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Alicia Jo Rabins’s new album Girls In Trouble refers to the original girls: Miriam, Ruth, Chana, Rebecca, and lesser knowns like Jephthah’s Daughter, Judith, and Tamar. Yes, they’re women of the Bible, and biblical times weren’t always great ones to be a girl. In her songs Rabins (also fiddle player for the band Golem) illuminates these characters’ stories with great insight and disarming indie fiddle-folk melodies. If you haven’t read the Bible since Hebrew school, her powerful, poetic details will make you pull it down off the shelf. With her dreamy voice, Rabin makes ancient spiritual conundrums and predicaments understandable and fresh while still respecting the mystery of the original stories.

Merging music, literature and women’s studies, the project originally started out as Rabin’s master’s thesis and was partly inspired by a “chavruta”-learning course where she explored questions of faith and interpretation through conversations with Orthodox women. In “Snow,” her lyrics reflect on Miriam’s punishment – a skin disease and a week of exile in the desert – for her ambivalence over her brother Moses’ marrying outside the tribe. It’s a harsh sentence and the song shows Miriam re-evaluating her relationship with God: “No voice came down from heaven/ and I never saw words written in fire”  

The opener, “I Was A Desert,” tells the story of Tamar, who lost two husbands to God’s wrath and was forced to seduce her own father-in-law to conceive children. With sly gentleness, Rabin sings, “I was a desert until I learned / to make the sky rain down on me / And I was a barren field until / I planted myself with borrowed seed.” (Good thing, too, since Tamar’s twins preserved the tribe of Judah, from whence King David and Jesus are both descended.)

Judith was another woman of action. Instead of praying and waiting for the Lord to deliver her people, she ingratiated herself into the Assyrian camp and seduced their leader, Holofernes. “I brushed my hair with oil of myrrh/ and smiled at the general/ while he drank his wine.”  As the song ends, Judith, despite being resolute, considered the woman she will make into a widow, before she cut off Holofernes’ head.  

Produced by Scott Solter (Mountain Goats, Spoon, and Okkervil River), the album was recorded in rural North Carolina with Rabin’s husband Aaron Hartman (Old Time Relijun) and was cut by hand to give it an organic texture. With whimsy and skill, Alicia Jo Rabin has created a 21st Century musical midrash that’s both a respectful inspection of biblical themes and a record of very human stories—women living in a hot desert culture where no one ever doubted the all-powerful Deity with the final word.