WHETHER you happen to be the pope visiting the States or Dorothy dropping in on Oz, nothing makes you feel special like a pair of ruby slippers. That’s why singer Vikki Thorn will be in her red stilettos as she saunters onstage when the beloved Aussie trio the Waifs play the Bowery Ballroom Sunday.
“I spend the majority of my time at home with my family, so when I’m onstage, I wear my red pumps,” says Thorn, speaking with The Post on the phone from her new home in Utah.
“It might sound silly, but it’s how I separate my everyday life with performing.”
Thorn is a straight shooter. She’s simple and direct in conversation as in life: red pumps for stage, boots for the street. It was this directness that gave the Waifs their new album’s title track (and this week’s featured MPFree), “Sundirtwater.”
“That song started as an e-mail to my prospective husband. We hadn’t physically spent a lot of time with each other because I was on tour,” she says. “This was my way to speed up the getting-to-know-you process. In it, I was saying ‘This is who I am, this is what I want and need out of life.'”
But when she turned it into a song and took it to the band, which includes her sister Donna Simpson and Josh Cunningham, the words took on new meaning.
“The song started to represent us. We were in the studio and it was very apparent, since we’re three different songwriters, the album was going in three different directions,” she says. “So the elements sun, dirt and water symbolized our differences and how we have to be one in the music.”
That’s easier said than done.” It took a fortnight of negotiations to decide what was going to be included. It was stuff like, ‘I’ll take that song, if you guys will give this one up,'” she says.
“In the end, that made for more diversity and less cohesiveness, but it really is a true representation of who [the Waifs] are musically,” says Thorn.
Friction isn’t fiction to the Waifs. Speaking about her relationship with her sister, Thorn concedes “We’re famous for not getting along.”
She quickly adds the music is only possible because they’re sisters.
“If we weren’t sisters, we would have been out of each other’s life by now because of the way we’ve treated each other. We’ve grown up together and we create together.”