The last decade of music-making for Portland’s queen of minimalist Americana has encompassed a children’s album, a surprise collaboration with k.d. lang and Neko Case, the highly acclaimed Warp and Weft album, and now rave reviews to her latest offering The Lookout. Russ Bravo caught up with her before the final date of her UK tour this month …
Your new album has quite a lot of foreboding in it – is that a reflection on how you’re feeling about stuff in terms of the world or something closer to home … ?
The normalisation of far-right thinking in the States is really shocking – the misogyny, and racism and xenophobia – it just seems so weird to live there. I know these things are happening here too, and around the world there’s this wilful rise of the right wing. I can’t not write about it – I have to write about it.
Some of it’s cloaked, some of it’s not, but as a person who tries to grapple with things through song, that’s one of the things I grapple with. As a parent, too, trying to feel hopeful – maybe I’m just naïve – but it’s human nature to be hopeful. I want to be hopeful because I’m a parent, and if you have young children you want to believe the world’s a good place, and somewhere they can find themselves fully realised, you know?
But I do fear sometimes that it might get worse before it gets better. I don’t know about here but… it’s confusing.
Do you find it helps you as you write – music is the best route for you to put out how you’re feeling about things?
Here I am, it’s my tenth record, I’m 44, I have children. I mean, what am I doing? What should I be doing with my life? A lot of people in their mid-forties start to wonder ‘well I accomplished so many things that I set out to do’, and you know your time is limited. In your twenties, you think nothing is limited. When things are going well with me I feel like with my music … it’s a deeper way of being. The other day we had a great show in London and I just felt very alive, very much like I was giving what I can give, which is … my heart, really, and soul – and my words and my melodies, and my guitar playing – I care so much about that – and I work really hard, and it felt like it was coming back to me, you know, in this really nice, positive feedback system. And there are other days when I think ‘maybe there’s something else for me?’ You know … I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.
Is there a spiritual dimension to this for you? ’I’m here for something – what is it?’
I guess that’s part of my problem. I come from an atheist family – we didn’t ever talk about spirituality, or God, or anything because we lived in this very right wing, hardcore Christian environment and my parents were the opposite. But they taught us all about nature, science and art, and creativity, and all that stuff, so that is my spirituality, though I don’t really think about it day to day as a spiritual practice. And I grapple with that, too, like ‘what is my spirituality?’ Those big questions – what does it all mean, and where is my place? There are times though where I feel I’m getting a mystical experience through music, which is spiritual and that’s the closest that I’ve been. I mean camping deep in nature, like backpacking and stuff, that can feel that way as well.
We’ve talked a bit about hope, and the way your songs look for that – “When it grows darkest, the stars come out”, stuff like that? Do you think that music has a significant role to play in changing the way that people act?
You know, that’s a great question. Are you thinking like it having like an activist, political role?
Kind of – like you change the way people act through changing the way they think …
I think you can certainly see the power of music in different social movements through time – Bob Marley, the folk revival of the Sixties, the anti-Vietnam protests. And now hip-hop is creating a platform for young people to speak out about everything. I don’t know about minds, exactly, but maybe it can help someone feel happier that day? I want people to feel moved – that’s my goal, because when I feel moved by music it’s almost like I’m a teenager again you know, and it’s like “Ahh, music’s the best” and you feel that dopamine rush, and that’s so good. And maybe it’s harder to get that from a painting or a book, because music is so visceral and cutting – so quick to affect the mind and the heart.
Do you think there’s an emotion that you tap into most when you write songs? With some people, for instance, there’s a real anger that drives into the music … is there something that you’d say you write from?
That’s a good question – I don’t really know. This record is a lot about things being temporary – things changing, things disappearing so there’s a fleeting quality to a lot of the lyrics. There’s beauty but it’s there and then it’s gone. It’s not where we live – we live in a place of struggle.
“Man is born to struggle as the sparks fly upwards” didn’t someone say? I think it ’s from the Bible or somewhere like that?
I like that.
It seems to me that there is a lot of music coming out at the moment that is determined to address the real breadth of human experience. Yes there’s love songs, there’s protest, there’s ‘have a great time’ type of music, but there’s also ‘this is an awful thing I’m going through, how do I deal with it?’
I think that’s appropriate for this era. If it was all ‘everything’s awesome, it’s so cool!’ people would be, like, ‘What?!’ That wouldn’t resonate right now.
Maybe like the blues rewritten, in a way, just expressed musically in a different style …
You’ve written a lot of songs on the album with that sense of watching out, being prepared, seeing what’s coming and how we ready ourselves for it?
Yes, for sure. Watch Fire is like that – it’s me, writing to my children (if they know it or not), saying “I’ve got your back”. That’s the mother’s instinct to protect – that’s a lot of what this album’s about. Eyes wide open, looking ahead, seeing what’s coming, and – ‘stay awake!’
You’re well known for your work ethic – do you have an idea from the start how a song is going to work out? Do you start with the lyric, or a tune? How does it come together?
It comes out in different ways. A lot of times I’ll start with something I already had working – like lyrics from yesterday that I knew were good but I couldn’t find the right music. It’s nice to start from little scraps and just build from there rather than just a blank page. The blank page can just overwhelm you …
But sometimes I will just start from scratch, especially if I’ve been writing for a while and I say to myself ‘you know, you’re really not getting anywhere from these scraps, so scrap the scraps and start afresh’. I hadn’t written a song in a year, so I go into writing patterns. I determined to write four hours a day, four days a week, for a year and see what happened. I actually didn’t think it would take a year, but Tucker [Martine] my husband who’s my producer told me ‘keep writing’! I was super annoyed, but I kept writing and it gave us a lot of good material to work with, and a lot of songs to choose from.
