by Patrick Rapa
Elizabeth Elmore knows how to write songs about loss. "I’ve done plenty of practicing," she belts out with her new band, the Reputation, "These days I say goodbye more than anything." Her soaring voice and tight riffs tell you "Alaskan" is a rock song - maybe the best she’s ever written - but the music cannot entirely offset the aching, bitter lyrics.
"A lot of the most important people in my life disappeared in a very short period of time," Elmore explains over the phone from her Chicago apartment. The former frontwoman of the critically lauded but short-lived Champaign, Ill., band Sarge, found that she had fewer friends once that band split up, and she was just a regular old law school student. Which is not to say she ever gave up music entirely. Elmore, a reputed and confessed workaholic, drove herself around the country for a solo tour to promote Sarge’s beautiful posthumous CD, Distant. Unwilling to surrender to the singer-songwriter, acoustic mindset, she lugged around a Marshall half-stack and an electric guitar, playing loud rock songs alone onstage. These shows were powerful and engaging, but still, it was obvious she’d rather be in a band.
So next she hit the road with the ElizabethElmore4, which was really just a group of friends helping her get that old rock n’ roll feeling again. She had no idea it would solidify into an actual band. Like Sarge, the Reputation is a skilled rock group that has already undergone its share of lineup changes - Elmore’s lost more drummers than Spinal Tap.
They have a self-titled debut CD coming out March 19 on Initial Records, and it’s comprised mostly of songs about accepting that people disappear. "I wanted to name the album The Uselessness of Friends, which is the title of one of the songs," laughs Elmore. "Everybody in the band vetoed that. They said that was a little bit melodramatic and dark."
Though her words may come across as pessimistic in print, she laughs as she says these things. Elmore is nothing but enthusiastic about the Reputation. "They’re really great guys," she says. "Hopefully they’ll stick around."