Inconsiderate Bitch

A precursor to the Happiness CD now to be out on 4AD. Mixed by Ivo Watts-Russell. Not available… except used in stores.

Released January 17, 1994, Inconsiderate Bitch was Lisa Germano’s first commercial release for 4AD and her introduction to the label’s audience. The five-track EP arrived three months before the April 1994 reissue of Happiness, functioning simultaneously as a teaser for that album and as a formal announcement of the new relationship between artist and label. It was issued as part of a practice 4AD maintained of releasing limited-edition “temporary” releases to supplement concurrent catalog releases by the same act—not quite an album preview, not quite a standalone statement, but both at once.

All five tracks draw from the Happiness sessions, but none appear here in their album form. Tracks 1 through 4 were remixed by 4AD founder and then-president Ivo Watts-Russell and engineer John Fryer at Blackwing Studios in London. Track 5, “(Late Night) Dresses,” was remixed separately by original producer Malcolm Burn. The EP’s sequencing, sonic character, and presentation were shaped entirely within the 4AD context—its existence is a product of the label’s creative investment in Germano from the outset.

Background

The story behind Inconsiderate Bitch begins with Happiness failing at Capitol, and then finding its way somewhere it fit. Capitol Records had signed Germano in the early 1990s, seeing a multi-instrumentalist with Mellencamp connections and what they imagined as mainstream potential—a rootsy Indiana songwriter who might translate to the alt-country-adjacent market they were building. The video for “You Make Me Wanto Wear Dresses,” the Capitol single, made this framing explicit: cartoon castle backdrops, a rodeo-adjacent wardrobe, romantic-fantasy production values. When Happiness was originally released in 1993, Capitol was mid-shakeup and provided next to no promotion. The album received appreciative reviews and sold almost nothing.

Germano successfully lobbied to retain the masters, and what followed was an unusual turn: Ivo Watts-Russell, founder of 4AD, heard the record and wanted it. As Germano acknowledged in the liner notes for the 4AD reissue, she felt she’d been “resurrected from the dead” by Watts-Russell and his label—language she paired with pointed parting words for Capitol: “all the people at Capitol Records who suddenly aren’t there anymore…ain’t life fun?” The move to 4AD wasn’t just a label change; it was a recalibration of how Germano’s music would be presented, contextualized, and heard. In a Bloomington Voice interview in 1995, Germano reflected: “4AD is cooler because they trust you.” The contrast was not subtle.

Inconsiderate Bitch was the first expression of that trust made public.

Themes

As a collection drawn entirely from Happiness, the five tracks here trace the album’s dominant emotional register: self-interrogation, unease, dark humor, the difficulty of sustaining intimacy. Germano has described Happiness as exploring what it’s like to try to love a man—the complications, compromises, and erosions that accumulate. The 4AD remixes, by routing these recordings through Watts-Russell and Fryer’s aesthetic sensibilities, push that register further toward the atmospheric and the unstable, pulling back from any commercial legibility the Capitol sessions might have preserved.

The title of the EP is language directed inward, a form of self-accusation that appears in Germano’s work as a kind of gallows humor about the impossible standards women navigate in relationships. It doubles as a wry commentary on the reception that could await a woman writing this frankly about emotional difficulty in 1994: you’re either too much or not enough, too raw or too self-indulgent. That the title of Germano’s debut 4AD release is self-deprecating rather than triumphant is entirely consistent with her artistic posture throughout this period.

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No.	Title	Length
1	Happiness	8:17
2	Energy	3:49
3	Puppet	4:03
4	Sycophant	5:29
5	(Late Night) Dresses	4:16

The five tracks on Inconsiderate Bitch were originally recorded at Kingsway Studio in New Orleans under the production of Malcolm Burn—the same sessions that generated Happiness. Kingsway, owned by Daniel Lanois, was a significant site for immersive, atmospheric recording in the early-to-mid 1990s; Burn, a close Lanois collaborator, used it as a base for much of his production work during this period.

For the EP, Watts-Russell and John Fryer took four of those recordings to Blackwing Studios in London, a converted war-damaged church in southeast London that had been Fryer’s professional home since 1980, and a central facility for 4AD’s sound throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Blackwing was where Fryer had engineered the first Depeche Mode album, produced the Cocteau Twins’ debut, and co-created This Mortal Coil with Watts-Russell himself. It was, in other words, the studio most directly associated with the aesthetic identity Watts-Russell had built. Bringing Germano’s recordings there to be reimagined wasn’t a neutral technical decision; it was an act of creative integration, placing her in the same sonic lineage as the label’s foundational work.

The fifth track, “(Late Night) Dresses,” was remixed by Burn rather than Fryer and Watts-Russell, preserving the production perspective of the original sessions for a track whose character depended on its arrangement.

