During the Klondike Gold Rush, the Red Onion Saloon in Skagway, Alaska, operated as a thriving brothel and a rare (sometimes) source of autonomy for the women who worked there. More than a century later, Juneau-based singer-songwriter Taylor Dallas Vidic found empowerment at the old bordello too, by offering feminist tours in character as Madam Anya Johnson. Innuendos loosened up tour groups, forging a connection that made them receptive to some serious history lessons – alongside dick jokes.
“What working at the Red Onion did for me was make me feel really comfortable about being a human in front of other humans, and to talk about things that often feel taboo or uncomfortable, and to normalize them,” Vidic says. “It’s translating from making sex jokes to feeling comfortable standing in front of a lot of people and saying, ‘Hey, here’s what it felt like when I broke my heart or when someone else broke my heart.’”
Vidic’s songwriting is warm and vulnerable. She’s equally capable of belting above sultry and coy jazzy tracks, carrying intricate, stripped-down folksongs on her magnanimous voice alone, and building grand theatrical numbers, as well. She does all of it on her debut album, Cat & Mouse, a collection of 13 (mostly) love songs that deliver an expansive, playful representation of what is perhaps humanity’s most perplexing and intoxicating experience. And it’s all rooted in the same multifaceted understanding of shared humanity that Vidic used to bond with strangers on those summer stints in Skagway.
Beyond an exceptional, arresting voice and range, Vidic’s songwriting conveys an acuity of emotion which pushes what is superficially an album of love songs well beyond predictable tropes. “They tell you it takes time, you’ll see/ To remember who you use to be/ Remember how to sit in the quiet/ On your own,” she sings on the album’s opening track, “Falling Out of Love,” which lays out in minute, closely felt detail the experience of returning to self after a breakup:
I’ve learned to fill the space that
I’d kept for only you, dear
I smile at all the faces
Walk past all the places
We used to go
Each breath a little deeper
Each song a little sweeter
Now that the scent of you doesn’t linger on my pillow
Anymore
Heartbreak might be age-old song fodder, but Vidic extends it far beyond breakups to many kinds of aches (loss, longing, unbearable certainty) with an alluring immediacy. In her hands, the simple mechanics of falling in and out of love – or wishing to fall in love, even if just for the evening – become a comforting exercise in self-discovery and relatable human experience.
There’s “In a Song,” about a crush that’s missed its moment. “High,” which yearns for the good parts of a past entanglement. And “In Your Arms,” a cinematic, self-aware disquisition on a relationship’s irreconcilable differences: “I said it’s a big ole world/ The place we could go, the people we’ll see/ Just imagine the strangers we could meet,” Vidic sings, adding: “He said/ My corner’s just fine with me.” By song’s end, Vidic is off on the grand adventures she dreamed for them both, solo.
Part of Vidic’s remarkably evolved approach to love songs derives from practical necessity. Juneau, Alaska – population 32,000 – is small and isolated both from the rest of the country and even the state, by geography; with no roads out of town and flanked by impenetrable mountains, ice fields, and the Gastineau channel, it’s accessible only by boat or plane. Living within those few square miles, it’s impossible to avoid running into an ex regularly. In the same way that Vidic’s ethos accepts humanity’s many facets, so too she’s maintained love and respect for her exes. Indeed, most of them were invited to – and attended – her album release show.
“Finding ways to actively reframe relationships when they have run their course is a matter of survival of the heart. And it would be such a loss to not get to continue to care for the people that I have loved, that have loved me,” Vidic says. “I don’t know if I’m just lucky in that I’ve found people that are willing to do that – even though it is messy and hard at times and a little confusing at times, too, and uncomfortable; we spend so much time with people that we choose to love and we share so much…I really like holding onto those moments.”
Juneau’s geographical limitations and eccentricities crop up on the album in other ways, as well. “I let those mystery boys get me every time/ When the stakes are low I’m better at not losing my mind/ An hour is too far when an airplane is in play,” Vidic sings on “Muse.” Nothing quite as bittersweet as unrequited love, specifically one that’s unwanted.
“Twice a Day,” the album’s opening foray into its folk/Americana B-side, is the only song that doesn’t overtly take place in Alaska, written during a few months in New York City. On it, Vidic, a consummate observer of the world around her, contemplates the near-infinite possibility for human interaction in a big city surrounded by so many more souls than in her hometown: “Maybe I would make you laugh each day/ Maybe when it ended I’d be begging you to stay/ Maybe we’d grow old and see, we’re as happy as we’d ought to be/ But we’re always a platform away.”
