Music | Arts & Culture | The State House
| From left to right: Megan Chenot, Chrissy Gardner, Abigail Zsiga. The three perform this Saturday at The State House. Lucy Gellman Photo. |
Megan Chenot was looking for a spot at the piano, trying to maneuver around it in a cast. Abigail Zsiga steadied her and whipped out a stool. Chrissy Gardner joined them, squeezing into the middle. They laughed nervously. It was the first time in months that they’d all been rehearsing in the same time zone, and they were still getting used to it.
The three are members of Sister Willow, a new musical effort that spans New Haven, San Francisco and England. Officially launched in the fall of 2018, the group plays The State House this Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets and more information are available here.
Sister Willow was formed unofficially in the spring of 2017, when Zsiga left New Haven for England after 17 years in the area. At the time, all three members had ties with New Haven and with each other: Chenot grew up in West Hartford and then moved to Hamden in her twenties; Gardner moved to Westville in 2007 as a member of A Broken Umbrella Theatre, and Zsiga lived in Hamden for years after moving to the East Coast for a job in New York.
In New Haven, the three found themselves overlapping with each other at A Broken Umbrella and New Haven Theater Company gigs, or jumping in when someone’s band needed an extra vocalist. They had quirky connections too: Zsiga’s “Let The Joy Rise” had become the first song in Gardner’s cabaret repertoire years before, after she heard it on a burned CD and adapted it to piano, not knowing who the singer was. Chenot had become familiar with Zsiga’s work when her brother toured with the artist. After the three met through musician Steve Rodgers, “we became like sisters,” Zsiga said.
So when Zsiga announced she was moving back to England—she is initially from there and moved to the U.S. decades ago for a career in club music—the three decided to sing together as part of a proper send off. There was only one problem with the set: they sounded too good for the group to be a one-time thing.
“It was always there,” Chenot said in an interview Wednesday, at Gardner’s Westville home. “From the moment we started singing together. Like: ‘I know you’re leaving, but this cannot be the end.’”
Except Zsiga was about to move across the ocean. And then months later, Chenot and her husband decided that “we wanted an adventure,” packed up their car, and moved to California. In 2018, Gardner resuscitated the idea, noting that technology made it possible for the three to rehearse and record in different places. The other two signed on almost immediately.
Just months into the project, the three have weekly Skype meetings to talk about music and recording, navigating an eight-hour time difference that exists between the three of them (Zsiga joked that Chenot will be eating breakfast while she is eating dinner). Earlier this year, they recorded a single entitled “Jericho” Gardner mixing the audio in her home studio. In part, that collective sound guided them as they brainstormed a name for the group.
“I feel like the sound of our voices coming together is like being under a willow tree with the light coming through,” said Gardner.
On the track, which Gardner wrote for but did not include on her last album, Zsiga’s voice comes in over piano with strong hints of Joni Mitchell and Sarah McLachlan. But the song is completely her own, and she lets listeners know it: her voice is muscled and round, it can reach and shrink back at the drop of a pin. As she wanders through the chorus, Chenot joins in on harmony. They’re so tight that they conjure an image of bodies crowding in around a mic somewhere, rather than thousands of miles apart.
“There’s just just something about working with people that you trust immediately,” said Chenot. “That they’re gonna get all the sound around you and take exactly the right path that you hope they would take to get to this vision you have.”
“Sometimes I open my mouth and we’re singing together, and I can’t tell who is doing what,” added Gardner. “We did it together by accident, and then we were like, ‘oh, we have to do this.’”
In part, she added, they’ve chosen to make the project theirs as a mark of total independence. After decades in the music industry, all three said they’ve experienced frequent sexism, from audio technicians who fail to acknowledge their presence to those that do, only to refer to them as “sweetheart.”
For years, Gardner recalled, she would defer to male audio technicians and producers who insisted that she didn’t know what she was doing. While she praised certain male colleagues in the industry, she said there’s still very much “a system in place that needs to shift.” And she—as well as Chenot and Zsiga—want Sister Willow to reflect it.
“There’s a little piece of me that’s hoping that we can kind of show girls that it’s actually right to step up and say stuff,” Zsiga said. “If you speak up, you’re a diva-bitch. And if you don’t speak up, you get pushed around. This is not me bashing guys. This is me wanting to help women be stronger and more educated, and more confident knowing they can do it.”
On Saturday, they will be singing work exclusively by women and women-identifying artists: not only themselves (all of them write music) but also Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Carole King, Bonnie Raitt, Barbara George, and Sara Bareilles. They are already planning future performances together, aiming for two per year, as well as an album somewhere down the line.
“I hope that we can do this as much as we can in different parts of the world,” Chenot added. “The one advantage to us being so far apart is that we’re setting up home bases in places that we wouldn’t otherwise have friends and fans.“
“Collaborating for me is just the biggest joy, because it makes you think of things that you would never do on your own,” Zsiga added. “Being with people you trust to that degree—it’s just huge.”