By ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN 
Tuesday, August 9, 2005 Page R3

WINNIPEG -- Two pretty housewives are working in their black-and-white kitchen, cooking up dinner with something extra special for the menfolk sawing lumber in the yard. The men come in to eat, the women watch, and the poisoned spuds take effect. The killers grab their guitars, run to the truck and hit the gravel road to freedom -- for a mile or so, till the police pull them over. They sing the final chorus from the back of the cruiser.

"We were housewives in the thirties in our previous lives," said Shelley Marshall, referring to more than just the scenario for Sunset Chaser, the latest video by the Winnipeg band Nathan. Marshall and Keri McTighe, who formed Nathan six years ago, make a down-home kind of music that often refers to domestic details. They tend to sing in close, sweet harmonies that wouldn't be out of place on a record of Appalachian gospel tunes. But there's usually something mysterious at the core of their songs, as if to remind you that home is just another word for the place where you keep your darkest secrets.

Jimson Weed, the title song of their Juno-nominated disc on Nettwerk Records, is all about the prickly toxins we keep inside. Lock Your Devils Up counsels self-repression ("bind your longings in barbed-wire electric fence"), with a toe-tapping tune that seems made to be sung around the woodstove. You might say the same about One Spend, if the song weren't about plastic surgery -- another kind of secrecy about who we are and how long we've been here.

"We try to let the songs take us where they want to go," said McTighe. "So some of them will be really rootsy, and some more like pop songs." Some show the effects of Marshall's first musical life, as a kid from a Polish-Russian family wheezing out polkas on her accordion. It was one of those apprenticeships that had to be buried and half-forgotten before it became truly useful.

"I picked it up again when I was old enough not to care," she said. "There's enough lame guitar players in the world already, so it makes sense to play other instruments."
McTighe played piano as a child, was inoculated against rock through her parents' Queen and Iron Butterfly records, and picked up the guitar partly as an escape from the left-brain exertions of her training in graphic arts. Like Marshall, who learned six-string banjo before recording Jimson Weed, McTighe is a collector of instrumental skills, her latest being the ability to wail on the theremin, a motion-sensitive synthesizer.

They also practice the old-time crafts of needle and thread, sewing all their own performance costumes and making the quilts that decorate the CD cover of Jimson Weed. Their current tour contingent includes Marshall's four-month-old daughter.

McTighe and Marshall came together in typical Winnipeg fashion, by playing in bands that shared members and supported each other's shows. For them, the music scene came with training wheels attached.

"It's a really great, nurturing city," said McTighe. "Everybody plays in each other's bands. As soon as you have a song, there's a stage to play it on."Not having to push to be heard suited their temperaments. To judge from our conversation, these women have graduate degrees in self-deprecation.

"When we made our first record, [2001's Stranger], the guy who recorded it said that we were the only band where people argued to have their instruments softer," McTighe said. "We were saying, 'Turn my guitar down, turn my guitar down,' and he was saying, 'I can't turn everything down.' " Marshall writes songs according to the same principle. She's most comfortable as a backup singer, and resorts to subterfuge when faced with the expectation that she who writes the tune will also sing the lead.

"Almost every song I've written has a double lead, so I can take advantage of Keri's voice," she said. "And then what happens is that I end up trying to sing backup for her." Quite apart from her singing ability (which is greater than she thinks), helping rather than leading may be a natural role for someone who is also a trained nurse.

Nathan started as a duo, then became a quartet with the addition of bassist Devin Latimer (now McTighe's husband) and drummer Daniel Roy. The recording of Jimson Weed ultimately drew on the performance skills of at least a dozen other musicians, including pedal-steel player Burke Carroll, the Brothers Cosmoline and producer John Switzer.

Nathan is a regular at Times Change Café, a Winnipeg club that McTighe characteristically describes as the band's home. They have toured Canada and much of the United States. Their biggest gig to date, aside from a brief appearance on last spring's Juno Awards show, was on Parliament Hill on Canada Day last year. Their smallest may have been their Nashville debut, at a radio show where the live audience tally exactly matched the number of players.

McTighe and Marshall didn't mind. They almost make a living from Nathan, but they're not really in it for the money. Playing music is part of their way of expressing their inner lives and of pursuing their social being in a community of musicians. Some of their songs may sound lonely or cut-off, but their performances are always a celebration of whatever it is that brings people together around a stage, a singer and a slightly disturbing song about home, sweet home.

Nathan plays the T.O. Twang festival at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre on Sunday, the Rogue Folk Club in Vancouver on Sept. 16, the Sidetrack Café in Edmonton on Sept. 22 and the Ironwood Stage and Grill in Calgary on Sept. 23.