"She'd be a mirror," bassist Eli Burke said of his former bandmate. "She'd be the person you needed to talk to at any given moment. She'd give and give and give until there was nothing left. She had a million friends, but only her inner circle was privy to how sensitive she was and how she carried that empathy like a badge. She told me once that she carried a flag for every girl she's ever dated. I asked her how she could live like that. She just said that she didn't have a choice."
Meghan Galbraith and 8 Inch BetsyBaby Robot Media
Galbraith was also an active member of her Chicago community, volunteering at Girls Rock! Chicago, where she taught music to teens. "Sometimes at camp, bands are having a hard time—kids are struggling, they're not getting along, they're having a hard time writing the songs, whatever it is," camp director Melissa Oglesby fondly remembered.
"And we have band coaches who float around and come in and magically save the day," Oglesby says. "There are very few people who can do that—it takes a very special kind of person, and that was the best skill that Meghan had." Involved in the DIY scene and a proud queer femme, Galbraith was inspirations and a source of compassion and hope to all.
8 Inch Betsy - About Control
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And of course, there was her band. As her passion, Galbraith's music made huge waves in punk and DIY communities and continues to reverberate among those who knew and loved her (and hosts of new fans). 8 Inch Betsy combined a riot grrl attitude with '90s pop punk, and during their tenure they toured with the likes of The Gossip, Girl in a Coma, Marnie Stern, Sybris & Jucifer, Cyndi Lauper and Indigo Girl Amy Ray.
The band was comprised of Galbraith, bassist Eli Burke, and drummer Melissa Thomas. They began playing together in 2004 after they came together to form a band in Chicago. All three of the members identify as queer or trans, leading their music to be classified as "queercore," but Mean Days focuses less on sexuality and more on the universals of the human experience, in all its complexity, violence, and euphoria.
The Mean Days is a textured and complex album, but it's all held together by Galbraith's voice—distinct and hoarse and profoundly human, it adds a sense of haunting, ragged world-weariness to all of the songs.
Lyrically, the album focuses on the often private, cloistered universals of human experience: on self-loathing, on the cruelty and loneliness of being alive. Musically, the album is a testimony to the cathartic euphoria of creating art that shares our deepest secrets with the rest of the world.
8 Inch BetsyMeghan Galbraith
Songs like the title track "Mean Days" are heavy-hitting, high-energy electric punk bangers, held together by growling electric guitar and talkative basslines. Galbraith's voice is the unifying factor, lowering to bleak mumbles and rising up to screams in the chorus. "It's all lost in the design, floating effortless, we reach no consequence," she sings—a perfectly nihilistic and quintessentially punk f*ck you to the heavens and to the sometimes hellish nature of life on Earth.
Other songs, like "So Dark" and "Night," are slower burns. "Night" in particular is dark and brooding, a compilation of wailing guitar peals that sound a bit like howling wolves. "Night" is the kind of song that encapsulates the electric horror of loneliness, the way it crawls and embeds itself in the brain.
"Waiting for you patient in the kitchen, you've turned out all the lights," sings Galbraith. "Looks like I'm in for the night." It's desolate but not defeated—the tension in the guitar and bass drum hits makes the song feel almost like a celebration of sorrow.
There's a fiery core of life, insistent and immortal, inside these songs, a testament to Galbraith's enduring legacy as well as the immortalizing power of art.
It seems like Galbraith was able to instill an electric, life-giving force in her personal interactions as well as in her music. "Every person I talked to at the celebration had an incredible story—you know, 'Meghan changed my life because of this thing that she did,'" said Galbraith's ex Miranda Anderson of Galbraith's funeral.
Now, with the release of "Mean Days" coming in the middle of a pandemic when so many people are desperate for catharsis and hope, Meghan Gailbraith's music and legacy will clearly continue to heal and inspire us all.
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