Brisbane-based singer-songwriter Asha Jefferies was suffering a serious case of writer’s block last year, when inspiration struck. The end of a long-term relationship provided her with permission to question her identity, her goals, and – ultimately – her sense of self; it wasn’t an ideal situation, but it certainly cured Jefferies’ creative paralysis. She wrote the beautiful, reflective “Crybaby,” which features a more poppy sound than the melodic indie folk of her previous singles.
“The song is mostly about realizing the personal freedom that I had, and that I wasn’t allowing myself to have,” Jefferies says. “It’s so easy to tell yourself that you can’t do this or you can’t do that, but at the end of the day, you’re the only one that’s holding yourself back.”
A couple of months after breaking up, Jefferies got back together with her partner, Josh Tate. He’s also the visual artist, filmmaker and photographer for much of her work, so they had to reshape both their professional and personal relationship. The song, and the breakup, have led to a deeper connection, according to Jefferies.
“We were able to re-form our relationship. [‘Crybaby’] was all about the transitions and how positive relationships can die, but the relationship can [be repaired and] move on. Josh does all the creative content for my work, so it’s been a really interesting time collaborating and putting together a music video for the song about that breakup.”
“Crybaby” was created during the pandemic, at a time when Brisbane was not under the same harsh restrictions as Melbourne. Jefferies was able to meet with her producer Aidan Hogg (also a co-writer, producer and bass player in Jaguar Jonze) several times a week to write and record. They’d first met when Hogg was working as a sound engineer in the studio where Jefferies was recording and the two remained in touch; Hogg also played bass for her during her live performances in 2019.
Jefferies reached out to Hogg in May last year and asked if he was interested in writing and recording. That kicked off a few months of productive sessions at Plutonium Studios in Brisbane. “Going into the studio and talking to Aidan was so good for my mental health,” she says. “Being able to leave my home and be able to go and work.”
Home was a “really, really busy share house” last year, and Jefferies was limited to creating music on GarageBand in her bedroom. “I didn’t really feel that comfortable playing my guitar and building songs that way, so I would just put headphones on, sit on my computer, and record chords and melodies. It’s really addictive, and it’s been such an awesome way to teach myself how to produce in a really basic way.”
Working with Hogg was a contrast to her experience working on previous release “Break” with producer Ian Haug, songwriter and guitarist for both Powderfinger and The Church. Jefferies had applied to the American Express Music Backers Fund, winning a day of studio time with Haug and engineer Yanto Browning at Airlock Studios in Brisbane. Though they’d never met, Jefferies says the Brisbane music scene is one of pure support and “wholesomeness,” where emerging artists are given the friendship, support and advice to become recognised.
“A lot of the songs I’d written were with Aidan, so I brought in a bunch of demos from the last two to three years,” Jefferies remembers, adding that they settled on “Break” because everyone involved felt connected to it. The finished version shimmers in morning light, sparse piano chords, romantic layered harmonies, and luxuriates in the enormous spaciousness created by clever composition. “The way that Ian produces is so intuitive, and he really listens to all the lyrics especially, and [knows] what parts should be really delicate and what parts should crescendo. He’s always got so many mixing notes. He’s just so into it, it was really cool.”
They’ve talked about working together again in the future, but for now, Jefferies is writing by herself, a process she says feels organic, authentic, natural. Jefferies uses these same words when describing the artists she admires most, including Australian indie-folk pop acts Kate Miller-Heidke, Josh Pyke and the John Butler Trio and New Zealand artist Nadia Reid.
“I started singing really young and I wanted to be a diva, a pop star, but when I was 10 or 11, my dad took me to the Woodford Folk Festival. It was the first time I’d seen live music and all these really rootsy artists,” she recalls. “I think what really struck me was how real they were, and the connection that they were having with the audience. From then on, and throughout high school, it was so much about what the story is that I want to tell and how do I want to connect with people.”
Asha Jefferies will be connecting with audiences again soon – she’s assembled an all-female band (Jaymee Watkin, Vlada Edippulit and Jo Davie) and they’re preparing for a national tour, kicking off May 1 with a Sunshine Sounds Festival set at Eumundi Showgrounds in Queensland. Tickets for headlining gigs celebrating the release of “Crybaby” in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Fremantle and her hometown of Brisbane, are on sale now.
Follow Asha Jefferies on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.
Welcome to Audiofemme’s monthly record review column, Musique Boutique, written by music journo vet Gillian G. Gaar. Every fourth Monday, Musique Boutique offers a cross-section of noteworthy reissues and new releases guaranteed to perk up your ears.
Elizabeth King’s life was always centered around the church. “We had preachers in our family, my mom and my daddy was church people, and mom was a great singer,” she told the Memphis Commercial Appeal. “That’s just how I was brought up.” She began singing at the age of three, later recorded with the all-male Gospel Souls, and subsequently formed another singing group, the Stewart Family. But she wasn’t interested in seriously pursuing a singing career, because of her reluctance to tour while she was raising her family (she was eventually the mother of fifteen children).
Which is why it’s taken her so long — King is 77-years-old — to finally release her debut album, Living in the Last Days (Bible & Tire Recording Co.). King has a commanding voice, as is evident from the opening track, “Blessed Be the Name of the Lord,” performed acapella to further emphasize her power. Elsewhere, she’s backed by the vibrant Sacred Souls Sound Section, who make foot-tapping numbers like the title song really jump and swing. When King and the Sacred Souls lock into a groove together, as in “Reach Out and Touch” and “Testify,” the musical force they generate is irresistible. She’s just as compelling in slow burning numbers like “Walk With Me” and “You’ve Got to Move.” This is uplifting music that will soothe your soul.
When Marianne Faithfull was hospitalized with coronavirus last year, she wasn’t expected to survive. But she beat the odds and pulled through — and went right back to work on her 21st solo album, She Walks in Beauty (BMG), created in collaboration with Warren Ellis (best known for his work with Nick Cave the Bad Seeds), and featuring guest appearances by the likes of Cave and Brian Eno.
Its release fulfills Faithfull’s longtime dream of recording an album of poetry. It’s an area she’s explored before — her 1965 album Come My Way featured “Jabberwock,” a recitation of Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” — but never in such depth. Her resonant voice is tailormade for the classics, and when set against the languid, atmospheric musical backing, the effect is sublime. The title track is the renowned love poem by Lord Byron; “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is John Keats’ tale of a woeful knight; “The Lady of Shalott” is Lord Alfred Tennyson’s epic ballad of a doomed young woman (Faithfull chooses the darker 1833 version of the poem). Faithfull breathes new life into these timeless works, turning them into something exquisite.
Merry Clayton has the kind of music resume that could fill the entirety of this column. You’ve heard her voice on records by Carole King, Ringo Starr, Tori Amos, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Linda Ronstadt, Coldplay, and Odetta, to name a very few, as well as her riveting guest appearance on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” She’s released her own records too, and was profiled in the 2013 documentary 20 Feet From Stardom.
Now, twenty-seven years after the release of her last album, comes Beautiful Scars (Motown Gospel/Capitol CMG/Ode Records). Its appearance is even more remarkable considering the challenges Clayton has faced in the last decade; following a serious car accident in 2014, both her legs were amputated below the knee. Clayton’s resilience can be seen in her first question to the doctor: would her voice be affected? No, it would not. Beautiful Scars is the result.
Indeed, she wears those scars proudly, calling them “beautiful proof that I made it this far” in the album’s title song, so filled with emotion it moved her to tears. There’s a wonderful version of Sam Cooke’s “Touch the Hem of His Garment,” her voice soaring with ecstasy. She revisits Leon Russell’s “A Song for You,” which she first recorded in 1971, her voice now grown in stature to become fuller and richer. And as always, there are songs of the faith that helped her persevere, such as the joyful testifying of “He Made a Way” and “God Is Love.” Merry Clayton’s indominable spirit vibrates through every note of this record.
Evie Sands launched her music career in the 1960s. But after watching other artists go on to have hits with songs she’d previously recorded (including “Take Me For a Little While,” “I Can’t Let Go,” “Angel of the Morning”), she began moving into songwriting herself. She eventually stopped performing in 1979 to pursue songwriting and producing full time, though still releasing the occasional record.
Get Out of Your Own Way, on Sands’ own R-Spot Records label, is her first solo album since 1999. It’s fairly bursting with warmth and positive vibrations; the musical mood is an engaging rock/pop mix, with elements of country and soul, and rich harmonies throughout.
Highlights include the soulful “My Darkest Days,” a powerful number about overcoming despair, and the opening track, “The Truth is in Disguise,” a solid rocker addressing the confusion and uncertainty of diving into a new relationship. The title track provides a gentle reminder that you might be getting in the way of your own success. “Don’t Hold Back” is a go-out-there-and-get-’em ode of affirmation. “Leap of Faith” encourages you to make one.
On October 10, 1970, John Lennon was busy working on his first solo album at EMI Recording Studios (not yet rechristened “Abbey Road,” after the Beatles’ album of the same name). The sessions had been going on for two weeks. But on this day, his wife, Yoko Ono, was finally going to get the opportunity to make her own kind of music.
Having just finished mixing his song “I Found Out,” Lennon, on guitar, started jamming with bassist Klaus Voorman and fellow ex-Beatle Ringo Starr on drums. After vamping through some Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins numbers, the power trio began to stretch out. And as Lennon’s playing became increasingly wild, slashing at his instrument as he spiraled down the scale, he shouted out for Ono to join him, and she did.
Ono’s vocalizations were a desperate, keening sound, matching the twisted noise from Lennon’s guitar, her persistent cry of the single word “Why?” becoming the aural equivalent of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream. Lennon was enthralled. “She makes music like you’ve never heard on earth,” he enthused to Rolling Stone later that year. “And when the musicians play with her, they’re inspired out of their skulls.”
At the time, the general public didn’t agree. When John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band were jointly released in December 1970, Lennon’s album was heralded as a brave, uncompromising work. Ono’s was overlooked, or derided; she recalls being sent photos of her records stuffed in a garbage can. “So many people didn’t understand her,” says Simon Hilton, production manager of the new JL/POB reissue – out today, in honor of the double album’s 50th anniversary – which also includes Ono’s sessions on the “Ultimate Collection” version of the set. Hilton believes she experienced backlash not only because she was a woman, but because of her otherness: “She sounded a bit funny, and she liked screaming.” But over the years, that assessment has changed. YO/POB has come to be recognized as a pioneering album, one that laid the groundwork for independent music and alternative rock to come.
The original album is bold and bracing; there simply wasn’t another record like it. “Why” launches the album with a furious assault that grabs you from the second it erupts and doesn’t let go. In contrast, “Why Not” is a leisurely stroll, the musicians providing a steady backbeat to Ono’s ululations until the final minute, when it gradually speeds up, then burns out, drowned out by the sound of a subway rushing by. The title of “Greenfield Morning I Pushed an Empty Baby Carriage All Over the City” echoes the cryptic “instructional poems” in Ono’s book Grapefruit, and the song itself is equally ominous, opening with an industrial droning, Yoko’s vocal cutting throughout the piece like a mournful siren.
“AOS” is drawn from a 1968 rehearsal with Ornette Coleman. It is a stark, spare track (aside from a sudden torrent of sound in the middle), Ono holding her own in the company of Coleman on trumpet, Charlie Haden and David Izenzon on bass, and Ed Blackwell on drums. “Touch Me” is all sharp edges and jarring rhythms, interrupted by what sounds like a tree cracking in two, then morphing into something slower and more distorted. “Paper Shoes” has an agitated, percussive beat percolating underneath Ono’s almost breezy, wordless vocal, swooping in and out.
Ono herself had little familiarity with rock music or its culture when she began working with John Lennon. Born in Tokyo in 1933, and growing up in both Japan and the US, she was a classically-trained pianist, who dreamed of becoming a composer. Her father discouraged her ambition, sending her to take voice lessons instead, explaining, “Women may not be good creators of music, but they’re good at interpreting music.” Ono eventually rebelled against such strictures to chart her own course. In 1956, she dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College and married composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. The two moved to a loft on Chambers Street, in Manhattan’s Lower West Side, and quickly fell in with the city’s experimental arts community. The loft became a site for “happenings” – mixed media events that featured spoken word, music, and experimental performance.
Ono performed at these and other events, often playing with ways to create sound; a 1961 concert she staged at Carnegie Recital Hall (adjacent to the larger Carnegie Hall) featured a piece in which dancers moved objects around the stage while wired with contact mics. She also experimented with how to use her own voice. “In 1962, I went into shouting, but not the kind of shouting that you know of me doing it over rock music,” she told me in an interview. “It was very similar to [her 1981 solo single] ‘Walking on Thin Ice.’”
In 1966, she went to London to participate in a symposium entitled “Destruction of Art,” with her second husband, Tony Cox. She met Lennon when he came to one of her solo exhibitions. Two years later, when they became a couple, they began making experimental recordings together. Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions, and Wedding Album mixed organic and electronic sounds, vocal manipulations, and improvisations; on “No Bed For Beatle John,” for example, Ono “sings” a newspaper article to an improvised melody.
Working with rock instrumentation necessitated a more aggressive vocal style. “I was from the avant-garde, so I was still a little bit structured at first,” Ono says. “But when I went to rock and we did all that stuff, the Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band kind of thing, I was loosened up by then from doing a few shouting pieces in London. And then I just felt great! The only thing was, because they were playing electric guitar and all that, to go over that and do your voice experiments was very difficult. So that was when all that came out like ‘Aaah!’ Those things started to happen because they forced me into it. Pushed me into it!”
Today, music aficionados could recognize Ono’s music as the bridge between the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith, with a vocal style later heard in the work by performers like the B-52’s or Diamanda Galas. But in 1970, devoid of that framing, listeners were perplexed, if not outright hostile. Klaus Voorman was startled when he first heard Ono singing, as he backed John and Yoko at a “Rock and Roll Revival” festival in Toronto in 1969. “She started screaming and doing this thing,” he recalls. “And people all stood there. And I looked at Eric [Clapton, also in the band], and we looked at our feet. We were really shocked, just as much as the audience.”
But by the time YO/POB was recorded, he’d gained an appreciation for her unorthodox style. “That record is incredible,” he says. “I love in particular ‘Why Not,’ where she sings really quiet, and John is playing on the guitar; she’s doing all the squeaky noises, and he’s doing the slide guitar and it’s really floating, really simple stuff. She turned him on to all this and he says that too, that he would’ve never thought of doing these things this way. It’s definitely Yoko’s influence.”
What’s especially exciting about the tracks in the new box set, is not only their length (about three times that of the original album), but also that the music is presented in its original raw state, before any editing or added effects. “Yoko did a hell of a lot of editing to it after the recording,” says Simon Hilton. “It is absolutely incredible. It’s making all of these decisions that you wouldn’t normally take, but she’s taken them with great bravery… they’re groundbreaking, in terms of not editing on the beat, but still editing somewhere that makes it work incredibly well.” Tracks were slowed down or sped up, enhanced with sound effects and delays, looping and sampling. “It was a very exciting record to do, because you never knew what was happening,” said the album’s engineer, John Leckie.
On “Why,” we can hear that the musicians were playing for nearly ten minutes before Ono chose to join them. “Why Not,” which runs over twenty minutes, has a bluesier cast to it. Shorn of its sound effects and manipulations, “Greenfield Morning” is more laid-back, but still just as haunting. Hearing just the bare tracks gives you a sense of being right there in the room with the musicians, caught up in the moment of creation. Voorman further explains their approach in the liner notes: “It’s not like really recording a song, it was recording a feeling. Ringo and my thing was, ‘We are the rhythm band, we’re just gonna put down the basis — some chair she can sit on and build a song around, build her music around.’” Three previously unreleased tracks flesh out the story; “Life” in particular percolates with a nervy energy, the musicians laying out a taut foundation for Ono’s ethereal cries to float upon.
It was the release of Rising in 1995 that helped lead to a reassessment of Ono’s earlier work. Old prejudices and misjudgments had faded away, and now younger musicians were eager to experience her music. L7 dropped a sample of Ono’s warbling into their track “Wargasm.” The Rising tour saw alternative rockers like the Melvins and Soundgarden joining Ono on stage. Remixes of her music by the likes of Cibo Matto and Tricky made her a regular presence at the top of Billboard’s dance chart. “When Yoko did her singing in Toronto [in 1969], the audience didn’t have any context to what she was doing,” says Voorman. “They didn’t know what it was supposed to be. So they were really shocked, I would say. Now, she has got an audience, and the people know what they come to see, and they know what she is presenting.” At present, the new mixes of YO/POB are only available on the Blu-rays in the “Ultimate Collection” box set, due to licensing issues; Hilton hopes to someday be able to release more material. But the original album, reissued twice since 1970, is readily available, and is well worth investigating as a barrier-breaking musical statement. For her part, Ono views her musical legacy with equanimity. “I feel that I always have my own voice and it’s different from others,” she says, “and if somebody wants to hear it, they will.”
