“Why the Mud Flap Girl?” My friends have asked me.  “Does it really represent your music?”  “Are you trying to be ironic?”  I’ll do my best to answer those questions here.

About a year ago, I met Ric Menck.  Ric strikes me as an artist who really gets other artists.   He’s a musician and songwriter who plays in the revered Indie band Velvet Crush. He’s played drums with Liz Phair, Marianne Faithful, and Aimee Mann.  He sent me a Facebook message, earlier this year, and in it he said, “In our culture now, people are used to things happening very quickly.   TV shows like American Idol perpetuate the myth that an entertainer can become famous overnight. The reality is, it takes a lifetime for an artist to gestate.”

Gestation.  What a great metaphor for the life of an artist.

I’ll offer these broad strokes about my own gestation.  Sometimes I’m asked when I started making music.  It’s a difficult question to answer.  I can’t think of a time, in my life, when it wasn’t there.  You can’t take water out of mud.

In the late 90’s, I endured the sudden end of a significant relationship.  It’s sounds like a bad stereotype, but those things in life that are the most painful can sometimes lead us to where we’re supposed to go.    At that time, I flashed on this image of myself as some girl left on a dirt road, splattered with mud from a late-model pick-up truck as is screeched away.  In my imagining, there were chrome “mud flap girls” on the back end of the the truck, and they were also splattered with mud as it sped off.   I didn’t realize, at the time, that being hit with that particular “imagined mud” would be the start of a better life.  Songs started pouring out of me.

Enter, the Mud Flap Girl.   As a young girl, I’d written embryonic songs – but now I wrote with a vengeance.   I wrote my first serious body of work and did a short pressing / limited release of Mud Flap Girl my “first CD” in the early 2000’s.   I set up my music publishing, through BMI, and named it after my curvy, mud-soaked friend.

Here were are, about 10 years later, and she has a new life.  Philip Warbasse has put her into the design for a QR Code, to represent my music, through his company Print 2D.   This new technology is, to quote Philip, “In it’s infancy now but within a year or two, this will be mainstream.” Users can scan the 2D Barcode, with a smartphone or iphone, and be taken to the music via a designed mobile environment.   The “readers / reader apps” for this technology can be easily downloaded – but will become more and more available, in cell phones, as the platform takes hold.   I’m thrilled to be in on the front end of this curve.  I’m sure there will be many more applications…

As to the Mud Flap Girl, “Does she really represent my music?” I dunno – I like to think that there’s a certain grittiness to what I do musically.  There’s a little dirt under my writer’s nails, a small-town innocence, a femininity…

“Am I trying to be ironic?”  Absolutely.