An American-born artist who’s spent her past many years making music and starting a family in Toronto, Meg Remy records and performs as U.S. Girls. Her newest LP out now, Scratch It, was created out of a burst of inspiration in playing live with a band assembled by Nashville guitarist Dillon Watson in a pinch. In spring of 2024, Remy needed folks based in the southeast to justify an appearance at a festival in Arkansas, too cost-prohibitive was it to bring her Canadian band down for just one performance. “I’m always a problem solver so, you know, this just means something new,” she recalls. She contacted Watson, with whom she’d interacted in Canada once upon a time, and he answered the call to form a Nashville band for her to play with.
Instant was Remy’s gelling with these Music City professionals (Watson, Jack Lawrence on bass, Domo Donoho on drums, Jo Schornikow and Tina Norwood on keys plus THE Charlie McCoy on harmonica!), and she was encouraged by them to record to tape, which she’d not done before. So she went home and wrote the songs that would become the nine-track Scratch It, then returned to Nashville last summer to lay the songs down at recording studio The Bomb Shelter.
The exception to the rule of songs created for this project was the lead single she’d already written called “Bookends,” a sprawling, several-verse ode to Remy’s late friend and fellow indie artist Riley Gale. This song I described as downright scholarly references Eyewitness To History, a historical collection of 300+ eyewitness accounts of great world events spanning twenty-four centuries, and Remy was moved to illustrate in song the concept of death as the “great equalizer.” The companion video was directed by Caity Arthur.
U.S. Girls, featuring the band you hear on record, is currently touring in support of Scratch It. Before tour began, and Remy came back to Nashville for a pop-up first performance with this group at locally owned DIY venue Soft Junk, she expressed excitement about the hang time that they were going to get on the road. She said she has a running joke with another musician pal that “tour is just like the most expensive vacation you could have, so you want to be touring with your best friends.”
I cited a video explainer Remy did for the Canadian news organization CBC during COVID-19 about the budgetary considerations of touring and asked about her calculation now, five years later. (As we know, it’s only grown more expensive post-pandemic.) The artist kind of shrugged and said, “We want to present our music and have a good time. Because we can’t control anything else at this point and it is a gamble, the risk is massive. So it would be awful to be taking this risk with a bunch of jerks, you know what I mean?”
Remy had twin sons a few years ago — she was actually pregnant during the making of her last record, the much more pop- and dance-forward Bless This Mess — and she admits that she can no longer tour like she used to because she doesn’t want to be away from her boys. The balance is tough. This contrast is sung about, really lamented, in the Scratch It track “Dear Patti,” about missing Patti Smith’s set when U.S. Girls was also on the bill because Remy’s kids were horsing around at the venue and the family just needed to get out of there. WNXP got an exclusive performance of “Dear Patti,” which was co-written with working Nashville parent-musician Tristen, to share from the Soft Junk show.
In addition to kids and transportation costs there are environmental considerations with touring. “And it’s all happening at this time when I wanna play more than ever, you know, especially with these people because it feels so good,” said Remy. “It’s bittersweet, but again, these limitations coming up, I’m not gonna push against them. I’m just gonna take what shows I can get and be grateful for them and not expect anything. And if we learned anything from the pandemic, it’s just like things can stop at any moment.”
The whole process of band formation, song creation and now live performance seems very “flow state” for Remy, who had to let go in some of the places she might otherwise push in or insist upon another take. That’s the beauty in recording to tape. She said, “I thought I knew what it meant but it’s a whole different realm of logistics and how things work. You know, the fact that I brought this 12-minute song [“Bookends”] to try to capture live — I didn’t realize quite how challenging that was going to be, but everyone was up for it.”
Speaking of her usual means of production, including on Bless This Mess, Remy said that working in isolation from home one “can just endlessly tinker.” With Scratch It, she was “thinking more about arranging while writing this time around instead of kind of writing a basic thing and then arranging and adding and decorating putting all this frosting on on top.” She said it’s important to her to write “sturdy” songs that can exist in their most basic form or with the embellishments of a 10-piece band. The songs on this new album feel at once sturdy and freeing for her.
“I’ve found time and time again that you don’t have to push too hard and, if you are, there’s something off. This just was very natural and almost laid in front of me.“
Hear my full conversation with Meg Remy of U.S. Girls here and wherever you stream podcasts via WNXP Podcasts.