There was an 11-year-old figure skater who met a 12-year-old hockey player and her life was forever changed.

“He told me about a college radio station and I started listening to college radio from my little stupid radio in my room, and I remember listening to R.E.M. and Siouxsie and the Banshees and weird stuff like Circle Jerks, and I would tape the radio and that was it for me,” Rykarda Parasol says, “That was a big deal.”

If Nick Cave had a uterus and was impregnated by Johnny Cash, Rykarda Parasol would be their talented daughter with the low voice.

Some of her songs start slow and draw you in, swaying to her ballad, then break into driving rock rhythms where she calls the demons up from her kidneys and wails her confessions, and when she has you by the throat, everything drops back to the minimal ballad. She then gives you time to catch your breath with her slide guitar backed songs, reminiscent of a few tracks off of Mother Juno by Gun Club. Parasol is our modern day Marianne Faithful, and we’re only now witnessing the beginning of her legacy.

Her mother had other plans for her. She wanted Rykarda to be a figure skater.

“I was a good skater, but I always got last because of my music choices. I remember skating to Blondie and I got a lecture for that because I wasn’t really into the typical ‘The Firebird’ by Stravinsky bullshit. I didn’t want to do just what everybody else was doing,” Parasol says, “There was a Pink Floyd instrumental that I skated to and I thought, ‘Ok, now I’ve got them, I can skate to an instrumental and it’s great and innovative’.”

Parasol picked up the guitar when she was around age 19. 

“I would play ‘Louie, Louie’ over and over again, which is essentially what I do now. It’s all just three chords,” Parasol says, “I make no attempt to be a guitar player because I know I’ll never be any good. But, luckily, the strange way I play and what I can play is miraculously the sound I want.”

It’s a sound many people are attracted to. Parasol has developed quite a following and a lot of her gigs are played to full-capacity crowds.

She performs solo as well as with her band, the Tower Ravens. In May she performed solo as an opener for Colin Hay at the Red Devil Lounge in San Francisco, who is best known for his years as lead singer of the Aussie band, Men at Work. Either solo or with back up, Parasol is a powerful performer.

Parasol studied opera when she was younger.

“I couldn’t sing in tune, and I wanted to sing, and I knew my parents wouldn’t pay for singing lessons, so I said, ‘What about opera?’ And that sort of appealed to my mother’s sense of elegance,” Parasol says, “Apparently I was a soprano and very high, but through that I guess I learned how to strengthen the lower voice as well. Then I lived in this apartment building where there were people above and below and side-to-side, and I had to sing really quietly and I think just over time I tried to push it.

“When you’re a female and you try to sing low and you’ve never really sung that way, nobody can hear you, so I’ve had to develop it.”

She has enough songs to record a new release and gave me a sneak preview of three of them. With her eyes closed she strummed the guitar and belted out lyrics that should be Holy Scripture in the bible of romance and heartbreak. 

“I guess when I was growing up and listening to music I was very aware of material that seemed timeless, and I always thought that was more my aesthetic,” Parasol says, “The songs are based from true stories so I really don’t make it up. It just sort of comes.”

Among the tracks are “The Covenant” and a drinking song that I didn’t get the title of, but here’s a taste of the lyrics: “what so we care/of worry and hurt/girls come let us/raise our skirts.”

Bravo!

“I don’t know if it’ll be quite as layered as the last one,” Parasol says of her forthcoming release, “It may be a pretty sparse thing. We’ll see what happens.”

If the songs don’t sound exactly like she wants them to sound, she won’t be in a hurry to get them released.

“I have no fear with recording,” Parasol says, “If it doesn’t work, we’ll go back and record it again.”

She’ll be recording with …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead and Spoon producer, Mike McCarthy in Texas in July. Included in the other soon to be recorded songs are the subjects of heroin, lust, atheism and mind-fuckery, “all with a twinge of humor.”

In addition to the new relese, Parasol has plans for a European tour in the fall.

Parasol lists Nico as one of her major influences. “Now I’m half an interval lower than I’ve ever been, which is probably around Nico’s range,” Parasol says regarding her voice, “It’s really weirdly low. Nico is definitely one of my influences… I think she had an interesting approach to playing music too, because she wasn’t a musician but she wanted desperately to be one. That’s probably not too far off from me, if I have to be honest about it.”

Even with her continued success and her following gaining momentum, her mother still wants Parasol the figure skater.

Regarding her music career Parasol says, “I can’t talk about it with my mother. I’m in the closet with music. I know it’s strange, but she doesn’t want to hear about it, know about it, see it. I’m not really sure why.”

Parasol’s lyrics hint that she’s a fan of literature, and she confirms that.

“The song always starts with a good story for me, otherwise there is simply no point in writing a song. So, it’s like poetry to me no matter what I can or can’t do with my voice,” Parasol says, “I’m more of a writer/reader than musician. I mean, I compensate with what I can bring from that end to music because god knows I ain’t a musician.”

She’s self-deprecating and jokes, “Back when Milton was alive poetry was music. I’m bringing Milton back Timberlake style.”

Listen: Rykarda Parasol  [at myspace.com]

Watch: Rykarda Parasol and the Tower Ravens ”Jam Tart“  [at youtube.com]