The artist and musician Cody Critcheloe (who records as Ssion), has worked with Gossip for years, painting its portrait for the “Real Power” cover and directing videos for the album’s first two singles. In a phone interview, he said that Gossip’s members have been authentically themselves from the start. “Whatever they were bringing to a basement in the early 2000s,” with Ditto “in her bra and panties, that soul and spirit never changed when they were playing to, like, an arena in Italy,” he said.
Gossip’s influence reverberated widely, even for fans who never experienced a show. Jessamyn Stanley, the yoga teacher and author, discovered the band as a D.J. at her college radio station in North Carolina. The group’s confidence at belonging in spaces where it were outside the norm totally subverted her worldview. “That was such a huge part of how I was radicalized, how I came to understand myself and my queer identity,” she said. “I wouldn’t be me — fat-positive activist, yoga teacher — none of that would’ve happened without Gossip, and especially Beth Ditto being who she is.”
Ditto is from tiny Judsonia, Ark. and Howdeshell is from neighboring Searcy, both dry towns about 50 miles from Little Rock. They formed Gossip with another Arkansas friend, Kathy Mendonça, who had led them to the ’90s punk and riot grrrl scene in Olympia. (She’s now a school counselor.) In the beginning, they were almost defiantly raw. “I remember when we learned that people tuned their guitars between songs,” Ditto said.
Thought they weren’t steeped in theory, Howdeshell’s style leaned experimental — “I was using intentionally strange tunings,” he said, “very avant-garde, like taking a string a whole octave down” — and Ditto’s musical bedrock ran the gamut from the British post-punk act Raincoats to Patsy Cline and Black Sabbath.
“With us, it’s just vibe and references,” Blilie said. A veteran of Portland bands like Chromatics, she joined as drummer after being blown away when she witnessed Gossip play “Standing in the Way of Control,” which Ditto wrote in response to a Bush Administration proposal to ban gay marriage.
Rubin, the storied producer, arrived to oversee “Music for Men,” and in 2019, Ditto came to him again, to work on what she thought might be a second solo album (her first, “Fake Sugar,” was released in 2017), before realizing she missed Howdeshell’s input, and called him in. Buoyed by Rubin’s faith — “I don’t know if I would’ve trusted anybody else,” she said — it became a Gossip album soon after that.
