There is not much in Fresno, California: heat, gang violence and farm after farm after farm.  Taking this into consideration, it is almost shocking that in the middle of Ag-ville, USA, comes one of today’s foremost gothic acts, The Shroud.  They have appeared on several compilations and are veterans of the goth scene, headed by the beautiful Lydia Fortner, whose career has spanned nearly a decade.  There have been several bumps in the road and several line-up changes, but through it all, the band has persevered and continues to produce some of the most beautiful music in the scene today.  Their music is characterized by rich textures surrounding Lydia’s powerful voice.  Their most recent release, A Dark Moon Night, continues a legacy that I hope continues far into the next millenium.  After a few weeks of phone tags and some cancellations on my part, I finally had the privilege of speaking to Lydia about life and the band.  Lydia is even more charming than I expected.  To be honest, I went into the interview a bit nervous, but her candidness and her laughter put me right at ease.

Did the band form on Halloween ’91?
That was the first official performance of the first line-up that was actually The Shroud.  The Shroudettes started in 1989, which was the original thing this grew out of.  I tend to not mention The Shroudettes anymore at this point, because it is so far away from where we are right now.

Under what circumstances did The Shroud end up forming then?
The Shroudettes were more cheesy death rock stuff.  As time evolved, some people still wanted to do cheesy death rock and I wanted to do something a little more serious and with more potential to express more things.  So, those of us who wanted to do that basically dropped the other people and became The Shroud.

At the beginning of your bio, there is a mention of neo-paganism...what do you mean with that term?
I do think, there is resurgence in pagan ideas, particularly in our subculture, but in general as well.  I see a lot of it cropping up here and there – the interest in magic, the occult, and whatnot.  But I call it neo-paganism because we are obviously not doing it the same way as it was done before.  We are in a different society...I’m obviously not trying to write pagan or Wiccan music the way that Stryper was trying to do Christian music.  It is part of one’s psyche or make-up or personality, so it does pop in there every so often.

How open do you find the goth community in a whole to be towards new music?
I think, it depends on what group of people and what club.  There are a lot of people still who are way into old school; they don’t want anything to change at all.  Those were glorious old days, but none of those bands are really doing anything anymore.  There are a whole bunch of bands that are doing stuff now, but some people haven’t noticed yet for reason.  I can totally understand, because I remember when I first got into all of this and there was a certain thing going on and everything was a certain way.  It would have been beautiful if that moment and time had lasted forever, but it can’t...it won’t...it’s not going to.  Unless you want to be a dinosaur, you have to support what is currently going on.

I think, it has to do with how impressionable some people in the scene are, so they are afraid to like a band that other people would put them down for liking.
Yeah, it’s like designer clothing.  You have to like the right band.

Bands have to pay their dues to make in the goth scene for the most part.
It is kind of an elitist thing.  It’s such a specific scene.  It’s not like where if you are into rock, you can pretty much be into anything.  Or alternative...that’s such a broad term now.  To be gothic, that’s pretty specific.

What kind of overseas following does the band have?
It’s really hard to monitor that type of thing.  We can pretty much only tell by album sales or magazines.  Pretty good, I guess, from what I have been able to tell the past few years.  We did get quite a bit of mail from all over the place actually... Malaysia even!  Who ever thought there were goths in Malaysia?  A few from there, and of course, Germany, Italy, France and England.  Bulgaria, Belgium and Russia.  Poland and all of these kind of places.  It’s interesting too, because the impression I get from some of the old eastern block countries that some of the stuff gets handed around secretly.  It will take a long time for a Propaganda magazine to go through.  They will write a couple of years later after the article has come out.

How much has the internet helped in marketing the band?
Oh, it’s helped loads!  It’s a brilliant thing.  I hear they are trying to charge a dollar a minute for long distance usage of internet.  There is something going on right now with the phone companies and FCC that just terrifies me.  Right now, it has been fantastic, because it is spontaneous and so cheap.  You can have links to everything.  It’s fantastic for supporting the scene.

Who runs the website?
A friend of mine who lives in a town that is about an hour drive from here that I met at school.  I pretty much just email everything to him and send him pictures and stuff.  He sets it up with my supervision.  It’s kind of a puny site though, because at the moment it comes with our email account, so they only give us 10 megs.  I want to buy more megs if I can, but it is about $5 a meg.  We were going to put the pictures from the new album on the website in their original form.  As a gift from the photographer, he sent us all the pictures on a CD-R.  We were going to put them right from there, but he scanned them at such a high resolution that each picture was 40 megs.

