Morningwood: "I'm A Crazy Sex Monster"
Tuesday March 28, 2006 @ 06:00 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

Morningwood

If the producers behind Girls Gone Wild ever need a spokesband, then Morningwood should be it.

During a recent show in Toronto, lead singer Chantal Claret pulled a young female fan on stage and proceeded to grab her breasts and pull up her dress. It would have made the GGW guys proud.

This particular show only saw one woman get groped, but during the song "Take Off Your Clothes," Claret's been known to help a bevy of gals undress.

"[I can get] five girls in their bra and underwear, and spray them with champagne and smack their breasts and make them kiss each other," she boasts backstage before the show.

These public displays of flesh are all in a day's work for Morningwood, one of North America's raunchiest new rock foursomes. On their self-titled debut disc, the group sing about getting it on with New York girls, about a babysitter getting it on with a kid, and pretty much having sex with everyone and anyone. For some critics, their frank attitude toward sex is refreshing. But others take offence.

"There are people who are really offended by what I do," says Claret. "I really am just trying to speak how I feel, and I think people appreciate sincerity and honesty at the end of the day. But there are people who just cannot handle the fact that there is an aggressive female and it offends them."

Claret thinks that some of the outrage stems from a lack of female-fronted bands. People just aren't used to a woman talking dirty.

"There's a rarity in having a sexually aggressive female and have it feel honest," Claret says. "It usually feels really forced and unnatural. It feels so fake."

Despite the criticisms, both Claret and guitarist Pedro Yanowitz agree that having a female front the band has helped them get away with a lot.

"We have a song on the record that deals with a babysitter who gets fresh with a kid," says Yanowitz. "I think if a guy sang that, it would be totally different.

"She can get away with a lot on stage. I see the way people respond to her, the guys and the girls. It's different. Some people are like, 'What the fuck?' and she'll call people out, call guys out and say, 'Don't fucking talk during my show.' It's awesome to see."

"It works because it shows the parallels of women," says Claret, "that they can be submissive. But me being a woman myself, I am being dominant so it's a woman taking advantage of another woman. It's not showing a submissive woman being taken advantage of."

Singing about sex wasn't Morningwood's original intention. Their first batch of songs had nothing to do with the libido, but once Claret became a more confident writer, her personality started affecting the subject matter.

"I think the songs we were writing before were a little more timid," she admits. "I wasn't being 100 per cent true to my voice, which is just like, 'I'm a crazy sex monster.' I heard that voice and I was like, 'Alright, I'll fucking tell people.'

"With 'Take Off Your Clothes' that was me sort of opening the floodgates. Let's start with this and then, you know, we'll see where it goes. That was, 'Oh, I'm an aggressive female' and my music's going to sound like that too."

And it seems that more people like the band's brash persona and loud, crunchy music than don't. They're in the midst of a North American tour and "Nth Degree," their poppy first single, is all over rock radio and in an American Eagle Outfitters commercial. Despite their current success, Yanowitz and Claret are still surprised at how far they've come since the band formed in 2001.

"There are times where I'm like, 'Holy shit,'" says Yanowitz. "It's like a rock monster."

"Yeah," adds Claret, "we really did create a rock monster together."

Here are Morningwood's Canadian tour dates: