Girls in Trouble Rescue Biblical Females From Obscurity

Posted on Oct 29th 2009 3:30PM by Benjy Eisen
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Girls in Trouble didn't exactly start the way most musical projects do. Instead, it began as Alicia Jo Rabins' thesis for a Masters in Jewish Woman's Studies. At a professor's suggestion, the singer-songwriter wrote her thesis on lesser-known female characters from the Bible as songs rather than an essay. In the end, Rabins got her degree -- and a record deal. Naming the project "Girls in Trouble," her self-titled debut will drop on October 27 via JDub Records.

Rabins says she was surprised to find out that many of the biblical stories are just as "gruesome, romantic, dark and mystical" as anything else she had come across while studying literature as an undergrad. "It doesn't describe a perfect world; it describes this insane, messy world we live in," she tells Spinner. "And a lot of the women's stories get ignored. So in a way this is just music, and in a way I do see it as part of restoring balance to a tradition that was balanced towards the men's stories for many years."

There's the song 'Snow,' which is about Moses' sister Miriam and how she was, according to Rabins, "this feminist, Jewish icon." But then God punishes her with leprosy and exile for questioning her brother. Then there's the song 'Mountain,' about a girl who intentionally lets herself be sacrificed by her father. You know, normal, everyday stuff.

"I'm not a historian and I don't really know whether any of these stories literally happened, but to me that doesn't really matter," explains Rabins. "I once read a quote that said, 'Myth is not something that never happened, it's something that happens again and again.' I see these stories as archetypally true in the way that the Greek myths are: humans trying to understand themselves through stories."

And, of course, through song.