Partying hard, getting evicted, breaking up and starting out on a new solo career – these are the earmarks of a Quarter-life crisis in the making. Sydney-based artist Lola Scott has been through it all, so it makes sense that she’d commemorate her tumultuous twenties by titling her debut EP 1/4 Life Crisis.
The lead single, “The Eviction Song,” is catchy, fresh and resonant. Melodically upbeat and brimming with sarcasm, it is based on a true story: after breaking up with a long-term lover, Scott moved back into a shared house early in 2021, where the non-stop parties and subsequent short-term flings provided ample fodder for lyrics. When the neighbours finally had enough of Scott and her housemates, they were evicted; it was Scott’s sixth move in four years (and she’s had two moves since then). Far from being disheartened, or learning from mistakes, Scott has moved in with several of her housemates from the original party house and their good times continue.
The latest single from the EP, “I wanted to call her but I’m tragic and she’s overseas (8 months),” was written with Scott’s co-producer Oscar Sharah, a founding member of electronic pop project Mel Blue. Scott is debuting the video, directed by Mel Blue band member Lewis Clark, exclusively on Audiofemme.
“It was written from [Sharah’s] perspective about a long-distance relationship, knowing that it’s not going to work but trying anyway,” Scott explains. “The lyrics are us playfully talking about the things that happen in a long-term relationship, like if we make it to payday, I’ll take you to Norway. The video is us driving on opposite sides of the road, like being on opposite sides of the world. We’ve got some cute choreography – we just imagined it while we were writing it. We shot it at 3am, and choreographed it on the spot.”
Before she was a party animal, living the rockstar existence of a 20-something Aussie girl with lots of dreams and little money, Scott was a guitarist. Growing up in the New South Wales highlands, her high school years were spent practicing the instrument, which culminated in a Bachelor’s degree in guitar, working as a session musician immediately post-high school throughout university.
“I was working with 4 or 5 bands, but I quit them all to focus on my solo career,” says Scott. “I’m not sure how I juggled being in that many bands at once, but I guess a lot were collaborations with friends, trying different styles of music. Studying guitar and starting out as a classical guitarist, pop was a dirty word for a while.”
Scott’s love of pop started out thanks to a bargain chair Tasmanian-born fellow musician Asta was selling on Gumtree (like the US version of Craigslist). “She saw that the boot of my car was full of busking equipment. She had just moved to Sydney from Tasmania, so she suggested we should jam and that lead to our collaboration and friendship,” Scott remembers. “Asta asked me to play keyboard. I did piano lessons when I was a lot younger, so I had that background.”
In 2018, immediately out of university, Scott took the creative and professional leap into her own solo career. Her early singles “Crowded Conscience,” “Cyclone Weather,” and “Take Me Back” combined indie rock and synth atmospherics. “Take Me Back” was a radio favourite on youth station Triple J, with its layered harmonies, rock-synth atmosphere and crisp, flawless production. But it was her track “4E Jobless” (or “forever jobless”) that really hit home for many young Australians. In 2020, youth joblessness in Australia rose from 0.9 percent to 15.6 percent, which equates to one in three young people in Australia being unemployed or under-employed. The pandemic has only worsened the situation nationally, especially for creative professionals and youth aspiring to careers in the arts.
“Everyone that studied music ends up in massive debt, but I was brought up in a family that wanted me to finish a degree,” says Scott. “I don’t think [a degree is] something you need to be a great musician. I met most of the people I ended up working with through going out and seeking collaborations.”
Scott wrote “4E Jobless” when she quit her day job. “A lot of musicians work in side hustles before music is your main gig,” she muses. “I would always joke about how it was a retirement plan for me, that music was a hobby. I know different friends would have rules, like if they haven’t made it before 30, they’d get a ‘real job.’ Quitting my day job wasn’t that I was suddenly stable, but I decided to put 100 percent of my time into this because if I don’t do it now, when will I have the choice to put all of my time into it?”
Scott’s approach to sustainability in the music industry is to expand her skill set, and to that end, she’s been working on strengthening her production skills. “I spend a lot of time observing and learning from producers. Joel from Eskimo Joe is a legend and I learned so much from him when we were writing together. I’ve also been hanging out with friends who are producers, and Oscar has taught me a lot. YouTube tutorials are also really great, too.”
Scott produced most of the 1/4 Life Crisis EP together with Sharah. “Often, we’d come into the studio with nothing and work together on guitars. We produced as we recorded, so everything you hear on the EP is the demos; we don’t produce a different track. I always think I can be a minimalist but then I hear all these bendy synths and I love a big chorus that feels like a lot of layers, drone and intense emotion. Whenever I put down one guitar part, we always joke that I can’t help but put down a ‘guitarmony.’ We work by throwing all the ideas in at once, then taking them out one by one.”
Scott’s musical influences take a similar approach – humour, authenticity, and genre-defying musicality define their work. “I’ve been listening to Phoebe Bridgers, I love how she writes lyrics,” Scott enthuses. “I feel like she’s stretching the genre wherever she wants to take it. I also love Caroline Polachek, who does some really interesting things with melody that I haven’t heard in pop music before. The production is insane and I love the concepts that she sings about. One song, called ‘Door,’ is like [sci-fi movie] Inception as a song. I also listen to Rex Orange County and I love everything he does. I grew up listening to The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan – [I was fascinated by] how she flips [the register] from chest-voice to head-voice and I think I mimic that a lot in my music now.”
The lyrical content on 1/4 Life Crisis is intense, and while there’s a comic, sarcastic edge to the delivery, the experience of break-ups, joblessness, eviction and loneliness are sadly relatable.
“I definitely believe that whenever something negative happens, there’s something positive that comes out of it,” Scott says. “I like to write about things [knowing that] it’s painful, but once I’m in a room with friends, talking about it makes it a lot easier to go through those kind of things. If I wrote by myself, it would be a lot sadder. Honestly, when I was writing, I didn’t think about how it would connect. I just wanted to be honest with my own experience.”
Americana duo Ida Mae have a way of creating magic through their music. Comprised of husband and wife Christopher and Stephanie Jean Turpin, the duo traversed across the pond from their native London to Nashville where they’ve released two spectacular projects in the form of their 2019 debut album, Chasing Lights, and follow up 2020 EP, Raining For You.
But all roads lead to Avalon – a faraway, mythical land they capture in “Road to Avalon,” the opening track on their upcoming sophomore album, Click Click Domino, out July 16th via Thirty Tigers. The duo capture the mystical feeling of Avalon — the famed island in Celtic mythology that serves as a place of renewal — in the song, which opens with the plucking of a haunting banjo and ringing ukulele. Met with their equally enchanting voices, the lyrics call on vivid imagery that compares highways to ribbons, the twosome traveling roads so deep they feel like lost dogs with “raw boned, stony feet.”
Part of what makes Ida Mae stand out is the way they allow the music take its time, each note simmering as they detail the “heartaches and visions” they experienced on the road to their destination. The couple says the song was inspired by the cities they passed through that felt abandoned or forgotten, with the goal of creating a “sparse Trans-Atlantic dream state,” honoring this mission through lyrics one can’t help but want to dissect. “We are the names that came before you/Now we’re just drifters barricaded at the border/Sharing whispers in the shadows painting pictures on our gallows,” they sing, with a sense of passion that can be felt through the speakers.
“Road to Avalon” is merely a continuation of the distinct and eclectic sound Ida Mae has established over the years – the melodies allow the mind to wander, while the lyrics pull you back in with their poetic nature. The gorgeous title track from last year’s EP, which will also appear on Click Click Domino, exemplifies the duo’s songcraft. “Raining For You” evokes the feeling of driving through wide open spaces as they sing, “In the stillness/You begin to rust/A heartbeat ain’t enough without some love/The night keeps calling/The sky keeps falling/And I keep raining for you.”
Despite the grandiose, cinematic nature of these tracks, most of them were recorded in the couple’s home-built studio, in two or three live takes. Initially, they had wanted to record Click Click Domino in a more traditional studio setting, with the English producer who helmed their debut; though their plans were stymied by the halt of international travel, they leaned into faithfully reproducing the energy of their live show, giving new life to the songs they’d played to enthusiastic crowds night after night before the pandemic hit.
You can hear that energy best in the scorching “Click Click Domino” as it offers a searing take on the vapid world of social media with its “aesthetic apathetic,” “prima donna playboys” and “populism politics” as told over a bluesy, gritty, guitar-heavy melody.
Ida Mae dance among a beautiful marriage of country, bluegrass and folk, their production efforts taking the listener for a scenic ride through their imaginations — proving they have what it takes to leave a distinct mark on the modern world of Americana music.
For some artists, the last year of increased solitude offered an opportunity to step into their craft and be more prolific and creative than ever before. For others, it presented a debilitating pit of emotional and physical quicksand, making it nearly impossible to get through the day, much less create anything. Kaylan Waterman, aka Vespre, landed somewhere in between the two. Her latest single and first solo release in almost three years comes after a long period of collaborating, resting, reflecting and rediscovering her muse. “Back to Me” is a buoyant reunion with Spring, self and love lost and found; and one that Waterman worked damn hard to get to.
“I know a lot of people who are like, ‘I made my magnum opus during COVID!’ That was not me, at all,” says Waterman. “I tried a couple of times and my body, my spirit just told me: Don’t even stress about it, but this isn’t it for you… focus on other stuff.” So, that’s what she did. Waterman, who works full time at local label, artist management and sync company Assemble Sound, already has enough on her plate to tire anyone out. But, on top of working full time and collaborating with her brother Kaleb the Intern, Moon King, and others in 2020, she started a sharing table in her neighborhood to provide food and other necessities to folks in the community.
While Waterman devoted her time and energy to filling other people’s plates, her’s was running low. “I just did not have it in me to create. I was too stressed, I was too sad, I was grieving, I was just like in survival mode,” Waterman explains. “I felt very depleted and music was the only thing I knew that would help fill me up.” So she started writing for herself, meeting at the cross-section of heartbreak and healing.
Waterman explains that the idea for “Back to Me” started almost as a clapback to peoples’ responses to her breakup. She says that although she’s the one who walked away from her relationship, everyone assumed she was dumped. “I would tell people, and they’d be like, ‘I’m so sorry, he’s the worst!’” Waterman says. “And I’m like, ‘umm, maybe I’m the worst…What are you talking about? I ended this.’”
The song allowed Waterman to reclaim her narrative and communicate the complex array of emotions that can accompany a breakup. She wanted to portray the duality of being resolute in her decision but still feeling loss and grief. “I just wanted people to know that women – especially independent, very self aware women – can make difficult decisions and still be soft and longing and wanting. We hold both of those things at the same.”
Waterman embodies this duality in “Back to Me.” Though her poetic lyrics focus on nostalgia and longing for a former lover, the music that accompanies them is upbeat, driven by shiny synths and ebullient percussion. The video (co-directed by herself and Andrew Miller) mixes the ethereal and the mundane, showing Waterman as both a serene nature goddess and a forlorn bodega shopper. Though she’s feeling the ripple effects of heartbreak, Waterman refuses to hide from her complicated emotions, and is determined to dance through it all.
“I think I did accidentally write a pop song but I don’t really gravitate towards pop in that way,” she says. The songwriter, pianist and producer grew up listening to Detroit house and attending the jazz festival as early as age 9. She says that she feels most inspired by female artists like Patrice Rushen – whom she lovingly named her Subaru after – who sit somewhere in between house music and jazz, disco and R&B. “I want people to be able to dance to the music I make, because Detroit is such a dancing town,” says Waterman. “I wanna speak to that culture more. I wanna write for us more. For my friends that go out dancing like me.”
Dancing in the middle seems to be where Waterman finds her stride. In the middle of heartbreak and happiness, rest and resilience, triumph and tears. Her music finds its strength in vulnerability and suggests that the listener do the same. “I feel like I’m coming back to life and I wanted people to hear it in that way,” she says. “Maybe it’s your creativity coming back or maybe it’s a person or maybe it’s just spring. Maybe you’re happy that this horrible winter is over… I wanted people to listen to it and hear however they wanted to hear it.”
When TellemJoness and Shalom first linked up to record “Fade Away,” they never knew it would lead to a project. The two Cincinnati natives – Joness, a local hip hop staple, and Shalom, a budding star – had been fans of each other’s for a while, and the chemistry in their intertwined voices was just too good to pass up.
“’Fade Away’ was just gonna be a collaboration. I would do a verse or whatever, maybe be on the hook. So, we did that and Shalom was like, ‘Joness, do you think you could hop on this other song too?’ And ‘Divine Council’ happened,” Joness says. “So, we were like, ‘We should release this as a project.’”
A few recording sessions later in Joness’ home studio, and the pair had created Modern Nostalgia – an atmospheric three-pack including “Fade Away,” “God Like,” and “Divine Council.”
It’s also Shalom’s debut project. “It’s been a long time coming,” Shalom reflects. The duo first joined forces officially in 2019 on Papa Gora’s single, “Mayday.” Working on building his own catalogue, Shalom approached Joness about featuring her on a song while at Cincinnati’s Elementz.
“I’ve always been a fan of Joness,” he tells Audiofemme. “I met her at a poetry slam called Speak… and being exposed to those creatives in the city motivated me to do something of my own.”
TellemJoness added, “I’ve known him for years as a poet and an activist in the community – so, a very kindred spirit, but he’s nice with some flows, too.”
“I think we both resonate with the sonic vibe of the project because we’re both poets,” she continued. “I know my power is in my words; my relationship with words and how I use them and string them together. And that’s important to him as well. So, the content, the things that we talk about in the three songs – it’s heavy.”
The emcees discuss religion, spirituality, and provide commentary on society as a whole, though you’ll have to listen to the project a few times through to truly get the deeper meanings; it’s easy to be swept up in the dreaminess of Joness’ and Shalom’s vocals.
“The things we talk about in ‘Fade Away,’ ‘God Like,’ and ‘Divine Council,’ they’re all – for lack of a better word – trendy things,” says Joness. “Like, people talk about their spiritual journeys, exalting women – as we should be, because we do so much but get credit for so little – and getting rid of negativity, keeping positive auras. But where we’re coming from on these tracks are not necessarily trendy places – they come from a place of healing for us. We kind of flipped these trends on their head and presented them in a different way.”
Photo by: The Content Girl
“All of the messages that we have intertwined in the songs, it was important for us to shine a light on those things and speak honestly,” Shalom adds. “And we wanted to make sure our sound was fluid, which I think came pretty natural.”
The artists’ conscientious bars are underscored by celestial production, courtesy of Pxvce. The effort was also engineered by Joness and mixed and mastered by GrandAce. With their first collaborative project out, Joness and Shalom are now working on their solo endeavors – though they’re open to working together again in the future.
“I think we kind of set a standard with this,” Shalom says. “We could create a Modern Nostalgia Part 2. So, we’ll see what happens.”
Joness is currently readying her debut studio album P.O.L.R., which was delayed last year due to the pandemic. “Now that [Modern Nostalgia] is out, I’m even more inspired,” she says. “I’m so grateful for Shalom. He’s an example of if he wants to do something, he’s gonna go do it.”
Follow TellemJoness on Instagram for ongoing updates.
Brisbane artist Jaguar Jonze, the alter-ego of Deena Lynch, is brave – both in the bold moves she makes as an artist, and as a woman navigating a tense socio-political climate. Despite her lengthy 2020 hospitalization due to COVID-19, she released her first EP, Diamonds & Liquid Gold while literally in the back of an ambulance; completed her second EP, Antihero, released April 16th; began collecting statements from victims of a Melbourne photographer accused of sexual assault; and revealed her own experiences with racism directed at the Asian community.
Lynch and her band had been working on Diamonds & Liquid Gold since founding Jaguar Jonze in 2018. Released in April last year, the EP established the project’s eclectic, vintage-meets-futuristic pop sound on tracks “Kill Me With Your Love,” “Beijing Baby,” and “Rabbit Hole.”
“I’m really proud of my debut EP, especially because I had worked so hard for so long in the lead up to it,” recalls Lynch. “When it came time to release the EP, the world had gone into a pandemic. All of my plans and structures had like fallen out of place, and my health was something that I was battling. I decided to release Diamonds & Liquid Gold regardless of the fact that my entire plan was shot to bits, because it was the only constant that I had in an environment of chaos, and I felt like letting that go would also further devastate me. It gave me something to look forward to every day and work on while I was under hospital care, recovering from COVID.”
