Girls In Trouble: Deceptively Sweet

Imagine turning your thesis into an indie rock song series, performing shows with your soon-to-be-husband and some bffs, then having your debut album released on Jdub Records. So is the (albeit extremely truncated) life story of fiddler-vocalist Alicia Jo Rabins. Her self-titled debut album Girls in Trouble drops today. And I, being super-lucky enough to have received a preview copy, have been obsessing over it for months. This is a woman who took obscure and dark stories from the Midrash and turned them in to sweet indie pop ditties. Genius!

The Forward was already singing Girls in Troubles' praises earlier this year. Click for the complete article: Art Pop Indie Rock Meets Midrash

When I caught up with Rabins a few months back she gave me a few interesting nuggets about her life and work:

- Besides performing with (other Jdub band) Golem and Girls in Trouble, Rabins still finds the time to tutor b'nai mitzvah student
- She played violin throughout her childhood but she discovered klezmer fiddling when she found Alicia Svigal's album "Fidl." It piqued her interest because a) it was phenomenal and b) they shared a name
- She got her Masters in Jewish Womens Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhatten - and it was a professor who encouraged her to turn to music for her thesis which we now know, led to Girls in Trouble
- She pays close attention to details in the Midrash and only chooses the most interesting and dark to turn into song form. Here is an example of a story she told me:

"There is this amazing and fairly obscure story in the book of Judges [in which] we dont even get [the woman's] name, just her fathers name in Hebrew, Bat Yiftach (Yiftach's daughter) in English, Jephthah's daughter. it's a parallel to the Abraham and Isaac sacrifice story: some significant variations. Yiftach is a warrior and vows in the heat of battle that if he survives he'll offer the first creature he sees. when he gets back home, who does he see but... his daughter running out to greet him.

Now, he should have known this because in ancient near east tradition this was always what happened, women came out with drums and tambourines to greet victorious warriors returning home so he is like "oh NO" and tells her what happened, she says "well, let me go bewail my virginity with my friends for two months in the woods" and she does. And then returns to him and it reads "he does as he had vowed" and the end of the story is that every year the virgins hold a celebration in her honor. 

it's a little ambiguous what he actually did to her  because the word for offer is "olah" which clearly means burnt offering and that's what he vows but there's kind of an implication he might have consecrated her as a nun or something because of the whole bewailing virginity thing and it never literally says he killed her. 

So, scholars debate this but in context it seems pretty clear that he actually offered her, as in killed her and the most interesting thing to me is that if she could have lived two months away from her family she could have spent the rest of her life away, so why on earth would she return to be sacrificed?!

That's why i wrote the song about her (all the songs are in the women's voices) understand why she might have done this."

Clearly, the subject matter of her songs is pretty intense. That's all for now, dear readers. Keep your eyes peeled for a more complete story on the band, as soon as the group graces the Bay Area with their much-anticipated presence. I'll be first in line.

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