Is he a good critic?
He is a good critic. He has a kind of a ‘meh’ attitude, which is a little hard sometimes, and I’m ‘what do you mean?! – I think this is really good!’ and it steals my thunder in a way, but I don’t need him to prop me up or bolster me, I need him to be honest.
He is my first listener and my most passionate fan and also my harshest critic, so it can be annoying but he is a great editor. He is just honest – he hears something or doesn’t and a lot of times we agree on that, which is very convenient because if we had a very different aesthetic I don’t think we would have made records together.
Do you have a lot of songs that are put away, but you might get them out at some point in the future and think ‘actually there’s something in that’?
Yeah. I push for that sometimes because there’s a few that I wrote on this last round that I thought ‘that’s really cool, maybe I should keep that’ so I asked my manager to listen to this, you know – just a different ear, and he has a less discerning ear in terms of he’s just a music fan, so he might let some stuff through … I don’t know, we’ll see!
I can’t usually tell – that’s the nice thing about having Tucker is that I don’t have to be too critical. I just write, write, write, write … and then he can help go through it. Because a lot of artists this far in get stuck with the self-criticism, because they’re doubting themselves and crushing themselves down. Since I have him, I’m like, well he can decide. Whatever. Just write the songs!
You’ve done a lot of collaboration in recent years – with k.d. lang and Neko Case for example. Did you seek that out for working out new material or was it a fun thing that just happened to come along?
That just came along. I was given an invite about four years ago now. KD sent us an email out of the blue – I had met her a few months earlier at a benefit show and asked her to sing on my last album Warp and Weft, which she did very nicely, and she had met Neko around the same time and she put two and two together and sent this group email saying ‘do you guys want to start a band?’ And I was ‘let me check my schedule – I’m free!’
I just wanted to work with them because I’d admired them in different ways for a lot of years, and it was cool. It was definitely challenging, and there were things about it that I would change if we did it again – but I don’t know if we’re gonna do it again. It’s probably just a one-off in all honesty but it was very interesting to see how other people write, be in the same room with basically strangers and write songs together. Really interesting.
The thing that I’m happy about with that project is that we did get each person’s distinct voice, both singing and songwriting – that aesthetic voice represented on record, and it feels like a relatively whole piece instead of this weird jumbled ‘supergroup’ mishmash thing, y’know? It doesn’t feel smashed together in an awkward way. It feels like a piece of art, and that I’m proud of because it’s hard to get three strong-willed people to co-operate and do something basically as strangers at that intimate level.
Is touring something you really enjoy when you’re doing it but glad when you’ve finished? Something you know you have to do to get the music out there but it’s become much harder work with a family and what-have-you …?
It’s certainly a big thing I have to think about before I plan it and I have to talk it through with Tucker and be strategic and smart because I have limited resources and energy, and I need to be thoughtful about it all. But yeah I like to tour, especially now I don’t do it all that much.
It’s like three weeks here and three weeks there, and then I don’t do it for a couple of years while I’m writing a record. It’s really not that much compared to most musicians. When I am out I feel kind of free, like I have one of those nights in London and I feel ‘I’m realising my human self here in my whole form’ like not just my mum self, or my wife self, or my housekeeper self, or all those other selves that can be more important at home can just take a back seat, and I can just be an artist. That’s really cool.
And do you find that as someone with 20 years of music making behind you, and a family, that your mindset on tour is different …
For sure. It’s kind of a privilege to have people coming and crowding in these rooms and paying me money to play my songs. Sure there are times when I think ‘oh why didn’t I pack out a room in New York, and should I have gotten more people, and why was that show crappy?’ but most of the time I feel pretty good, and I get to spend time with my musician friends and we get to become really tight as a band on stage and that feels good.
The way people consume music has changed hugely in the past two decades and in lots of ways, it’s become harder to be a working musician and to pay the bills – so live performance seems to be much more the thing that hooks people in? Has that changed the way you approach a live show?
Yeah, I think so. I just want to put on a good show and I didn’t really care about that before. I’m not sure why I care more – maybe it’s because I was hanging out with k.d. lang and Neko Case and they’re great ‘show’ people, or maybe it’s because I realised that if I don’t put on a good show then people aren’t gonna come! We have pretty nice outfits, we’ve thought through what we look like, we have this screen projection in the back – that doesn’t work in all the venues – but a lot of times it does and it’s an animated cool expanded version. This video that a Basque woman made which you can find on my Instagram account – she did some of the artwork for the record, and we’ve expanded that for the song Lightning Rod for the show.
We’ve got a full band, but it’s expensive and if I’m lucky I’ll make like $2000 on this whole tour, which is a month of work, but it feeds the machine and the machine is my songwriting, publishing, owning my own record label, having a manager who takes a reduced commission, and we keep it working. My husband’s the producer so it’s like a family business and we did just buy a studio in Portland which is cool because before we had to rent, so it’s not like we’re impoverished and things keep moving forward. But it’s not the most simple of math to figure out …
And I guess having control of your own music, when you tour, how you tour etc is so precious, compared to being told where you have to go and what you have to do.
It is! And I don’t take that for granted because I know a lot of people who do not have that freedom. I’m really fortunate to be able to call my own shots, especially as a working mum, as I would be so stressed if bosses were telling me when I have to be places and where I have to be sacrificing time away from the family and all that.
Lookout is out now on Bella Union
Order via Drift Records