Antihero provided an opportunity to further investigate and experiment with what Jaguar Jonze sounds like, and what it could sound like. “On my debut EP, it was me figuring out who I was as an artist, what I wanted to say as an artist. It was a really slow experimentation,” Lynch says. “I’m really proud of the body of work we pulled together to help identify what that Jaguar Jones sound is, and now we just get to play on from that and experiment further, which is what hopefully I’ve been doing with Antihero too.”
Lynch is the ultimate multimedia artist – outside of her music, she’s a portrait photographer, a graphic designer and a painter; Jaguar Jonze, Dusky Jonze, and Spectator Jonze each have an Instagram account. Prior to assuming the Jaguar Jonze alias, Lynch performed simply as “Deena,” self-releasing two albums. In fact, Lynch doesn’t see herself as the Jaguar Jonze; her bandmates are an essential element of the project. “I’ve got Joe Fallon on lead guitar, Jacob Mann on drums, and then Aidan Hogg on bass, who is also producer alongside me, and each of them are so important. They’ve been with me since the project started,” she says. “Each of them bring their own individual parts, but we work so well together. That’s why we were able to record Antihero without physically being in the same space, because we’ve spent years working together.”
The band signed with Nettwerk Music Group in 2018, who brought US producer John Congleton on board for Antihero, working together remotely due to the pandemic. Congleton’s previous work with St. Vincent, Lana Del Rey and Angel Olsen had won Lynch over years before. “It allowed me to push boundaries and think outside of the box and comfort zone of where I would normally go,” Lynch says, of sharing production roles with Hogg and Congleton. “I think also because of the environment that I was in through the entire making of Antihero – it was actually recorded and finished off while I was in hospital with COVID – there is that layer of darkness, anxiety, uncertainty and desperation, that kind of seeped through the music and gave it a more industrial, dark undertone.”
Lynch was born in Japan; since her father was Australian, she moved there aged six, but the process of waiting for her Taiwanese mother’s citizenship meant moving between homes for years, which Lynch believes is the catalyst for her complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Her PTSD experience was the subject of “Rabbit Hole,” which she performed as part of Eurovision Australia Decides in February last year. Her inclusion was a last minute opportunity, since the original artist had pulled out. Once Lynch was assured that she’d have full artistic license to collaborate with the Eurovision directors, she got on board.
“I got to have some really amazing experiences,” she enthuses. “It was my very first live TV performance. It was the biggest show that I had ever done, physically, in a room of 3500 people. I’d never had lighting design, never had any ear monitors, I never had set design. It was like, if Jaguar Jonze was doing stadium shows, what would it be like, and I got to play in that fantasy world for a night.”
With Antihero, Jaguar Jonze takes the fantasy even further, bringing each of the EP’s songs to life with a series of visually striking videos. Lynch’s flamboyant outfits and take-no-prisoners energy are like beautiful armour against a harsh world, one in which Jonze has been on the pointy end of some vicious microaggressions and outright racism.
In a recent Instagram post, Lynch shared some “brutal truth” with her followers, writing: “Today marks one year since I received my positive test result for COVID-19… The Asian hate and racism I dealt with from friends, the public and those who were looking for a place to project while I was trying to recover from COVID-19 was unacceptable… Racism is not new to me or to my fellow Asian communities but the pandemic has heightened and threatened our safety to a level where we can no longer be compliant and stay silent, nor should we have to. I will no longer push past the feelings I’ve had over the year and allow it to continue to hurt those around me. My body has healed but my heart remains broken. We NEED to make a change.”
She reflects on the post now as the beginning of a series of “snapshots” of the reality of racism for herself and so many others. “To be honest, I haven’t had an interview talking about racism yet, so it’s something I’m still learning to process and articulate and that post was my first time talking about it,” she explains. “The reason it took me a year to post about it was that society wasn’t ready to hear it and accept it, and that environment had been finally broken down because of Black Lives Matter and the current movement in the US, with #StopAsianHate. The work of other people has made it easier to digest what I’m saying. I just want to create conversations and to learn from that and hopefully it creates a safer environment for people to take accountability and create change, rather than instilling fear into everyone.”
Shedding light on racism hasn’t been Lynch’s only form of activism; in July last year, she became aware of several women’s stories of being sexually harassed by a well-known Melbourne photographer. Having had her own experience in the past, Lynch was compelled to open her inbox to women who wanted to share their stories. Consequently, over 130 women came forward with allegations of harassment against the photographer. Lynch shared their stories anonymously through handwritten post-it notes on Instagram.
“Reports have been made to the police, and not much has happened, and been acted upon,” she admits, with an evident tiredness to her voice. “I’ve been working on a lot of investigations behind the scenes, but all of that takes time. It’s a bit of a waiting game of whether or not society is ready to make an important change. The fact that calling it out, like I did, took on the momentum that it did, is a miracle in itself. It’s really sad that [coming forward] is a difficult feat to achieve.”
Lynch still suffering post-COVID fatigue, but it hasn’t prevented her from writing new material, and getting excited about supporting San Cisco on their national tour, which kicks off May 26 in Western Australia. She’s particularly hyped to perform “Murder,” since she never knows what version of the song she’ll end up delivering.
“I really love performing ‘Murder’ because I get to play the flute in it, and I get to sing without my guitar so it’s just me and the mic stand,” she says. “Depending on how I’m feeling that day or what the crowd is vibing to or the environment or how the band is collaborating together, for some reason it’s a song that seems to be versatile to different interpretations. So I always have a lot of fun with it.”
Having fun with murder while saving society from itself, and overcoming a deadly virus while releasing an EP from the back of an ambulance? It sounds like Jaguar Jonze has all the material for a memoir. Here’s hoping.
Follow Jaguar Jonze on Instagram for ongoing updates.
Over the last year, many of us have picked up new hobbies to fill the endless expanse of time between the initial lockdown and the present, the uncertain future of when life will go back to “normal” and what that even means at this point. No longer do we measure time in minutes, days, or weeks, it would seem, but rather through loaves of sourdough bread and craft projects and how long it took your tomato plant to produce fruit last summer. Em Boltz, one half of Philly experimental electronic duo Enchanted Forest, is no different than the rest of us, except they spent their year delving deep into the world of modular synth construction.
A recipient of the Audiofemme Agenda Artist Grant, Boltz used the grant money towards the completion of an ambitious project – a recreation of the Buchla Music Easel (the iconic Additive Analogue Synthesizer spoken of in reverent tones since its incarnation in 1973) using Eurorack modules. If that sounds like a foreign language to you, that’s okay – it does to me too. The most important takeaway is that the true Buchla Music Easel will run you over $3,000, whereas you can get pretty close to creating your own for much less.
Essentially, Boltz has been scouring the internet for elements that help to imitate the Easel’s unique sonic possibilities, bits and pieces like oscillators, low pass gates, and spring reverbs, and patching them together to try and produce the organic, “magical acoustic space” that only the Buchla itself offers as a compact package. Using a Eurorack format as the base allows the user to customize their desired experience as it has no set signal flow, so that one can gain the most from whatever singular modular components they desire.
A sneak-peek at Em Boltz’s set up, courtesy of the artist.
Boltz’s interest in the Buchla was born of their love of psychedelic and krautrock music, as well as the compositions of artists like Suzanne Ciani and Terry Riley, both of whom included the Buchla in their musical repertoire. “This isn’t by any means a precise replica of the Buchla,” Boltz explains. “And I’m still very much learning how to navigate modular synths, but this is like my intro to it as well. I’ve just been slowly adding modules and integrating them into this Eurorack that I’m creating, which has been overwhelming definitely, but also super exciting… It’s been interesting, building a synth, because I feel like my approach to music is so intuitive, and I’ve been reading so much and trying to recreate this thing.”
The challenge is further magnified by Boltz’s background in the humanities; as a poet and an English student at Kent State University, they had no formal background in such a technical practice. They’ve largely depended on YouTube and web forums to amass the necessary knowledge. “I feel like I learn something new every day,” they say. “I’m constantly trying to watch videos of other people talking about their set-ups… because essentially you’re recreating what someone [else] has created when you go buy a synthesizer, so there are all these different variations of what you could do… the possibilities are limitless.” The goal here is to recreate the uniquely organic sounds the Buchla is capable of – a “60s zingy vibe,” or an “acoustic funk,” for instance, according to one video I watched to try to get a handle on this. The Buchla, even as a replica, makes what Boltz says is “the trippiest stuff. It’s the simplest way you can put it.”
So far they’ve been successful, utilizing the makeshift Buchla to write and record the latest Enchanted Forest release, a visual album appropriately titled Research, out on Dear Life Records on June 18. The tracks, and their accompanying videos, focus on the intersection of the natural and digital worlds; “a lot play with nature because I just love nature, and I feel like that’s something I see through all the work I do, like poetry, music, writing,” Boltz says. “Making things that sound like they’re created in nature, which is what’s so cool about working with analog gear. It’s this really organic sound to it that really aids that.”
Today, Boltz shares what they call “abstracted visuals” for two of the LP’s tracls – “The Tap” and “Open Window” – premiering exclusively on Audiofemme. On “Open Window” you can hear the sound of birds chirping layered under the synth effects. Though they are already using the synthesizer to produce music, it seems as though the project could carry as long as long as Boltz wants it to, acquiring new pieces of equipment and patching them into the existing set-up.
Enchanted Forest began as a Boltz’s solo endeavor, but it has recently expanded to include Noah Jacobson-Caroll, who Boltz met in 2017 when both played guitar in dark pop group Corey Flood. Research was written and recorded through email correspondence over the last year. “This band started in May 2020, so it’s only ever known COVID,” Boltz says. “The new album is all recorded through this karaoke machine, at least on my part. It’s all just us sending stuff back and forth.”
As far as what’s next, they say, “We’re already working on another album. We don’t stop.” Enchanted Forest intends to continue to collaborate remotely, because Boltz says they’ve “really come to enjoy creating this way.” And with seemingly endless possibilities, Research seems like an intriguing prologue to what Em Boltz and Enchanted Forest will create as time goes on. “Honestly it’s the best album I’ve ever made, which feels really good.”
When asked why she makes music, Pacific Northwest songwriter Beth Whitney begins a story about a transient woman she met in Modesto with a ball of tangled fishing line.
“She sat next to me and she had a backpack and she took it off. She reached into her backpack and took out this big, basketball-size collection of tangled fishing line, and she started, with hands that were shaking a little bit, to unravel it and straighten it out,” says Whitney. “Finally, after 20 minutes I was like, ‘Do you want me to help you with your fishing line?’ And she said, ‘No, this is just something I have to do with my hands.’”
For Whitney, making music is the same way. The process of creating songs is a bit of an obsession, born from her desire to untangle the chaos of her own life into something more intelligible and beautiful to share. And Whitney’s newest album, Into The Ground, which drops May 28th on Tone Tree Records, does just that.
With her sense-making lyrics and familiar melodies, Whitney powerfully clarifies the meanings in her own nature-soaked life and provides listeners a way through their own internal chaos. There’s no better example of the grounding essence of Whitney’s songwriting style than her latest single “Moonlight” and its accompanying behind-the-scenes studio video, which Audiofemme premieres today.
It wasn’t long ago that Whitney wouldn’t have identified as musical. Growing up in the small rural town of Snohomish, Washington, a town she says is “all about school sports,” softball was the lens through which she looked at life for many years. She was a pitcher until she broke the index finger on her right hand; serendipitously, it was around this time that she was approached by a friend from church, who was holding a guitar. He simply asked her, “Could you use this?”
“I was like, ‘Yeah, I think I can,’ even though I didn’t play music or anything at the time,” remembers Whitney. From there, she started learning to fingerpick—which was all she could do with her broken finger splinted—and even wrote a song on a whim for her sophomore English class.
“I wrote this song and I played it for the class which was kind of nerve-wracking and I was just like, well, maybe it’ll get me a C,” she says. “But after I finished the song they all jumped up and gave me a standing ovation and I was like, what in the world? It made me think—this connects. I was like, ‘here I am.'”
In that way, music and songwriting were quite literally gifts Whitney was given and learned to use, and so she rarely refers to her music as hers. It’s about all of us. “Music has helped me hold this life itself with more open hands,” she says. “I think we as human beings are unbelievably more complex than we can measure, and also much more simple. We all know life is loaded with the brutal and the beautiful all intertwined [and] for me the search for poetry in there keeps me tethered.”
Listeners will hear the organic way Whitney creates, and how her songs are both personally and universally relevant, on “Moonlight.” The song begins with the peddling of two notes on guitar, and a gently ebbing vocal melody. Its major harmony coupled with Whitney’s poetic lyrics are both vaguely familiar and uniquely her own; Whitney has also intentionally inserted instrumental space, led by cellist Natalie Mai Hall, in order to activate her listener’s own musings within the framework of the song.
“The verses are so short and so straight. I definitely poured into them, but even when writing it, I thought, ‘Let’s just have this big instrumental section and we’ll come back in.’ The whole idea [was] to have this string section where the listener is talking with… and contemplating the moon,” Whitney explains.
As a result, “Moonlight” is one of the most grounding songs to listen to on Into The Ground, which is saying a lot, because the entire album has a clear, present, in-the-moment feel about it. And yet, “Moonlight” almost didn’t happen. It was actually not the one she had planned to record that day at Tacoma’s Mothership Studio – she was debating between three other songs, but found herself writing this one in the wee hours before the studio session instead.
“The song is somewhat inspired by my son. He looked up at the sky and he’s like, ‘Moon come down from there and play with me,’ and it was this sweet interactive thing he had with the moon and then that planted something in me,” says Whitney. “Years later I wrote this song [about] a profound loneliness that I thought was just mine. The older I get the more I realize how lonely a lot of people are in this existential way. People surrounded by others, people loved, gregarious and outgoing, and always surrounded by other people.”
While of course, loneliness is always inextricably connected to feelings of sadness and isolation, Whitney’s observance of the moon’s loneliness also welcomes the light side of alone-ness; the strength and presence of mind that being alone can afford. After all, this is a two-sided coin that Whitney herself flips everyday.
In fact, Whitney lives with her husband, Aaron Fishburn (who plays bass on the album), and their two kids, deep in the woods near the quaint mountain town of Leavenworth, Washington in a secluded rustic cabin Whitney’s grandparents built in the seventies, complete with wood-burning stove, a composting toilet and unreliable cell service and WiFi. There, they focus on immersing themselves and their kids in the natural world—an introspective, quiet way of life that unavoidably permeates “Moonlight,” and the whole of Into The Ground.
“You walk outside and the songs sort of write themselves,” she says. “You look at the moon and you’re like, how lonely is that, but how majestic is it, and how strong is it anyway, and it’s just getting its light from the sun and reflecting it back to us and it’s fine, it’s not jealous of the sun or something. You go out and the songs kind of write themselves. It feels like cheating.”
The accompanying video for “Moonlight,” created by Whitney’s friend Michael Krantz, who took footage of Whitney and her band while they recorded the song in the studio, often zooms in on Whitney’s profile, flanked by sunlight, then switches to her nodding along with the instrumental section against a dark, amber-lit backdrop. In that way, it also plays on her contemplation of the dark and the light in her own life, of the moon, and of loneliness, all the while highlighting the mystical experience Whitney had writing and recording of the album.
“The studio experience for this album was so incredible and life-giving and magical,” says Whitney. “Everything came in for that week and just fit beautifully.”
Follow Beth Whitney on Facebook for ongoing updates.
“Sometimes, it feels like I’ve been writing this book all my life,” says Daphne A. Brooks, author of the recently released Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. Brooks, a Yale professor who previously wrote Bodies in Dissent and the 33 1/3 book on Jeff Buckley’s album Grace, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1970s and 1980s, where she developed an affinity for both rock music criticism and Black feminist literature. “I’m a Black Gen Xer who was bequeathed this landscape of post Civil Rights integrationist culture, at least, on the one hand,” she explains, “even if that’s accompanied by racial retrenchment politics of the Reagan/Bush era and beyond.”
In Liner Notes, Brooks, who herself has penned liner notes for releases of music by Aretha Franklin, Tammi Terrell and Prince, fuses her intellectual passions to take readers deep into library vaults on an exploration of the legacy and impact of Black women in music. This isn’t a traditional music history book, although, at one point, Brooks had considered writing “a long, sweeping history of Black women and popular music culture.” Instead, she says, “the book that I ended up writing is really about the story of why we’ve never had a book like that before.”
Divided into two sections (fittingly, “Side A” and “Side B”), Liner Notes crisscrosses through time as Brooks connects writer and singer Pauline Hopkins, who was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with Janelle Monáe; looks at famed author Zora Neale Hurston’s work as a singer; and digs into the the quest for music and information surrounding 1930s blues musicians Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas.
