**The Weekend Ladies**

The Photo Ladies Interview - by Edwina Hay

The Weekend Ladies is the new musical project by Tessa Greenberg and Ariel Sims. Their previous group together, Tayisha Busay, disbanded in 2012 with their final performance occurring at Glasslands Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn only for that venue to close their doors in 2015 due to a new, more profitable, tenant desiring that same location for their new office. Their upcoming EP, Ghost Town, began to form in 2016, a year that marked personal trauma, loss, and the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States. Nearly five years later, we’re in a pandemic and most places in New York City are closed because of the deadly Coronavirus a.k.a. COVID-19.

The Weekend Ladies’ newest single “Love is a Choice” can be purchased on Bandcamp and their full Ghost Town EP is now available on all platforms. In this interview, The Photo Ladies help you get to know The Weekend Ladies.

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Tessa and Ariel, how did you two first meet and decide to make music together?

We met in 2003 at Marymount Manhattan College while studying theater, but we first got to know each other while taking a radical liberal arts class about the social taboos around menstruation. That class ended up informing so much of our shared feminist views that we still incorporate into our art and activism to this day. However, ultimately the music and collaboration were born out of dissatisfaction with what our theater education had shown us in terms of performance outlets. We were both theatre misfits and began looking for alternative ways to engage in the performing arts. I think we both identified in one another that feeling of "Ohhhh, YOU'RE a cool weirdo TOO!" During this time, Tessa had a video assignment for a film class - a song and music video about her favorite sneakers - and asked Ariel to collaborate. It was fun, weird, and it gave both of us some of that outlet we had been looking for that made us think: “hey, we don't have to audition for anything ever again, we can just make our own music and performance art.” We bonded over our shared childhood of singing and taking dance classes during the Jock Jams/90s house & freestyle music era that became a sort of holy grail for us and continues to inform our taste and musical style. After college, we kept making our own weird songs and performances and within a year, we had a handful of bizarre electronic songs written using a free version of Apple's GarageBand that we started performing in the back of bars at odd weekday time slots. At first, our act was more of an early 2000's digital love letter to vaudeville and it didn't fit into any genre but we just kept doing it and enjoying it more and more. Then one day, we sort of looked at each other and said, "Could this be a real thing? Should we maybe try and be….like...an actual band?" The answer was yes.

Ariel during Tayisha Busay’s set at Public Assembly on June 24, 2010.

Tessa during Tayisha Busay’s set at Public Assembly on June 24, 2010.

I met the two of you via your previous group, Tayisha Busay, and first saw you perform before Big Freedia at Public Assembly during the Northside Festival in 2010. Can you tell us the importance of New York City in the formation of your music as Tayisha Busay and how that led to your new duo known as The Weekend Ladies?

As Tayisha Busay, we first existed on the furthest fringes of an already fringe scene. We weren't an indie rock or folk band so it was hard to get on those bills, and we weren't a hip hop or DJ act either. At first we really just squeezed our way into every possible show that needed a spot filled... I mean we FINAGLED! We mostly played in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of Manhattan where there was a lot going on musically. Still perpetually outsider-weirdos, we weren't chic, slick or cool, and we often felt incredibly bored at the popular shows where the bands took themselves too seriously. As young artists, we battled an immense amount of sexism, misogyny, and exclusion, even after the addition of our third member, Brandon Levesque. We rejected the idea that we had to be a sexy women-led band and instead we leaned into our sense of humor and corny Bat Mitzvah-Slumber-Party level stage antics from our Jock-Jams-School-Play-Theater days. We knew that it was our New York too and that we could define it for ourselves. After a couple of years of playing out, we finally crossed paths with some fellow, like-minded DIY electro-pop acts like Planet Rump, Suspicious Package, and Great Tiger. By 2010, indie-electro and DIY dance-pop was more of a "thing" and it felt like New York was finally embracing it (and us) a little bit. Most of the love we got was in the gay bars and alongside other queer acts - like Big Freedia. To this day, it’s the queer spaces that feel like an artistic home to us, anywhere we go. After our last show as Tayisha Busay in 2012, we took five years off from performing together so we could spend time on other jobs and projects, and probably to grow up a little! In 2016, we reconnected after some intense life changes and a period that Ariel would coin as "Raft Times." Our old version of New York had completely changed, but some of the loss we experienced encouraged us to start writing again: that's when The Weekend Ladies formed. After Tayisha Busay, we've joked that we were "traumatized by DIY" and all the scrappiness and hustling that burnt us out in the Brooklyn scene. The Weekend Ladies is a rejection of that. It's now more about the art, leisure, and slow, deep, empowered catharsis that we can create through music and performance. We also learned how this approach to art makes us better activists and all-around more balanced people.

