Tabatha Predovich is a tall, statuesque redhead and front woman of the band UZZA. Their sound is dark, guitar-driven rock, reminiscent of The Cure, overlain with Tabatha’s powerful, perfectly-pitched voice. Her voice has been compared with that of Siouxsie Sioux, although she insists that she has never been influenced by the singer of the seminal post-punk band Siouxsie and the Banshees. Her influences include an eclectic mix of bands like Hall and Oates, Kate Bush, Culture Club, God Bullies, The Cure, Curve, PJ Harvey and Garbage—bands that infuse the seemingly simple with complexity and hide the surprising within the everyday.
On a warm Friday afternoon a couple of weeks ago, I met with Tabatha at her home in Golden Valley. I first saw UZZA perform back in April at Ricochet Kitchen and was impressed by her commanding presence at the head of a six-piece outfit of male rock musicians with notably catchy guitar hooks and a tight rhythm section. As the focal point, she brings order and clarity to the chaos with her persona and her voice. Even off stage she embodies an element of the larger-than-life—over six feet tall and willowy, when she met me at the door of her suburban bungalow in a tank top and jeans and hugged me, I was struck with the notion that this is what it would be like to meet a modern-day Greek goddess for an afternoon chat at home. Amid energetic puppies and surrounded by surreal bric-a-brac that ranged from orange Christmas lights and witchy ornaments to framed portraits of gray aliens, we drank ice water and talked about music.
Green Glass Door: When did you first discover that music was something you wanted to do with your life?
Tabatha: Let’s see. I was a kid, around six or seven, and I used to walk my dog and make up little songs when I was walking my dog. And being kind of shy and weird, and not having a lot of friends at the time, I used to walk around by myself, making up dumb little songs. Then I discovered I could actually sing. I joined choir, my parents gave me voice lessons, I did all the talent shows in the malls, and I had a karaoke machine. Then I turned eleven and wanted to be a race horse trainer, so I got away from the singing for a while, until I turned fifteen. I was in my first band then, called Yana. We did a lot of Duran Duran covers, but I wrote one song for the band. Then I went to MacPhail’s and took opera lessons, and that was really good, because I learned how to sing properly, using my diaphragm, and it’s helped as a rock singer, so that I’m not killing my voice when I sing.
GGD: You lived in Chicago for a while, so tell me about some of the other bands you were in before. Tell me about the path to UZZA.
Tabatha: I wasn’t very happy in Chicago. I was with a boyfriend who was in a band, and he was on tour all the time, so I was left alone in our apartment with all his recording equipment. I needed to do something creative, so I learned how to use the mixing board and would come up with stuff on my own using keyboards. Sometimes I would use the file cabinet like a drum—I’d take a drum stick and wrap it with tape, and then I’d use it to pound the file cabinet. Eventually I got into drum machines, and that was my project Velvet Rat, which was all improv—weird, freaky stuff that wasn’t really musical; it was more like performance art. Then I moved from Chicago to Minneapolis. There was an ad in the City Pages from an English guitarist looking for a singer, and he named all the people that I like, so I met with him and we formed a band called Elysium. It started out like British pop but it evolved into techno music towards the end. Eventually he got offered a job in England and he asked me to go with him. So we did the band over in England for a couple of years, and it was the best time of my life. I loved England, I felt right at home, and it’s an experience I will always look back on and say, “Those were the good old days.” It was beautiful there. But I had a boyfriend back in Detroit when I was in England, and he wanted me to come for Christmas, so I went to Detroit for Christmas and ended up staying for about ten years. It was not my plan, and while I was there I was depressed for about four years and didn’t do anything musical. Then somehow I got out of the depression and formed a band called Radium, a goth rock band, and that’s how I met my husband Rich. I ended up firing all my band members and asking my friends if they played music. Rich is a guitarist, so he and I reformed Radium together and played for a couple of years. Then I wanted to get the hell out of Detroit, so we moved up here to Minneapolis and formed UZZA in 2009. We’re very happy with the people in our band now; we’re all different, our guitarist is kind of a conservative Tea Party guy, I consider myself a conspiracy theorist, and then we have a Democrat drummer, and my freaky husband Rich, and then Charles Sadler just joined our band, from Stellar Vector, and we’re very happy to have him with us; he’s added quite a bit. But in between all these different bands, I was sick. For a period of about ten years my kidneys were slowly failing over time, and that prevented me from really getting a career with music going. Eventually I had to get a transplant, and luckily my father stepped in and gave me his kidney and saved my life. That was where part two of my life started, and that was a whole new beginning. That’s when I met Rich, my husband, and I had Radium and everything was great, and we moved here in 2004 and got married by Count Dracula in Vegas. We worked on a project for a while with Christopher Shillock, an anarchist poet and spoken word artist, an older gentleman, I think he’s 70 now, and Rich and I turned his poetry into music and performed with him, all while trying to get UZZA on the ground. But then in 2006 I got cancer, Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, because of the drugs I take for my kidney transplant. So that was another year pretty much wasted, not being able to do music because I couldn’t sing, because I was so weak. Then I kicked cancer’s ass, and then we bought this house and formed UZZA and now everything’s cool, finally. So I’m just waiting for the next part of my life, for what’s going to happen next.
