Pamela Connolly and Cathy McGuinness, of the excellent, yearning, grinding melody-wranglers Pillow Queens, are “coming down from being on tour”, after a run of European gigs supporting the Los Angeles band Lord Huron.
“A lot of it is just because your days aren’t structured as much any more,” Connolly, who sings and plays guitar and bass, says. “But a lot of it is probably 25 days in a row of drinking, even if it was just one or two drinks. I can imagine your body’s just, like, ‘Uuurgh’.”
“A tour is quite jam-packed,” McGuinness, who plays guitar, says. “You drive to the destination, you soundcheck, you eat, you play, you sell merch.”
“I’ve had to be my full social self for 25 days in a row,” Connolly says.
RM Block
Was it good?
“It was great, really, really, really good.”
“Paris just felt like it soared,” McGuinness adds. “It feels like we’ve levelled up in a scary way. There was an intensity.”
“This is our first significant tour without Rachel,” Connolly says about Rachel Lyons, the band’s long-time drummer, who recently left to pursue another career. “It’s a hard one to adjust to when you’re bringing other people into a dynamic that you’ve built over the years. It can be a bit strange, but it’s also quite refreshing as well, to see how our sound changes as we grow.”
“I think it made us all individually reflect on where we’re at with Pillow Queens,” McGuinness says. “I feel like there’s a new energy ... We’re just going for it now.”
They’re currently caught between the future and the past as they prepare for a National Concert Hall gig marking five years since they released their debut album, In Waiting. The band formed in 2016, and they had all been in other bands before. What was different about Pillow Queens?
“I think, for me anyway, it was the first time that I was in a band with all women,” McGuinness says. “So I felt like it was a communication that I had never had the pleasure of experiencing before.”
How was that different?
“Our worldview,” McGuinness says.
“People who I’ve been in bands with before were some of my very best friends, but women and men definitely have a very different life experience.
“So then, when you take a step further and we’re all queer, we understand each other on a level that straight white men probably can’t,” she says. “I guess you’ve just experienced the world through the same kind of lens, and that makes for something very interesting and cool to happen.”
“We also had the luxury of knowing a lot of really talented people in our bubble,” Connolly says. “I have joked that it would probably have been really hard for us to not make an all-queer girl band, considering what our social lives were like at the time.”
“I think Sarah and Pamela were probably more in tune with themselves, more so than I was when we started Pillow Queens,” McGuinness says, referring to Sarah Corcoran, her fellow vocalist and bass player.
This is the thing you’ll tell your kids: at the pub I used to go to, all the most talented people in the country would drop in and sing
“I was very much, like, ‘Do we have to have a queer drummer? Is that really so important?’ And then, when we had created an environment that was for queer women, it was, like, ‘Oh, I have been lacking this representation.’ I didn’t even know myself that I was missing it.”
They had been influenced by everything from Rory Gallagher to Nirvana to Rilo Kiley, but by the time they were recording In Waiting they were trying to create their own sound.
“Some of the songs were written right before we went into studio,” Connolly says. “Others were written at the very beginning of the band and shaped by us growing as a band together ... The likes of Holy Show, we’d been playing that since the beginning, but at the very end on the outro we would sing Celine Dion. It felt really good.” She laughs. “I was really into Celine Dion at the time.”
“And then, obviously, when we were making the record, we needed to come up with another outro, because we can’t pay for Celine Dion!” says McGuinness.
“HowDoILook used to be called Easter Sunday, and if you dig out the old version the melody and words are mostly the same, but the vibe is entirely different. We were stitching songs together a little more than we do now.”
In Waiting is also unapologetically Irish, melodically and thematically. “I think it’s us showcasing how important folk vocals have been to all of our music tastes,” Connolly says. “On that record you can tell we were listening to a lot of trad ...
“I’d go to Walsh’s when I lived in Stoneybatter. Junior Brother might be there, or the Lankum heads, or The Mary Wallopers or Lisa O’Neill, and I remember thinking, ‘This is my life. This is the thing you’ll tell your kids: at the pub I used to go to, all the most talented people in the country would drop in and sing.’”