Being in the goth scene, do you feel any kind of resistance at all as far as crossing over to the mainstream?
Not from listeners, but the industry still hates the word goth.  It’s still a four-letter word.  I don’t know why, because if you look at all the movies and anything else in the popular culture that’s doing well, has a dark edge to it.  Sometimes it is really goth too.  That kind of thing does appeal to people.  For some reason the music industry is just missing it.  It seems like the word is being used more often in a non-facetious context.  I believe it was the VH-1 video and fashion awards, they mentioned that the new Smashing Pumpkins video had a goth setting, totally seriously. Vanity Fair was describing Madonna’s dress she wore to the Golden Globes awards as goth without being a putdown.  So, I think, that perhaps it might be possible in the future, the industry might be more responsive to it.  Hopefully we will still be around then.

What effect do you think Marilyn Manson has on the whole scenario?
Gives people a twisted view of it.  The word goth can be used for anything and it can be used for him, but I think people that don’t know, assume that is what the whole thing is about.  I think it’s really brilliant that he is not doing that on this album and all the little kids that are dressing like that just because of him are now going to have to buy new wardrobes.

So, the current line-up has been together for three years?
Yeah, that’s amazing.

Do you know how many people have come and gone through the band?
I don’t know how many people, but I did actually write down all of the line-up changes once for somebody and I think we have had 13 line-up changes since 1989.  A lot of them were in the first year.

Are there that many goth musicians in Fresno?
No, that was part of the problem, they weren’t goth and were faintly embarrassed by it, I think.  It wasn’t an appealing thing for them, so they would leave really quickly.

I’ve talked to some of my friends in Fresno and it never seems like a very gothic sort of place.
No, not when you’ve got agricultural land on all four sides of you...and cows slightly to the east.  The town of Clovis, which is not really a suburb of Fresno, but they behave like one because it is right there.  You cross one street and you are in Clovis.  They wear cowboy hats and cowboy boots for real.  So, there is this really heavy ag influence.  It’s a pretty big punk rock town too.  Country, punk rock and, of course, all of the hip-hop stuff and there are raves all the time.  There are tons of raves going on here.  I see all of this at Hot Topic where I work; they bring their flyers in and whatnot.

So, how did you finally get a goth group together eventually?
I finally found the right people.  I think, individually, a lot these people would not be in a goth band on their own.  Our drummer is a former member of the Supreme Love Gods.  It’s that Manchester sound and all that.  He is really into Suede and all of those people.  Our keyboardist, Hendrik, is really into techno and ambient stuff; he’s a big Brian Eno fan and Download...stuff like that.  Iyan, probably, would be goth.  He’s way into Fields of the Nephilim.  Rodney and I...I don’t know what we would be.  We would probably be doing Dead Can Dance if it was just the two of us.  It’s the combination of all these different elements that make it what it is.

What was the deal with the financial fiasco with the first CD?
The moral of the story, before I begin:  no matter whom you are working with, get it in writing in a contract, even if they are your friends.  This was somebody that was mostly Rodney’s friend; he was starting a label and he was also our producer on the album.  I was against it from the beginning.  I just didn’t like working with him that much.  He didn’t have the kind of personality that makes friends in the music industry...let’s just put it that way.  I shouldn’t be slamming him in print, because he did work very hard.  Basically, the label thing got very strange and I wanted out.  Rodney said you’d better get a lawyer, so I got one.  We really wouldn’t have had any problem, except for all the master tapes and all the product was at this guy’s house.  He insisted that we owed him $12,000 for studio time.  By the time we got it all worked out, we ended up paying him the $12,000; we got all of our CDs and all of our master tapes.  If we hadn’t got all of that stuff, we would have been screwed; we would have had nothing to sell for two years of work.  Basically, it was a bad situation.

Have any other labels courted you?
Obviously, none like the real, major ones.

