Beth Ditto, singer
In the early 2000s, everyone I knew was in a band but none of us dreamed of breaking through. I used to record my vocals in the bathroom and I was really bad at writing lyrics. So we had lots of half-written punk songs.
Standing in the Way of Control changed everything. The song was partly sparked by the Federal Marriage Amendment, a proposal by the George W Bush administration to outlaw same-sex marriage [subsequently defeated]. At the time, my very best friend – who was queer like me – was having a brutally hard time. He lived in Olympia, which was three hours from where I was in Portland. We’d talk on the phone and he’d open up and was very vulnerable. The world felt like it was turning upside down and he was having trouble existing. The amendment was the final straw, so I wrote the song for him to know how much I loved him – and to tell the administration to fuck off.
I’d always been scared of writing lyrics but Standing in the Way of Control came out in a two-minute splurge. I drew on personal experiences, such as growing up in the Bible Belt and being labelled a bitch because I wasn’t going to scripture class, and being called weak because things like sexism, racism and homophobia really affected me. My size was more of an issue then too. I wasn’t bullied at school or anything – I was outgoing and popular – but I’d ask myself: “Why do people think like this?”
I guess everyone can relate to the title, the idea of resisting control. It wasn’t just my gay friends who were having dark times. The economy was shit and people were struggling. We were called a gay band, a queer band, a riot grrrl band, but we were just working-class kids and people connected with our song.
So many people have told me, “That song got me through ninth grade”, which makes me very happy. Sadly, the song’s as relevant now as ever, and the friend who I wrote it for is having the same crisis once again.
Nathan ‘Brace Paine’ Howdeshell, guitar, bass and keyboards
We wrote this song in our drummer, Kathy Mendonça’s basement. We were just jamming and I had this disco guitar riff in my mind. Beth’s lyrics filled in the spaces. A band in a basement is a good, simple, organic way for a song to be born.
Kathy had a very simple, primal, garage-rock way of drumming, like Moe Tucker from the Velvet Underground. When she left to pursue a degree, Hannah Billie stepped in, using the hi-hat cymbal – and the song just came alive. We recorded it at Bear Creek with Guy Picciotti from Fugazi – a big hero of ours. It was our first time in a real studio but they let us be ourselves. It was still pretty DIY.
By then, we’d been playing at being rock stars for years. I first met Beth when we were 13, in Arkansas, and I put her band’s music out on my little cassette tape label. The Bible Belt has some lovely people but can be oppressive when you’re a young punk rocker with a crazy haircut or blue hair. People used to chase us around town.
Standing in the Way of Control turned us from outcasts into a mainstream band. The Soulwax remix ended up on the soundtrack for TV series Skins, which was huge in the UK at the time. Beth won NME’s cool Person of the Year award and was loved because of who she is. Everything just started rolling for us. We went on the Jonathan Ross Show. We were driving to another show when we heard our song on the radio for the first time. Everyone went: “Waaaaaah!”
I think we handled our British success pretty well. No one became an egomaniacal rock star asshole and we didn’t turn into Oasis and beat each other up. We played some wild shows that felt like Stooges concerts. Then it was nice to come back to America where nobody cared about us and everything was back to normal.