First albums are always special. Often, they represent the culmination of years’ worth of a musician’s best and hardest fought work – John Prine’s eponymous debut, Emmylou Harris’ Pieces of the Sky, Guy Clark’s Old No. 1 – and Cat & Mouse is no exception. Written over more than a decade (Vidic penned its oldest song, “Muse,” at 21), the album is, for Vidic, a scrapbook of her life and formative early adulthood.
“I think most people can agree that songs take us back to moments in our lives, be it a playlist that was on the radio a lot when we were in middle school, or that particular song that helped you get over a breakup or a song that makes you think about your parent,” she says. “And these songs do that for me, but they are snapshots of my existence and of the people that I’ve come across.”
From her delivery on stage to the studio production of Cat & Mouse, Vidic also brings the banter and cheek of her madam tour guide gig, as well as the showmanship she’s cultivated as part of burlesque troupe, The Nude & Rude Revue, and through many community arts events she’s helped organize. Leaning into her life’s dualities, Vidic made the album with two distinct sides; Cat, the album’s A-side, is jazzy with a big band sound; Mouse is a stripped-down, folksy, and sparsely-instrumented B-side. It’s a concept that easily could have been sonically incongruous, but both sides flow together through the power of Vidic’s voice, aided by the album’s title track, which she rendered in both styles and delivered at the end of each side, respectively.
Juneau’s geographic isolation can be a mighty impediment for musicians, but it’s also a blessing that breeds collaboration and allows musicians a certain freedom to grow and flourish without the pressures of bigger music cities in the U.S., says Juneau-based musician Andrew Heist. Heist has played in a myriad of bluegrass bands in Alaska over the last 20 years, and lends his scintillating mandolin to “Falling Out of Love.” He also shares stages with Vidic as part of their songwriting group, the Muskeg Collective.
“Without the pressure to get a product out there to build her name in a competitive scene, there’s this community familiarity that is so rare and amazing in Juneau,” Heist says. “It’s sort of like the old soul version of hearing somebody sing, there’s a depth to the way that she brings her music forward.”
Most of Vidic’s songs are exceedingly personal, yet she manages to spin the exquisite pain of heartbreak into something universally relatable, and she’s equally vivid when singing about someone else. Vidic wrote “Wet Tennis Shoes” in part thinking about a friend whose father left when she was too young to remember him. The song effuses not just ache, but a crushing loss of innocence, as well: “Boats made of paper float on the pond/ A little girl playing wonders where you have gone/ You took all the sunshine and made her skies grey.” And though the paper boats do not actually dissolve, the song’s omnipresent drizzle – “Rain on her window/ Rain on her head/ Rain on the rooftop as she lies in bed” – evokes the dissolution even more effectively.
After spending most of the album exploring feelings’ small intricacies, Vidic’s final track before the “Cat & Mouse” reprise is “Stockades,” a showy, declarative pop number about the enormity of falling head over heels. “The Stockades fell/ When he touched my hips/ And he kissed my lips in ways they’ve never been kissed,” she cries before continuing: “Lord knows it took one night to tear this empire down/ The walls we built, they’re falling faster than Jericho to the ground.” Still, kingdoms fall and so do powerful loves; and again by the end of the song, Vidic is reminding herself how to get back up and stand on her own two feet. Now, and always, too.
The strength of Alaskan songwriters’ connections extends beyond helping each other and into the community at large as well. As part of her album crowdfunding (Cat & Mouse was also partially funded by a prestigious local grant), Vidic asked for funds to bring music into the state’s network of nursing homes, a goal inspired by visiting her mother in a long-term care facility and a few concerts she’s already given.
Memorably, Vidic recalls how at a Christmastime performance she stepped offstage to sing among the audience to bring herself into focus for them. Next to a man she’d noticed never uttered a word on previous visits, Vidic sang “Silver Bells.” Part way in, the man joined her, singing along with words he’d learned long ago.
Nursing homes are often undesirable performance locations; they’re sterile, poorly lit, and underfunded, their residents not the most attentive or engaging audience members – yet, Vidic observes, those people deserve live music, joy, and respect, as much as anyone. She plans to rework her stage performance into a version with which to bring music to those spaces where it’s rarely heard, and sorely needed.
“That again brings me back to my time at the Red Onion and finding that shared humanity with strangers, and just feeling like we’re all just human beings doing our best, sharing spaces and trying to find joy and make moments worth living,” Vidic says. “What’s the point without it?”
Photo Credit: Sydney Akagi