It seems like you guys should be on Cleopatra or something?
At one time, but this one guy who I was just speaking of was representing us at the time and he messed that up too for us, because he wanted to have his own label.  So, there were a series of misunderstandings with that.  By the time I found out what was going on, it was too late.  Cleopatra, I don’t know, don’t seem to be too interested in what we are doing right now.  Like “Dark Moon Night,” I sent them that and they keep asking if we are going to do more stuff like “Alice.”  Well, that was really cool, but we don’t actually have a string quartet in the band; that was just for fun.  That’s what they want us to do.  That would be fun to do – I wouldn’t mind doing an album like that, but it’s not what we are doing right now.  I’ve made friends at a couple of other labels, so next year it looks potentially more interesting.

What were the circumstances when you made your videos way back when?
Ah, the low-budget videos.  Well, Fred Berger called up and was telling me he was going to start putting videos on his videozine things instead of having it be just the movies.  This was the end up September  of what year...was it ’92?  Yeah, I believe it was ’92.  We didn’t have any videos.  We had been planning on making some.  He asked do you have any videos?  And we were, like, well, when do you need them by?  He said, the first week of October, and I said we would have videos for you.  So, we got my friends together that had video cameras.  At the time we were renting a rehearsal space at the Wilson Theater, which I don’t know if you’ve been there or any of your friends have ever been there.  It’s big...it used to be a movie house...a vaudeville house, actually in the 20s.  Then, it was a movie house.  Beautiful place.  Giant stage and we had the keys to everything.  We filmed on the stage for two days, two fourteen hour days, and then we went out to some property that Rod’s friends have right on the King River and filmed the water footage for “Ophelia” that day and then spent six weeks editing it at school and got it out to Fred Berger October 3rd.  And there on there and I though, oh my god, that’s the highest stress thing I have ever done.  So, basically for the cost of a few pizzas and some videotape we got our videos done.

Have you done any video work since then?
We have footage for “She,” but we haven’t had access to editing equipment since then.  The stuff for “She” is there waiting to be edited.  I have a friend now who has just bought a bunch of computer video editing stuff, so if we ever have time to hook up and do this maybe we will get that done and then something for this album.  We did film our CD release party at Coven 13.  We had three cameras.  I would like to edit that together and put out the live show.  That would be great, because so far the touring that has not happened.

Why are there two versions of “Let Me Hold On” on the new album?
Cause we liked them both.  Actually, we almost only put the slower one, the one with fewer drums in.  Well, the other one is good too.  The way we stumbled on that one, Rod was putting a mix up and had gotten that far and we were like, “Wow, that sounds cool.  Don’t put anything else on.”  And so, we did just almost put it on that way, but we liked the danceable one too.

That’s one of my favorite songs on the album....
That’s the first one we wrote, actually.  After the thing with the old label and the old album...one night Rod said, “We need to write something instead of these long involved things that is just short, direct and to the point.”  He sat down in the kitchen and made up the whole song, the chord progressions, while I was doing dishes.  Put it on the four track and then I wrote the word to it.  Because we didn’t have a band at the time, everybody had quit during the Long Ago fiasco, so that was the first one we worked on when we got everybody.

I was rereading your lyrics today and they all seem incredibly personal – do they all come from deep inside you?
Yeah, pretty much.  I’m not topical, I guess.  Most of the time, it all comes from the music that they give me to write to.  They will come up with a song idea and put it on tape for me and I will listen to it.  Not only will I get the melody that way, but a lot of times the song will just tell me what it’s about too.

I must have been in a daze earlier, because I thought your lyrics were far more cryptic and when I was going through them today I was really impressed by how they all fit together.
Well, they may have been cryptic the first time and then when you encountered them again, you may have gotten another level out of them.  I do try to keep them rather...I don’t know if I want to use the word vague, but I try not to be real specific.  I try to keep them open so people can relate things to themselves as well.

There are some lyrics that are so cryptic that you can’t understand what is going on.  Those lyrics really really bug me.
It doesn’t communicate a lot then.  The purpose of words is to communicate.  It’s nice to write beautiful things like Shakespearean sonnets that are a little cryptic if you don’t want to spend the time to figure it out, but, especially in popular music, the whole point is to get something out of it on an emotional level.  So, if you don’t know what they are talking about, it’s not going to happen.

If you want to write something for yourself, then just put it in a journal or something.
Exactly, this is something we’ve discussed amongst ourselves and in other interviews.  If you are just going to do it for yourself, you can do whatever you want.  Once you’ve made the decision that it’s something you are going to share and/or sell, you do have to think in terms of what people want.  Not to the point of doing something perfectly just to sell – you can’t go, this is what they want, so this is what I am going to write.  In terms of selling out, this is a big discussion in the underground scene, I say as soon as you make something to sell, you’ve sold out.  Just try to make something good at that point.  If you don’t want to sell out, then just save it for yourself.  Making a living at something is selling out, no matter what it is.

