Carla Bozulich

Carla Bozulich is probably best known as the leader of 1990s band the Geraldine Fibbers, who played a sprawling, majestic, cathartic kind of music that could hardly be contained by as humble a term as alt-country, the label commonly used to describe the band.

Bozulich has been performing and recording in a variety of styles and incarnations since she was a teenager in the early ’80s. She did post-punk with Neon Vein, industrial music with Ethyl Meatplow, and experimental music with Scarnella and on her own, and she’s scored soundtracks for film and theater. She’s also built up an impressive list of collaborators, including — to name just a few — Nels Cline (once a member of the Geraldine Fibbers and Scarnella, now of Wilco), Thurston Moore, Mike Watt, Lydia Lunch, and avant-garde drummer Scott Amendola. When Bozulich recorded her first solo album, a song-for-song tribute to Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger, Nelson himself joined her.

Through all her work, the one constant has been Bozulich’s voice — a rough, gruff sound that’s equally effective at conveying rage, hurt, and tenderness. In fact, the three kind of go together: When Bozulich lets loose with a fiery wail, she sometimes sounds as if she’s about to blow out her vocal cords in a spray of blood, and something about her makes you want to make sure she’s okay. I once saw a Fibbers show where she had so strained her voice that she couldn’t hit the high notes. A member of the audience — a man, it turned out — stepped up and volunteered to help her out. It worked out just fine.