Esther Mae Scott (Photo: Paddy B. Bowman)
It’s a book that’s as much about the music as it is about the efforts to uncover and preserve the legacies of the artists. “I’m an archive freak,” says Brooks. She spent years traveling to and digging through material at Rutgers University’s Institute of Jazz Studies, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and Harvard’s Schlesinger Library. “I love spending time in archives, because of the ways in which you can really handle the materials of other individuals rooted in history and see what they left behind for us,” she explains.
One of the archives she visited early in the course of this project was that of late journalist Ellen Willis, who was The New Yorker‘s first pop music critic. Here, she made an interesting discovery. “What I found in [Willis’] archives is that, when she was an undergrad at Barnard, she had interviewed Lorraine Hansberry as being someone who was influential to her,” says Brooks, “which was intriguing because Ellen Willis was this badass radical feminist but she didn’t write very much about race and about Black music once she became a music critic.”
Brooks also delved into the archives of Rosetta Reitz – 67 boxes of notes and writings in the care of Duke University – in her research as well. Like Willis, Reitz was a Jewish feminist based in New York. She launched Rosetta Records in the late 1970s to reissue hard-to-find recordings from women jazz and blues musicians. “She also wrote her own liner notes, her own kind of critical essays, to accompany these recordings, in which she just laid down this hardcore radical feminist second wave prose that was absolutely gorgeous about why we needed to really regard the blues women as being these absolute pathbreaking sonic innovators,” Brooks explains.
Zora Neale Hurston (Photo: Library of Congress LC-USZ62-108549)
Liner Notes highlights the intellectual labor involved in making music, as well as the labor attached to preserving the art and artists’ life stories for future generations. In reading the book, you might wonder, how important is it for artists and thinkers to maintain archives of their work? “I think it’s crucial with regards to being able to care for the historical work that they’re doing, in part because we are given access to the richness and the depths of their creative life-worlds and their intellectual life-worlds,” says Brooks. If an artist does leave behind an archive, she says, “those materials allow us then to continue to extrapolate the different kinds of stories we might tell about why they matter to us.”
However, not all artists leave archives and that can be for a number of reasons. “That is also an ethical kind of phenomenon in and of itself as well, if they choose not to or if they don’t have access to doing that,” says Brooks, “which we know is true of all sorts of marginalized women. Women of color, African American women and Jim Crow American culture didn’t have the kinds of formal ways of documenting the historicity of their own importance.” But, there were informal methods and that leads to various ways that future generations might engage with the work, which is also part of Brooks’ book.
As to whether or not contemporary artists are considering future archives, Brooks says that’s a complex subject. “It’s been complicated with pop musicians, especially African American ones too,” she says. “Historically, we have been so deeply disenfranchised, not only in the context of this country but also the recording industry and the kinds of reparations that have yet to be paid to them. So it means that you have generations of Black artists who have been wary of where and how their material archival life-worlds are handled.”
Meanwhile, though, she says she would love to know if someone like Solange, who Brooks interviewed as part of a David Bowie and Prince conference that she organized at Yale in 2017, is considering archiving her work. Brooks describes Solange as a “robust intellectual force” whose reading informs her art. An example that Brooks mentions is the influence that Claudia Rankine’s 2014 book Citizen had on Solange’s widely acclaimed 2016 album, A Seat at the Table. “You want to have her archive all the notes,” says Brooks. “You want to see her copy of Citizen and how it’s marked up and what are the drafts of different tracks, from ‘Cranes in the Sky’ to ‘Don’t Touch My Hair,’ that have some kind of a through line between Rankine’s poetry and the songs that end up on the album.”
Says Brooks, “That’s partly what I’m talking about, what’s important about the archives, but also what I dream of what a Solange archive might look like.”
I met Mario Sulaksana four years ago, in a Wayne State University practice room. He was the band leader of a fundraiser for the Artist Residency I was living in, and the residency coordinator suggested he accompany me for a song or two. When we first spoke on the phone, I remember preparing to meet a 40-something, well established jazz musician – he sounded so grown up and formal. I was shocked, then, to see a 20-something man in basketball shorts and a backpack greet me and let me into the practice building. “I actually graduated a few months ago but I can still get in here to practice,” he explained.
I was a bit skeptical at first. As someone with very limited formal music training, collaborating with the “music major” types always kind of intimidated me or rubbed me the wrong way. But there was something about Mario that felt different. His professional demeanor mixed with his college kid wardrobe was extremely endearing. After a few minutes of talking, it became clear that he is the kind of person that makes it feel like you’ve known him for years within a few minutes of meeting. And then he started playing the keys. I was floored by his intuition and ease on the keyboard. Within two hours, we had written three songs together, one of which we performed at the fundraiser.
As much as I’d like to think I’m special, Mario is the type of producer that brings out the best in every single musician he works with. That’s probably why, then, four years later, his debut album Conclusion features almost twenty different musicians (including me), all of whom could tell a similar story to mine. The record is a kaleidoscopic portrait of Mario’s last eight years in Detroit – absorbing inspiration from the greats like Stevie Wonder and Quincy Jones, spending countless hours composing and performing, and making friends that naturally evolved into collaborators and vice versa.
Sulaksana explains that while writing the record, it became clear which of his friends would be the perfect fit for the parts he had in mind. “It’s just kinda how my brain works. I can only imagine the words coming from a certain voice, or the pocket grooving from a certain drummer,” says Sulaksana. “I think it reinforces the message to the musicians that I care about them as people first, and that everyone’s individual voice matters.”
Of course, wrangling so many musicians is extremely time consuming and difficult. Nonetheless, Sulaksana managed to record the entire album in a matter of six 12-hour days at Rust Belt Studios, a studio just outside of Detroit. Sulaksana says that over half of the songs were finished or written in the studio, speaking to his ability to improvise. “I remember writing the lyrics to ‘How You Wanna Be Loved’ the night before my session with Keyandra, but I had only completed the song halfway,” says Sulaksana. “I then finished the rest of the lyrics quite literally on the car ride to the studio.”
Part of his improvisational prowess comes from the years Mario spent as a band leader for live shows. Before recording Conclusion, Sulaksana worked any number of weddings, dive bar shows and gigs in Detroit’s mainstay jazz clubs, Cliff Bells and Willis Show Bar. And while he played thousands of covers in this time, there were a few that stuck out. Although most of Conclusion is entirely original music, he chose four of his favorite pop songs to record “Mario style” – which means complex chords, lush arrangements, and a killer band. The covers showcase his knack for transforming a universally recognizable song into one that feels like you’re hearing it for the first time.
The one that stands out to me is “Landslide,” sung by local artist Madelyn Grant. A departure from his normally intricate arrangements, this cover is stripped down, featuring just Sulaksana on the keys and Grant on vocals. The arrangement is a perfect example of Sulaksana’s wide-ranging influences, from gospel music to Fleetwood Mac. Grant’s ethereal vocals float over Sulaksana’s unexpected chords, a combination that is as satisfying as it is unordinary.
As far as his original work on Conclusion, Sulaksanapays homage to R&B and soul legends. One of the first songs he wrote on the record, “Always,” is his most obvious tribute to Stevie Wonder. Not only does the name nod at one of Stevie’s most beloved songs, but the jazz-infused chords and languid melodies are reminiscent of Songs in the Key of Life. In the chorus, Justin Showell sings Sulaksana’s lyrics, “Stevie always told us, love’s in need of love/I know that your love is in need of mine,” acknowledging the depth of Wonder’s influence on his musicianship.
Though Sulaksana cites Wonder as one of his heroes, he admits that the album’s eclectic sound pulls from a mosaic of different sources. “‘How You Wanna Be Loved’ had a lot of Floetry and D’angelo energy behind it. The Intro, ‘Love is Here to Stay,’ felt like a lost K-Ci & JoJo demo, and honestly a lot of the others just kinda happened,” says Sulaksana. “Each song had its own influences and I think it’s pretty evident when you juxtapose them individually and out of order from the album.”
As is the story for almost everyone, the past year has been one of shapeshifting, growth and change. For Sulaksana, it’s meant switching gears from band-directing live to producing in the studio, arranging other artists’ songs to writing his own, and stepping from the shadows into the spotlight. While he was itching to get into the studio to record songs he had been writing for years, he says he feels most at home working behind the scenes. “I wish I could be somewhere in between Chad Hugo and Mark Ronson,” Sulaksana muses. “Maybe leaning more toward Chad at the moment… I don’t really care to have my face on a bunch of things. It’s weird to promote myself. I work with so many beautiful stars who shine on stage and make it look easy. I want to lift them up as high as possible.”
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It began with upbeat demos recorded in his parents’ dining room, Robert Smith recalled in a 2004 Rolling Stone interview, but the sound of The Cure’s third album would change a couple weeks later when he wrote “The Funeral Party” and “All Cats Are Grey” in one night.
Faith, released on April 14, 1981, marked the middle of the era that would come to define The Cure. Sandwiched between Seventeen Seconds and Pornography, it was part of a three-album stretch that, in the annals of alternative music history, would be remembered for both inner-band turmoil and the darker sound that resulted from it.
It’s also during this trifecta of albums that The Cure earned its reputation as a “goth” band, a label Smith rejected and one that, really, is only true insomuch as they became a gateway band for later generations of young people who would fall down the goth rabbit hole.
As for Faith, I’m hesitant to use the word “goth” to describe it. Goth is pulling up your best pair of ripped fishnets, teasing your hair and heading out to the club with your friends to turn pirouettes on the dance floor. Goth is dark and dramatic, but it’s still fun.
Faith, on the other hand, is not a fun album. It is the nights when you flake on your friends and stay in bed, staring at the ceiling because the world is just too much. Faith is heavy. And, unlike so many other Cure albums, its weight isn’t offset by lighter moments. There’s no “Love Cats.” No “Just Like Heaven.” No “Lovesong” or “Friday I’m in Love.” There’s not even a creepy “Lullaby.” The closest thing to a moment of levity on this album is “Primary,” Faith’s only single, which is a dance song in much the same way that Joy Division’s now-classic single “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is. Yeah, you can move to it (there’s even a 12″ extended version of “Primary” that’s killer), but it becomes a dance where you’re frantically shaking off angst.
In 2011, Smith described the album in an interview with The Guardian. “Faith was the sound of extreme desolation because that’s how we felt at the time,” he said.
It was a difficult period for The Cure, at this point a trio consisting of Smith, bassist Simon Gallup and drummer Lol Tolhurst. In a 1993 interview with Record Collector, Tolhurst notes that, at around the time of the making of Faith, his mother was sick and Smith’s grandmother had died. He also noted the bandmates’ mutual history with religion – both Smith and Tolhurst attended Catholic school – impacted the material. “Organised religion tells you one thing, then as life unfolds you realise that there’s an individual interpretation you can put on events,” Tolhurst told Record Collector.
In a 1981 Trouser Press interview, Smith describes Faith as a response to the themes on Seventeen Seconds. “Everybody I know has gone through the emotional trauma of Seventeen Seconds, which is learning you can’t trust people as implicitly as you’d thought when you were younger,” he said. “Faith is about having gone through that and trying to discover what you can have faith in, the loss of innocence and growing older, as in ‘Primary,’ and trying to sort out what your life’s about.”
All of that is reflected in the sound of Faith; it’s a vivid album in both its lyrics and sound, from the religious imagery of “The Holy Hour,” to the dirge “The Funeral Party” to the allusions to Mervyn Peake’s mid-20th century fantasy series Gormenghast in “The Drowned Man.” Like all of The Cure’s best albums, it drops listeners into a series of scenes that manifest clearly with each song, even when you aren’t familiar with the specific points of reference.
Faith didn’t garner widespread critical acclaim upon its release. In that 1981 Trouser Press interview, Smith counters accusations that it was a “self-indulgent” album, noting that the reason why it took a longer time to record than previous albums was a bit beyond their control. “It took so long because we kept getting thrown out of studios in favor of ‘more important’ people, and once we lost the mood we never quite got back the atmosphere we wanted,” he revealed.
Several years later, Smith readdressed the critics in a 1987 Spin interview. “Listening to our records like Pornography and Faith, I still think they’re good. They weren’t just the whims of this brat, even though they were horribly slandered,” he said. “It’s good that there’s been very little I would change. That gives you confidence.”
In time, Faith didn’t quite become the fan favorite that its follow-up, Pornography, did, but there are certainly people – myself included – who would argue that it’s one of the band’s finest albums. It’s an essential album in the band’s catalog, one best reserved for the days when you can play it start-to-finish and let yourself feel everything that’s packed within it.
I first read the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh’s work during the pandemic summer of 2020. I had seen the hot pink spine of My Year of Rest and Relaxation on the subway, sitting on a bench in Maria Hernandez Park. It was the kind of quintessential NYC “cool girl” read that I’d normally eschew out of my own misguided self-perception, that I’m somehow above that which is popular. But sometimes things are popular because they really are good. The last year or so has seen a meteoric rise in the writer’s ubiquity, deemed “superabundently talented” by the New York Times and succinctly described by The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino as “easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible.” Her raw talent, sharp prose and fearlessness in the face of the grotesque have earned her these adulations.
Anyway, I finally succumbed and devoured the book within 48 hours. So rarely have I read something that made me laugh the way this book did, a loud, singular “HA!” at moments that particularly signified the novel’s irreverence, like I was in on a joke that wasn’t for everybody. And Moshfegh’s fiction really isn’t for everybody, which is part of what makes it so interesting. As soon as I finished Rest and Relaxation, I handed it off to my best friend, declaring it one of the best books I’d read in years. She couldn’t finish it. “I don’t know, Mandy,” she said. “It makes me feel weird.” Yes, exactly! I thought. That’s why it’s so great! Other friends made similar remarks about that book and her other works, as if to enjoy them must come with a caveat as to why they made you feel uncomfortable. One liked Rest and Relaxation but didn’t care for the way it “glorified drug use,” while another read McGlue but couldn’t finish it due to the title character’s frequent usage of a certain modern homophobic slur, despite the novella’s setting in 1851 and the character’s internalized struggle with his own sexual orientation. While everyone is entitled to their opinions, I’d argue they’re missing the point. These facets of the work don’t serve to offend or cradle you, either way – there is no room for that in Moshfegh’s world.
I’d think she would agree, given that she told me “Fuck what everyone else thinks” when we spoke on the phone a few weeks ago, me in my apartment in Queens and she in her home in Los Angeles. “I’m not trying to appease or validate anybody,” she expanded. “I’m trying to lend an experience through my fiction – like, here, take this walk with me. I’m going to bring you to this other world, and you might experience something you wouldn’t experience in your normal life. And whether or not people are like, ‘Oh, that feels good,’ or they’re like, ‘I hate that, that’s disgusting,’ it’s whatever. I’m not TV, you know?”
And yet, so often people try to place her in a box. She personally doesn’t like to read the many takes on her, the way people will talk about her as though she’s “part of a trend, and not an individual.” A common descriptor of her creations is “otherworldly.” I get it, to some extent; her tendency toward nameless narrators and unidentified locations can certainly transport a reader to “another” world, but ultimately I would disagree. I’d say the characters she constructs are so profoundly ordinary, so ugly in their naked humanity, that it catches the bits and pieces we don’t like to talk about to the point of feeling otherworldly, if only because we don’t like to admit these things are so of our world.
The narrators and main characters certainly hit this mark: the title character in Eileen obsesses about her bowel movements, and the title character in short story “Mr. Wu” could definitely be construed as creepy or somehow deviant, given his preoccupation with the woman from the arcade. But it’s often the supporting characters that the narrators or main characters interact with who are so infinitely strange that they feel so fundamentally real. “One of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature,” Dr. Tuttle of Rest and Relaxation, is a prime example of this, but my favorite would be the landlady/astrologer/gossip columnist Mrs. Honigbaum of the short story “Nothing Ever Happens Here.”
The narrator, a handsome small-town Californian who moves to Hollywood to be a star, moves into her home and describes her with an unflinching specificity: “She would have been in her late sixties. She wore a dark-blond wig and large gold-framed sunglasses. Her fingernails were long and fake and painted pink. Her posture was stooped in the shiny quilted housecoat she wore when she walked around. Usually she sat behind her desk in a sleeveless blouse, her thin, spotted arms swaying as she gestured and pulled Kools from a tooled leather cigarette case. Her ears and nose were humongous, and the skin on her face was stretched up towards her temples in a way that made her look stunned all the time. Her makeup was like stage makeup, or what they put on dead bodies in open caskets. It was applied heavy-handedly, in broad strokes of blue and pink and bronze.”
