The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn - Background

Background

The story of the Casady sisters, Bianca “Coco” and Sierra “Rosie”, is as mythical as their twee, freak-folk music. The girls spent their youth traveling like nomads throughout the Southwestern United States and Hawaii, splitting time between their mother and father. Their mother was an artist. She encouraged the girls to drop out of school and learn through traveling the world instead. Neither of the girls finished high school. Their father became fascinated with Native American shamanism after the divorce. He would take the girls with him into the desert for days while he went vision quests, a ritual which included the ingestion of the psychedelic cactus, peyote. In the midst of their whirlwind childhood, the girls took refuge in music. Bianca was a prolific songwriter by the age of 9, and young Sierra nurtured a love for classical music. In an interview with New York Magazine in 2007, Bianca recalls her sister’s relationship with music, “My sister couldn’t communicate with words. She only knew how to be musical."

The girls separated when their mother threw Sierra out of the house at the age of 14. For ten years, the girls lived separate lives. Bianca found a home in Brooklyn, New York working as an artist, poet, and fashion designer. Meanwhile, Sierra studied opera at the Conservatoire de Paris. The sisters reunited one fateful night in 2003 when Bianca called Sierra asking for a place to stay. Over the next few months, the sisters combined their respective talents, Bianca’s hip-hop influenced, childlike tremor and Sierra’s classically trained opera, to create CocoRosie. They recorded their first album, La Maison De Mon Reve, in the bathtub of Sierra’s Paris apartment. From then on, the sisters have been inseparable; making polarizing, genre-breaking music that gives the listener a glimpse into their fairytale world.