New Mystery Girl in the Clear

Photo by Victoria Renard  

We’ve all seen her at some point in our lives – a girl that, though we’ve never seen her before, we just feel there’s something about her. Sometimes we do get to know her; sometimes we don’t.

“That’s the thing about a mystery girl,” mused Chrissy Flatt, who knows a little about this particular subject. “You might see her all the time -- or you may never see her again.”

To some of you, Flatt may be a mystery. But here at Garagerocktopia, we’re all about clearing up the inscrutabilities, particularly when it comes to cool music, and so we’re going to shine a little light for you on New Mystery Girl.

Flatt is the force behind the band, which has turned heads of late thanks to the song “Brand New Love,” which was recently added to the playlist of Little Steven’s Underground Garage. Garagerocktopia was lucky enough to have Flatt give us some clues to what she and New Mystery Girl are all about.

“New Mystery Girl not a band in the traditional sense of a regular band with regular people,” explained Flatt, talking by telephone from Austin, Texas. “it’s more of a concept. I have a vision of what it is that I want to do. Eric Hisaw (guitarist) and I work together to make that happen. A band can be limiting because you do so much of the work, so much of the writing, but then the band can down what you're actually able to do.”

"That said when Bobby Daniel joined us on bass and Hector Munoz on drums (both former Alejandro Escovedo's Sensitive Boys) the songs really came to life live as well as on recording in a more powerful way so I do consider them part of "the band"

Hearing the band’s name might conjure up visions of Scooby-Doo or Agatha Christie, but Flatt says it’s actually derived from “Who Are the Mystery Girls?” by the New York Dolls and Roy Orbison’s “She’s a Mystery to Me.” But Flatt says the band’s name also comes from her own experience of being that girl who’s in a moment where she’s a little short of notoriety but stuck in confines of a place unknown.

“Often,” explained the friendly native-born Texan, “when girls are gathered and a new girl walks into the room, you can always hear one that says ‘who's she?’ and then not like her right away.”

“That's happened to me, and it came from a singer whom I really admired,” Flatt confessed. “At first, I was hurt, but then I realized that maybe it was a compliment. Maybe I was serious enough to intimidate her. Or maybe she actually liked me.”

But lots of people are starting to like New Mystery Girl’s music. Their tunes, while loaded with ‘60s-ish hooks, are bouncy and maybe a little more polished. Flatt aptly describes the sound as “garage-pop.”

Photo by Victoria Renard  

While the current album, Crawl Through Your Hair, does channel decades past, over the long haul NMG’s music has roamed the range a bit.

Previous releases have drawn much from country music and would probably fit comfortably in the clubs of East Nashville, where you can actually find cool country music. Flatt makes no secret of the fact that she’s into many different genres and won’t be beating any one sound to death.

“Just like a lot of good bands, our style has moved around,” said Flatt. “I like many different styles and I appreciate all kinds of music. I'm not a music snob. Buddy Holly is a huge influence on me. With his music, there's just a vast expanse of musical directions. Sam Cooke pretty much also like that.”

Though New Mystery Girl may be new to some, Flatt has been making music for many years. In the last decade, she released some albums under her own name, and already, Flatt’s leanings towards country and British Invasion-style rock were already evident.

Those currents continued on the first New Mystery Girl album, Twist City. Incidentally, the woman whose photo -- taken by the legendary portraitist Paul Hesse -- adorns the album cover looks vaguely like Flatt but is actually her mother, a former model.

During the interview, it becomes clear that Flatt is a serious music historian, who, in addition to Holly and Cooke, acknowledges the sway of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Slim Harpo and perhaps the greatest symbol ever of what Austin music is all about, the late Doug Sahm.

Flatt makes no secret of her appreciation of British Invasion bands and how they actually increased the appreciation of our own home-grown music.

“At the time, much of the general public wasn't privy to the black music being played in the South,” Flatt explained. “People were sheltered from most of its cool energy. It was bands like the Beatles And The Rolling Stones that started serving up the energy of the South to a bigger audience.”

Though we honor garage-rock on this blog, like any kind of music, garage-rock has its share of clunkers. It’s not too hard to find garage-rock that is is over-amateurish and, in the opinion of your humble blogger, retro just for retro’s sake. But for Flatt, her ‘60s leanings is tribute to the honesty and authenticity of that decade.

“I love the energy it's just amazing,” said Flatt. “It's the promise that I'll be moved and shaken. Sometimes the music is just light and fun, but still with a lot of feeling. If a song is silly, it’s because it's meant to be silly, like some of the girl bands. There was also a lot of acting bad, of leaving behind the constriction of the ‘50s.”

Don’t take that to mean Flatt’s heels are dug in at 1969.

“I do stick to a lot of older music but that doesn't mean I'm not open to new music,” Flatt said.  “Mostly, though, somebody will have to recommend it to me. Austin has a lot of cool shops, and I might hear something I like. so I'll ask when I'm at the stores. Sometimes I'll also stumble on to something I like on Facebook.”

Most music aficionados know that Austin is one of the great music cities in the U.S., if not the world. While bands from the Texas capitol aren’t always regulars on the Billboard charts, the density of adventurous and innovative bands is mind-boggling.

And, full disclosure, Austin is actually one of my hometowns – South Austin in the House, baby! I lived a few blocks south of the legendary Continental Club, a venue which regularly featured everything from outlaw country to blues to punk.

Austin is the kind of town where you can walk down a residential neighborhood and hear music wafting from garages and living rooms that sounds better than much of what gets played on American commercial radio.

But I digress. Being in a city dense-packed with some much great music has its challenges, which Flatt – born in Austin and raised all along IH-35 -- has navigated well. One of those is the occasional clannishness of the bands.

”I used to notice that all the musicians had their own little clique,” Flatt recalled. “There was the blues camp, there was the rockabilly camp, etc. They all dressed and talked for the part. So whatever kind of music you were into, you know what store to go to.”

“I never fit in any one category. I always checked all of it out. I’d come around and they'd ask “what are you?”  After a while people started warming up to us, and realizing ‘oh, you're not here to threaten us.’ Which I didn't have time to do anyway.”

New Mystery Girl still performs mostly in the Austin area, where they command a loyal audience. Little by little, thanks in part to "Brand New Love”'s airplay on  LSUG's, that audience is growing.

“A lot of our audience is family and friends,” said Flatt. “We have a nice little scene. But now we have a new audience. More people are contacting us, and our CD sales have gone up. a lot of my friends  take pictures of my song displayed on their radio. Radio and the internet have been amazing. You hear from people all over the world and of course you get some revenue from that.”

The real music geeks may notice Flatt’s surname, which is the same as an American music immortal whose first name was Lester. Though Flatt said her father also had musical inclinations, she couldn’t say definitively whether she was related to the bluegrass legend.

  

”Lester Flatt may possibly have been a distant cousin of mine,” said Flatt. “I do know this -- I grew up listening to his music and others like him. That music wasn't so cool at the time. I would be playing it in the on the car radio and people would hear it and look at me very funny.”

Enjoy this story? You might also check out our features on Soraia and Genya Ravan.


The Garagerocktopia World continues next time with a feature on a very cool British band, Oh! Gunquit, who combine garage, rockabilly, punk and R&B for a sound not like any other.