And yet, he says, “I didn’t think she was unattractive.” It reminded me of that John Mulaney bit about his temp boss Henry J. Finch IV, when he describes the man’s appearance in such specific detail because he “need[ed] you to believe this is a real person [he] knew who existed in the 21st century.” The descriptors are vivid and perhaps “otherworldly,” unflattering even, but they coalesce into an image so real you can clearly imagine Mrs. Honigbaum standing next to you at the bus stop in Queens, her wig tucked beneath one of those plastic bonnets to protect it from the rain. She becomes, to me, one of the most sympathetic characters in the whole collection of stories, a pseudo-mother figure who eggs the narrator on in his quest for stardom despite his lack of talent and his goal’s inherent futility, constantly reminding him to call his own mother. Despite the superficiality and cruelty of the Hollywood rat race, you leave the story with a feeling of tenderness born of the character’s strange but wholly tangible humanity.
Riva, the best friend of the narrator of Rest and Relaxation, also exemplifies this. She’s less attractive than the narrator, or so it is narrated, and certainly less privileged. She “came from Long Island, was an 8 out of 10 but called herself a ‘New York three,’ and had majored in economics.” She struggles with bulimia, follows celebrity gossip and radiates an “envy that was very self-righteous.” The narrator constantly judges Riva’s predictable behavior and responds to it with cruelty – “‘Don’t be a spaz,’ I said when her mother’s cancer spread to her brain” – but in rare instances acknowledges her kindness, her humanity: “Everyone I knew at school hated me because I was so pretty. In hindsight, Riva was a pioneer: she was the only friend who ever really dared to try to know me.” Ultimately the ugly things the narrator says about Riva, however unflattering, serve to endear us to her, another lost, precious human being trying to find her place on this messy planet.
I asked Moshfegh how she was able to write these characters so fearlessly, unencumbered by our constantly offended culture and if she had any concern about what her readers might think about her as a result. First, she admonished me of that fear regarding my own writing. “That’s a burden. You gotta throw that out,” then continued, “Ultimately I want to write things that I’m interested in, because if I’m not interested in it, what’s the point of writing about it? I like characters that are complicated, like real people, but maybe have characteristics that will push a narrative into an interesting place. Like a completely well-balanced person, which doesn’t exist, to me feels very static. I like characters struggling with something they’re carrying around, because then they have to look for solutions, or ways out of their situation.” This relish for the complicated, the struggling, becomes all the more complex when placed into the societal narrative of female writers writing female characters.
Moshfegh’s female characters garner a microscopic critical scrutiny. Why? Their personalities and physical appearances fall all over the spectrum of femininity from “acceptable” to “unacceptable,” yet something about them is unlikeable or off-putting enough that it strikes at readers’ unconscious notion of what women are supposed to be doing in our factual world, let alone a fictional one. On one end of the spectrum is Eileen, who describes herself as “ugly, disgusting, unfit for this world.” It’s worth nothing that Eileen describes herself this way, as opposed to some omniscient narrator assigning these traits to her out of their notion of what female fitness is. She’s so disgusted by both her body and her sexual urges that she swaddles her genitals in diaper-like undergarments, and drinks so heavily that at one point she wakes up next to a puddle of her own vomit frozen in the passenger seat of her car.
Place this in contrast to the narrator of Rest and Relaxation, who describes herself as such: “I looked like a model, had money I hadn’t earned, wore real designer clothing, had majored in art history, so I was ‘cultured.’” In other words, she is everything a woman is supposed to be, has done everything a woman is supposed to do. In a profile on The Cut, Moshfegh acknowledges the intentionality of this contrast: “After I wrote Eileen I just got so sick of everybody saying how gross and ugly she was. And I was like, well, would you say that if she looks like a model? So I was like, fuck you! I’ll write a book about a woman that looks like a model. Try to tell me she’s disgusting! And that just proves you’re a misogynist.”
Still, the intentionality of this didn’t save Moshfegh this incessant scrutiny. She recalls a recent essay in the New York Times called “Heroines of Hate,” that pointed out how when many female heroines of contemporary literature, the narrator of Rest and Relaxation included, are presented with the opportunity to hate themselves or the men in their lives, they’ll choose themselves. It reads, “It’s as if the protagonists of these novels, faced with the choice between being their own worst enemies or men’s victims, have all chosen the former.” Are there no other possibilities? Moshfegh thinks that there are. “I thought it was a very unevolved take on characters, on female characters that have complicated feelings,” she says. “Why are those the choices? You know? I thought that was kind of disgusting… there’s this thing where if you have a female character who has a weakness, that somehow you’re being subversive? Because we’re supposed to love ourselves no matter what? Which is such a high order that no one could ever achieve, and if they did, they would be complete ego-maniacs.”
It’s the concept of “toxic positivity” on steroids, a direct insult to the current popular narrative of the female journey towards wellness and self-esteem that we espouse on Instagram. One that’s become so wrapped up in the destruction of the patriarchy that if women are to expose even a modicum of their dark and twisty inner monologue, even within the confines of a fictional work, it’s somehow sacrilege and must be called out.
Could it not be that we are far more complex than that? Could it be that this perceived self-loathing, as confined to Moshfegh’s female characters, emerges from an ennui with the impossibility of modern existence, and has nothing to do with their femininity at all? From where I stand, it looks a lot more like that. Even when they do admit feelings of hatred, they don’t seem so much wrapped up in this feeling towards themselves or their male counterparts as much as the world in general, their ambivalence and spiritual exhaustion. The narrator of the short story “The Weirdos” moves in with her significant other and declares: “I hated my boyfriend but I liked the neighborhood.” The narrator of Rest and Relaxation seems similarly apathetic, repeatedly seeking out an older lover who seems to be just as mutually disinterested when “a romantic urge surfaced now and then.”
The sex they share is neither intimate nor pleasant, merely an itch to scratch or a game to play, the way so many modern situationships can reek of the sense that we ought to do this because we feel we should be with someone, even if we are not particularly taken with that someone – a mating ritual devoid of intentionality. In one of my favorite moments in Rest and Relaxation, the narrator begins a series of increasingly manic phone calls and voicemails to her lover, beginning at 5 a.m. and continuing in shorter intervals, more outrageous lies: she’d been sexually assaulted; she’s HIV positive; she’s thinking about getting a boob job; she needs financial advice. It goes on and on until:
“At nine o’clock, I called again. He answered.
‘What do you want?’ he asked.
‘I was hoping to hear you say you miss me.’
‘I miss you,’ he said. ‘Is that it?’
I hung up.”
Read it however you like, but I don’t think she behaved this way out of a conscious self-loathing, or a hatred for him either. I think there was a gaping hole inside her that had to do with so much more than just herself, or her relationship with him, and this hollow reciprocation of her needs didn’t fill it. More of a 21st century unease, a cosmic uncertainty of what we’re supposed to do or be that we quash with any number of vices – alcohol, or drugs, or meaningless sex. When you think about it that way, it feels rather familiar, no? Almost uncomfortably so. And it has no gender.
After all, we’re all just trying to live, or as Moshfegh puts it, “These are the things that are going to feed me, literally, with sandwiches.” And while it’s true that when the artist decides to share work with the world, they open themselves up to criticism, I think it’s also a truth well-acknowledged that female writers writing female characters carry heavier scrutiny than male writers doing the same. The Los Angeles Times even concedes this in another profile on Moshfegh: “Literary culture demands a personality test of women that few men have to take, and especially of women who write frankly about women’s experiences, making them seem somehow answerable to readers, available, in a way that (to pick another first-person novelist more or less at random) someone like Richard Ford never has been.” If you don’t believe me, go ahead and spend a few hours browsing r/menwritingwomen on Reddit.
“It’s very difficult living as a writer, I mean fuck!” Moshfegh admits. “It’s hard to make a living as an artist of any kind.” As she navigates the world with this somewhat new, albeit well-earned, relevance, she abstains from the self-indulgence of social media and tries not to dwell too heavily on the capitalistic forces that sway the titans of the book industry. She notes that she’s “much more interested in what the author chose to title [a work]” when describing a recent conversation with her partner (novelist Luke Goebel) about how superficialities like a book’s cover can affect a reader’s experience. “There’s a certain buy-in that has nothing to do with the quality of the work, based on who’s producing it as something for sale,” she says. “When you hear a song on the radio, it’s as though it’s been officially approved by the radio gods, and therefore it’s something worthy of being listened to. And when you see a book and it has a fancy jacket and quotations on it from positive reviews, it’s like, it’s okay to like this book, because it’s officially good, because we’re telling you it’s approved.”
Recently she’s begun working as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, which has offered some relief from the exhaustion of the book world. She also spent her quarantine year penning a new manuscript that takes place in the Middle Ages (what will that look like? I immediately wonder), describing how her recent shift into script-writing has eased her approach to her novels. “You never want to feel oppressed by reviews, or what’s selling and what’s not, and what other people find valuable… it’s better to be focused on your creative work, right?” she explains. Referring to her film work, she adds, “I found that if I have more of an outlet, my books are less precious to me in that way… I don’t have to put so much pressure on ‘this is what everyone wants next.’ I feel a little bit more free.”
So in the end, cut the lady some slack. Allow her to continue to transport us to these fascinating, sometimes dingy corners of our ever-expanding world, and stop trying to make it what it isn’t. Just let it be what it is.
Performer, vocalist and composer Gian Slater could have limited herself to purely working in the jazz world – but why would she, when she excels at pushing boundaries? After eight albums of original music, and numerous collaborative projects, she pushes those boundaries yet again on her newest release, Grey Is Ground, out April 16th via Biophilia Records, with a small in-person launch show on April 17th at The Jazzlab in Melbourne’s Brunswick East. The album is awash in luscious synth-pop soundscapes that swirl, ebb, and twine around Slater’s spellbinding voice.
“The name was inspired by this sense of a neutral place, where you’re open to mystery,” explains Slater. “There’s colour all around you, amazing and exciting, but then there’s this neutral place that is my ground. Just because I feel uncertain doesn’t mean that I can’t feel the ground beneath me. That was the analogy I was trying to make, that there’s still ground. There’s honesty and truth to that neutral space.” Slater laughs. “I can describe feelings in songs, but trying to break that down in this conversation is really difficult!”
Gian Slater began composing Grey Is Ground when she was pregnant with her first child, and began recording when he was just six months old. This emotional atmosphere allowed her to question her priorities in life and in her work, and to sculpt soundscapes and lyrics that reflected her investigations. Rather than following her traditional methodology, Slater embraced the uncertainty that had previously instilled fear in her.
“It’s definitely a musical map of that time of my life. I really embraced the acceptance of mystery in the making of this album. I wanted to focus on listening, which as a parent is a continual lesson I learn daily,” she says. “The music itself, too, is really inspired by embracing the unknown. There’s great power in the vulnerability of not knowing the answer. With access to so much information these days, we feel like we should know the answers. So I found it cathartic to write this music.”
“Spider,” the intensely energetic opening track on the album, “cuts to the chase of what the whole album is about,” Slater adds. “’Spider’ is the centre of a web of mystery. I was interested in describing that knotted up feeling of uncertainty – the layers of doubt, questioning, anxiety, a search for truth underneath the superficial. ‘Spider’ is my metaphor for a truth that may be painful and dark – and a surrender to embrace the spider.”
Its unsettling lyrics (“Lift me up out of shell/Out of perfume-covered smell/Give me blood and bone/Give me essence not dilute/Give me wisdom over youth/Or give me just your eyes”) are brought to life by the “ambiguously rhythmic” dancing of Lilian Steiner and Melanie Lane in a video for the track, shot by Madeline Bishop and premiering today via Audiofemme. As Slater says, “The song rides on this rhythm, searching for the release of truth.”
“In the early stages of 2020, I reached out and asked if Lilian and Melanie would dance to ‘Spider’ in their homes, recording on their iPhones. Their improvisations reflected a duality of mystery, a truth in two perspectives; the shadow and the light, the flowing and the rigid,” explains Slater. “As soon as it became possible with COVID restrictions, we filmed the dancers together side by side, but still improvising freely.”
Slater says both she and Bishop were completely moved by the dancers’ interactions. “I was so drawn to way Lilian and Melanie improvised through ‘Spider.’ They embodied the power and vulnerability in the song in such an intuitively special way,” Slater says. “Then the very multi-talented label director of Biophilia Records, Fabian Almazan, edited the footage to create more texture, ambiguity and pace. He really added another layer of abstraction that reinforces the themes.”
In many ways, collaboration has become essential to Slater’s process. For Grey is Ground, she worked with Barney McAll, who has provided production and keyboards for Sia, Daniel Merriweather and Aloe Blacc, trumpeter Phil Slater, and drummer Simon Barker, with additional drum programming by EDM beatmaker Emefern. Her collaborators are skilled in the art of merging classical instruments with a pop sensibility.
“I met Barney about 15 years ago in New York through mutual friends,” recalls Slater. “He’s an Australian who lived in New York for many years. He’d heard my debut album when I was in my early 20s and he was a very senior musician at that time. He’s been incredibly supportive, a mentor and friend. He’s one of my most significant musical collaborators. We made an album together in a band called Sylent Running. It made its way around, even though it was a pretty underground recording.”
Grey Is Ground took seed after Slater joined Barney McAll and Simon Barker for a performance at the Sydney Opera House in 2015. The trio found their groove, providing the impetus for Slater to start composing an album of music that played to their strengths, both individual and combined. “Simon is one of the most incredible musicians and drummers in the world. He’s got his own very individual rhythmic language,” says Slater. “So, I really considered that, and Barney’s world too.”
Slater says the first iteration of the album’s title track – the first written for the album – had a lot of improvisation in it, built on Barker’s layers of rhythmic ideas. “The verse has a straight, simple, floaty feel, and then it moves towards a chorus section. There’s three different rhythmic cycles; the keyboard part, the pulse, and the melody. They all meet and end at the same time, but they have different cycles occurring simultaneously,” she says.
The end of the track is a big “release section.” Slater explains that tension and release occurs when the song has been bubbling away, but then, towards the end of the track, the harmony remains in a loop without lyrics, as there is a surrender and letting go of the song’s tension.
Across the album, Slater’s mellifluous voice works organically with the instrumentals and patterns within the music. On lead single “Ocean Love,” she toys with timing so that her voice rides over and under the melody, playfully racing ahead or falling just behind its momentum, clever without being contrived. The synthesized drums hint at a slowed-down tropical house beat, the harmonised vocals layering like waves rolling in one over the other. Right at the end, like stars studding their light through a perfectly black sky, there’s a rain of snare drums, a patter of open hi-hat and cymbals enveloped in tinkling piano keys.
Internationally, in the world of jazz alone, Slater has swept up prizes galore and premiered new work at both the Melbourne International Jazz Festival and the Capital Jazz Festival in Canberra. She won the MJFF Apra Composers Commission in 2010, won Best Jazz Vocal Album (2010 and 2013) at the Bell Awards, and received the Creative Australia Fellowship in 2012.
When she hasn’t been creating and performing works for herself and in collaboration with other composers and performers, she’s worked as a lecturer in Jazz and Improvisation at both Melbourne and Monash Universities, the legendary Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and also The Manhattan School of Music. Inspiring her students to be brave and authentic comes naturally for Slater.
“I’m taking a year off from Monash this year, but I’m still with Melbourne University’s Victorian College of the Arts, as I have been for 15 years,” says Slater. “I’m passionate about teaching, particularly teaching vocalists and empowering them to make their own choices about the music they want to make.”
Likewise, Slater switched up her usual modus operandi when it comes to composing, which has typically meant finding the harmony, layering on the melody, then weaving in rhythm intuitively and finally. For Grey Is Ground, the rhythm provided the primary spark for each song, upon which Slater added melodies, interwoven with the synaptic-stimulus of synth waves.
“I think the electronic thing had been explored by Barney and I in Sylent Running. With this new album, I really wrote the music for Barney and Simon in an acoustic version, but it became clear really soon that the architecture of my compositions leant themselves to the electronic synth world,” Slater says. “I had been playing synth in other projects and using it in the composition process, so it’s a detour away from the other music I’ve been creating. None of my music neatly fits into a genre, but prior to this, it’s been definitely more jazz-influenced.”
The result treads beyond the everyday world into an ethereal wonderland, both familiar in its nostalgic references and intriguingly novel. “Barney and I were drawn to pulling apart this music, giving it a lot of love in terms of recording tracks with a sense of curiosity around trying stuff out and not just doing one or two takes. There were so many layers, we really tried to bring new things out us as artists and the compositions,” says Slater. “I can hear in each layer the enormous time and those magical moments that we found along the way.”
