Beth Ditto has long been the person you’d turn to when needing someone else to make sense of the chaotic world. Loud, proud and unabashedly blunt, the singer staked her reputation as one of punk rock’s most straight-talking front women. But nowadays, get her started on the current state of affairs in our country — heck, our world — and the former Gossip singer is uncharacteristically at a loss. “Honestly I feel more overwhelmed now than I’ve ever felt,” Ditto, after a long pause, says of living in Donald Trump’s America. “There’s so much crazy stuff going on. It’s really depressing.”
Last year, Ditto, 37, released her debut solo album, “Fake Sugar,” a collection of fiery barnstormers that pay homage to the Arkansas native’s Southern roots. And it’d be easy to take a cursory listen and hear songs like “In and Out,” what with lyrics like “I, I do it for you / You, you do it for me / And we go in and out of love” and hear an album all fine and pleasant and, well, a bit placid. But as Ditto says when calling from her home in Portland, Ore., on a recent morning, make no mistake: She’s still the same firebrand she always was. That compelling, provocative female rock star whose band’s bluesy dance-punk mixed with her muscular vocal chops and take-no-prisoners performative streak made her a bonafide star in the U.K., with bougie friends like Kate Moss and Karl Lagerfeld to match.
The situation, she explains, is just different now.
To hear Ditto tell it, despite essentially being the face of Gossip for the band’s 17-year run, the made-to-be-famous feminist who challenged fat-shamers by posing nude for magazine covers says it took her band breaking up two years ago for her to understand how essential she was to its operation. “Zero idea,” she says of her previous understanding of how much she meant to Gossip fans and how, at least to the outside world, she seemed as much her former bandmate Nathan Howdeshell’s equal if not the band leader. “I didn’t really realize that I put in an equal amount of work,” Ditto says reflecting on Gossip. “I don’t know why. It’s funny.”
In an effort to explain this seeming odd lack of self-awarness, Ditto chalks it up to her meeting Howdeshell as “this young 14-year-old girl who couldn’t drive yet and was just starting to get into punk rock” compared with him being “this supercool 16-year-old. So I always had that complex with him. If Nathan made Gossip hip,” she adds, “I made it accessible. That was what was really good about us together.”
But now, in the wake of Howdeshell moving back to Arkansas, the band breaking up, and last year’s “Fake Sugar,” Ditto is flying solo. Touring behind the album, she says, was hardly an adjustment: “I think it’s still a pretty similar experience (to Gossip).” Writing the album, on the other hand — especially following the demise of her band, the death of her father and a tumultuous time with her wife of four years, Kristin Ogata — proved decidedly challenging. “It was really weird,” she says of the sessions for her solo debut with Grammy-nominated pop producer Jennifer Decilveo (Andra Day, Melanie Martinez) and a band of session musicians including Queens of the Stone Age bassist Michael Shuman.
“I always compare it to where you’ve never dated anyone else,” Ditto says. “In terms of the band, I married my high school sweetheart and never went outside of that. And then all of a sudden you’re dating somebody else and you have to learn how to ask people out again, you have to learn how to kiss again, you have to learn how to be confident again.”
Ditto has long been painfully honest in her songs, and on “Fake Sugar” cuts like “Savoir Faire,” where she sings “I get so tired of feeling sick and tired,” she’s no different. This open-book mentality became her calling card following the 2007 Gossip single “Standing in the Way of Control” that, in addition to shooting her and her band to global fame, saw the then-23-year-old explicitly calling out Republican politicians who opposed gay marriage.
Of course, Ditto says, she wishes her former band’s most famous song had by now lost its cultural relevance. Sadly, she believes its message is “more relevant than it ever was. It’s really crazy. I did not see that coming.”
Get Ditto going on the current presidential administration, and she’s not likely to stay quiet. The singer says she shudders to think how some of her closest high school friends from Arkansas voted for Trump: “It’s like we couldn’t even be friends now. I am one of those people where if you voted for Trump I can’t be your friend. That’s what family is for. Those spots are reserved for people I have no choice but to love. Friends don’t get that privilege.”
And when the self-described feminist Ditto is asked about her relative quiet in regards to the #MeToo moment, she says, “Of course I support it 110 percent but sometimes a feminist has to take a little break from being in the thick of it because it can be so exhausting and really triggering.”
Still, Ditto says she remains a vocal champion for the disenfranchised and underserved. But getting into the #MeToo fight “doesn’t feel like a healthy space for my brain right now. I would definitely shout to the rafters if I needed to but right now I want to be involved in a more faceless way. I don’t really feel like sharing my story yet.” But, she concludes, “sadly, I don’t know a single woman that hasn’t had an experience (involving sexual harassment) or doesn’t have a story. Not one.”
Dan Hyman is a freelance writer.
onthetown@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @chitribent
