words by Rebecca Johnson
photos by Dan Britt

“It’s a triple entendre,” says Jessica Cowley, explaining the moniker she and bandmate Julia Shirar chose for themselves. “’Pillows’ is a 5th-grade boys’ taunt for breasts — it’s a British thing. And there are two of us, so that fits. But also, it’s sort of a deceptive name. It sounds soft and fluffy… and in reality, we don’t consider ourselves to be like that at all.”

True to Cowley’s words, there’s no fluff on Pillows’ forthcoming debut, Two Step. Stripped of conventional trimmings such as keyboards, their music has a naked, no-frills honesty on top of a sound that’s pretty as hell. Stark yet tender, airy but dense, “a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll” — the album’s series of smart, bittersweet rhapsodies form a delicious, perfectly balanced paradox that’s itself broken up by the odd pop ditty. The duo admits to influences ranging from Joan Jett to Neil Young, but all of Pillows’ songs carry their own distinctive stamp.

Their sing-along hooks, frequently built on close harmonies between Cowley and Shirar’s beautifully matched voices, are coupled with the kind of wry, clear-eyed thoughtfulness that confidently embraces its own contradictions, with results that are never what you’d expect. Case in point: the album’s titular song, in which Shirar, swaying to the beat of an old-fashioned waltz, stretches her voice to approximate a blues diva’s roughness, proclaiming “Weddings and contracts make me wanna heave / And I don’t give a damn about your self-esteem,” all the while inviting the listener to something as quaint and down-home as a two-step.

The surprises are in keeping with the playful duplicity of Pillows’ title, though Shirar and Cowley have always had fun with their names on stage, having previously performed together as Beulah Faye and Miami Duluth — one half of former Oakland darlings the Run for Cover Lovers — prior to the band’s breakup in 2003. Within a month of the split, the twosome had cast aside their alternate identities and began performing together under their own names. Thus, Pillows was born: very much as a “cushion” to the impact of RFCL’s breakup, caused by conflicting career and artistic directions just as the group was starting to catch on big in the Bay Area. “Our goal was kind of to maintain our momentum,” says Shirar, “to just be able to release another record and keep going.”

The identity of the new project evolved during these live performances, as Shirar and Cowley adapted their style to the austerities of a two-piece. “Originally, we were taking RFCL songs and breaking them down and seeing what happened, just to get a feel for what we were trying to do,” says Shirar. “It’s really spare, coming from a four-piece rock and roll band with keyboards, so that’s a big fill.”

Not that it sounds like there’s anything missing from Pillows’ sound until she points it out — but if simplicity is part of what makes their music striking, the two also have a great deal of instrumental versatility to draw on. Shirar rattles off the list: “Both of us do vocals, both guitars, both drums; she plays bass, and then we both play a bunch of other shit.”

The duo swap all their instruments back and forth, and also share songwriting duties, in an impressively even partnership. Even their vocal range is almost exactly the same — Shirar “just tortures me by making me sing really, really high,” Cowley interposes with a giggle. “It’s a great collaboration,” says Shirar. “It’s fun when you don’t want to play something, like these nutty vocal lines [Cowley] writes that just paralyze me. I’m like ‘OK, I can sing this, but I can’t play it! Give me the drumstick!’”

A two-headed beast from the start, Pillows was nonetheless transformed by the “writing rampage,” as Shirar terms it, that followed their first shows, during which they shed their early, borrowed skin to emerge as a completely new animal. If the impulse for their music came at first from the immediate past, over time Cowley and Shirar reached further back to draw from more distant roots. Both grew up musical, somewhat against their will, and have identical tales of woe to tell about practicing piano for hours on end — maybe the real reason there’s no keyboard in Pillows’ arsenal?

“I hated it. I never practiced,” says Cowley, who grew up in Southern California. Instead, she says, she yearned for an electric guitar, the instrument that, for her, symbolized the restless power of rock and roll, though she didn’t get one until she grew up and bought her own. The way Pillows’ minimalist arrangements highlight the sound and reverb of both guitar and bass with near-hallucinatory clarity seem to relive the raw beginner’s excitement at finding out just how powerful that one, singly strummed chord can be.