In 2020, Choctaw singer-songwriter Samantha Crain released A Small Death,a lush, indie folk album about surviving trauma and chronic pain. That album found both critical acclaim and a huge base of fans who fell in love with Crain’s elegant paean to survival. Now, the four-song I Guess We Live Here Now (out April 9, 2021) presents, as she says, an epilogue to that album, a glimpse into how reclaiming her power is shaping her life.
“Coming out of that really hard time that A Small Death catalogued, this was a sigh of relief. These songs really are, more than anything I’ve written before, about the agency and instrumentality we have over ourselves in big decisions and on a daily basis,” Crain says by phone from her Oklahoma home. A Small Death and I Guess We Live Here Now are just the latest releases from Crain, who’s steadily released music since 2007, picking up two Native American Music Awards and touring with the likes of The Mountain Goats, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Josh Ritter along the way.
But after three car accidents in a single month in 2017, Crain was unsure she’d make music again. Losing use of her hands, she was bedridden for a year. During that time, she excavated years of traumas, delving into past relationships and working through wounds, a process that led to A Small Death. That album centers around acoustic guitar and, primarily, Crain’s beguiling voice. Her vocals are the emotional center of the record, a simultaneous rasp and ache conjuring a hard-won vulnerability. After the album was complete, Crain found she had more to say but wasn’t yet ready for a new project.
“The songs on the EP were written afterwards. I wasn’t in the headspace to move on to a completely different record. I didn’t have a new record in me. I just had these additional thoughts, which were my impressions of myself increasingly at peace with uncertainties and having more agency over my own decisions. I found a lot of undiscovered love for others in my heart,” she says of her road to healing and self-empowerment.
“I learned a lot of tools on that journey and cataloged a lot of little tricks, and I’m still learning survival tricks, as most people do. You learn as you go. You get older and find more confidence,” she says. While the songs on I Guess We Live Here Now are built of the same sonic elements as A Small Death, there’s a palpable sense of freedom to the new songs. Crain’s vocals soar higher and the melodies are more playful, even when she sings (on “Malachi, Goodbye”) about ending a toxic relationship.
The EP opens with “Bloomsday,” its title referring to the annual James Joyce-inspired celebrations on June 16. If ever a song evoked a summer day and an open heart, this is it. Choosing this song as the first track sets the tone. “I don’t think you can hear a song like ‘Bloomsday’ and think I didn’t make it through okay. It’s literally the most uplifting, hopeful song I’ve ever written. That speaks for itself,” the singer-songwriter says.
She can’t explain exactly how she found her agency. As she says, “It’s hard to pinpoint. It’s like baking a cake where you know there are a lot of ingredients put in but you’re not sure of the science behind why it makes the cake.” She has drawn a lot of strength from the writings and music of Poet Laureate and Native artist Joy Harjo. “Even though we’re 35 years apart, there are a lot of similarities in our stories. Her work as a poet, playwright, musician – she has made me feel less alone, less defeated in difficult times,” Crain explains.
“I release you, my beautiful and terrible/fear. I released you. You were my beloved/and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you/as myself. I release you, my beautiful and terrible/fear. I release you,” Joy Harjo writes in “I Give You Back.” In lines like these, we see Crain’s kindred connection with the poet, their simpatico ability to be poignantly unflinching in dark times.
While Crain needed to survive those dark times in order to write these songs, I Guess We Live Here Now stands alone as well. From the summer breeze of “Bloomsday” to the gentle sway of “There Is No Mail Today” to the drum-and-flute based “Malachi, Goodbye” to the lilting, plucked strings of “Two Sitting Ducks,” this EP is repeat-ready, whether or not listeners have heard A Small Death. It continues Crain’s story, but the story is far from over.
“Everything I make is an epilogue and a prologue,” the singer-songwriter says. As her favorite poet Joy Harjo puts it in “There Is a Map,” “Rivers are the old roads, as are songs, to traverse memory./I emerged from the story, dripping with the waters of memory.” On A Small Death, Samantha Crain mined her memory with songs, wounds becoming roads to take her out of her trauma. I Guess We Live Here Now takes listeners a few more miles down the road to find Crain still making melodic, plush folk music centered around her unmistakable voice. Only now, she’s saying, “Give me something, Bloomsday’s coming, open up the doors and have a goddamn beer.”
Follow Samantha Crain on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.
In the midst of our conversation, Bridget Rian makes it a point to note that her Enneagram number is a four, signifying a fear of not accomplishing anything of substance during one’s time on earth or not being remembered after they pass on. Rian channels that fear into her haunting song, “Trailer Park Cemetery,” premiering exclusively with Audiofemme.
Rian was on a road trip through rural Florida en route to a historic property that housed several Native American artifacts when along the way, she drove past a cemetery in the middle of a trailer park that immediately captured her interest. “I remember thinking how different it was. This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, but I love it,” Rian recalls, describing the cemetery as both “spooky” and “cool.” Coincidentally, she was reading a mystery novel at the time, about a group of teenagers who escaped to a cemetery as their chosen hangout spot. “It reminded me of my childhood and how I literally ran through cemeteries with my friends,” she says. Rian turned this vision into song months later, while sitting in her Nashville home. As the concept for “Trailer Park Cemetery” materialized, the young singer immediately put her thoughts on paper.
“Thinking about the afterlife and the unknown, I think the scariest for me would be that nothing exists, that it’s just over, and you don’t get any second chance,” the New York native explains of the song’s meaning. “There’s an aspect of me wanting to stay young forever in the song. I have this fear of being forgotten or a fear of death where it’s comforting to think that people would live that close, or kids would come and hang out and my body wouldn’t be alone.”
She begins by gently pulling the listener in with a soft acoustic guitar, setting the scene of a trailer park set alongside a dirt road between tall oaks and pine trees, brought to life by community-oriented people greeting one another from their front porches.
“I don’t want peace and quiet/It’s overrated anyway/I’ll take loud voices over silence any day/I don’t ask for much/But to choose where my body lays,” Rian sings; she’d prefer to be laid to rest in a place where life constantly surrounds her, counteracting her fear of silence and keeping her youthful spirit alive.
The wise songwriter brings this notion to life through the chorus, which finds her surrounded by community even in death, symbolized by neon lights, the above ground pool next door and the littered beer cans that lay by her tombstone, left there by the young people partying in the cemetery like she and her friends once did. “The chorus is the part where I express that I want to be there forever. It’s direct imagery of people that were there,” she describes. “I don’t want to be laying on my death bed and thinking ‘I should have done that.’ I am a worrier, and I don’t want that to stop me. That’s a big fear, that I’m going to look back and miss out. Even if I’m dead and looking back at the people partying in my cemetery, I don’t want to be like ‘I wish I did that.’”
“Trailer Park Cemetery” is featured on Rian’s upcoming debut EP, Talking to Ghosts, set for release on July 9. It finds her exploring spirits from the past, whether it’s a loved one who has died, a past version of herself, or the ghosts that lie in “Trailer Park Cemetery.” “I know that there are people out there who have done weird stuff like party in cemeteries, and I hope that it makes people feel seen. I also want people to not take for granted the life around them,” Rian remarks when asked how she hopes “Trailer Park Cemetery” impacts listeners. “I like to call it my personality song. This is me. I’m kind of weird, but here it is. I think it goes down to the core of my personality.”
Ahya Simone had no intention of being a harpist. From the minute her high school counselor added the novel elective to her schedule in ninth grade, she wanted nothing to do with the class or the instrument. But, like many impactful experiences in her life, this opportunity that seemingly fell into her lap became one of the most important aspects of her life. “I always say that some of the greatest things or the most pivotal things in my life happen to me through things that I didn’t even necessarily set out to do,” says Simone. “And how I got into the harp was one of those things.”
Though Simone grew up in the Baptist church where she nurtured her love of singing, the Detroit born-and-bred harpist, singer and filmmaker says the harp changed her life in ways she could have never anticipated. She explains that learning the harp was an integral part of embracing and understanding her femininity. As a self-described “5’4″ cunty little gender expansive child,” Simone admits that she was hesitant to embrace the harp at first because of its association to femininity. “It’s like the thing that people do when they’re so obsessed with something, but then they’re like, “I’m gonna be the total opposite of that.”
But come the end of the semester, Simone was the star pupil of her class and was encouraged by her teacher to continue. Besides giving her a creative outlet and a chance to learn how to read music, the harp acted as a safe space for Simone to access her femme side. “It was a way for me to be feminine in public space in a way that felt safer than trying to outwardly express femininity in ways like dressing in feminine clothes – it was more so a caveat to my actual transition,” says Simone. “Honestly, it was lifesaving to me, just like transitioning was life saving to me. I probably wouldn’t have transitioned when I did if I didn’t play the harp.”
Simone continued to excel at the harp, which led her to continue her studies at Detroit’s Wayne State University. And while her relationship with the harp grew, she felt stifled by the confines of the orchestra pit. As someone who grew up with a love of singing and listening to Earth, Wind and Fire, Anita Baker and Beyoncé, there was a part of Simone’s artistry that was waiting to be tapped into. “I had to play… 300 year old dead people music in a goddamn pit and I was like ‘Oh my god I can’t do this anymore,’” Simone remembers. “I can’t sit in this pit with all these white people that don’t understand me and I’m the only harpist.” So, by the time graduation came around, Simone decided she wouldn’t waste her time clawing her way to the rare harp chair in an orchestra. She would take her own path, one that paid homage to the R&B and electronic music that raised her and the groundbreaking jazz harpists that paved the way for her.
“I am so floored at how underrated Dorothy Ashby is and how many jazz greats have no idea who Dorothy Ashby is,” says Simone of one of her greatest influences. She explains how discovering jazz harpists like Dorothy Ashby, Alice Coltrane and her teacher Brandee Younger has expanded her theoretical knowledge of the harp. Aside from inspiring her to delve deeper into her improvisational impulses, these artists reaffirmed Simone’s belief that the harp was not only destined for those content to play Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” for the rest of their lives.
“Western thought and culture kind of siphoned off the cultural vastness of what the harp represents,” says Simone. “Because now, it’s associated with like, delicate white women. And, you know, I’m not a delicate white woman… But one thing I do feel like it represented to me was a sense of boldness, a sense of elegance that I had hoped to embody as a young person. And also it was cool. It wasn’t the violin, it wasn’t the piano. Pianists were a dime a dozen. But the harp was just like – this is some bad bitch shit actually.”
Since being cajoled into trying the harp her freshman year, Simone has forged her own path as a musician, ranging from being the Principal Harpist for the Wayne State University Symphony to collaborating with electro R&B artist Kelela, scoring Louis Vuitton’s Fall/Winter 2021/2022 digital runway show, and releasing a video for her debut single “Frostbite” in October 2020.
She’s also written and starred in the critically acclaimed web series Femme Queen Chronicles – the story of four Black trans women navigating life in Detroit. Much like Simone’s experience with the harp, her foray into filmmaking happened organically and unexpectedly, as a result of an impromptu meeting with friends at KFC.
In 2017, Simone attended a community meeting with other trans women to address the acts of violence that were affecting trans women of color in Detroit. After what was understatedly an extremely heavy couple of hours, Simone and a few of her friends decided to go get some food and decompress. “One of my co-creators wanted KFC and everyone else wanted Wendy’s, so of course we went to KFC because she wanted some potato wedges,” Simone says. “We were just talking shit, talking about growing up Black and trans in Detroit…and, like, I just pulled over from laughing so hard about our funny ass stories. I was like, this is what I wanna see on my screen… something quirky and funny and joyous… that’s not always at the expense of trans women in front of these cis audiences.” And just like that, Femme Queen Chronicles was born.
Simone’s intrinsic musicality permeates the cadence of FQC’s first episode,“The Clock.” “If you notice… it’s very rhythmic,” Simone explains. “It’s almost like a jazz song. It’s just this really dope rhyme. It has a beat to it, a pacing that felt really musical to me.” With just this first episode out, FQC has already garnered recognition from Blackstar Film Festival, the Sundance Institute, Cinetopia Film Festival and more. The series is an amalgamation of lived experience blended with nostalgic sitcom inspiration. “It’s kind of like, Chewing Gum meets Living Single,” says Simone. “It’s like, weird, quirky comedy with Black trans women from Detroit.”
Created by Simone and her friends Paige Wood and Bre Campbell, the first ten minute episode proved to be a daunting task for such a small team. “I think it all came together really well even though I was kicking and screaming and crying the whole way through,” says Simone. “It took six months from the idea to writing the script to shooting and editing and doing the music. It was crazy. It was just buck wild.”
Though the team had a small budget for the first episode, they’ve been in an incubation period for the last few years, trying to raise enough funds to continue the series. Aside from production costs, Simone and her team have implemented an impact plan that ensures anyone involved in the production has access to emergency funds, as well as hiring trans interns to assist on set. And while the team has been in talks with production companies and networks about future partnerships, there’s still a lot of work to do in terms of developing Season One. “In 2019, we did a nearly all Black, trans writers room,” says Simone. “We didn’t get to finish, but we managed to get some very fleshed out episodic outlines… So any support monetarily that could support us in being able to sit our ass at home and actually write the script [would be helpful].” FQC accepts donations on an ongoing basis via CashApp.
It’s clear that whatever the next steps are for Simone and Femme Queen Chronicles are, they will be on her terms and rooted in bolstering her community.
Follow Ahya Simone on Instagram for ongoing updates.
A nomad since birth, crossing borders from France, Italy, England and finally overseas to America, home was not so easy to define for Cristina Vane. On her debut LP Nowhere Sounds Lovely, released April 2nd, the Nashville singer-songwriter documents her experiences on a road tripacross the United States, rediscovering her roots and exploring her own questions of identity, both personally and musically. A wholly unique venture from her typical realm of folk rock, Vane fleshes out picturesque and anecdotal ballads with added doses ofthe Western styles of music she stumbled upon and came to love on her journey.
Born to a Sicilian-American father and Guatemalan mother, the family’s constant migration around Europe paved the way for the singer’s unique style, owing to a diverse exposure of manifold international music markets. In her adolescence, Vane resonated with the sounds of electronica, ‘90s British indie bands and classic rock ‘n’ roll groups predominant in the eclectic European music scene of the time. Influenced by artists like Alanis Morissette, The Cranberries, Dire Straits and Depeche Mode, Vane felt compelled to siphon her disposition into angsty tones of folk and blues rock. Belting out full-bodied vocals and intimate guitar vibrations on her previously released tracks and EPs was only the beginning of an evolutionary road for her musical career.
After moving to the U.S. at the age of 18, Vane chewed over matters of identity and her position in the world as a musician as well as the physical and emotional idea of home. Drawn to the music scene and sense of community in LA, she migrated to the West Coast, employing her passion and knowledge of music by working in a folk guitar shop. While attempting to settle in a city she had hoped to call home, Vane felt lost in the overwhelming crowd of other locals. On “Will I Ever Be Satisfied”the musician ardently expresses her longing in a beautifully sung melody on top of an old hymn-like tune: “I have asked too many questions/Andonly echo no reply/Into these voices I have listened/They cannot know me or my strife.”
With pondering thoughts and a desire to pursue music more seriously, the artist packed up her instruments, gave up her apartment and set out on a five-month tour across the U.S. arranged entirely on her own. “Traveling Blues” sets the scene of what the trek was like on the road – sleeping in tents at campsites and on strangers’ couches, playing gigs in tiny bars and backyards, aimlessly moving along without knowing the road ahead. It wasn’t all glitz and glamour. “Sometimes you’ve got to get lost to get your feet back on the ground,” she sings, followed by, “This path leads to nowhere/Nowhere sounds lovely/Well I’d sure like to go there.” Craving the thrill of adventure rather than a fancy vacation, the musician rolled along an unfamiliar path that would change her life forever.
Encountering the great American sights from Utah to Texas to Louisiana, Vane had the chance to reclaim her identity as an American in a country she had roots in, but never fully explored. “Badlands” and “Dreaming of Utah” gives listeners insight into the awe of experiencing the wonders of these sights for the first time. Embroidered with grungy electric guitar riffs and gliding notes, “Blueberry Hill” provides a snapshot of the Western desert landscapes, “high on that mountain” in Taos, New Mexico, a spot frequented by the musician on her route.
Visually satiated with the picturesque landscapes of the American plains, Vane also had a chance to develop an infatuation with the historical music of the South. By then, the idea that she had to leave LA for Tennessee had crystalized in Vane’s mind. “[The trip] was totally inspiring,” she tells Audiofemme. “I came back and realized that I needed to move to the South to get closer to the history that’s still alive.” Vane set off for Nashville, picking up the banjo, pedal steel guitar and even a little fiddle along the way, with the intention of writing an album more reflective of her cherished memories of the American South.
