Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs Get Peppy on New Album

Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs wrote their forthcoming third album, 'Medicine County,' on a farmhouse outside Athens, but that doesn't mean they had Georgia on their minds.

"I think it has the opposite effect, actually," Golightly tells Spinner, insisting that the out-of-the-way abode she now shares with Texas native Lawyer Dave, the singer and multi-instrumentalist who alone makes up the Brokeoffs, has little effect on her music. "We're so insular in how we work and wherever we live, we're not exposed to an awful lot of what's going on. We could be anywhere in the world, really. We live in our little bubble."

Golightly is no stranger to close-knit communities. The British singer, songwriter and guitarist got her start in the early '90s fronting the Headcoatees, an all-girl garage-rock group formed by hyper-prolific poet, painter and all-around punk svengali Billy Childish. The Headcoatees were one of the many groups associated with the "Medway scene," a term used to describe the motley collection of artists and musicians that, since the late '70s, have sprung from Childish's home county of Kent, England.

Since breaking from the Headcoatees in 1995, Golightly has released more than a dozen solo records. While she's always infused her music with elements of country, recording with Lawyer Dave has given her a chance to delve further into a genre she says shares much in common with punk.

"It's the same -- those people weren't doing it for money, originally," she says, comparing the early American cowboy strummers to the first-wave British punks. "Musically, it's very different, but I think the approach to it is not. It's a way of getting people involved in something they might not have considered themselves good enough to be involved in. If all you can do is play the triangle, there's a place for you."

Golightly says 'Medicine County,' due out March 30, is peppier than her and the Brokeoffs' last full-length, 'Dirt Don't Hurt,' most likely because she and Dave cut the tracks during a rare stretch of downtime.

"There's only one slow song on it, which I didn't think about until afterward," she says. "I just think we had more energy. We hadn't been recording in the middle of a tour, which we were for the last record. We had an opportunity to sift through potential tracks and decide. It was a case of [the fast songs] being the ones that stood out as the ones we wanted to put on it. Having a bit more time made it different."