Melora Creager

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Melora Creager (born March 25, 1966) is an American cellist and singer-songwriter. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, she grew up in Emporia, Kansas, with an older brother and a younger sister, both of whom were adoptive as she was. Her mother was a graphic designer and her father was an administrator and physicist at a university; both were very supportive of the arts, and encouraged their children to take up musical instruments. Creager began playing the piano at age five, and the cello at age nine. However, she gave up the cello in the eighth grade (not wanting to be involved in the orchestra scene), only to pick it up again several years later in college. In the mid-1980s she moved to New York City to study photography at Parsons School of Design, where her friends encouraged her to resume playing the cello. In 1989 Creager formed a duo with Julia Kent called the Travelling Ladies' Cello Society (Rasputina in its fetal stage), and Kent remained in the band for ten years, finally leaving in 1999 amid much drama and disagreement; she and Creager's relationship has been described by Creager as a "decade-long dysfunctional marriage." In 1991 Creager founded the Brooklyn-based alternative band Rasputina, which originally consisted of six other cellists (whom she found by placing classified ads in the newspaper) and was influenced by both rock and the members' classical cello training. By 1996 she had trimmed it down to two other cellists and a drummer. She also played cello for Nirvana on the European leg of the In Utero world tour (including the band's final show in Munich).

Creager is known for her unique fashion sense, including an obvious interest in corsets and Victorian bloomers, which she is known to wear during her live performances. She is also fascinated with historical events and people of the past, including the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, Howard Hughes, Rose Kennedy, victims of Josef Mengele, and others. These stories she often deftly weaves into the lyrics of her songs, as well as fictional stories of her own creation, told in her wispy, tremulous vocals. The song "Mr. E. Leon Rauis" on the album Thanks for the Ether was inspired by a black-and-white photograph of a man she found in an attic, and expresses the wonder she felt about him and what his life could have been like. It is now known that his name was actually E. Leon Rains, and he was a fairly well-known opera singer from around the turn of the 19th century till the middle of the 20th century. Her lyrics also employ sly, dark irony and quirky, goofy humor; Creager is known to play with words and often brings separate strings of words together to form the lyrics of a song or a spoken piece. Each part can contain its own idea and meaning; together their message can be enigmatic and vaguely ominous. An example of this combining of words is the spoken piece "Kate Moss" on Thanks for the Ether.

In 2003, Creager starred in the short film On My Knees, based on The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick. Cullwick, a literate Victorian maid and fetishist, secretly married Arthur Munby in 1873, a middle-class solicitor who relished watching Cullwick go about her daily chores, covered in the soot and mire of her occupation. Her diaries detail their secret relationship and the sadomasochistic games in which they engaged; for much of her life, Cullwick wore around her neck a heavy chain and padlock, to which only her "massa," as she refers to him, had the key.

Creager is the mother of a young daughter named Hollis Willa Lane, who wrote and sang the lyrics of the song "Nov. 17dee" on the album Frustration Plantation.

[edit] Discography

[edit] Trivia

  • The name of the band came from the title of a song Creager wrote a long time ago, and of course her preoccupation with Rasputin. The "a" is presumably to make it feminine and thus give it a different meaning, contrasting the daintiness associated with women of that age with Rasputin's reputation for depravity and controversiality. In an interview, Creager said, "'Rasputina' implies sex, death, unkillableness, revolution, history, drama, religion..."
  • Creager was a jewelry designer for several years before taking up the cello professionally.
  • Creager was in a band called Ultra Vivid Scene in the late 1980s.
  • When asked in an interview whether she thought people were inherently good or evil, Creager replied, "I think people are inherently lazy, which is harder to overcome."
  • Creager collects beads and ribbon as well as old portraits, her favorite of which is the one she found of E. Leon Rains. She also has one of a hunchback midget lady that she likes very much, and many of children.
  • When asked in an interview about the reaction of classical musicians to Rasputina, Creager said, "People who are specifically cellists of all different ages will make a point to see us. They love it, because they know exactly what we're doing...playing the cello. But I think the classical music world is a pretty tight and closed thing. I've never been involved in it. I don't even know if they know of us, because for us to perform and put out records in a rock world... I don't know that anyone crosses over at all."
  • Creager described herself as a loner growing up, always being in a fantasy world. She recalls spending entire summers without going outside, instead playing games such as "Victorian maid" with her sister, in which she would force her to assume some kind of character.
  • In art school, Creager was accused of having a "commercial" drawing style and using visual tricks as an illustrator would. She does all the art on Rasputina's album covers (except the cover of The Lost & Found) and on the band's official Website.
  • Creager played in the Kansas Youth Symphony.
  • Creager appeared in cameos in the films Longtime Companion (whose title refers to the only term in which a gay man's lover could be mentioned in an obituary in the 1980s) and Back Fire!.
  • Rather than keeping up with new musical trends, Creager prefers listening to old records she knows and likes over and over; these include music by Bach, Arvo Pärt, Michael Nyman, Tom Waits, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, the Andrews Sisters, a lot of music from the 1930s, and some movie soundtracks.
  • Creager prefers reading nonfiction to fiction.
  • Creager's best friend is a fashion designer named James Coviello.
  • Rasputina performs the first song on the tribute CD Where's Neil When You Need Him?.

[edit] External links

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