Last year Birch illustrated a book of the singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten’s lyrics; the two met through Holdsworth in 2011, and Van Etten called her “so inspiring” in an email, adding that she admires Birch’s inclination “to not do what’s easy or expected” and “to let us continue to watch her learn as a part of her art.”
Birch sings, writes and plays bass like someone who cannot help but be herself, and her distinct, sometimes contradictory personality oozes out of every track. She’s silly but also dead serious; she can be self-deprecating in one breath and thrillingly self-assured the next. Her solo songs likewise represent a tonal and thematic hodgepodge. “Digging Down” is a dub-inspired screed against — among other urban disruptions — construction noise. “I Am Rage” is an ode to female anger sung in a lilting, ironic whisper. The abstract “And Then It Happened” and the bouncy single “Wish I Was You” represent two completely different sonic approaches to one of the album’s central concerns: the hard-won and sometimes ecstatic self-acceptance that comes with age.
Still, Birch and her bandmates in the Raincoats always had a certain unassuming chutzpah, even when they were just starting out. “There’d been articles going, ‘The Raincoats say they rehearse,’” she said. “But we did rehearse! We just didn’t rehearse in the way that people thought rehearsal should be. We weren’t sergeant majors playing to a metronome. We were feeling our way through in an organic way, and embracing the mistakes as we went along.”
The Raincoats telegraphed an infectious, do-it-yourself ethos. “What we wore was odd,” Birch said, recalling their “messy hair and our inside-out clothes and our spots with stripes.” She continued, “What we sounded like was difficult. We were not pandering to a common taste. We were trying to do our own thing. But we had a hard-core fan base who got us.”
Though the group was most active from the late 1970s to its first breakup in the mid-1980s, that fan base has grown exponentially over time. Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney and Angel Olsen have all cited them as formative influences.
The Raincoats’ most famous fan, though, was also one of the most vehement: Kurt Cobain, who included a rapturous ode to the Raincoats and their self-titled debut album in the liner notes to the 1992 Nirvana album “Incesticide.” (A letter and a signed copy of the record that da Silva mailed him after they met in London, Cobain wrote, “was one of the few really important things that I’ve been blessed with since becoming an untouchable boy genius.”) Cobain’s adulation helped get the band’s first three albums back in print, but his sudden death thwarted a plan for the Raincoats to open for Nirvana on tour.