GROWING UP IN HOUSEHOLD WITHOUT POP CULTURE, PINEY GIR STARTED MUSICAL LIFE IN PENTACOSTAL CHURCH

PENTACOSTAL HARMONIES INFORM HER CURRENT INDIE POP WORK ON 'GERONIMO!' OUT OCT. 16 IN THE US ON HIGHLINE RECORDS

For Piney Gir, there were no cartoons or pop music growing up. Instead, she was a deacon's daughter and grew up in a strict Pentacostal household in Kansas. "My parents were was pretty strict. Pop culture was naughty so I started glamorizing it even more because it was forbidden fruit," she recalls. She attended church three to four times a week and went to a special Christian school where there was chapel, music and prayer every day. "We sang happy clappy Christian stuff. There was an awful lot of harmony singing. As a result, I can sing harmony as easily as I can sing melody. It was extremely tuneful music, happy, and with strong melodies."

There was speaking in tongues, dancing and fainting. Church was never really boring and the early choir days may have given Piney her first taste of drama in performance.

Meanwhile, her parents split up slowly, culminating when her father moved to Seattle to start up a prison ministry. All this moving around started when she was nine and she discovered rock and roll when she was free from the church at 14. Suddenly, she found herself in public school. "As soon as mom and dad split, I just soaked up pop culture," diving into the top 40 artists like Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson "because they were safe and hell-free" but soon she discovered Nirvana, PJ Harvey, Guns 'n' Roses, and Depeche Mode, embracing the darker side of rock and roll, it spoke to her soul.

Her parents' split had another effect. "I saw a lot of countryside between Kansas and Seattle. We did a lot of driving, it probably prepared me for touring!" she recalls. The trips also began her exposure to other kinds of secular music, the kind you find on cross-country AM radio, including favorites like Loretta Lynn, The Shangri-Las, and Paul Simon.

'Geronimo!' is slated for a US release October 16 on Highline Records. UNCUT gave the album four stars while The Sun called it "undeniably charming." Q Magazine called it "exuberant, bursts with joy, divine."