GGD: That’s an amazing story and I’m glad that you talked about your illness and the way it’s affected your life and music because it’s the next thing I was going to ask you about.
Tabatha: Yeah, I like people to know. Some people are afraid to admit that they’ve been sick, but I think it’s good to talk about it because ultimately things turned out well for me and I want people to be inspired by that if they’re sick. There’s a lot of people that I talk to that have cancer and I’m trying to help them through it. It’s not a death sentence; you can overcome these things and become a better, stronger person and appreciate life more, so I like people to know.
GGD: So tell me about UZZA—the name, what inspires you as a band in the songs that you write and perform, and about your songwriting process.
Tabatha: I got a puppy in 1996, a little black and white Husky pit bull, and I was trying to find a name for her, so I looked in one of my UFO books in the index, and found the name UZZA. Supposedly UZZA is a chariot of fire, a god in a chariot of fire over Egypt, which could be a UFO. So I named her UZZA, and UZZA just passed away last August. I loved her so much—she was like my best friend—so I wanted to name a band after my friend who’s been with me through a lot of hard times.
When I was in my teens, when my parents got divorced, I started writing songs about the divorce, and they’re pretty silly when I look back on them now, because I was just a kid, but that’s where I started really writing structured songs. But now, in my creative process, I typically enjoy improv—not planning ahead and just seeing what comes out. There’s some songs that I’ve written for UZZA that really came out of nowhere, and they turned out to be pretty decent songs. I’m pretty proud of myself for being able to do whatever comes out. It’s a weird sort of thing; I’m not sure where it comes from. I just started working with Samwell Rowan, and he asked me to sing and come up with lyrics, and that was cool, because Samwell’s music is pretty trippy. He gave me song titles, and this was the first time I decided to write using titles as inspiration. So I like improv; I tend to not like things planned out. My husband Rich is totally opposite of me. He’s totally structured, very anal retentive about things, where I’m like, oh, anything goes.
Rich and I write all the music for the band right now. He will record musical parts—guitar, bass, keyboards, drum machines—on our Macs, and then he’ll throw it my way, and then I will listen to it and see how it makes me feel and I’ll just start writing lyrics, and then pick them apart and create melodies with the words that fit. Sometimes it becomes a totally different song than when it first comes out. Then there are other times where I’ll write all the music, and then I’ll give it to Rich, and then Rich, being a true musician, will come up with guitar and bass parts. So it’s collaborating. And I usually write about darker things. For some reason it makes me feel better, it’s like therapy in a way for me. My mom and dad don’t quite understand me; they say, “Why can’t you write happy music?” But I see the world in a different way than they do. I think we have the potential to make it so much better than it is, but I’m a realist—I wish I were an idealist but I’m not—and I think my life experiences have made me write about darker subjects. When I listen to dark music it makes me feel good, because it’s like I’m listening to words I can relate to, and I can get something like a demon out, and then I feel better. The direction UZZA is going in now is that we’re trying to get our other band members more involved in the writing process, so we’re hoping to have some jam sessions coming up in the next couple months.
GGD: On your website and in other places you talk about UFOs and a spiritual energy in all beings. I was wondering, in what way does that philosophy contribute to your writing?
Tabatha: I guess it does contribute to it. I’ve had some weird, spiritual, freaky experiences, mostly in my teens and twenties, a lot of out of body experiences and just strange things that made me do a lot of research on life after death. I don’t necessarily believe in the Christian god, but I believe there’s something out there. I’ve had out of body experiences, where I’m going toward the light, going through a tunnel, and to me we’re made up of star matter, so whatever is in that light is God to me. I’m not sure what that is, maybe we go through a worm hole to another universe or something. I do write about that in a few of my songs, and people are thinking I’m just writing about death. But death is a new beginning—it’s being born again, not in a Christian sense of what “born again” means, but being physically reborn in another world after you die in this one. Or maybe we come back to this world in a better body and an improved personality. So I include topics like rebirth and reincarnation in some of our music.
GGD: What is your overall creative philosophy? Do you see art and life working together in some way, and if so, what is it?
Tabatha: Well, I know that if there weren’t art, there would be no life for me. They definitely go together. And thank God for artists of all kinds, because they make the world a better place. If it weren’t for us, the world would totally be going to hell, but I think we are the ones that make it more beautiful; we can reach out to people that might not be creative and make them see a different perspective about life and appreciate things that they wouldn’t have if they just went on with their nine to five jobs. They definitely go together: art and life.
Click here to visit the UZZA website, listen to some of their songs, and watch video excerpts of their live performances.
Photo credit: Carla Haglund, FairShadow Photography