A very Bartlett holiday

When Sarah Berentson and Austen Case got together to play music for a video on Bartlett owner Karli Ingersoll’s Collect blog last June, they were barely a band. They hadn’t recorded anything. They hadn’t performed live. They hadn’t even thought up a name for themselves.

“We went up on the roof (of the Bartlett) and took some photos, then played our songs,” Berentson recalls – she played ukulele, Case beat on a snare drum, they both harmonized. “And (Karli) said, ‘If I’m going to post this, you have to have a name.’ ” Berentson off-handedly suggested Mama Doll, a name she and Case had been tossing around, and it stuck immediately.

A little over a year later, Mama Doll now has four members – bassist Jen Landis and guitarist Claire Fieberg would join later – has toured the West Coast and has released an LP called “As the Crow Flies,” recorded in Moscow, Idaho, this summer with producer Bart Budwig.

Berentson initially started Mama Doll as a side project while she was a member of Terrible Buttons, a popular Spokane folk group that broke up in May. Since the band’s dissolution, she’s focused all of her attention on Mama Doll, and she says she had never really considered herself a legitimate songwriter until then.

“I don’t think I had totally invested in myself as a musician at that point,” Berentson said of her time in Terrible Buttons, “so I didn’t care that I stopped writing songs when I joined the band. And it was my choice. There was nobody saying, ‘Now you can’t write songs anymore.’ I just stopped.”

Rustic, folksy and haunting, Mama Doll’s songs are musically spare but emotionally lush, heavy on striking vocal harmonies and reverby guitar parts that Roy Orbison would have loved. The songwriting process usually begins, Berentson says, with a skeleton comprised of her lyrics and a basic melody, and then Case, Fieberg and Landis color in the empty spaces with their own parts.

“It’s cool for me as a songwriter to watch it develop before my eyes,” she said. “The style is something that was formed by everybody. Claire adds a little bit of a surf element from time to time with her guitar tones. Austen comes up with really unique beats, and Jen is just an amazing bass player. … We just lucked out that all of those styles sound good together.”

The material on “As the Crow Flies” is occasionally quite morose – song titles like “The Cold,” “Doom” and “Sad Song” advertise that plainly – but it’s also beautiful and carefully crafted, and Berentson says that getting some of these songs out of her system and onto tape was a therapeutic experience.

“When I wrote those songs, I was in a way darker place in my life,” she said. “I think it was easier for me to channel my sadder, darker feelings through music, and it was really helpful for me. Some songs I wrote and I’d look back at them and be like, ‘ That’s how I felt about that? I didn’t realize I felt that until that lyric came out of my mouth.’”

The band is planning a second album, which Berentson promises will have some more upbeat songs on it. They’ll likely tour again, too, even if it doesn’t allow them to effectively quit their day jobs.

“We pursue Mama Doll aggressively and fiercely, just to see what will happen,” Berentson said. “I think I’ve grown up enough that I don’t need to say, ‘We want to make it big,’ or anything like that. We just want to play music and have fun and work hard at it.”

Other than a handful of solo shows pre-Terrible Buttons that she deems “awful” (“I am so happy that none of it is recorded,” she said), Berentson had never really had her own material performed before forming Mama Doll. She says her work has significantly matured in the years since, and she’s adamant that the process of adding everyone else’s individual parts is what brings the music to life.

“I don’t ever feel like it’s my project, and that makes me really happy to say that,” Berentson said. “I never feel alone onstage, I never feel like the front person. I just feel like it’s four of us making music together that we all have equally contributed to, and it wouldn’t be what it is without everybody in it.”