“About five years ago, these bizarre dark songs started creeping into my head,” says Catherine Pierce. “I don’t know what shifted.”
Before that, she and her sister Allison, who’ll open for Coldplay Friday and Saturday at HP Pavilion in San Jose, had been toiling in a folky obscurity since their 2000 debut, The Pierces.
But with 2007’s Thirteen Tales of Love and Revenge, something changed. It was sly, subversive and a little shocking in all the right places, with songs like “Secret,” with its haunting lyric “two can keep a secret when one of them is dead,” and “Boring,” featuring a long list of “girl-on-girl, ménage a trios…marijuana, cocaine, heroin” that are all rejected as dreadfully tiresome. The sisters’ songwriting wit got sharper, and their eccentric but slick indie-pop sound more sophisticated.
“I think we had just grown up a little bit,” says Catherine, who attributes some of their reluctance to cut loose before Thirteen Tales to their upbringing in Birmingham, Alabama.
“Growing up in the South, you’re taught to be polite. The first two albums are nice and polite,” she says. “I think they were more the visions of the producers.”
But once their own, more twisted musical vision was out there, pop culture started taking notice. “Secret” was used in the memorable teaser for the third season of Dexter, the one where the donut box fills with blood. (And really, could there be a better band to do music for a Dexter promo than one called the Pierces?) Since 2010, it’s also been the theme song for the TV show Pretty Little Liars.
.Interview: The Pierces Open For Coldplay at HP Pavilion