Why do they think the record resonated with people?
“A lot of people have said to us that, for them, that particular album represents a very lonely and bleak time in their life, because obviously we brought it out in Covid,” McGuinness says. “It reminds them of a lack of intimacy, and it’s a very intimate record in terms of yearning ...
“I think also, after the marriage referendum, it was a real important time in gay people’s lives and liberal people’s lives. And it kind of feels like Pillow Queens has become – it sounds supercheesy – but this real community.
We’ve written a good chunk of record number four
“After gigs we’d have parents coming up to us and just being, like, ‘God, it’s so important to see you guys on stage. It’s really helping our queer son or daughter.’”
Does that representational role feel even more important now because the context has darkened for queer people and marginalised groups internationally?
“We have struggled with being seen as a ‘queer band’ in bold,” Connolly says. “We never wanted to turn away from it at all. We sing about being queer. We will always sing about being queer, because we sing about romance, we sing about our lives.
“Sometimes we get a little bit frustrated when questions would always be going in that direction, but because of how much darker it’s gotten we now think we need to get out of our heads when it comes to that, because there’s something more important going on. And we want to proudly be called a queer band.”
“It’s just the climate that we’re living in, sadly,” McGuinness says. “We’d love for it not to be a conversation. But when we’re seeing our trans friends’ rights being taken we will absolutely give the floor to trans rights and let the music take a back seat.”
Anti-trans feeling is “one of those things that’s quite frightening when you see it, especially in the UK.
“When it grows legs, and grows quite powerful legs, you look at your watch and you’re, like, ‘Oh God, it’s only a matter of time until it creeps its way into our environment ...’ It’s the same with the growth of the right wing in this country, and while you see it popping up, you will also see it being hit down by the majority of people.”
Why do they think Irish bands are so politically outspoken relative to US and UK bands? “It could be the closeness of the Irish scene,” Connolly says. “So while we don’t all know each other personally, you feel bolstered by your peers and able to say more political stuff. And in this country, personally, I think if you’re not pro Palestine, that’s the weird thing.”
“The UK being a little bit more complacent, they just don’t have it in their fibre, I suppose, from their history,” McGuinness says. “They haven’t been in the hands of the British Empire, so maybe it’s not in their blood so much.”
What’s next for Pillow Queens? “We’ve written a good chunk of record number four,” McGuinness says. “We’re just going to keep on writing until we can write no more. I assume we’ll record it at some stage.”
“Here’s hoping,” Connolly says. “I mean, I keep on writing songs and I’m, like, ‘There’s a second verse in there somewhere.’”
They’re writing together in a windowless practice room in East Wall in Dublin. “It can be quite maddening but also a bit euphoric when you get into a groove and are just seeing if you can find something,” Connolly says.
“A lot of it comes from really interesting guitar sounds that Cathy makes.”
(McGuinness looks touched.)
“We all have just massive amounts of voice notes [on our phones]. Some of them are me waking up in the morning thinking I’ve just come up with something, and then I listen back to it and it’s gibberish.”
“I’ll mark where [the voice note] is recorded, so it’s, like, ‘Tesco’, and then just muttering like a mad person,” McGuinness says.
We talk a little about the bands they’re listening to (Waxahatchee, Wednesday, Amyl and the Sniffers) and the authors they’re reading (Chloe Michelle Howarth, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Edna O’Brien) and the way the band have changed.
“I definitely continue to have impostor syndrome, but I feel like we’re more confident in ourselves,” McGuinness says. “Pillow Queens, in its infancy, very much just happened. Popularity kind of fell on to us.
“Whereas now I feel like we’re confident musicians and performers and businesswomen. We’ve grafted really hard, and I feel like it shows in our live performance.”
How do they feel when they look back at In Waiting?
“It did feel really lucky how much sense that record made, considering it was just an accumulation of our work” Connolly says. “But I guess that’s what a record is. We assumed that it might be a little bit janky, but it just made so much sense.”
Pillow Queens play the National Concert Hall, in Dublin, on Tuesday, October 21st
