Chicago songbird, violinist and guitarist Heather Lynne Horton had many muses for her new album, “Get Me To A Nunnery,” out this Friday on Pauper Sky Records. Not the least of which were fellow strong feminist voices like Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush and Sinead O’Connor (the album was actually mastered the day O’Connor died in late July), all of whom embody the fighting spirit of the record.
Its title is a riff on a line in “Hamlet” in which the main character insults his former paramour Ophelia in a misogynistic rage.
Along with the new song “Ten Times,” about how much harder it is for a woman to be heard in a patriarchal society, the album was inspired by a radio DJ in Scotland during the promotion of Horton’s last album, 2018’s “Don’t Mess With Mrs. Murphy.” The DJ almost refused to play the lead track (during a showcase of women artists, no less) simply because he didn’t like what he saw on the back cover. The art shows Horton in the buff, chained to a shopping cart, and was meant to represent the many roles women play in society.
“I had the title for this new album the day that happened, about how a man can dictate where a woman should go, the nunnery or the brothel, there’s such a fine line,” says Horton.
Yet, in the sweeping 10-song record, there’s also a tribute to another muse/radio DJ who always supported Horton: the late WXRT-FM DJ Lin Brehmer. He’s remembered on the finale track, the Celtic orchestral piece, “Lin’s Never Ending Song.”
“When Lin first announced he was sick, publicly, and I knew he was going to be going through chemo, I thought what can I give this man? What can I do to keep his mind occupied or distracted? It was a desperate attempt, but I just started recording with my violin and decided I would do like 20 seconds every other day and send it to him and [his wife Sara Farr] . ... It’s still not finished and never will be,” Horton reveals.
At first, she wasn’t keen to include the track on her newest record, but it was Sara who implored Horton to do so.
“I said no way in hell, this is Lin and Sara’s song and it’s private, but as [Sara] told me, it doesn’t diminish the gift … and Lin would want it to be out.”
Horton first got to know Brehmer “like everybody else in Chicago,” she says, “listening to this hilarious but kind and gentle force come through your radio every day … he was that beacon and part of my welcome to Chicago in the early ‘90s,” she adds, ending up in our fair city after crisscrossing the country at various spurts in her life.
Born in Honolulu, then adopted and raised in Madison, Wisconsin, Horton headed to Minneapolis post-college (on an eternal hunt to find Prince) before eventually settling in Chicago where she met future husband, the singer-songwriter Michael McDermott, who appears on “Get Me To A Nunnery.”
In addition to the couple’s short-lived and now dormant side project, The Westies, they also share a 12-year-old daughter, Willie Rain, who is likewise a gifted guitar player.
“I’m talking a total savant,” says Horton, something mom discovered as the youngest McDermott tried to learn Kate Bush’s complex signatures in “Running Up That Hill.”
Listening to the whisperingly beautiful tracks on “Get Me To A Nunnery,” you can hear the through lines to Kate Bush and so many other women artists whom Horton finds kinship with, all of them storied dames whose lives in one way or another take on their own Shakespearian arc.
In particular, Sinead O’Connor’s fight against the system was on Horton’s mind while writing.
“I loved her from afar. I just wanted her to win, to be a champion before she died. … All she cared about was telling the truth. She had no vanity. She shaved her head to prove it. It was beyond me that people didn’t put her on this great pedestal. She, to me, is the pope. She is the truth,” says Horton, finding alignment with that mission.
“I have to say the truth, too. We all have a responsibility to do so. I may be a housewife in Orland Park, but I have a lot of love and a lot of sadness and a lot of worry … and yet I have a pen.”
