Interview: 14 October 2008
When did you begin working in sound?
“I always liked to sing and play different instruments, ever since I was a kid. I just never thought of it as a viable career option. And, then, after I began the recordings which evolved into The Bride of Dynamite, a friend of mine urged me to take a look at focusing more of my energy into music.”
Did you immediately find your own musical ‘voice’?
“Yeah. I think when I sat down to write my first batch of songs, I certainly didn’t waver. The songs came through me; it would’ve been hard to avoid them.”
What kind of musical reference points were you using?
“At that point, I didn’t actually listen to any cool new music. I was more interested in capturing a feeling that I perceived not just in music, but art across the board. I was really coming out of a long period of writing a lot of poetry, so I guess there was an atmosphere that I wanted to create, to come through in the songs. It’s pretty hard to put into words. A friend of mine once referred to it as ‘a field of miraculous occurrences.’ Where I’m sort of creating a space, or an environment, where things would happen, and to invite other people in to experience that.”
Did those first recordings live up to your hopes for them?
“Definitely. I didn’t think that through in a rational way. Sometimes it takes doing the thing to be able to identify what it is that you’re doing. Now, I can look back and say that, but at the time I was just doing what I felt like doing.”
Was it a big change, after you first released your music unto the world, having to identify it with an outsider’s perspective?
“Sure. Your interpretation of what you’re doing may adapt to these perceptions coming at you from the outside. It’s a very strange experience to be labelled in different ways. You find yourself wondering about it. Lots of people want to be simplified, in their own minds, so having other people tell you who you are, and what you’re doing, makes it dangerously easy. I kind of work against that. I’m trying to always return to a more original source of inspiration.”
How did people label you?
“Fortunately, the first album was only released a couple years after I first started recording. The first experience I had with sharing my music was amongst friends, amongst other artists, so I got more open-minded feedback: no labelling, just returned inspiration. But, then, when The Bride of Dynamite came out, and it was associated with Devendra’s label, then people started comparing my singing style to Vashti Bunyan, and making leaps of association with English folk music. I wasn’t really into English folk music, and I didn’t even hear Vashti until after I’d recorded that album, yet that didn’t stop some people for really angling for this idea that I was really out to emulate her. I never really thought of myself as trying to make a certain kind of music; I was just trying to record the stuff I was hearing in my head.”
Did that change with Frontier? Did you have to have more specific intent to make a record different to the first?
“I didn’t want to make an album that was really different. For me, making an album takes a really long time: I mainly record on my own, and I’m really involved with the artwork, so it’s a long and involved process. I was interested in that process, and exploring whatever feelings were coming up, whatever sounds or images were passing through me. Kind of like if you paid attention to your dreams, and started to try to give them form in music or art, trying to be true to what was in your mind. I was actually a little bit disconcerted by some of the sounds and the atmospheres that were coming out; I wasn’t sure how to really feel about it. I just tried not to analyze too much, and let it come through to its conclusion.”
So, is this album almost like a dream journal?
“Not specifically. I was using the dream thing as a metaphor, in the way that we can have distance from our dreams. We have them, and then we look at them, and then we can explore them through looking back at them. I tried to do that with my life, with my waking dreams.”
Frontier seems, to me, to be much more dense than The Bride of Dynamite; there’s a lot of opaque layers in there. Is that how you hear it?
“It’s funny, because I wrote and recorded the songs in the winter when I first moved out to New Mexico. I was out in total isolation —I didn’t even have a phone!— and it was rather snowy, so there really wasn’t a sound around me. It’s possible that some sort of residual cacophony from city living was coming through me, through that silent place.”
Why did you move to the middle of nowhere?
“I guess I wasn’t feeling very excited by being in the city anymore. If you don’t have a clear relationship to New York, or any big city, it can be more draining than it is invigorating. So, for me, it became very draining to be there. I wanted to go to a quieter place to explore other things that might come up once some of those distractions were removed.”
Did you actually approach recording differently this time?
“I do like to set little rules, or structural guidelines, for myself, just to give me jumping-off points. I like to play games in the process or writing songs. With this album, I wrote all the songs as words before they were songs. That was an interesting process that took me into a territory that I wouldn’t have been able to get into if I had tried to create lyrics that fit in to melodies that already existed. I let the words come first, then I’d build the sounds around these words. The way I wrote them, the way they came out, was very not-thought-out. I wanted them to feel freer, to sound more like the way conversation sounds than like the poetry that I had been used to reading and writing.”
