PILLOWS BIO
In 2003 a Bay Area garage band dissolved and an
Oakland two-piece was born. Drummer Jessica Cowley and guitarist Julia Shirar aimed to create a full sound with
spare instrumentation that wasnıt confined to a single genre and translated easily live. To that end, the pair
began to switch up instruments (including guitar, bass, drums, glockenspiel, beer bottle & birdcage) to craft
bare melodies beneath lush girl-group harmonies, resulting in a sound that is alternately melancholy, hopeful,
and raucous. Their personal musical influences include the Texas plains, broken-down city landscapes, Roberta Flack,
The Raincoats, The Kinks, Neil Young, old musicals, love, death, and beat-up cars with broken stereos.
RECENT PRESS
"Their music has a naked, no-frills honesty on top of a sound that's pretty as hell."
- Rebecca Johnson, Performer
"Whereas two-piece bands and girl bands are usually perceived as having
some sort of schtick, the fact that Pillows is a female duo is completely irrelevant. These lovely ladies from Oakland play bare-bones melodies,
and the vocals are simultaneously joyous and melancholy. Just when you get all cozied up in your own pillow start to drift into dream land, they
kick up the tempo with post-punky, gritty, revved-up electric distortion, slipping in and out of genre counterparts with the greatest of ease."
- Devan Cook, Willamette Week (Portland)
³Best Musical Duo: Pillows get
kudos from critics for the stylistic complexity and emotional honesty of their material. Shirar
and Cowley weave together country melodies, punk rhythms, and rock embellishments as they sing
their sophisticated tales of liberation and woe.²
- Best of the East Bay 2007, East Bay Express
"We're kicking ourselves for not having known about the Pillows a long time ago. We're trying furiously to make up for lost time,
because the Pillows are pretty damn amazing: It's former Run for Cover Lovers members
Jessica Cowley and Julia Shirar playing music like a girl-group version of Stephin Merritt,
if he got over himself and rocked out once in a while. On Two Step, the duo's first
CD (another's due next year), country influences invade certain phrases, but most of the
tracks are pop and rock with smart, sad lyrics: "Lemme Count the Ways" is just fucking
beautiful. Two sweet but plainspoken voices, two dry senses of humor, and two ragged,
bloodied, but not broken hearts drive the band to Jeff Buckley-esque heights without ever
sounding sentimental."
- Hiya Swanhuyser, SF Weekly
"Cheap technology sometimes makes it easy to forget that some of the best music is simple and stripped-down. The Oakland female duo Pillows practices this aesthetic wonderfully, and East Bay listeners are beginning to take notice of this just-right mix of pretty harmonies, country accents, and noisy rock flourishes. Former members of the Run for Cover Lovers, Pillows' 2005 debut, Two Step, is optimal for driving a beat-up car kicking up dirt on a country road, or as the soundtrack for realizing your lover has abandoned you at a motel. It's not precious or sweet, but the prettiness lies in the clarity of their sound."
- Kathleen Richards, "Critic's Choice", East Bay Express
"There isn't one misstep on this Oakland duo's remarkably eclectic and exciting new album... The sparse production on Two Step creates a distinctive, haunting beauty."
- Paul Freeman, San Mateo Daily News
“It's always amazing when something good comes from something bad -- like how we now get four more years of George W. Bush jokes. Or how the break up of an excellent local band occasionally breeds another one, as is the case of Pillows. Formed by Julia Shirar and Jessica Cowley after the Run For Cover Lovers dissolved in summer 2003, Pillows takes the Lovers' straight-ahead country-garage sound and twists it into new shapes. There's still plenty of tough-gal vocal harmonies and dirty guitar licks, but now there's also pretty waltzes, delicate piano parts, and kicky drum machines. And lyrically, although the gals still channel the swoony sadness of Patsy Cline ("Hardship is our medium/ We fight therefore we breathe"), they also embrace the poetic righteousness of Patti Smith ("This is the noise my mind makes/ This is the spoon my love cakes/ This is the way my heart aches/ If you want it you don't need to know why").”
-Dan Strachota, San Francisco Weekly
"Many things come in pairs: socks, scissors, gloves, and Pillows' Jessica Cowley and Julia Shirar. Together they perform an aggressive brand of folk music that sounds like Sleater-Kinney or Le Tigre with Sandy Denny on lead vocals."
- Alex K. Fong, MCMF 2005 Noise Picks, SF Bay Guardian
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