The musician soon began piecing together songs blended with elements of Appalachian mountain, old-time and bluegrass music. “Over my journey I started to learn more about Hank Williams, The Carter Family and [other] country music,” she explains. “When I got into the studio five months laterI had some songs I had written from last summer; in my head I was referencing a country waltz, and I said ‘let’s put pedal steel on it.’ I never played with those things in my life, but I knew that was the vibe I wanted for that song.” With the guidance of Cactus Moser, a Grammy Award-winning producer known for his work with Wynonna Judd, Vane crafted a well-rounded album packed with lush melodies, heartfelt lyrics and musical memories she acquired on her trip.
As a foreigner for most of her life, Vane was moved by the culture of community in the South, deeply rooted in its music. “Family is important,” she says. “It’s Southern culture. If you think of some of the roots of its musical genres, family has a really deep meaning for a lot of people.”
With her travel stories, her experiences, and the Southern music she unearthed, Vane was able to satisfy her thirst for community and belonging, confidently calling Tennessee home. Embellished with the slow wails of the electric guitar intertwined with the fiddle, “Satisfied Soul” encapsulates the delightful afterglow of her travels and the comforting bliss of finding home.
A vibrant compilation of documented travel stories, Nowhere Sounds Lovely commands attention with its impressive mash-up of blues, rock, bluegrass and old-time music. With each song telling a different story (as Vane puts it, like “an ice cream cabinet where you can choose any of the flavors,”) the album evokes the wonder and exhilaration of being lost in unfamiliar places and in the search for a deeper meaning of belonging. Through her album, Cristina Vane hopes to promote acceptance between those with deep cultural roots and those lost wanderers or nomads, like herself, without any roots at all. “There’s nothing wrong with being proud of where you’re from, but there is something wrong with alienating people because they’re not born and raised somewhere,” she says. “Some of us don’t have that luxury.”
A few years ago, Julie Plouffe-Raymond was asked to perform at a birthday party. For the evocative singer, whose simmering vocals are inspired by jazz and R&B, it should have been a simple request, but shyness had other plans. She asked guitarist David Wade to accompany her “because I was too shy to sing alone,” she explains from Montreal. “We liked playing together so it grew from there.”
In 2018, without fanfare, they began releasing stunning bite-sized EPs under the name TREMENDUM, featuring songs about the binds of lovers, seasons, and freeing oneself in a chaotic, unpredictable world—track “Birds” (from FALL) is a spine-tingling example of their breadth and nuance. The ambiguous nature of nature itself (whether human or seasons) has become a way for the pair to access creative ideas that then make it into their music.
“The idea behind the four seasons started with our song ‘Winter,’ and it inspired us. Something we liked was that it gave us the motivation to release music steadily,” says Plouffe-Raymond. “We learned a lot with that process since it was possible to explore and grow with each season [via each] EP.”
This magical quality is reflected in the name TREMENDUM, which Plouffe-Raymond credits to Wade. “He was studying philosophy, and he liked the concept of Mysterium Tremendum, which represents the feeling that people have in front of the sacred,” she says. “He was brewing beer at the time and wanted to name a beer Tremendum, but it ended up being the name of our band.”
The pair’s influences naturally overlap in countless ways—from Wade’s catch 22, NOFX, D’Angelo and K-OS to Plouffe-Raymond’s Ella Fitzgerald, Amy Winehouse, and Nina Simone, as well as genres like bossa nova, cumbia, salsa, and samba, and the pair have learned to fuse their styles creatively. “David usually writes guitar licks and a little bit of a structure for the song,” Plouffe-Raymond says. “I always write a ton of lyrics. We try to mix it, and we tweak it together, until it works. Sometimes it takes two years to write a song, sometimes two minutes.”
The duo’s recording sessions have not only generated some magnificent work, but have also come with their share of memorable experiences. “When we recorded SUMMER, we were in Guatemala City. We did not speak a word of Spanish, and the sound guy didn’t speak a lot of English, so it was really challenging – and funny – to communicate,” says Plouffe-Raymond. “We were lucky that everyone was so nice and even if we had a language barrier, we still managed to understand and like each other a lot. We were living in his garage, sleeping in a single bed, and the studio was in his house, so we were there 24/7 for a week, but it was a very memorable experience.”
Plouffe-Raymond also fondly recalls the recording session for one of the duo’s favorite tracks, “Love,” from their WINTER EP. “For the ending part, we were using all kinds of different stuff to make sounds: shoes, wood box, our hand,” she recalls. “We were also screaming and jumping – we felt like we were playing like kids! This is what music should be sometimes.”
In 2020, the pair were ready to make the next installment, SPRING, when the pandemic hit. “Every time we wanted to go in the studio, there was another quarantine,” Plouffe-Raymond says. Undeterred, they began work on new music; ironically, the EP’s themes lined up with the global experience – transition through rebirth.
But rather than evoke the brutal loss and despair that spurred that transition, the pair chose to focus on the feeling of rising from the ashes. “Something a little more optimistic, lighter, growth. Hope after winter,” explains Plouffe-Raymond. “When we were in the studio, we played a lot with sound, overdubs, and we wanted to make it sound bigger than the other seasons. The songs are a little more upbeat.”
The pair describe their “soul-alternative” sound as a “melting pot of everything we like: music with emotions, jazz, rock, R&B, bossa nova, hip hop, authenticity and originality.” It’s a perfect description of their deeply unique sound, and an example of how far soul music can stretch.
For the last year, most of us have been stuck at homes, unable or afraid to venture outside due to COVID-19; looking back, the stagnant nature of the past twelve months creates a kind of time warp – a fuzzy, murky glass through which we remember the year. Oakland-based musician Lilan Kane turned the year’s frustration and angst into music, penning the aptly titled “TKMO” (Time Keeps Moving On).
“Searching for something to fix my frustration/sitting here seeing the lessons I’m facing/losing my mind in this situation, alone,” Kane cooly croons on the her latest single, which follows Kane’s 2020 EP Shadows album, a collaboration with Costa Nostra Strings and Jazz Mafia. “TKMO” is mellow in comparison to much of her catalogue, winding its way down a path without going anywhere in particular. Kane tells Audiofemme she enjoys its untraditional nature, saying, “I’m kinda glad it’s a little different, because we just got hit with something different.”
“TKMO” is all about easing into the unknown, feeling at peace with the uncomfortable. “Be hopeful while feeling hopeless,” Kane explains. “Feeling like there’s an end in sight when I don’t really know that there is. How am I going to spend my time? What am I supposed to do with myself right now, when everything feels so open-ended?” The music reflects a sense of wandering, but its tone is light, not venturing into the apocalyptic, end-of-the-world narratives of many 2021 singles. Likewise, the video focuses on the artsy doodlings of Ariel Wang, who creates a swirling abstract visual in time with the relaxed tune.
Kane gravitated toward music at a very early age, drawn to the piano in her kindergarten classroom, constantly finding herself plinking at the keys. “I begged my mom for lessons and I wanted to sing and I wanted to put on shows for my family,” she laughs, remembering the persistent nature of her childhood self. She spent hours on piano, learning the songs she wanted to sing. She ended up in her high school’s a cappella group and ultimately landed a spot at Berklee College of Music, majoring in music business. While she loved her time there, she often found herself in her own head, wondering why she wasn’t writing more on her own.
“I just didn’t know yet how to explore that part of myself,” she recalled. “I really started writing more once I was out of college. I felt a little insecure and stagnant in college, because I saw a lot of other people writing. For some reason, it just didn’t feel as natural to me. ”
After college she moved briefly to New York City, before landing in the Bay area. In the ten years she’s lived in Oakland, Lilan has opened local shows for musicians like vocalist Sharon Jones and percussionist Pete Escovedo. She found her place in the Oakland blues scene, building her skillset, meeting people, and getting her feet wet, but it wasn’t until quarantine hit that she tackled a mountain she’d been waiting to climb: writing a song completely on her own.
She built “TKMO” on her piano, creating a skeleton on her phone’s voice memo app. Normally, she would have taken that skeleton to a band and had them experiment with the parts, adding in their own personal flair. With “TKMO,” once the basic structure of the song was there, it was Kane herself tooling around in Logic, adding the drums in.
“Every other song, I’ve been in studio working with the band, working with the musicians, working with a producer. This, I wrote after quarantine started,” Kane explains. “I developed the whole demo track on my own, recording all the parts, and then I stared to send it out to other musicians: Hey can you play bass? Then I’m dropping them in, starting to slowly build my song in a totally different way.”
In the past, Kane has tweaked her songs via many live performances. “Some of the songs off my first album, I performed for like three years before we ever recorded it,” she says. With “TKMO,” live improvisation obviously wasn’t an option; instead, she had to reach a whole new level of trust with herself as a creator. “This is me concocting this idea without the feedback of anybody else. They just recorded the part I asked them to,” she says. “So even though it was collaborative, it was the most non-collaborative approach to writing a song for me than ever before. It made me feel very vulnerable because I realized I’m going to rely on myself for this.”
Kane credits much of the ease within the song to American funk, soul, and jazz legend Roy Ayers. She had planned to pay tribute to Ayers before COVID struck, and it was his music that she often turned to for peace and inspiration at the start of the pandemic. His notes helped her breathe and find the place where “TKMO” could come to life.
Kane has written eight full songs during quarantine, all with this newly found sense of space and creative authority. She’s hoping to release an album early next year, but for now she’s content to release each song in its own time. “It’s going where it’s going,” she says of her music. “It’s on its own journey.”
What happens when you bring together two musically inventive, botany-obsessed Seattleites? You get Pikefruit, a local duo that draws on the techniques of electronic production and their love of the Pacific Northwest’s lush natural world, in the pursuit of dynamic, orchestrated chamber pop.
Pikefruit, named for Pike Street in Seattle and the duo’s shared love of plants, released their first EP, Sprig, in 2019. Their debut full-length Inflorescence drops May 14, 2021, and last week they shared the album’s first single, “Wish You Were Here.”
“Wish You Were Here,” epitomizes why Pikefruit are one of the most exciting up-and-coming groups in the area today. The unique, shimmering synth creates a metallic underpinning for high, reverberant vocals. The result is alluringly catchy—even dancey, at times—without sounding cheap or overly-commercial.
Pikefruit’s otherworldly production is the work of Alex, who started getting interested in production as a kid, after witnessing an elementary school music teacher demoing a MIDI keyboard.
“I remember…being enchanted (and baffled) by how it changed from a piano to a flute to an accordion to whatever other (probably awful) presets were built in to it,” says Alex, who, along with singer Nicole, prefer to keep their last names anonymous. “It felt like there were limitless possibilities within the keyboard, though in retrospect there were probably only like 50 instruments. It was a long time before I understood what that keyboard was actually doing, but I never really lost that sense of wonder.”
Alex’s interest in making electronic music grew exponentially – he liked school band, but not playing other people’s music. Once he got his hands on music notation software Sibelius, he began learning to arrange, at first for a bassoon trio (of all things).
He soon found himself wanting to explore a larger pallet of sounds than the existing instruments he had access to could offer him, so he turned to production. By 2013, as his list of loops, samples, and textures grew, he began to seek a vocalist to add lyrics to his sonic landscapes. He scoured the internet and found Nicole, who until that point had only sung karaoke with friends or a solo in the shower.
“He messaged me and said he wanted to hear my voice, and I was like, ‘I’m not a professional, but sure,’ and he’s like, ‘That’s okay, I just want to hear it,'” remembers Nicole. “He was looking specifically for something between Passion Pit’s Chunk of Change, Beach House, and the vocals from Chvrches. He had a really specific idea of what he wanted to create and he was looking for, basically, the missing piece – which I guess was me.”
At the time, Nicole wasn’t necessarily looking to perform, though she did enjoy singing. In fact, she says she was really embarrassed when she recorded a short audition tape for Alex and shared it with him. “I went to his apartment and let him listen to it on my phone with headphones and I threw a blanket over my head and I was like, ‘Okay, just don’t look at me while you’re listening to it.’ I’ve come a long way from there.”
She definitely has. Almost a decade later and Pikefruit has grown from a fun hobby project to an actual professional group, with an EP, and now an LP, to their name. Still, there’s a note of surprise in Nicole’s voice when she discusses how far they’ve come.
“I didn’t think it was going to go anywhere. I thought we were just making music for fun. I didn’t realize he wanted to actually show it to people. But then he was like, no, people need to hear this,” says Nicole. “He really drove us from super amateur, like recorded on our laptops, to being professionally recorded and shared with other people.”
Sure enough, Inflorescence, is their most polished album to date—even as they handled all the recording, producing, songwriting and instrumentation themselves. All the while, they manage to skillfully grow an album from a subtle and malleable concept—Inflorescence is about the different moods we all go through, and aims to have them flow organically from one song to the next, as a mood would change in life.
“It’s different emotional expressions. Every song is a different idea, in a way. We didn’t write all love songs, or we didn’t write all of one particular theme,” says Nicole. “‘We Begin’ has recordings from a playground and [represents] the freshness of the really early morning and that crispness when the sun is just rising and there might be dew on the grass and the flowers around you as you’re walking. And then it kind of morphs and evolves through not even a fraction of the ideas and states that people are in throughout the day.”
That said, Nicole and Alex don’t like to make it too obvious what their songs are about. They leave that element of mystery intact, so as not to impede the listener’s own interpretation of their music. “The catalyst for each of the songs on Inflorescence can be traced back to some particular experience Nicole or I had, but the main exercise during the songwriting process was to incorporate other related experiences and build a more abstract or conceptual interpretation of the experience,” explains Alex.
Still, “Wish You Were Here,” has a concrete birthplace—in the booth of a restaurant where Alex, who was eating with someone glued to their phone, felt like he was competing with a social media feed. “I don’t remember who it even was at this point – it was many years ago – and the song in its final form isn’t really about them specifically. As Nicole and I developed the idea into a full song, we incorporated other similar experiences of longing for significant others who just weren’t paying attention,” says Alex.
It makes sense that a lack of awareness from a friend or lover would bother Pikefruit enough to inspire one of their songs—their careful attention to each layered detail, vocal part, and lyric is exactly what makes Inflorescence such a lush, interesting delight.
In the fall of 2019, Elizabeth Hart, best known as bassist for the band Psychic Ills, was pregnant and looking for a project that reflected this moment in her life. “I was interested in finding some way of collaborating with my physical state in a way,” she says on a video call from Buenos Aires, where she and her New York-based family spend a few months of the year.
Hart is also a dancer, and earlier in her pregnancy, she had worked on some dance projects, but by her third trimester, the changes in her physical experience presented the most intriguing creative possibilities in that particular moment. “Luca was already moving a lot. My body was very full,” Hart recalls. So, she and her husband, producer Iván Diaz Mathé, experimented in the recording studio.
Mathé had been working with bionsonic MIDI technology, which translates movement into sound, for a few years. In the studio, they connected the device to Hart’s stomach and recorded the resulting music. That led to the album Sounds of the Unborn, which will be released via Sacred Bones on April 2. The album is credited to their daughter, Luca Yupanqui, who was born in November 2019.
Hart says that she found the recording experience to be meditative. “I just wanted to soak in the sounds in a way and the experience and just see what happened,” she says. “Sounds would come in. Things would come in unexpectedly or the tracking would take a turn, and it was really interesting to hear the sound as it was happening. “
She describes the MIDI as working similarly to a polygraph, picking up information from both Hart’s body and Luca’s. “That technology is essentially writing the score,” she explains, “so it’s choosing which notes and the duration of time that the note is playing.”
Hart and Mathé recorded the album over multiple sessions that were an hour to one-and-a-half hours in length and Hart describes that method as an “organic” process. “We were just seeing what sounds came out of this,” she says.
In fact, an album wasn’t the end goal when they began the project, but they came out of the recording sessions with hours of material. “After it was all said and done, we had a bunch of material recorded. We realized that we thought that we had an album there,” she says. Then Luca was born and it wasn’t until months later that the couple returned to the studio with their daughter to mix the album. They opted not to add any additional playing to the recordings. “There was some processing, maybe effects or things like that,” says Hart, “but we wanted to be true to what was recorded.”
Photo Credit: Naomi Fisher
That nearly hands-off approach to making the album is an important conceptual decision in the project. It’s music made without the decisions of musicians. “It was not necessarily something that we may have chosen, had we been deciding what was being played,” says Hart.
Instead, they were flexing their curatorial muscles. “That process was listening to a bunch of material and selecting the bits or the moments that we felt were interesting to us,” says Hart of working on the mix. “Those parts are what became the songs on the album.”
