LA Weekly

Onstage and off, their banter is layered with years of private jokes that only sisters have the pleasure of sharing. They all have the same mother, but Jessica’s (and brother Jonathan’s) father is director Wes Craven; Lily and Abigail’s dad is Tom Chapin, brother to folk legend Harry Chapin, of “Cat’s in the Cradle” fame.

Over the last three years the sisters migrated west from New York. They sang together but never really formalized as a group until they did an off-the-cuff version of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” and it immediately got radio play.

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“The idea,” says Lily, “was to take everything out of it and just let it be a song with vocal harmonies. We pick songs that can really transform. People can hear them in a new way.”

“I think what people don’t realize about ‘Toxic’ is that it was written by four of the best songwriters in L.A.,” Abigail says. “Then all this production gets added, but if you take all of that away it still is an amazing song.”

Lily points out how cool it was to turn “Toxic” back into a song rather than “a Britney song.”

“We grew up with folk music,” Lily says, “and the whole idea is that songs get passed around and changed. Anyone who wants to sing them can sing them. Folk music is music of the people.”

Folk was originally a genre the three rebelled against but then reconnected with in the process of forming a band.

”It’s not that we didn’t like folk music,” says Jessica. “It’s that, well, familiarity breeds contempt.”

“But our band is not a traditional, straight-up folk band,” Abigail interjects. “We play at folk festivals and sometimes people are like, ‘What are you doing?’ Our music isn’t political. It’s not preachy, it’s not happy . . . ” She trails off, trying to find the words to explain.

”Yeah, folk traditionally is either happy or political,” Jessica says. “If it’s unhappy, it’s because you’re politically unhappy. I mean, we’re unhappy politically, but we don’t talk about it in our songs.”

“The thing that’s folky,” Lily adds, “are our instruments, acoustic, and our harmonies. But also there’s a tradition of storytelling in folk music. Music is used by people to forget their lives. In a certain way, we’re doing that. We want to take them on a journey.”