Interview: Harley Quinn Smith’s the tenth don’t make boring art, so fuck off.

Two years into their marriage, Margaret Keane’s lifeblood was snatched away. Her husband Walter Keane mounted an exhibit at hungry i, a comedy club in San Francisco, to sell some of his work. Unbeknownst to her, Walter claimed ownership over the famous “Big Eyes” series and set off decades worth of turmoil, both in and out of court. Margaret eventually triumphed and was awarded $4 million in damages in a 1986 court ruling. 28 years later, her story hit the silver screen in a Tim Burton-directed, Amy Adams-starring bio pic dissecting the truth behind the canvas in classic Hollywood glamour. “Back home he tried to explain it away. He said, ‘We need the money. People are more likely to buy a painting if they think they’re talking to the artist. People don’t want to think I can’t paint and need to have my wife paint,'” Margaret has said about the night things first went awry. “‘People already think I painted the big eyes and if I suddenly say it was you, it’ll be confusing and people will start suing us.’ He was telling me all these horrible problems.”

Men claiming the work of others, particularly that of women, has a long, tired history. In 1971, John Baldessari took credit for an art-piece called “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art,” which was performed by a group of his students at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in Halifax, Canada. Reportedly, Baldessari (teaching at CalArts at the time) couldn’t fund his own trip to Canada and so enlisted volunteers to etch the handwritten phrase into the walls of the gallery, thus making a statement about the exhaustion of early ’70s art and its many conventions. But at the core, it was a way to manipulate art itself and destroy trust between creators and bystanders.

Punk-rock band called the tenth ⏤ fronted by Harley Quinn Smith and Taylor Blackwell  and featuring musicians Kelly Cruz (drums) and Eden Hain (guitar) ⏤ reframe art’s intention with the merciless “I Will Not Make Any Boring Art,” the hair-raising opener to their first full-length album, Dunes. Guitars rub against one another in a provocative, thumb-biting display serving to squelch any doubts. “We’ll just put our daggers in,” Smith spits venom in retaliation against a system constructed to devalue the art of women. Blackwell, also a visual artist, splashes harmony and her own vocal stabs parallel to Smith’s groundwork, allowing the lyrics to swell and erupt. The song also makes mention of the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous activist group formed in 1985 to combat ramptant sexism and racism within the art world. “There’s a bad habit of people, particularly men, taking credit for art they didn’t make,” stresses Smith to B-Sides & Badlands in a wide-ranging interview.

“I Saw a Ghost” bleeds the psychedelic with the dangerously macabre, as Smith twists the knife into the past. “Nobody warned you not to be on my bad side / Now, I kicked you out of my life and said my final goodbye / But when you come to my mind, I just wanna fucking die,” she growls with one of the album’s most visceral and deadly lyrics, originally intended as the bridge for another cut called “Goodbye Chelsea.” “I kind of fell in love with [the lyrics] too much and wanted to write it its own song. I began writing this song about the same guy from the song ‘Sid’ on our EP [2018’s ‘Boys We Don’t Know’]. He’s provided me a lot of inspiration, to say the least,” she says.

Smith bounces between the galvanizing shimmer of “Hymns and Hieroglyphs” to the tight wriggle of “Stop Pretending the Song’s Not About Me” to the scattered and torn confessional “I Don’t Feel This Way Anymore.” Blackwell’s and Hain’s guitar work splits open old wounds with a tender ache, stealing away parts of their former selves for safe-keeping; the production is both glittering and gritty, shallow and deeply-scarred, anthemic and delicate. Dunes shifts through scrappy fragments of pain, love, loss and coming-of-age in a tragic world, and the two singers, songwriters and musicians are only trying to make sense of who they are and what it all means right here, right now.

“We’ve had so many of these songs ready for a while now, but they didn’t have a place to fit in with that EP. We wanted to still stick with a theme, while also providing a wider range of material that didn’t all stick to one specific idea,” mulls Smith, whose acting career is reaching new highs this year with such stints in All These Small Moments (starring Molly Ringwald) and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Margo Robbie, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio). Additionally, Blackwell works extensively as a visual artist and illustrator and likewise has several upcoming projects, including the thriller The Exposed (now in post-production).

“We actually didn’t have a goal for the tone of the album until we picked the name ‘Dunes,’ which didn’t come until far into the process. We kept hearing the word ‘dunes’ everywhere to the point that it was becoming odd. It’s not a super commonly used word in normal conversation, so we were kind of taken off guard when it kept coming up,” says Smith. “It felt like the universe was saying, ‘I’m sending you a clear message homies! Take it or leave it!’ So, we then realized there was no escaping dunes, and we named the album. It was only then that we realized ‘dunes’ can also be representative of the ups and downs an individual will go through in their lifetime, and that’s how this whole thing can connect. And from there, everything just made a lot more sense.”

Dunes is out now.

Below, Smith explores many of the record’s standout moments and discusses weight of burgeoning fame, the allure of tragedy and learning of music’s vitality to her well-being.

“Goodbye Chelsea” is surefire standout, seemingly in which you are wrestling with a former, fairly toxic, lover. “I’ll resurrect you if you want me,” you sing. What did you draw upon for this song?