And, in re-listening to recordings, they made some interesting discoveries. “We would find things that we hadn’t even remembered hearing at the time it was recorded because there was so much material,” says Hart. “Towards the end, when we felt that we had everything, we went back through and listened to some more material and then we found something in there that we had passed over.” Some of those sounds ended up on “V2.2,” the video for which was released in late February. “It ended up being one of my favorite songs on the album,” she says.
Sounds of the Unborn flows like a movie score, building and releasing tension over the course of ten tracks. It’s full of whooshes and gurgles that give off the feeling of journeying into space or deep underwater – or perhaps, coursing through the human body.
“It definitely felt like material that I wasn’t so used to working with,” says Hart. “It wasn’t intellectually chosen by us. It was really fascinating to work with. You don’t go in there with a preconceived idea of what it’s going to be. That was the really fun part of the process.”
Hart and Mathé brought in various artists to help visualize the music. Martin Borini, who made the video for “V2.2.,” also provided the album cover art. Artist Victoria Keddie used Super 8 film footage from the recording sessions to make the video for “V4.3 pt2,” which was released earlier this year. Hart, who is currently finishing work on an album made in the honor of her late Psychic Ills bandmate Tres Warren, says that she and Mathé are in the early stages of follow-up to Sounds of the Unborn with various collaborators. “It would be kind of like a remix album, but not technically a remix album,” she says.
As for Luca’s reaction to the music, Hart recalls one moment in the studio when they were mixing the album. “She just made some face to us, looked to us, and we were like, does she recognize this?” Hart says. “She looked at us so knowingly.”
Hart laughs, though, when she thinks of how Luca might respond to the album as she gets older. “She’ll probably just feel like, you guys are so weird or something,” Hart says. Still, she says, she’s looking forward to her daughter’s reaction.
Follow Elizabeth Hart on Instagram for ongoing updates.
Maila Nurmi came to Hollywood in the 1940s, dreaming of fame and fortune. And after more than a decade of ups and downs, she had, briefly, attained it. She achieved international renown as Vampira, the world’s first horror movie TV host, setting the standard for what a horror queen femme fatale should aspire to, as well as laying the groundwork for the goth look decades before its time. Her cult status was further assured by her role in Ed Wood’s classic no-budget feature Plan 9 From Outer Space. And over the course of her eventful life, she crossed paths with numerous legends: James Dean, Orson Welles, Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley.
But that was then. When her niece, Sandra Niemi, cleared out her aunt’s apartment after her death in 2008, she found that Maila Nurmi had died in poverty. The only pieces of furniture she owned were a sofa and a plastic patio chair. Friends had often paid her rent, or the phone bill. But amidst her other possessions — the clothes, the memorabilia, the 30 pounds of beads — Sandra made an astonishing discovery. Maila had been chronicling her story over the years, “Pages and pages and pages of handwritten writings,” Sandra says. “Letters that she either forgot to mail, or it was a first draft. Scraps of paper, just a sentence or two, written in the margin of a calendar or a newspaper. Or just a scrap of paper by itself, sometimes wadded up and put in a pocket of an old jacket or a purse. Just a memory here and a memory there.”
When Sandra gathered up all the bits and pieces, they filled two plastic garbage bags. “I knew I had to put this together. And I wasn’t thinking ‘book.’ I was thinking, I’m going to find out who Maila is, and what she did with her life. What I always wanted to know and never could find out.”
But this was a tale that begged to be told to a wider audience, and over the next twelve years, Maila Nurmi’s niece sifted through her aunt’s writings, added her own research, and finally published Glamour Ghoul: The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampira, Maila Nurmi (Feral House). It’s the remarkable story of a cultural icon, whose personal idiosyncrasies curtailed a career that might have gone further, while her disdain of anything that smacked of conventionality meant she was a stranger to her own family. “I got to thinking, I’m the only one that has all this information about Maila,” Sandra explains. “There was more to her than just Vampira; that was such a brief part of her life. I thought, you’ve got to do a book, because if you don’t, Maila will only be a footnote in history. I didn’t want her to be a footnote. She deserved a lot more than that.”
Maila Nurmi was born Maila Elizabeth Niemi to Finnish parents on December 11, 1922, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Her father moved the family frequently as he pursued a career as a journalist and editor, and by the time Maila graduated from high school, she was living on the other side of the country, in the coastal town of Astoria, Oregon. Not wishing to be sentenced to a lifetime’s work the local fish cannery, Maila escaped to Los Angeles in 1941, appeasing her father’s disapproval by initially living with relatives.
Her early attempts to launch a career provided a rude awakening. A talent agent, luring her with prospects of future work, persuaded her to pose topless, after which no future work materialized. She escaped assault from another agent by smacking him in the eye. “No more showbusiness for me,” she wrote on one of those scraps of paper. “Everyone concerned is FILTHY!”
But still, she persisted. She eventually found work as a model. While living in New York, she appeared in Catherine Was Great with Mae West. Her dancing skeleton routine in the show Spook Scandals landed her a screen test with noted director Howard Hawks. But then her independent streak kicked in. Outraged that Hawks said she’d need to get her teeth fixed, she tore up her contract, told the director, “I am not a commodity to be traded or sold to the highest bidder!” and stalked out of the office, to his astonishment.
“She shut the door on any movie career she would have had,” Sandra observes. “And she very well could have had a great career. She was insulted that he thought she was less than perfect. And she didn’t want her teeth fixed; she was afraid of dentists. So that was the end of that. Of course, she was young; twenty-one, twenty-two, thinking, ‘Well, the world is my oyster. I can have any job I want. I don’t need him.’ And she did need him. But she did it her own way.”
Maila continued working on the fringes of the entertainment industry, getting gigs as a model, a photographer’s assistant, in the chorus line, bit parts in films. A liaison with Orson Welles brought no physical pleasure (“Orson was not a gentle lover and was possessed of an urgency to complete the act”), but did result in the birth of a son, who was given up for adoption. Childbirth proved to be such an excruciating experience she vowed to never again have children.
She could still play the part of a star even if she wasn’t one yet. Sandra was enamored when she first met her aunt in 1953, as a six-year-old. “I had never seen anyone so beautiful,” she says. “She walked out of the back bedroom to make her entrance — now I know that’s what she was doing — and she was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen.” Wearing a shimmering gold lamé dress, shoes with transparent heels, and colorful makeup (bright blue eye shadow that went “from the eyelashes all the way up to her eyebrow,” vibrant red lipstick), she seemed like something out of a fairytale. “I was looking at this goddess thinking, wow, that’s my aunt Maila! She was my own private Cinderella.”
The next year, Maila’s moment arrived. Her prize-winning attire as a black-shrouded zombie (inspired by the cartoons of Charles Addams) at a costume ball attracted the attention of Hunt Stromberg, Jr., KABC-TV’s program director, who was looking for someone to host the station’s screenings of old horror films. Maila decided to sex the character up for her audition, turning the black dress around so the zipper was in front, cinching her already slender waist (the result of excessive dieting), and padding her bust and hips. A black wig and three-inch fingernails provided the final ghoulish touches. Vampira was born.
Nightmare Attic, soon to be renamed The Vampira Show, debuted on May 1, 1954. Vampira opened the shows by slinking down a cobwebbed hallway toward the camera, finally erupting in a blood-curdling scream. She delivered black-humored commentary (“I went to a delightful funeral yesterday. We buried a friend of mine — alive”) while sipping on cocktails like the “Mortician’s Martini” (one part formaldehyde, one part rattlesnake venom, a dash of culture blood, garnished with an eyeball). She was an immediate sensation, and Maila found herself being inundated with requests for personal appearances, profiled in Life, Newsweek, and TV Guide, and an in-demand guest at film premieres. Stardom was hers for the taking.
But her explosive success burned out all too soon. She soon came into conflict with the station’s management, resenting their attempts to pair her with the host for their romance film slot, a softer character named “Voluptua.” She had to learn to get along with her bosses, she was told. But as always, she did things her own way. Things came to a crashing halt in 1955 when she disobeyed KABC’s demand that she not appear on a rival network’s program; the infraction led to The Vampira Show being cancelled. There was a short-lived revival the following year on KHJ-TV. But Maila felt the show was hampered by the poor quality of the writers, and it was cancelled after 12 episodes. Vampira’s run was over.
There were also personal disappointments. Her common-law marriage to screenwriter Dean “Dink” Riesner ended. She was shattered by the death of her close friend, James Dean in 1955. “She felt like he was the first person she ever, ever met that was from the same planet,” Sandra says. “And then he was gone and she was alone again. She never got over his death, ever.”
Her relationship with her family fractured as well. When Maila’s mother died in 1957, Sandra and parents came to LA for the funeral. To Sandra, the Cinderella princess was now a “sad girl in rags,” who didn’t change her clothes during the entire visit. “She asked my mother, ‘What are you going to wear to the funeral?’ And my mother thought, ‘Oh, thank God, she’s going to change her clothes!’ But she didn’t. She just turned her sweater inside out. And I’m sure now, looking back on it, it was to say, ‘My life has been turned inside out.’”
It was the last time Maila would ever see her brother Bobbie. “My father wanted to have a relationship with his sister,” Sandra says. “But to Maila, he represented everything she despised. He and my mother had built this little tiny two-bedroom house, and he had a job, and he had a family. And that’s everything she did not want. She did not want to be domestic in any way.” An invitation to visit Astoria was rejected. Maila dropped out of sight. “I’d say to my dad, ‘I wonder where she is, I wonder what she’s doing.’ And he’d say, ‘Well, you know, she doesn’t want to be found.’”
Self Portrait with Chuck Beadles
Maila did what she could to get by as her opportunities seemed to dry up; she had small parts in films like Plan 9, The Beat Generation, Sex Kittens Go to College. She worked as a housecleaner. She entered into a short marriage of convenience with Italian actor Fabrizio Mioni. She owned an antique shop, Vampira’s Attic. She perused swap meets, dressed up her finds with feathers and beads, then sold her wares from a table on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Havenhurst Drive (Grace Slick and Shelley Winters were customers). She provided fire-and-brimstone recitations on the single “I’m Damned”/“Genocide Utopia” by garage rockers Satan’s Cheerleaders. She moved frequently, and changed her name more than once. Marlon Brando, a former paramour, sent her money when she was hard up.
Sandra never stopped wondering what happened to her aunt. “I knew nothing about her,” she says, “And I was always obsessed with finding out. I had written to many, many newspapers, magazines, and television shows, asking if anybody knew where Maila Nurmi was, Maila Nurmi who had been Vampira. I never got one response. So I didn’t know if she was dead or alive.” When Sandra’s father died in 1977, she asked the Red Cross for help in finding her aunt so that she could let her know he had passed. “They couldn’t find her. Little did I know that she was going under the alias of ‘Helen Heaven’ then.”
Then, in October 1988, Sandra spied an item in Star magazine about a lawsuit Maila had filed against KHJ-TV actress Cassandra Peterson and other associated parties over their syndicated show Elvira’s Movie Macabre, which she contended infringed upon the trademark she held for Vampira (Maila ultimately lost the case). Sandra reached out to Maila through her attorneys, and soon her long-lost aunt replied with an eleven-page letter. “To think that Bobbie has died and I didn’t know,” she wrote. “Shame on me.”
In August 1989, Sandra and her daughter Amy drove to LA for a visit. “Maila was living in a reconverted garage with no refrigerator and no stove,” she recalls. “She had a hot plate. And just a toilet. She didn’t have a shower; she had to wash out of the sink. And there was one window in the living room, way up high like you would find in a garage, and that’s where Stinky Two lived. He was an abandoned bird that couldn’t fly, so Maila took him in and he lived there up on the window ledge.”
Despite the lack of amenities, hey had a wonderful time. As they drove around town, Maila regaled them with anecdotes and pointed out sights of interest (“That’s the hospital where all the celebrities go to dry out or die”). They splurged for a brunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, running into I Dream of Jeannie star Barbara Eden and getting her autograph. They drove to Griffith Park, where scenes from Rebel Without a Cause had been shot, to see the commemorative bust of James Dean. And the stories never stopped. “Maila never lacked for commentary,” Sandra chuckles. “She loved gossip, and she had lots of gossip to say.”
On their last night together, Maila unearthed some treasures for Sandra: family photos, Vampira scripts, a love letter from Marlon Brando proposing marriage (Maila turned him down: “He was a sex addict and a hypocrite”). She talked about Orson Welles, and the son she’d given up, wondering where was he was now. She recalled her brief affair with Elvis, whom she’d met in Las Vegas (“The way he moved those hips on stage, I was expecting a symphony, but I got Johnny One-Note”). They ended the night by singing the Finnish national anthem, and went to sleep on the floor, as Maila had no bed. Sandra told her aunt the week they’d spent together had been one of the best times of her life.
The two corresponded until 1991. Then, once again, Maila dropped out of sight. She was often without a working phone (and wouldn’t always answer when she had one), and when she moved again, Sandra couldn’t even reach her by letter. She never knew why her aunt stopped writing, but thinks it may be because Maila’s life was becoming more active. The 1980 book The Golden Turkey Awards had named Plan 9 as “the worst movie of all time,” rekindling interest in the film and its director, Ed Wood. She was interviewed for Rudolph Grey’s 1992 book Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr., and Tim Burton’s 1994 bio pic Ed Wood raised her profile even higher. “She was in demand,” says Sandra, “and I guess she just blossomed.” Maila had been on disability since she was diagnosed with pernicious anemia at age 46, which impaired her ability to walk. The income she received from convention and film appearances was most welcome. She also began painting, and selling her work online.
On January 10, 2008, Maila was found dead in her apartment, due to heart failure. She was 86. Sandra read about her aunt’s death in the paper, and headed to LA. “Through what can only be described as a miracle,” she finally found her aunt’s last residence, and the written record of her life that she’d worked on for decades.
Work on the book was a challenge. Some of Maila’s writings were dated, others were not. “Some were just a sentence or two; who she hated now, what they had done to her. One was an ‘Autistic List.’ I showed it to her friend Stuart Timmons, and I said, ‘You’re on this list. Do you think maybe she meant Artistic List? And he goes, ‘No. It’s Autistic.’” There were also the understandable nerves of a first-time author. “I’d write a little bit and think, well, this is crap. Nobody cares. I mean, horrible, horrible self-doubt. Awful, awful. Put it away for a year. Come back to it. It just haunted me.”
Then inspiration arrived, via a twist that nobody was expecting. In 2017, Sandra had given her daughter a DNA kit from Ancestry.com as a Christmas gift. Two years later, Amy came up with a match, and delivered the stunning results to her mother: “I know who Maila’s son is. I know his name. I know where he lives and I know his phone number.” Maila’s son, whom she claimed was the offspring of Orson Welles, turned out to be David Putter, a retired lawyer who’d served as an assistant attorney general for the state of Vermont. David had never known his birth parents, and his adoptive mother died when he was four. “So he’s kind of a motherless waif,” says Sandra.
In their first phone conversation, David asked Sandra if she knew who his birth mother was. “I said, ‘Oh, do I know who your mother is? You’re talking to the only person on the planet that is just finishing up her biography!’ Then I told him that she was Maila Nurmi — Vampira. And he said, ‘Oh my God. I waited seventy-five years to find out who my mother is. And I find out that she’s a vampire!’”
Finding Maila’s son broke through Sandra’s writer’s block, and the biography was finally finished. “I just wanted Maila’s story to be out there because she deserved it,” says Sandra. “She deserved a little immortality, and I was the only one that could do it. I wanted people to know that she was very intelligent. She was funny. She was extremely creative, resourceful, and she never sold out. People all through her life tried to buy Vampira. And as poor and poverty stricken as she was, she never sold out. She hung on to Vampira, until her last breath.”
Today, Maila Nurmi can be found at one of her favorite places: the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, situated behind the Paramount Studios lot, and the final resting place for luminaries like Judy Garland, silent screen star Rudolph Valentino, Wizard of Oz director Victor Fleming, and singer Yma Sumac. It was paid for by her friend, Dana Gould, whom Maila met when he was the host of The Big Scary Movie Show on the Sci-Fi Network. “She’s right on the roadway, and directly across the roadway is the huge lake with swans on it, the most beautiful spot in the entire cemetery. She has a primo spot; I couldn’t have handpicked a better place for her to be,” says Sandra.
“And Maila spent a lot of time in that cemetery. I have pictures of her in Hollywood Forever, sitting on one of the great director’s tombstones,” she adds. “She liked to be there. Her friend Greg Herger told me they went there often, and would have their lunch and just sit there and talk. She’d said, ‘I love this place,’ and now she’s there. I’m thrilled with where she is.” An image of Maila as Vampira is on her headstone. And when you look at it, you can almost hear her saying, “This is Vampira, until next week, wishing you bad dreams, darling.”
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