Barbara Manning

A pillar of independent music and one of the most vital, long-lasting, and interesting songwriters on the indie scene, Barbara Manning has been steadily adding to her wide-ranging body of work since the early '80s. Manning came into her own as a solo artist in the '90s, but collaborations have long been a core component of her output. She's been in multiple bands, like 28th Day and World of Pooh, but has also created work with peers that ranged from other indie songwriters to more experimentally inclined artists. Her songwriting style melds folk earnestness and punk volatility, creating a model that would influence subsequent waves of rough-edged indie artists like Elliott Smith and Liz Phair. Though Manning's tendency to switch back and forth between projects, bands, and aliases made her career a little hard to track, she remained active beyond the fruitful '90s, fronting the Go-Luckys! in the 2000s and moving forward from there with various performances and recording projects. Though Manning's 1999 album, In New Zealand, would be the last proper studio effort released under her name, she presented new material online from time to time, and in 2023 released a compilation of covers and various solo tracks titled Charm of Yesterday​ ​Convenience of Tomorrow. Barbara Manning was born in San Diego, California in 1964 and was playing guitar while practicing singing with her sister by the time she was in her early teens. During her college years in the early '80s, she joined her first band, 28th Day, jangly participants in the Paisley Underground movement. The band released a self-titled EP before breaking up in 1986, when Manning relocated to San Francisco, but their complete recordings didn't see the light of day as the bandmembers continued their respective journeys. Shortly after arriving in the Bay Area, Manning joined World of Pooh, while also writing and recording songs of her own. It was in 1986 that she recorded the material that would become her 1988 solo debut, Lately I Keep Scissors, originally intending these quickly captured lo-fi sketches to act as demos. As the '80s gave way to the '90s, World of Pooh changed their name to the San Francisco Seals, and Manning split her time between the band, solo efforts like 1991 album One Perfect Green Blanket, and creating less traditional experimental sounds with noise artist Seymour Glass as part of the duo Glands of External Secretion. The San Francisco Seals signed with Matador and released two albums with the label before breaking up in 1996. Manning continued as a solo act throughout the rest of the '90s, becoming known for her curatorial knack for engaging cover songs, in particular her rendition of New Zealand pop band the Verlaines' tune "Joed Out" on the major-label alt rock compilation No Alternative in 1993. 1993 also saw the release of Barbara Manning Sings with the Original Artists, a collaboration with Young Marble Giants member Stuart Moxham and the Mekons' Jon Langford. Throughout the mid- to late '90s, Manning became a beloved part of the indie community, frequently playing shows with like-minded acts like Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, and the Replacements. In 1995, Manning sang lead on "San Diego Zoo," the kick-off track on Wasp's Nest, the debut album from the 6ths, a project masterminded by Magnetic Fields songwriter Stephin Merritt that utilized a different lead singer for nearly every song. In 1997, she traveled to New Zealand and worked extensively with members of the Bats, the Clean, Tall Dwarfs, the Verlaines, and other configurations of the region's tight-knit indie rock scene, recording new songs of hers with input from the all-star backing band. The resultant recordings weren't released until 1999 as Barbara Manning in New Zealand, but her solo album, 1212, was properly released by Matador in 1997. Manning relocated to Germany at the end of the '90s, and while there she started a new band, the Go-Luckys!, who recorded several albums between 2000 and 2003. She returned to California before the end of the decade and briefly played in a new band, the Sleaze Tax, while occasionally recording solo material, some of which would be released for streaming in 2016 as Chico Daze. During a period when she was performing live less often, Manning gathered her strewn singles, errant tracks, and other miscellanea in various compilations. Among them, 2023's Charm of Yesterday​ ​Convenience of Tomorrow was released in the lead-up to a tour Manning was embarking on with Codeine, and comprised material from Chico Daze and covers she recorded in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic that included takes on classics by Galaxie 500, Bob Dylan, and many others. Moving to Los Angeles, Manning entered a new phase of her career, playing live shows and working on writing new songs for the first time in years.
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