HEIRLOOM ORGANIC
B
etty and the Boy are the type of extremely
talented beautiful weirdos who can’t help but be
as enveloping, genuine and eerie as their music
is. The sound created by this four-piece tour-de-
acoustic-maudlin-force could be compared to
the music of Cat Power or Mirah, but stranger
and with more instrumental viscosity.
Possessing an unmistakable vibe and a truly haunting
aesthetic, Betty and the Boy don’t make music for jovial
festivities — they make music to fl icker alongside candles.
“People think we are a bluegrass band ‘cause we
have a stand-up bass and a mandolin and we mic all our
instruments, then they get sore about it when they fi gure
out we aren’t,” says Josh Harvey (banjo, mandolin, vocals).
Harvey and Betty, the band’s namesake (whose real
name is Bettreena Jaeger) form the founding nucleus of
the band, which originated in Kalispell, Mont. Bassist
Jon Conlon and Michelle Whitlock, a violinist trained in
traditional Suzuki-method, came out of the woodwork to
join Jaeger and Harvey when the two nascent members
relocated to Eugene, a move that was very calculated.
They preferred to be in a smaller town like Eugene, as
opposed to the big blender of Portland.
Jaeger, the daughter of an English professor, was
groomed to be the captivating vocalist she has become.
Her voice sounds like it could be a resonating comple-
ment to the soundtrack for Requiem for a Dream. When
her father wasn’t teaching creative writing, she recalls,
he was dragging her to stoic poetry readings that Jaeger
NBT
ARTIST
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thought were “really creepy” and booking small shows
for their family band to perform. Jaeger says the family
band (Big Daddy Toad and the Tadpoles), consisting of
her, her father and her brother, pretty much played old
Pearl Jam covers in small venues and talent shows.
Harvey has a similar story. As a young boy, he danced
at the shows his mother’s band put on. His own son,
10-year-old Gavin, continues in this family tradition, and
even mans the merchandise table during Betty and the
Boy gigs. Gavin is also starting to pick up his father’s
banjo. To say that music is a way of life for this band
would be a gross understatement.
“There’s nothing synthetic about our sound,” says
Jaeger. “It’s minimalist.” She pauses, staring up at one
of her own paintings on the wall, depicting a garish
looking, monstrous snail devouring plant life. “Most of
our instruments are heirlooms passed down to us by dead
people,” she says.
Perhaps this explains the lingering lack of genre
and the thick presence of emotional mass in their songs.
“We’re basically some sort of hybrid between folk music,
bluegrass and classical,” Harvey says.
Live, Betty and the Boy are not a high-energy
performance act that will get you moving like their award-
winning peer and NBT co-winner Tyler Fortier. One listen
to their song “Moth to a Light,” the single they submitted
to the NBT contest, recorded in Conlon’s living room and
mastered by Jim Rusby, immediately makes that clear. This
isn’t a stomp-your-feet-raise-your-beer-glass type of tune.
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A die-hard Betty and the Boy fan recently choreographed
a music video to “Moth to a Light” that Jaeger describes as
being a “graphic and dark journey” through “drugs, suicide
and the afterworld.”
Though the state of the modern music industry is
often more diffi cult for performers who aren’t as live-
show oriented, Betty and the Boy are that rare breed of
independent musicians who could, if they wanted to, make
a leap into a different market, a market where audiences are
situated not on a ready-to-rock dance fl oor but at tables and
chairs, with closed eyes and open ears — something like a
Fareed Haque crowd, but a bit younger in age. This market
exists and Betty and the Boy has the talent to own it, though
such a leap may not be what the band is looking to make.
“We just want to be sustainable and happy with it,”
Harvey says of the band’s music. “We all have full-time
jobs, and I’m just as happy playing down by the water for
a duck or a nutria.”
“Money and art don’t go together unless you’re Lady
Gaga,” Jaeger says, smirking unabashedly.
“It would be nice to have a booking agent eventually
though, if the agent knew what kind of venues we would
fi t in,” Harvey adds.
This slightly reluctant yet refreshingly honest
perspective is to be expected of such unapologetically
talented musicians. They are the next big thing, as is
Fortier’s formidable performance-oriented attack, and
they will go as far as they want, until their music or their
instruments become heirlooms of another kind.
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EUGENE WEEKLY SEPTEMBER 15, 2011 13