I’m ready to ask Beth Ditto a question, but first, she has a few for me. “I genuinely love doing interviews,” she says over Zoom from her home in Portland, Oregon, with visible glee. “I just like talking to people. Interviews can be difficult, though, because you only have an hour, and I want to ask questions about where you are and what you’re doing. Like, genuinely, that’s my favorite part! Where in London are you right now?” Ditto hesitates. “I have to learn to tamp it down,” she says, with a sigh.
It’s this irrepressible energy, however, that first made Ditto a star back in the mid-’00s as one-third of Gossip—most notably with their breakout hit “Standing in the Way of Control,” which soundtracked many an OG indie sleaze house party. Two more albums and seven years later, however, the group decided to part ways, and Ditto embarked on a solo career, while also burnishing her status as a fashion icon (the singer has walked the runway for the likes of Marc Jacobs and Jean Paul Gaultier). Somewhere in between all that, she also established a side venture as an actor, with appearances in the Kirsten Dunst-starring Showtime series On Becoming a God in Central Florida, and the country music TV epic Monarch.
Some time in 2019, however—shortly after the band briefly reunited for a tour celebrating the 10th anniversary of their record Music for Men—Ditto found herself in Kauai, at the studio of their long-time collaborator Rick Rubin. “I was still in my 30s, for the love of God,” she laughs. She started out writing songs for her second solo album, but after a while, she felt there was a missing ingredient: Gossip’s guitarist, Nathan Howdeshell. “I just was like, I wonder if Nathan would come out here and work on the record,” Ditto remembers. “And he did.” While Howdeshell was noodling away in the studio, Ditto recalls exchanging a knowing glance with Rubin, and then turning to Howdeshell and saying it should be a Gossip record. “Nathan was like, ‘Oh, okay, well then I’ll actually start trying—I’ll start paying attention now,’” Ditto says, laughing. “It was so funny.”
Once they also had their third member, drummer Hannah Blilie, on board, it was full speed ahead for Gossip (albeit with a few pandemic-related disruptions along the way). And at the end of last week, almost five years after they first began working on it, the trio unveiled their sixth album, Real Power—a remarkable return to form after a 12-year hiatus. The record’s 11 tracks reveal themselves as some of the band’s most personal yet, charting Ditto’s divorce from her wife of five years (and her newfound romance with the band’s touring bass player), the death of her father, and also the personal estrangement between herself and Howdeshell that led, in part, to the band’s time apart. Yet there’s a subversive sense of joy woven through as well: the hip-shaking swagger of “Don’t Be Afraid” serves as a delicious kiss-off to a former lover, while the jangling, INXS-y guitars of “Give It Up for Love” lets Ditto’s vocals rip as she sings of falling head-over-heels into a new relationship.