How would you like The Shroud to be perceived as an overall entity?
Musicians, I guess.  People can perceive you a lot of different ways, but I would like to be seen as a group of people who create something beautiful...that create good art.  I don’t want to be seen as, I don’t know if celebrity is quite what I mean.  I don’t want people to think that, oh, they are high mucky-mucks.  We’re just musicians.

You are considered by many to be one of the most beautiful women in today’s goth scene; does that perception every seem to overshadow the music that you are doing?
Not so far.  All I can say is make-up is a wonderful thing and so are hair-crimpers.  I don’t know, I guess I just got lucky as far as that goes.  I’m not like Quasimodo or anything.  A lot of that has to do with make-up, costumes, all that kind of thing.  There are certain archetypes, I guess, that I can plug into that from the stage, translate a certain way.

How much does image have to do with music?
In popular culture, it’s probably just about equal.  It is part of the marketing.  But, I also think...this is, oh boy, I had a whole conversation one night after a show here in Fresno with a couple of other band people.  The three of us always end up talking after shows; it’s so funny.  We were discussing some other bands here in town and we all agreed that maybe image shouldn’t be the only thing you are known for.  But, you should at least look like what your music sounds like.  It has to be an integrated thing.  You can’t look like you just got off work and go up there and play your music because you have got to have more respect for your music than that.  It has to do with respect for the music and respect for the audience to have it be something special.  My background, I come from a family that have all played in orchestras where the men put on a tuxedo and the women put on a formal gown to play this special music you don’t hear every day.  You can hear it every day, but to go out and actually go to an orchestra concert, that’s something special and you dress up for it.  So, this is the same kind of thing.  You’ve created this wonderful music; you need to present it with some respect.

From people that I have spoken to, many of them seem to associate The Shroud as just being you.
Well, that’s understandable with all of the line-up changes we’ve had.  A lot of times, the only pictures we could use were of me, because no one else was in the band anymore that we had pictures of.  I think, just by default that became the only image associated with it.  We wouldn’t even send band pictures.  Every time we got a good band picture, then somebody would quit.  We just gave up after a while.  Now, I have been trying to submit pictures of the whole group to magazines, because now we really do have a group and they all look good too.  However, if I quit, there wouldn’t be a Shroud anymore.  If somebody else in the band quit, we could replace them.  In a way, it’s kind of like that, but I don’t like to think of it that way.  I have been the only constant since the beginning.  I’ve been doing this so long, I can’t believe this.

When did you start?
The Shroudettes started in January of 1989.

Do you believe that life is cyclical?
Do you mean cyclical in the terms of reincarnation?

That’s part of it...just in it being eternal...
Again, the Wicca things ties into that.  There’s the wheel of the year and all that and the whole image of death and rebirth.  I don’t know.  The votes aren’t in on the whole reincarnation thing for me.  It sounds really plausible though the more I pay attention to that kind of thing.  Things do seem to kind of come around over and over again.  Lessons to be learned, that kind of thing.  So, I certainly do not rule it out.  I haven’t been here long enough to observe enough to make my decision.

A few of your songs revolve around dreams.  What do you think the purpose of dreams are?
Most of the time, I think dreams are real life until I wake up.  They are pretty vivid.  I think it is part of your mind trying to tell you things.  I don’t know if you have heard the terms like “talking self” and “younger self,” which is stuff I’ve read in my Wicca books.  Your conscious mind doesn’t always get it.  Sometimes it has to have a few pictures to figure things out.  There are times when I dream things and then they happen later – I never know until they do that they are one of those kind of dreams.  Of course, psychologically, it is working out what has happened to you...trying to catalog it somehow.  There’s real important stuff.  You can learn a lot if you pay attention to them.  And not with one of those dream interpretation books either.  You have got to be a little more personally involved, I think.

Lydia is even more charming than I expected.  To be honest, I went into the interview

I’m interested to see what the future holds in store for The Shroud and the whole new wave of gothic music altogether.  Finally having reached a solid line-up, the sky is the ceiling for their futures.  And with someone as grounded as Lydia Fortner leading the band, The Shroud potential is boundless.