to make sure it wasn’t there, that I hadn’t transcended accidentally or something. It’s nothing more than a piano melody, but it’s timeless and haunting. It’s not a pounding of dark chords, it dances lightly half seen. It’s audible time travel.
“Music is a ghost,” Jill Tracy told Haute Macabre. “It’s an intangible thing—you can’t touch it, you have to record it to prove it was ever there. Music is time travel. It only exists moment by moment, note by note—and then vanishes. We can try to catch it, like a mythical beast or a falling star. But the only way it truly can exist is to archive it—recordings, videos, sheet music. The real music itself is a ghost.”
In that spirit, she began performing “musical seances” with violinist Paul Mercer in 2007, where they try to channel whatever influences might be floating around the venue.
In 2013, Mercer released the soundtrack to the darkly erotic independent film Psychopathia Sexualis, which was the first I heard of him. According to his Bandcamp page, “the album is based on the original textbook on human sexuality written by Richard von Kraft Ebing in 1840. The tracks are lush fetishistic soundscapes featuring exotic instrumentation and Paul Mercer’s signature violin style.”
And at times, bleakly terrifying. The two made a perfect pairing., and she continues to hold musical seances on her own, often in unusual locations heavy with vibes. She spoke in an interview with Haute Macabre, via Wikipedia, that “There is a hidden score all around us…Everything (and everyone) vibrates, holds a unique frequency, and maintains a charge— an actual residue, or talisman of Time. As humans, we are constantly interacting with, influenced by this energy, but most often fail to realize it. The Sonic Séance allows me to manifest the true magick and energy of moment and place.”
Chasing the spirits in the home of Spiritualism … Jill Tracy at Lily Dale
In 2017 Jill travelled to Lily Dale, in upstate New York. Lily Dale is a community of spiritualists – people who communicate with the dead. It’s been in existence for over a century, and they take it very seriously. It’s a tiny community, and nearly all the inhabitants are involved in spiritualism. It’s also a gorgeous place, with interesting early 20th century – folk carpentry versions of the prevailing, fairy tale style architecture of the time.
The result is The Secret Music of Lily Dale, released in multiple versions, including with a gorgeous book in 2022.
She recorded in the 1883 auditorium, the location of countless seances and spirit communications, locking herself in alone at sunset to compose. spontaneously on the village’s grand piano. “At dusk, the birds would always go crazy, and gather around me in the auditorium— in almost an Alfred Hitchcock-like fashion. It got to where I would sometimes play a melody, and then a bird would sing it right back to me! I couldn’t believe it. So there are lovely moments of compositions featuring call-and-response from native Lily Dale birds.”
In addition to the birds, the ambient sounds of Lily Dale make their way into the recordings, including a thunderstorm, recorded inside the auditorium. All of this adds to the atmosphere, allowing you to get the feel for the space in a more real fashion than simply setting up the microphones over the piano. Sometimes illusion is necessary to create reality.
The music isn’t all bird songs and golden hour light though. Tracy seems to have picked up on the spirit of the place more deeply than she expected. Also from an interview in Haute Magazine, available on her website, Jill tells the story of one of the tracks she recorded there.
“One night I became very frightened; there was this odd melody appearing in my head— constantly, as I walked the narrow Lily Dale streets, and in the woods. When I was in the auditorium later that night, my mind found it again and automatically started to play it on the piano—a key I’ve never played in— and the building just started to—react. I’ve never gotten scared doing these projects, but I suddenly became terrified— but forced myself to keep going. And it was not an evil-type of feeling, but just pure magic. I knew I had discovered something powerful. Like I had crossed a bridge between worlds. The building wanted this melody to exist. And it was to become part of it.”
“As the melody progressed, I heard a thunderous crack, thuds, steps, whispering, and I mean— this is late at night, 1am, there is no one around. You’re next to the woods, there’s just nothing. And I had locked myself in. My heart pounded. I kept playing in the dark. I wanted to flee, but I realized as I played the music that this was everything I ever wished would happen. This was absolutely, undeniably real.”
Beneath the mask
If you want to catch Jill Tracy live, you’ll have better luck living on the west coast, where she works from. She doesn’t tour much, so seeing her live tends to be intimate affairs. Dripping with atmosphere, just as you’d expect.
Which means for most of us, her recorded music is what we get to experience. Other people’s moments, replayed. I’ve followed her career for quite some time now and it’s always interesting seeing the sometimes bizarre events she plays. Exactly what you’d expect from our generation’s Queen of Noir.
But that’s Jill Tracy the actress, I presume at least. Though I’d be a bit hesitant taking a cup of tea from her.
All images courtesy of Jill Tracy and her helpful press release link. We god bless her for that.
To learn more about Jill Tracy, visit her website by clicking here.
Or check out her Bandcamp Page here.
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