Like what you see here? Subscribe and be the first to receive the latest issue of Out. But you know, that’s none of my business.” “Of course you want people to like it, but I think when you come from a punk-feminist-queer perspective, you’re used to a little bit of shadiness from straight mainstream media. “There’s nothing I can do about it,” Ditto says.
It’s no surprise, then, that she has little concern for how fans and critics might receive her first solo outing. In her Gossip days, she’d often perform in just a bra and shorts, and she’s unapologetic and celebratory when it comes to her weight in the midst of writing and recording Fake Sugar, she launched two plus-size fashion lines. That’s inherently queerĭitto has been open about her queerness from the start of her career, partly because she’s never really been shy about anything. I think Fake Sugar is such a queer record, because the love is really fluid and crosses a lot of different boundaries. You know that this is about your culture specifically.
On the soaring power ballad “Love in Real Life,” the singer confesses, “Nothing ever is perfect / There’s the good and the bad / Though it’s never on purpose, sometimes I make you sad.” Says Ditto, “When you hear queer people singing love songs, it speaks to you. It’s so crazy.”Īt its heart, Fake Sugar is speaking particularly to the gay experience and the complications that can arise from queer romance. Those are the hardest compromises, and I don’t think people can prepare you for what you learn in the first year of marriage. “You have to close off a part of yourself and shut down whatever your needs are in the moment. “You have to give your partner what they need,” she says.
#Beth ditto how to#
Ditto and Ogata, who’ve known each other since their late teens, tied the knot in Hawaii in 2013 and legally wed the following year.įor Ditto, who considered calling her album Music for Moms as a playful dig at her newfound domesticity, that meant learning how to be a better partner and embracing the responsibilities that come with it. The other explores the surprising difficulties that emerge after a couple’s honeymoon period. One finds Ditto wallowing in the heartache of separating from Nathan: “It was the longest relationship I’d been in,” she says. “It was time to re-examine that,” says Ditto, “and look at the really awesome things that came from being Southern and from theĪs she explains it, Fake Sugar is the tale of two relationships. Ditto was inspired by her adolescence, when her father, who passed away in 2011, would play artists like Patsy Cline. “I spent a good part of my adulthood running away from that, and I guess you could say processing the bad parts of it and really finding out who I was,” she says. Replete with Southern charm, it harks back to Ditto’s roots. But now she’s officially entered her “single phase.” Her new debut full-length, Fake Sugar, out on Virgin Records, bears traces of Gossip - the chugging rush of synths on “Go Baby Go,” the lite-punk sensibility of “Oo La La”-but the album feels more like her, mining sounds from pop, blues, and country. Then I just sent Nathan a text and said, ‘I think I’m done and I’m just going to do my own thing.’ He was like, ‘Let that baby fly!’ And we never really spoke about it again.”ĭitto toyed with flying solo in 2011, when she released her self-titled EP, produced by electronic dance duo Simian Mobile Disco. “For a while I couldn’t put my finger on it. “I was trying to write for the Gossip but without the Gossip, and it just felt wrong,” recalls the 36-year-old singer, sitting in pajamas in her house in Portland, where she lives with her wife, Kristin Ogata. For former Gossip front woman Beth Ditto, that breakup came after 2012’s A Joyful Noise, the group’s fifth album, which was released after member Nathan Howdeshell decided to leave Portland, Ore., and return to their home state of Arkansas. Breaking up is tough-especially when it’s with your bandmates of 17 years.