Boston-born songsmith Casey Dienel plays the piano, has a jazz background, and a fondness for subtle experimentation. After releasing 2006's sparse, songwriteresque Wind-up Canary under her own name, in 2008 Dienel started recording as White Hinterland. Issuing the grand Phylactery Factory LP, she soon followed it up with the French-language EP, Luniculaire. Prior to the latter's release, Dienel discussed her debut en Français.
Interview: 30 September 2008
When did you learn to speak French?
“I was about 12 or 13. I remember hating the repetition, learning all those participles, verbs, and tenses. But one summer I went to France to live with a family, and I got thrown in the thick of it, and really had to fake a good French accent. It just sort of stuck.”
Has your new EP gotten pronunciation approval from native French-speakers?
“I’m sure I bastardized it completely. I apologize for marring any formerly pristine vowel sounds with my horrible American accent. Writing in English, I definitely don’t write lyrics the way that I speak. If I walked around talking the way that I sing on Phylactery Factory, I don’t think anyone would tolerate it. Writing in French, I realized that my ‘mastery’ of the French language is purely conversational, not lyrical.”
Why make a French-language record?
“I’ve been really interested in exploring textures in sound, vocally, so I wanted to flip myself on my head, and see what would happen if I’m singing with foreign vowels and diphthongs and words that have to be stretched out differently. I wanted to see if that would mutate my abilities as a singer, and my approach. I look at every recording as a chance to teach myself something. Not to show off what I’ve learned, but to throw myself in the thick of something that really scares me. Every record comes out being a surprise to me, whether I failed or succeeded.”
When did you first encounter Comme à la Radio?
“I love the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and I had heard a few early Brigitte Fontaine records. But, when I heard that record, I completely flipped. The wind ensemble in it is so breathtaking, and there’s a lot of songs where textures will come in, or a mode will appear, and it’ll never appear again. I think that’s so fascinating. To be working in the medium of song, what you’re usually dealing with is structural repetition: a chorus and a verse. In that song cycle, you get a snippet of a verse, and it never comes back. It’s so beautifully fragmented, but yet it never feels fragmented.”
How do you approach the ornery task of reinterpretation?
“The main thing I wanted to do, with this EP, was to have fun. The best thing about Brigitte Fontaine, or even Serge Gainsbourg, is their willingness to go beyond what’s comfortable. I like hearing early Gainsbourg recordings, then hearing him play songs completely differently later in his life. It’s hard to tell how good a song is until you’ve put it through the wringer a little bit. When we decided to do the covers, we didn’t want them to sound too akin to the originals, but didn’t want to trample on them completely.”
How about your commissioned Björk cover for Stereogum?
“That was so much fun! I feel like Björk is the kind of artist who fearlessly takes her own work by the jugular, so we just went at it in my dining room, playing pots and pans, putting a fuzzy distortion pedal on a Rhodes and an old RCA mic on the vocals. I think it’s important not to take things too seriously; that keeps you from taking important risks, which make things interesting.”
Are you someone who always hopes to take risks?
“I think that insatiable curiosity, this unending restlessness, is always present in my writing. It’s good for me: it always breaks me out of any spell I’m in, anytime I’m writing too much of the same thing. Curiosity really wards of any stagnancy in creativity.”
Did you switch from Casey Dienel to White Hinterland because you were tired of people mispronouncing your name?
“It’s true! No one can pronounce my last name! I’m afraid I really was kind of irked by that. But when I recorded Wind-up Canary, I did it just to document these songs I'd been writing for almost ten years, but never recorded. I didn't think I was starting a career in songwriting. Once it was released, and I decided I wanted to continue, I thought it would be good to re-focus, to say: ‘if I am doing this, what is it that I want to do?’ The tradition of the singer-songwriter is certainly venerable, but I wanted to take my personality out of the picture, and put the focus back on the actual songs. And I thought a band-name would really help with that.”
Did you think long and hard about the name?
“I agonized about it! I had about 60 different names at one point, and somehow managed to whittle it down to White Hinterland. I liked the idea of it being a mutable image, but also a place, a location, where the songs are coming from. I also liked having White as a modifier, having some sort of color. It seemed like something I could color in with the songs, like a line drawing. I thought that would be very fitting, because it seems like I can’t stay put in one place for long; I always have to change something.”
Are you just a restless person?
“I think I’m more restless artistically. I’m a pretty boring person: I stay home a lot, I’m very domestic, I like to cook and read. Any restless side of me comes out when I write and play.”
How about when you’re on stage?
“I wish that I was the kind of performer that could transform an audience at my whim, but I’m not. As a performer, I’m less than a showman. Personally, I like going to see shows when it’s about music, and it’s about the alchemical properties of the songs being transferred onto you just by hearing it. There’s kinetic energy in a liveshow, even if you’re not grabbing your crotch. You know what I’m saying?”
That your shows go easy on the crotch-grabbing?
“For now. Maybe some more provocative theatrics can come into play one day, but until my music eases up on complexity…”
You need both hands on the piano?
“Maybe, one day, someone will design some kind of mechanical extension to grab your crotch whilst you play, but I don’t see that happening in my lifetime. Maybe in my grandchildren’s.”