This song means a lot to me and probably has the most interesting backstory out of all the tracks from the album. Taylor and I took a trip to New York together right before we started recording our EP in August. We wanted to hit up as many punk historic sites as possible and of course, most importantly, the Chelsea Hotel. The Chelsea Hotel is probably one of the most iconic and important locations in all of music history. It’s where Nancy Spungen was mysteriously killed; where Patti Smith lived with Robert Mapplethorpe; and where so many other music legends spent their time.

We had been looking forward to going for so long, but when we got there, it was being torn down and renovated. They were tearing the walls apart and erasing all the incredible history of the building. It left me fucking heartbroken. I’ve spent so much time in New York over my life, but I had never been to the Chelsea, and when I did, it was gone. It seriously ripped me apart. We got back to where we were staying and I sat on the fire escape and wrote this song. Although it’s about the Chelsea, I did want to personify it as a woman. I feel like the Chelsea really did have a soul and a personality to it. That place saw so much and knew the answers to questions no one else probably ever will. The Chelsea isn’t just a hotel; it’s a whole damn person.

“Hymns and Hieroglyphs” has more of a commercial lean to it. The images of “hymns” against “hieroglyphs” has a compelling duality to it, as if “religion” against “the secular.” Did that play a part into this song for you?

This is quite funny, actually. So, we named all of our songs, then we decided to change every single one. I used to be really emo, and so I was a big, big, big fan of bands like Fall Out Boy and Panic! At the Disco, who had very long and kind of non-sensical song titles. I really wanted to do that for our songs, so it was more like a secret that we shared as to what the song titles really mean. This one was not as secretive, though, so I will share. Taylor and I are both practicing witches, so the word “hymn” is one of importance and interest to us. Taylor also mentions the word “hieroglyphs” in the song, which when I heard it I was like, “Fuck this is good!” So, in the renaming process of the songs, we kind of put two and two together and landed on “Hymns and Hieroglyphs.”

Generally, the lyrics are cheeky and laced in cynicism, particularly as you deal with various relationships. Has that always been prevalent and key to your storytelling?

We want to be honest in our lyrics. I am personally an extremely open person, and I believe in calling people out on their shit. That’s what a lot of the songs I write are about ⏤ making people take credit for the mistakes they’ve made.

Is “Stop Pretending the Song’s Not About Me” a play on Carly Simon’s “Vain”?

No, but that’s funny because we want to do a cover of that song! This song actually has kind of a funny story, too. There was this guy that Taylor was interested in who was being kind of a dick to her, and it really bothered me. He clearly had feelings for her, but he wouldn’t admit it. He was definitely being immature. This boy also has a band, and he wrote a song that Taylor and I strongly believed was about her. Like the brave, badass lady she is, Taylor called and asked him, and he denied it. It made me so angry that I wrote this song about him. Taylor is such a nice person, that I feel sometimes I’m like the devil on her shoulder. I felt I had to write a diss track about him for her.

Most of the songs on the record are unexpectedly short, with many coming in at just two minutes or less. Did you feel you said all you needed to say on these?

Yes! We get our point across pretty fast most of the time. We don’t fuck around with what we want to say. We get right to the point.

“Friends on Billboards” feels as if you’re dismantling how we as a society dehumanize Hollywood and how we perceive fame. Was that your intent?

Very much so. Taylor and I are both actors and have many friends who are also in entertainment. It’s a very strange, but lovely thing, being able to literally drive down the street and see your friends up on huge billboards. It’s indescribably weird, but we wanted to have a song that spoke to that piece of life that is kind of only specific to people in Hollywood. Entertainment is a very odd business to be in and is not always great, but then there are incredibly special moments like seeing your best friend’s face on Sunset Boulevard.

Have you felt there’s been a tremendous amount of weight and pressure that’s resulted as your star has risen through the years?

Someone described it quite well on my Instagram the other day. They said something along the lines of “being a child of a celebrity is nice because you already have your foot in the door, but you’re also constantly paying off a tremendous debt by having to prove yourself worthy of being where you are.” I have to show the world that I am actually an individual with my own talents and creative endeavors. I’m not just the daughter of Kevin Smith. So, in that way, yes, I have felt a ton of pressure because I just want people to see me for me.

Speaking of Hollywood, you’re involved with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood coming out this summer. The whole story surrounding Sharon Tate and her death is so devasting, yet we as a culture eat up such catastrophes in a weird, ravenous way. Why?

I think it’s quite odd that people are so fascinated with murders and such cynicism. Suddenly, everyone’s talking about Ted Bundy, and it’s like wait what? Why am I driving down Hollywood Blvd and seeing Ted Bundy’s face plastered on a billboard? I think it’s because we’re living through a very dark time right now. There’s so much hatred and evil, mostly stemming from the White House, but there’s now this darkness looming over everyone. I think it’s kind of infected the minds of Hollywood to go darker and to become more sinister. It’s sad on one hand, but also I think getting a bit darker in entertainment isn’t a bad thing. Life isn’t always beautiful and lovely, clearly, so why represent it that way? I believe the dark and the evil should stay strictly in creativity like music, movies, TV, and stay out of the White House…

What did you come to understand about yourself through making this record?

I came to understand that I can’t live without making music. I started playing bass when I was twelve, and then stopped for probably four years. I wasn’t ever very happy during that time. It wasn’t until I started playing bass again a year ago that I realized how much I needed music. It was like a missing piece of my being was filled, and I could truly be my full self.

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