25 Days of Music: Day 7
A singing trio of the best kind of weirdos.
The Roches (pronounced like roaches) were a trio of sisters, Maggie, Terre, and Suzzy (rhymes with fuzzy) who sang tight, close harmonies on campy, sometimes very strange folk songs. They’ve always seemed to me like a band that barely missed what should have been its heyday; their first album came out in 1979, a bit too late for quasi-comic folk vocal trios, and they never really hit the limelight the way they probably would have a decade earlier.
Their combination of pure harmonies and deep weirdness are unmatched, to my knowledge; if you pick a song of theirs at random, you’ll either get soaring melodies that will tear your heart out, or a comical number about how they won’t give you their phone numbers. Or you might get their strangely compelling a cappella Hallelujah Chorus.
I couldn’t choose one song today, so here’s their lovely cover of The Fleetwoods’ 1959 song “Come Softly to Me”:
And their best-known song, “Hammond Song”:
Notes:
The eldest Roche sister, Maggie, died in 2017 of breast cancer. The others have continued playing and sometimes recording music. Fridays in May and June Terre hosts a Sunset Singing Circle in Battery Park.
I think I mentioned in last year’s series that the Roches played on Saturday Night Live in 1979. Here’s video of them performing the aforementioned a cappella Hallelujah Chorus. It’s hard to imagine SNL doing something that weird these days.
You know, I don’t know The Roches, have never heard of them. But you posted this, and then on the twelfth, Rod Dreher, whose substack I follow—and who doesn’t usually write about music—wrote about The Roches. Mostly, he was quoting from an article he wrote back in 2001, when he heard them singing on the street in NYC. The whole article is here:
https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=16-02-018-v