Each of the remixes differs meaningfully from the versions that appeared on either the Capitol or 4AD releases of Happiness.

“Happiness” (8:17) is the most dramatically transformed. The album version runs just under five minutes; this version extends it to over eight, with a buzzing, ambient intro that builds for well over a minute before the song’s melodic content arrives, and an equally extended outro that holds the song’s final atmosphere rather than cutting it short. It functions less as a song-within-an-album and more as an immersive standalone experience. This was likely Germano’s fullest original vision for the piece—a form that didn’t fit the running time constraints of a standard album sequence.

“Sycophant” contains an extended, slowly building intro absent from the album versions and omits the drums found on the Happiness release, giving it a more skeletal, hypnotic character.

“Puppet” runs roughly two minutes shorter than the 4AD album version and forgoes that version’s buzzing intro, but includes percussion from the outset that is absent on the Capitol original, making it simultaneously tighter and more immediate than either album version.

“Energy” is identical to the 4AD album version.

“(Late Night) Dresses” is a remixed version of “You Make Me Wanto Wear Dresses”—the Capitol single, substantially reworked by Burn into something considerably stranger and more interior than the original recording. On subsequent reissues of Happiness, this track was retitled “The Dresses Song.” The mimsyfarmerfanclub retrospective on the Happiness era observed that looking at the Capitol “Wear Dresses” video alongside the “(Late Night) Dresses” version tells you almost everything about the difference between what Capitol wanted from Germano and what 4AD received.

Packaging & Design

Inconsiderate Bitch was designed by the late Vaughan Oliver and Chris Bigg at v23—Oliver’s studio partnership with Bigg, which succeeded his earlier collaboration with photographer Nigel Grierson under the name 23 Envelope. Oliver had been 4AD’s in-house designer since 1982, and his work over the following decade gave the label a visual identity inseparable from its music: gothic, surrealist, textured, deliberately oblique. As Oliver himself described his philosophy: “I try to make images where you don’t always get ‘the message’ straight away. But these things leave a hook in you.” In 2019, 4AD’s obituary for Oliver said flatly: “Without Vaughan, 4AD would not be 4AD.”

The cover image is a painting by Cathy Fenwick, a British artist whose work appeared regularly in exhibitions at East West Gallery, London, and whose distinctive portraiture made her a recurring source for 4AD visual projects of this period. The front cover presents Fenwick’s painting in full color; the interior digipak presents the same work desaturated and zoomed in, with release credits overlaid. The back cover uses a portrait photograph of Germano by Andrew Catlin.

The contrast with Capitol’s presentation of Germano is stark. Where Capitol had put Germano in a flowery sundress against a cartoon castle backdrop, 4AD’s first commercial image of her was a painter’s uncanny portrait: mysterious, slightly disturbing, immediately at home in the label’s visual language. The packaging was doing interpretive work, telling a listener who picked up this disc what kind of artist Germano was and what kind of label this was, without a word of explanation.

The EP was released as a standard digipak. It was pressed in England and distributed as a UK release. No US commercial version was issued.

Reissue History

Inconsiderate Bitch has had a more complex afterlife than its limited original release might suggest. Four of its five tracks—”Energy,” “Puppet,” “Sycophant,” and “(Late Night) Dresses”—were included as bonus tracks on 4AD’s 1999 reissue of Happiness, making them more broadly accessible for the first time, though that edition has since been superseded and the tracks removed from current streaming configurations.

The EP’s most prominent reappearance came with the Geek the Girl: 30th Anniversary Special Edition in 2025, where it was included as a complete unit alongside the album and the Cry Wolf b-side “The Mirror Is Gone.” Pressed on crystal-clear double vinyl and released as a Record Store Day exclusive, the package brought the EP back into print and placed it in direct dialogue with Geek the Girl, framing Inconsiderate Bitch as the Happiness-era precursor that contextualizes everything that followed.

Personnel

All songs written by Lisa Germano except “Sycophant,” written by Lisa Germano and Jay Joyce. Published by Songs of Polygram International, Inc / Emotional Wench Music / Door Number One Music (BMI)

Bass: Daryl Johnson, Toby Myers
Drums: Kenny Aronoff, Ronald Jones
Guitar: Bill Dillon, Jay Joyce, John Keane, Malcolm Burn
Keyboards: Malcolm Burn
Pedal Steel Guitar: Bill Dillon
Everything else: Lisa Germano

Tracks 1–4 mixed by Ivo Watts-Russell and John Fryer at Blackwing Studios, London Track 5 mixed by Malcolm Burn Produced by Malcolm Burn Recorded at Kingsway Studio, New Orleans

Design: Vaughan Oliver and Chris Bigg at v23 Cover artwork: © Cathy Fenwick, courtesy of East West Gallery, London Back cover photography: Andrew Catlin ℗ & © 1994 4AD

Reception

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