Shirar also put in her time at the bench — and at opera rehearsals, to which her mother, a soprano, lugged her rather than pay for a sitter. Raised in Texas and Delaware, she also took in her fair share of country music. To judge from the vocal stylings found throughout Two Step, the country sound seems to have percolated into her music at long last… and in spite of the energy she’s put into repressing it over the years. “It’s really funny. [Even t]he whole Johnny Cash revival thing was really hard for me to open up to, because I was so used to being, like, ‘Get that off the radio!” Shirar cracks up.

Their music also has a heady, distinctively feminine sensibility that’s appealingly frank and self-aware, while avoiding the easy slide into cynicism. When Shirar sighs that “[t]he beauty of you is all made up by me / And I know there ain’t much more than what I see,” her tone is reflective, not accusatory. Yet Pillows’ emotional complexity is inseparable from a certain toughness, hidden in the contrary inspiration behind their name and expressed in lines like “Hardship is our medium / We fight, therefore we breathe,” that proves to be just as womanly.

“I’ve been so sheltered as a woman… without a lot of [female] role models, or much exposure at all to other women that were successful or doing anything that was, you know, part of the ‘guy world,’” offers Shirar. “And even though there’s tons of women playing music…”

“There’s still not enough,” Cowley finishes for her, meaningfully.

Shirar continues: “I still think it’s not necessarily the most natural thing to say, ‘Hey, I want to start a band with my girlfriends.’ Somehow, there’s got to be a guy involved to show you how to do it … It’s funny because most of the women [musicians] that we know are singer-songwriters. They’re not in a band, they’re on their own. And the women we know have been super-supportive. But all in all, it’s kind of every man for themselves — so to speak.”

Still, it must have been some of that independent-minded discipline, together with their mutual commitment to the project, that kept Pillows going long-distance last year, when Shirar temporarily relocated to New York for her day job in sound. Rather than go on hiatus, the two sent songs to each other over the Internet, and despite a separation of three thousand miles, managed to get together in person often enough to play about ten shows split between the Bay Area and New York. Two Step may well owe some of its hovering sense of pre-dawn lucidity, and its recurrent images of sleeplessness and sunrise, to the jet lag from all those red-eye flights.

The album itself was laid down in a marathon two-week recording session in June 2004, which saw Shirar flying in from New York, Cowley flying out (at one point) to attend her grandmother’s funeral, plenty of equipment hand-offs, and the shift of their recording from practice space to Shirar’s own house after the former was condemned. After which, says Shirar, “we cut it all ourselves … and the guy who mixed it [Richard Beggs] pulled it all out from underneath the pillow, because that’s what it sounded like.”

With Shirar back in Oakland, Pillows are ready and eager to forge ahead, by getting Two Step — and themselves — out to a wider public. The album remains unsigned at the moment, with Shirar and Cowley debating the pros and cons of independent release versus release on a label, though Shirar, at least, admits she’d rather have a label to take care of the business side of things so they can concentrate on their music. “You just want somebody else to distribute it for you so that it gets coverage. That’s a really nice luxury. Otherwise, you have to do a lot of work yourself.”

“We’ve still got it figured out,” Cowley chimes in, “that no matter what, we want to have it out [by November] or so. That’s the deadline. If it’s through us, or through somebody else, that’s fine.”

Set to tour the Northwest this fall, Pillows hope to take their sound nationwide after the album’s release. In particular, Shirar says, she’s “dying to play” her native Texas. “I love the little bars there. I would just love to play a bunch of tiny places, because it fits us really well.” But besides bringing a little country back to the Lone Star state and expanding their already diverse audience base, Pillows also hope to connect with one audience that’s closer to home.

“Ideally,” says Shirar, “I would like to have a lot of women, young women, come to see the shows and check us out. Just because — hey, maybe you could do this too!”

For more information, visit www.pillowsmusic.com.