Down to Cow

A couple of years ago, Birdy Bardot went on a cross-country road trip but eventually found her way back to Ocean Beach. Upon her return, she began trekking down to Cow Records on Newport Avenue, where she befriended the musician/writer and Cow employee Al Howard. During Bardot’s loitering sessions at Cow, she and Howard would talk music, and eventually Howard asked her if she would like to work with him writing songs.

“I said, ‘Absolutely,’” Bardot tells the Reader by phone. “Al’s the most brilliant lyricist I know of. He has this knack for just honing in on a simple emotion or state of mind and creating huge, beautiful imagery to add to the story. Al and I would work on melodies together...ideas for songs, just kind of for the fun of it. After we had a few down, we knew we wanted them to come to fruition as finished songs.”

Howard chimed in via e-mail. “She came up with the melody for the first couple of songs, ‘Possibilities’ and ‘Nothing.’ As soon as I heard ‘Possibilities,’ I knew we had something with a lot of potential.”

Howard wrote lyrics for the project and called on his musician pals to fill in the rest. A method that Howard says is “an easy process” when you have “great painters on each instrument. Everyone added tremendous color to the canvas that the rhythm section laid down.” The collaborative nature, and the fact that many of the players had to schedule time around work with their own bands, caused the project to move slowly. The crawl worked out well, though, as the 11-song project finished just around the time Howard, the Heavy Guilt’s Josh Rice, and Transfer mainstay Matt Molarius had started the Redwoods record label. The album had a home. According to Bardot, “The Redwoods put out the artwork, scheduled shows, and made the project come to life.”

Now, about two years after Bardot made her initial pilgrimage down to Cow, the Birdy Bardot album is getting a proper release. To celebrate, her band will be part of the “Redwoods Revue” show at the Casbah this Friday night, July 3, alongside Redwoods friendly acts Rebecca Jade and the Cold Fact, Midnight Pine, Erik Canzona and the Narrows, and Creature and the Woods.

The show is going to be one of many for Bardot in the second half of 2015, seeing as she is now juggling three bands. The New Kinetics are still active and booking shows and have a high probability of studio time in their future, while the all-female juggernaut the Rosalyns have scored a spot on Burger Records’ Burger-a-Go-Go! at the Observatory in Orange County in September.

“I get excited when we have these shows and I see a bunch of people supporting us — it’s overwhelming,” says Bardot. “It’s nice to know that people like this music and that they’re looking forward to owning a copy of your album. It’s the scene we have here in San Diego. People are thirsty for different kinds of music. They want to hear what you’re coming up with.”