Heavens to Betsy Baby’s Gone, an archival LP collecting eight previously unheard demo recordings alongside the band’s two early-’90s EPs, will be released on 16 October via Kill Rock Stars, marking the first release from Corin Tucker and Tracy Sawyer’s band since their split in 1994.
Thirty years on: what Heavens to Betsy Baby’s Gone actually contains
The 16-track LP is split between two distinct bodies of work. Eight demos, recorded in February 1992, make up one half. The other bundles together the 1993 and 1994 EPs These Monsters Are Real and Direction. A full tracklist runs from ‘Good Food’ through to ‘Driving Song’, with the title track sitting at position seven.
Tucker and Sawyer weren’t recording alone in 1992. Bratmobile’s Molly Neuman was in the room, and it was Neuman who captured those early sessions to tape. She also contributes new liner notes to the collection. Tucker is effusive about her role, quoting Neuman’s willingness to simply get on with it: ‘She was so confident and so unafraid to just be like, “Yeah, why don’t I just record that for you? I’ll just check out the Tascam from the AV library at Evergreen and do it.”‘ Tucker adds that Neuman ‘grasped right away that it was important for young women to have these tools to express themselves.’
The subjects the band were writing about in those sessions haven’t dated. A press release for Baby’s Gone lists rape culture, intersectional politics, and body shaming alongside celebrations of female friendships, queerness, and community. Sawyer addresses this directly: ‘I wasn’t sure if I would ever revisit heavens to betsy, and then when we started talking more about it, and feeling how relevant the subjects are today, almost even more so than they were back then… it just seemed like just the perfect opportunity to be doing this.’
Reunion, tour, and what comes after the record
The announcement of Baby’s Gone follows a reunion tour announcement made back in June. Now, Consequence reports that Tucker and Sawyer have confirmed a coast-to-coast US run kicking off on 17 October in San Francisco, the day after the record drops. That sequencing is deliberate: walk out of the studio, step straight on to a stage.
For both Tucker and Sawyer, returning to this material has been as much about rediscovering each other as adults as it has been about the music itself. ‘Just to know each other again as adults and as mothers, it’s really cool,’ Sawyer says in the press release. ‘Once we started playing again, it was like muscle memory.’ That phrase lands hard when you consider the gap: over three decades between those Evergreen State College tape machine sessions and whatever stage they’ll play San Francisco from in October.
Tucker and Sawyer are of course known separately through Sleater-Kinney, the band Tucker formed after Heavens to Betsy dissolved. But Baby’s Gone makes the case that the earlier project deserves a proper accounting on its own terms. Eight demos that barely circulated, two EPs that were always hard to find in one place, subjects that feel as urgent now as they did in the early 1990s: the archive has a reason to exist beyond nostalgia.
Tucker’s description of Neuman as ‘such a leader’ and ‘such an intellectual’ says something about the community that surrounded these recordings. Olympia in the early ’90s was a specific ecosystem, and Heavens to Betsy were part of a network of bands and zine-writers and organisers who were building something with very limited resources. A Tascam checked out from a college AV library. Eight demos. Thirty-odd years later, a full release.
The coast-to-coast US tour gets under way in San Francisco on 17 October.