What were some of your favorite venues to perform around NYC that have since closed forever?

Too many, gone too soon! Glasslands was our favorite, even though they'd get mad at us for throwing confetti and silly string everywhere. The old Silent Barn was a hot, fun mess. Death By Audio smelled like shit and they didn't always get us but we still fucked it up a few times. Sugarland really embraced us with open arms and made us feel at home. Shea Stadium was great. The OLD House Of Yes on Maujer Street (but check them out at their current home at 2 Wyckoff Avenue or on the Internet)! The old Secret Project Robot on Kent Avenue. Santos Party House! RIP :(

How would you characterize the Weekend Ladies sound? What are some of your musical influences?

At its core, our music is electropop. As performing artists, we combine our social activism, clowning, and witchcraft to serve fun and emotionally charged anthems for dystopian times. Our musical pizza pie is topped with everything from lots of Robyn, to Devo, Italo Disco, late 80s freestyle like Debbie Deb, Crystal Waters, Cher, Kate Bush, and the sound of our Moms yelling at a customer service person on the phone so they can get $8 back on their long-distance phone bill in 1994.

What is the songwriting process like for the two of you? Do you write lyrics and music separately or together? Has this process changed over the years from Tayisha Busay compared to now?

These days it's very Postal Service-style. One of us will completely produce the music and write lyrics to a near-full song and then the other will take the track and fill in the little details like vocal harmonies or synth fills. We are now very good at letting each other take the lead on a song so it can be its full self, and then giving each other feedback or ideas to build upon what's already there. Writing more individually has also been a great way to avoid forcing the creative process in a room together on an arbitrarily designated day, which is how we used to do more collaborative writing in Tayisha Busay. It was fine but our songs back then were more forced and lacking in depth because we felt we "needed" 1 more ballad or 1 more banger to round out the album or a set. But that was a made-up, bullshit mentality based on what other people had done rather than what made sense for us as artists. Since then, the actual content of our writing has matured and evolved quite a bit based on our personal life experiences from which we write. Tayisha Busay was like a teenager's diary. The Weekend Ladies is a thick, leather-bound, grown-ass journal.

Your first single as Weekend Ladies is “Love is a Choice” and the video features an 80s vibe and displays your sense of humor. How did you come up with the concept of the music video and bring it to life?

We shot the video this summer (still in the throes of COVID-19 restrictions) while we were cat-sitting for friends in Scarsdale, NY. We knew we wanted to do some kind of video for this song, despite the obstacles that the pandemic presented, and this house gave us the quarantined space we didn’t have in the city. For inspiration, we watched a lot of lo-fi, campy Italo videos from the ’80s and ’90s and realized how much we already love and embody this moment in culture and music. Around the same time, we had gotten really into watching all the old “Weird Al” Yankovic videos, almost as therapy for the stressful and heartbreaking time we were living through - we are perpetually soothed by “Weird Al”’s earnest absurdity and his relentless commitment to the “bit.” The plan for the shoot was originally very barebones: we would get a bunch of funny props at the dollar store, have our genius filmmaker friend Suzi Sadler come to the house in Scarsdale for a couple of days with basic equipment, and we would get some fun, very DIY green screen footage. By some stroke of magic that seems to follow The Weekend Ladies around, a porch-side conversation with a neighbor led to the discovery that she was sitting on a garage full of professional film equipment left by her husband who she had recently separated from. A filmmaker herself (and a woman experiencing recent heartbreak as well), she understood what we were trying to do and she lent us the top-of-the-line gear that took our rinky-dink operation to glossy levels that otherwise would have been impossible to achieve. The results are so perfectly us: through a series of random coincidences, we were able to beg and borrow our way into a video that we couldn’t afford, and we STILL chose to film ourselves goofing off, putting press-on nails on our toes and wigs on bouncy balls.

Proceeds from the sales of “Love is a Choice” will go to The Audre Lorde Project. Can you tell us more about this organization and why you chose them as a charity partner for your single?

Our artistic journey of the last couple of decades has been heavily influenced by our activism and intersectional feminism. We have seen that art and music are powerful tools for community organizing and social justice. Over time, the majority of our shows have become fund and awareness-raising events for various causes. Both of us have a healthy obsession with the poet/activist/feminist Audre Lorde, and also with the organization that evokes her name: The Audre Lorde Project, based here in our adopted hometown, Brooklyn. ALP is an LGBTSTGNC organization focusing on people of color in the New York City area. This org is about as intersectional as you can get, tackling the issues that arise as a result of compounded oppression of folx experiencing concurrent forms of discrimination based on gender identity, sexual orientation, race, immigration status, wealth inequality, etc. We also love ALP’s hyperlocal approach, letting them focus on the nuanced struggles that New York City presents.

What was the recording process like for the songs on the Ghost Town EP?

Our approach to writing and recording has always been very DIY and most of the production is done solo, bedroom-style. With this release, we wanted to achieve very clean, pop-sounding vocals, which is very hard to do when you don’t have the right equipment or space. We teamed up with our friend, engineer Thomas Ricard, who had done some previous work with Ariel for her solo project Ariel & The Swoon. He had the right equipment, knew what he was doing, and was a great energy match for us. It was important to have someone at that stage with a new perspective come into the mix after the two of us had been in a feedback loop with these songs for so long. Thomas recorded all of our vocals at his space at the infamous Danbro Studios in East Williamsburg, helped us with some of the arrangements and effects, and he played a sick guitar part on “The Gun.” Miraculously, we finished the recording of these tracks just weeks before COVID would close down the city. Our very talented friend Joseph Colmenero mixed and mastered Ghost Town. Tessa has worked with Joe on some of her previous solo releases under the name TWERP and he was willing to help give these songs the bump that we needed!

What is your definition of a Weekend Lady and how do you become one?

At some point, our shitty capitalist society invented this stupid idea that weekdays were for work and weekends were for fun and leisure. Fuck that. And fuck anything trying to exist solely in the binary! We have day jobs too - but experiencing joy and feeling blissfully untethered is something that anyone should be able to embrace during any day of the week, month, or year -- and as any gender. We happen to be cis-gendered ladies but, the truth is, ANYONE can be a Weekend Lady/Person/Spirit and the secret is that you already ARE one! Maybe your weekend spirit means smashing a bunch of burnt-out lightbulbs in the street just to hear that beautiful sound. Or maybe it's just sleeping in and eating two bags of the recently re-released 3D Doritos because the texture has a very special mouth feel. A Weekend Lady/Spirit embraces an instinctual will to find that joyful Saturday energy for even ONE minute on even the darkest of days. It's a fucked up world, but no one and nothing should be allowed to steal the joy and love you have within -- not even an asshole on a Monday.

Also, there used to be an amazing discount store on Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick called “Weekend for Ladies” where we used to frequent for the $1 rack!

If New York City resumes live events within the upcoming year, what do you envision being next for The Weekend Ladies?

It’s fair to say that about 50% of this project relies heavily on the performance aspects and it has been almost unbearable not having live shows to complete the true birth of Ghost Town. In the meantime, we have been able to focus on making some really great music videos and overall are trying to use this strange opportunity to delve inwards and out of our comfort zones. We hope to partner with new friends for some streaming/experimental/virtual experiences soon - if you host anything like this, hit us up!

3/4ths of the song titles of the Ghost Town EP are “Feel Like Shit,” Tired,” and “The Gun.” My final question for you is, are the Weekend Ladies okay now? I mean, besides the global pandemic and the general collapse of our society, of course.

In truth, the last four years have been incredibly rough on both of us - personally, professionally, politically, etc. The desperation, despair, and heartache was relentless and at times, insurmountable. However, making art about strife is very therapeutic for us. Written years before any inclining of the multiple global catastrophes we are currently experiencing, the themes of these songs are eerily relevant. When listening to Ghost Town now, we also can hear the beautiful things that we have learned about ourselves, each other, and life. We hear the trials and tribulations of an emotional odyssey that prepared us to weather this storm: Ghost Town is our unexpected adventure of hauntings and hallucinations that finds light in the dark and strength in sisterhood.