Cynthia G. Mason

Author: Sara Sherr
Source: The Philadelphia Daily News, Yo! Features

Local singer-songwriter Cynthia G. Mason has been a fixture on the indie rock scene since the mid-’90s, when she started putting out cassette-only recordings on her own label, Spiderwoman Records. The 32-year-old West Philly native is gentle enough for the ‘XPN/Lilith crowd, but her darkly observant lyrics and intricate guitar picking have earned her comparisons to Cat Power, Suzanne Vega and Kristin Hersh. She took a break to study at Temple Law School and is now a public-interest attorney at Philadelphia Legal Assistance, where she helps low-income women who are victims of domestic violence. Last year, she got her big break when her recording of Richard Buckner’s “Surprise, AZ” ended up on a Believer magazine CD, alongside tracks by Spoon, the Decemberists and the Shins. Mason also loaned her vocals to B.C. Camplight’s “Blood and Peanut Butter,” featured on an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy…” (click here for the rest of the story.)

Author: Brian Howard
Source: Philadelphia City Paper

For Cynthia G. Mason, it was a matter of if, not when.

After a string of cassette-only releases, the singer-songwriter with the rhythmically droning guitar figures, haunting voice and bewitchingly abstract lyrics, released her first CD in 2000. The eponymous seven-song collection on her Spiderwoman label earned her local plaudits and national acclaim. She started playing with a backing band made up of then-members of skronk-rock outfit Need New Body. The follow-up was being planned. The West Philly native and Penn grad had, it seemed, arrived.

And then the waiting started.

“Then I went to law school,” smiles Mason over a plate of French toast at Little Pete’s diner, around the corner from the apartment she’s lived in for the last nine years. “I guess there were several attempts [to record a follow-up], and a bunch of really wonderful Philly musicians along the way who wanted to help out. Everyone was supportive and great, but for some reason another year would go by, and I’d kind of make another attempt with another few people, never finishing the original idea. There are some unfinished demos out there.”

For Mason, one roadblock was that writing and playing music is often a solitary endeavor, so scheduling with bandmates who had other projects proved difficult. “I would find myself playing solo, and then playing with other people, and then playing solo again,” she says, “and I couldn’t figure out what kind of record I wanted to make.”

But the big holdup was the simple fact that putting oneself through law school, and the esquire title that comes with it, is a bit all-consuming. Now a graduate of Temple Law, Mason works as an attorney for Philadelphia Legal Assistance, serving victims of domestic abuse.

During the long six years since her last record, a couple of showcases for labels that bore no fruit soured Mason on the business a bit, and “I felt like it was time to take a step back and focus on what I liked about music again.”

So she started playing as a duo with Larry D. Brown, one of the guys in her old backing band, and started having fun again. “He knew I still wanted to finish a full-length album, and he also knew that I wasn’t really interested in going into a studio again,” she recalls. “One day he lugged over his old four-track and his favorite Radio Shack microphone and said, ‘Make a record. Work on it whenever you feel like it, and have fun.'”

And that’s when Quitter’s Claim (High Two), Mason’s first released recording in six years, began to take shape.

“My apartment gets amazing light in the morning. That’s such a nice time to be there,” says Mason. “When I began recording the album, I set up the four-track on my little round kitchen table in front of the window, put all the mics in the mic stands and plugged all the cables in and then just left everything like that for a few months. In the morning, before work, I would make some tea and record songs. I had a flexible schedule at the time, so I was going in to work late. I had the whole morning to hang out and work on the songs. I get up pretty early these days, so I don’t get the same light, but it’s still nice to make music before going in to work.”

For Mason, it was something of a return to basics, to the days when she’d record and release her cassettes through Spiderwoman. She finished the album this summer and decided put it out herself. “I had it mastered, got the artwork done, and it was about to be pressed,” recalls Mason. A serendipitous encounter with Dan Piotrowski of Philly’s High Two Records — home of Adam Arcuragi, Dave Burrell and Sonic Liberation Front — changed that. “I told him I was about to release a new record. He said he was interested in putting it out. It was really a stroke of good luck.” She gave him the e-mail contact of the place about to press the CD and Quitter’s Claim was added to the roster of one of Philly’s up-and-coming labels.

“This is cheesy, but things kind of work out when you stop trying,” says Mason of her previous attempts to land a label.

It was a lucky stroke for High Two, as Mason’s first released songs since the turn of the century — save for her stunning cover of Richard Buckner’s “Surprise, AZ” on last year’s Believer magazine compilation — delivers on the promise of that eponymous CD and ups the ante. Mason unfurls her trademark meditative rhythmic picking — “I consider myself a rhythm guitarist, even though I’m finger picking,” she explains — on a collection of 10 songs that ruminate, not surprisingly, on the frustration of trying to get things accomplished. Opening track “Like a Lifer Out for Good” and its sentiments of quiet desperation and tacit acceptance leave the listener wondering if the album will continue to track two, while “Fits and Starts” (“I keep threatening to disconnect”) could be read as an encapsulation of the last six years, and “Quit While You’re Misled” is, admittedly, as bald-faced as Mason gets about her musical hiatus. It’s not all about consternation, though. “The Way the Morning Came” is a touching if sad study on love and loss (“Every minute was a track star, with no skill for running late”) and “Nerve,” with its chorus “we’re more giddy than daring,” chronicles the nervous and nerve-wracking first flirtations of a romance.

Mason concedes that her songs all originate from her own experiences, and that she attempts to blur the details both to protect the guilty and in hopes that listeners can imbue them with their own meaning.

Despite the long layoff, Mason is both relieved that she’s finished Quitter’s Claim by her self-imposed deadline — “I’d decided December 2006 seemed like a good time to finish the record” — and that it turned out, thanks in large part to help from Brown, who plays on the album, the way she wanted. Ultimately, she was hoping to put out a record she could re-create live.

Because yes, despite the day job, Mason knows that making the record is only part of the equation.

“I have a generous vacation package,” says Mason of the prospects of taking some time next year to tour. Then she grins: “It hasn’t come up yet.”

Author: Michael Pelusi
Source: Philadelphia City Paper Thursday, January 11, 2001

“…While songwriting can be a potentially frustrating waiting game, fortunately Mason’s been patient, honing her share of gems. Her early work was recorded solo on her home four-track and released on two cassettes—Untitled (1996) and Critical Neighborhood Map (1998)—on her label, Spiderwoman Records. She was pretty wary about working with other musicians…However, once she started hanging out at Soundgun Studio at the behest of one of the owners, her friend Edan Cohen, Mason changed her tune…Whatever diffidence she once felt toward adding other players, you’ll find few traces of it now. The resulting self-titled, Cohen-produced album is an exquisitely arranged affair, from the precise folk-rock backing on “Measure” to the unsettled string section on “Wit’s End”…Live the songs take on yet another new life. Among the musicians recruited for the album was Chris Powell, who in turn introduced Mason to Larry Brown and
Chris Reggiani. All three are also members of Need New Body, and you can just see the standard press blurb: Acoustic guitar-strummin’ songstress…joins forces with three-fifths of an art-jazz-rock freak-out troupe. But that’s a bit reductive when it comes to this group. Why accentuate polarities when they make music that sounds so natural? Their supple renditions of “Subtle Things” and “For a Living”—with Reggiani’s sturdy bass, Brown’s subtle guitar colorings and Powell’s inventive, quietly urgent percussion—underline the restless, even angry emotions that lurk in Mason’s songs. ‘We pretty much took the tunes and just arranged them for a live setting,’ says Brown, ‘And that’s something I think is a really great achievement. You come up with an album like that with great string arrangements, percussion, and computer effects and then take it and re-do it all over again for the sake of playing live. With these guys, with Chris, Chris, and Cynthia, we could probably do it again. Just for the fun of it.’”…