S W A N S - Jarboe interview

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Swans have released their final work, "Soundtracks for the Blind." Michael Gira and Jarboe are closing the final chapter in the long and distinguished life of Swans. The strong, independent, and beautiful Jarboe, graciously shared her unique insight into her music and life.

In an interview featured in "Angry Women in Rock: Vol. 1," Jarboe tells part of her life story.
Jarboe had an unusual childhood. Her father was an undercover F.B.I. agent who was always assuming different personas for spy work in rural America. When he died, Jarboe found all sorts of spy equipment and quite a few tapes of recorded phone conversations. He had their home phone "bugged" and an unknowing Jarboe had her private conversations taped and listened to by her dad. Some of these tapes of Jarboe, as well unknown people, are used in "Soundtracks for the Blind."
As a child, Jarboe learned to sing from her father. She progressed from singing in church choirs, to imitating other people for lounge acts, to doing performance art in galleries, and finally to her own projects and Swans.
In Jarboe's mid 20's she was desperate for the energy and power of performing, but she constantly found the doors of the music industry closed to women and found that the "only way to get close to that power was to have sex with those people." She became involved with the music industry by providing "sexual entertainment" to "big-name rock 'n' rollers."
All of the humiliation she had to endure has enabled her to reach a point in which she is now confident in herself and completely unafraid of an audience. Jarboe says, "Inside I feel quite elegant, and yet what people want to do is describe someone who's been through those experiences as trashy."

She further describes her reaction to sexual degradation by saying, "I really identify with the Clive Barker films, when different creatures pull themselves up from the blood matter and become a form-- I know that well. I absorbed all this destruction, and became someone else."

Her personal life has taken many turns, and possibly the most dramatic was in her late 20's when she had a comfortable life with a husband who was a corporate systems analyst. She balanced the mundane with a secret life in the noise and hardcore music scene. Jarboe decided to give up everything in order to get back to "people who were doing something with their lives" and pursue her dream of becoming a member of Swans.

(Juno, Andrea ed. "Jarboe: Swans" Angry Women in Rock: Vol. 1. Juno Books: New York. 1996. p 9-35.)