The Gossip on “Lesbian Processing” With Rick Rubin: The Story Behind “Music for Men”

Photo: Lee Broomfield
When the Gossip’s third album Standing in the Way of Control broke huge in Britain, the public appeared to be staring at two Beth Dittos: the outspoken media minx who bounced into the U.K. gossip sheets and front row seats at Fashion Week, and the fierce frontwoman attempting to jostle society’s expectations with a beat you can dance to.
The band’s new Rick Rubin-produced album Music for Men (due October 6th) makes a fabulous case for the latter taking over: it’s an amazing, multifaceted, socially conscious record that seems destined to take the Gossip to even greater heights. “It has a lot of meanings,” Ditto tells RS of the record’s title, “but I also thought it was just a cool sound, that it sounded really good — it’s that simple.”
Ditto says she and bandmate Nathan Howdeshell (a.k.a. Brace Paine) write songs kind of magically — “Nathan will have a guitar part he made on his laptop and I’ll go into the hotel room and just sing over it. The lyrics and the melody come together at the exact same time always” — and Rubin seems to have been the ideal shepherd for the band’s first major label record. “He is really nurturing,” she says. “He always wants to make sure you have what you need, and I’m not talking about ‘Do you need whiskey, ’cause we’ll get you drunk.’ I’m talking, what do you need in your soul to make you feel as good as you can or as you can sound? Because the better you feel, the better the record’s going to come out. It was like lesbian processing 101.”
What Ditto says she needed and got in droves was the confidence to expand even her own expectations of what the Gossip could be. “His whole vision was seeing […]

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