Sweet voice, salty language

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This article was published 18/07/2015 (4051 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Don’t get taken in by the honey-blond wholesomeness of Shirley Gnome, the Vancouver singer-songwriter’s angelic voice or her down-home congeniality.

She may look like a fetching cross between Joni Mitchell and LeAnn Rimes in her rose sequinned cowgirl hat and black boots, but her tunes are downright R-rated, as in raunchy and risqué. The 31-year-old free spirit is a little bit country — she spells country without the letter “o” — and a whole lot of smutty.

“I certainly like to play with people’s expectations, because some people really think this blond girl in cowboy boots is going to be their male fantasy and it never turns out the way they want it to,” says Gnome.

The self-described “chanteuse-provocatrice” is making her Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival debut with her solo show, Shirley Gnome: Real Mature, an hour-long series of original music and hardcore musings.

Underneath her dirty ditties about threesomes, one-night stands and anal sex is an attempt to say something honest, insightful or at least witty about love, desire or the state of physical relationships today. Gnome seeks to wipe away the shame surrounding sex, as well as the reluctance to talk about it in public.

“I love pushing boundaries,” she says. “I don’t really, pardon my French, give a shit about what people think. It’s fun for me to push the buttons of people and see how they react. It makes me laugh.”

That tongue-in-cheek approach is evident on her first album, Ho Down, the cover of which is a photo of her passed out in an alley. Her latest, The Lady of the Night, which was released in February, again sports a sexually suggestive photograph of herself.

While her own life is a great source of material, Gnome is inspired by what she has been told in confidence by her girlfriends. The downside is that clueless male spectators occasionally get the wrong idea.

“Every once in a while, some guy will come up and assume I’m going to have sex with them because I sing about it,” she says. “It makes me wonder what’s in their head that makes them think that they are entitled to me. It’s probably something I’ll talk about in a song some day.”

Last November in a bar in Revelstoke, B.C., her audience included a trio of loogans who were shouting distasteful remarks at her. She didn’t appreciate being threatened; she shifted gears into anger pretty quickly.

“Hecklers are something I can deal with, but these guys were threatening sexual violence,” she says. “I just stopped the show and yelled at them like I was their nanny. They were like three children who had never been taught to be respectful. One walked out and the other two complained to the owner, who kicked them out.”

She recently added her mother as security on the fringe circuit. That led to questions about her mom’s reaction to her professional potty mouth.

“My parents think it’s hilarious,” she says. “I think they can see the line between fact and fiction, that the situations go beyond my personal life. It’s not like I’m bringing dudes home to their house. We don’t have that arrangement.”

As far as the explicit language is concerned, her folks have heard it all before. Gnome remembers playing a game with her brother as a child called Let’s Talk Like Dad, during which they would swear as much as possible. Her father did use profanity around the house, she says. The kids were told they could swear at home, but never in public or at anyone.

“When I was a teenager, my dad played me Lenny Bruce and George Carlin albums,” she recalls. “He always wanted us to know the F-word existed before television. We were an uncensored family.”

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca