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True to form, the latest recording by Rochester-based experimental folk group georgie is thoughtfully complex while also marked by a whimsical and at times absurdist streak.
The album title speaks to those elements. Band founder Clarie McClusky says “Scratching At The Door Until It Opens And Running Outside And Rolling In The Grass” was inspired when she let a friend’s dog outside to the yard. Musings on the concept of captivity mixed with the power of freedom hit her in that moment.
“Just the amount of joy I was witnessing in this dog as it finally got to go outside and roll around,” McClusky recalls. “It was just so beautiful and kind of really relatable to certain moments in life when you feel like, ‘Whoa, this is freedom. This is what my body has been craving all day or all year.’
“And then I just thought it would be funny to have a really long title for an album,” she adds.
The album cover plays with the line between the grotesque and the joyful. It shows an extreme closeup of a knee, bruised and covered in grass stains. McClusky says it was an old photo that she thought synthesized well with the themes of the album.
“You scrape your knee usually when you’re having a lot of fun. I think most people have scraped their knee doing something where they were probably feeling exhilaration or like a lot of silliness or something,” she says. “Definitely people hurt their knees in difficult struggles as well, but I think (the image) is a little bit more of, ‘There’s risks worth taking.’”
The 12-song album is a collection of songs both old and new; some were featured on EPs and live recordings released since the band’s 2023 album, “Intimacy Hangover.”
The band formed a few years prior to that release with a number of other local musicians including guitarist Leaphe Ferm, keyboardist Christina “CC” Das, trombonist Duvanté Cora, bassist Allegra “Rick” Dziedzic, cellist Andie Burkey and drummer Connor Benincasa. With georgie, the members have taken an intentionally collaborative approach by making group decisions on songs and the direction of the group.
Irondequoit-raised musician and rap artist Nigel Shola Blair features on the track “The Propaganda And The Pesticides” for this latest album. The Rochester-based Submarine Sound Studios once again mastered “Scratching At The Door” with McClusky giving kudos to producer and engineer Benjamin Wayne Torrey.
Unique to “Scratching At The Door,” several songs run together forming their own mini arcs. For instance, a three-song journey ruminating on city life forms the middle of the album.
“Limits” begins with recordings of New York City subways accompanying McClusky’s reading of a selection from “The Limits of the City” by Murray Bookchin. Instrumentals slowly rise in the first song until erupting in a chaotic ambience blending into the city soundscape in “DISTANCE, RATIONALIZATION, INTOXICATION.”
“Canyon” is the concluding piece where McClusky reflects on the entire sequence, singing: “A city is a canyon and I can’t afford the sky.”
“(Bookchin) was writing about what are the great things about cities and then what are the points where we can’t benefit from them,” she says. “I moved out of (New York City) in 2021. So, I think I was thinking a lot about protests and how different life is in these megacities. It really feels like the center of the world, and you kind of forget anything beyond the city exists. Obviously, there’s ecosystems of all sizes and types in huge cities, but it’s so, like, sealed up or something.
“I guess the main ideas (of the album) for me are like, a certain level of frustration with our…” adds McClusky, pausing to search for the right word. “I guess, society. And also a yearning to create something more positive and more loving. As part of all that, I think having fun and self-expression is part of pushing against what’s frustrating about society for me.”
Another way of pushing against that frustration is the 100 copies of the album that are available to order as vinyl pressings or cassettes. McClusky believes interacting with media physically is different than doing so digitally and another way of maintaining joy.
“It doesn’t go away. It’s not like a file that can be corrupted or removed from streaming. It’s a physical object that somebody can lend their friend or cherish for a long time,” she says. “It’s just nice to get these things in people’s hands and they can have a life of their own.
“I don’t have to know the statistics of how many times it was played. I feel like I’m pushed to be curious about whenever I have stuff online,” continues McClusky. “It’s really hard not to feel motivated to get your numbers up when they’re showing you graphs. I’d rather focus on making the special object and ideally getting them all out so people can hear things and intentionally listen to it. That’s more what I hope for than it being on a playlist.”
Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.
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