The Official Site
Game of Thrones Season 4 featuring Chelsea Wolfe‘s song “Feral Love” from her album Pain Is Beauty.
And don’t miss Chelsea Wolfe on Tour with Queens of the Stone Age – See all Dates Here
Bands who released great albums in 2013:
Nick Cave “Push the Sky Away”
Screature “Screature”
True Widow “Circumambulation”
Neko Case “The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You”
Queens of the Stone Age “…Like Clockwork”
William Basinski “Nocturnes”
Russian Circles “Memorial”
Deafheaven “Sunbather”
Master Musicians of Bukkake “Far West”
Bill Callahan “Dream River”
Favorite design collectives, designers or shops this past year (and probably forever):
Ovate, Sisters of the Black Moon, K/LLER Collection, Aoi Kotsuhiroi, Totokaelo, Ann Demeulemeester, AF Vandevorst, myYUKIKO, Rewind, Saint Laurent, Laura Lombardi, Bloodmilk, Nouveau PR, Kill City, Anu Tera, Loved to Death.
Best TV show of the year:
“Frozen Planet”: so beautiful, and narrated by the ever-electric Alec Baldwin
Best movies I watched on a plane on tour:
The Rolling Stones: Crossfire Hurricane – when the cameraman asks Mick Jagger what’s on the plate he’s holding and he says, “vitamins and salt.” <3
Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams – Werner Herzog is magic.
Hunger Games – I just think Jennifer Lawrence is badass.
Best movie trailer of a movie this year that I’ll probably love and also barely be able to watch:
Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Melancholia breaks my heart in two & Antichrist is incredible but took me three tries to get through to the end. Chaos reigns. And Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Favorite venues we played in 2013:
Glasgow – SWG3
Gothenburg – Truckstop Alaska
Philadelphia – Unitarian Chapel
Cambridge – Sinclair
Oslo – Blå
Fribourg – Fri-son
Sources of inspiration & guidance this past year:
My bandmates & musical fellows, especially my co-producer Ben Chisholm, TJ Cowgill AKA King Dude, director Mark Pellington, my label & management at Sargent House, Kali Kennedy, Jenni Hensler, The Book of Symbols, 1Q84, Ole Smoky moonshine, volcanoes, Richard Serra, Stephen O’Malley, Kristin Cofer, Darla Teagarden, Krist Mort, Gnarlitude Jen, boxing, Salem Mass., Josh T. Pearson, truck stops, strange hotels, Swans, Vice, Russia, Damien Echols.
“Death twitches my ear. LIVE, he says, I am coming.”
(Roman poet Virgil)
RIP Nelson Mandela
RIP Lou Reed
Chelsea Wolfe will be playing direct support on the Queens Of The Stone Age Tour on the following dates below, starting on January 30, 2014.
SEE ALL CHELSEA WOLFE SHOW DETAILS & TICKET LINKS HERE
QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE & CHELSEA WOLFE
Jan 30, 2014 – Raleigh, NC @ Raleigh Memorial Auditorium
Jan 31, 2014 – Columbia, SC @ Township Auditorium
Feb 1, 2014 – Knoxville, TN @ Tennessee Theatre
Feb 3, 2014 – Jacksonville, FL @ Florida Theater
Feb 4, 2014 – Saint Petersburg, FL @ Mahaffey Theatre
Feb 5, 2014 – Miami, FL @ The Fillmore /Jackie Gleason Theater
Feb 7, 2014 – Orlando, FL@ Hard Rock Live
Feb 9, 2014 – Houston, TX @ Bayou Music Center
Feb 10, 2014 – San Antonio, TX @ Majestic Theater
Feb 11, 2014 – El Paso, TX @ Abraham Chavez Theater
Feb 13, 2014 – Las Vegas, NV @ The Joint @ The Hard Rock Hotel
With her new album Pain is Beauty, Chelsea Wolfe self-imposed the weighty task of rewriting the ending to the George Orwell’s classic 1984. Though many would beg to differ, Wolfe believed the book could stand to end on a more positive note.
“I reread 1984 and I was unhappy with it,” Wolfe told Radio.com. “I wrote a more idealistic ending to the book because I have a more idealistic outlook on life.”
Due to her darker sound, which can best be described as beautiful black metal, Wolfe has been pegged as a rather gloomy singer. But she says people, mainly critics, have gotten her all wrong. ”There’s two sides to me: I’m very much reality based and also really idealistic,” she explained. “I like to think that there’s a fight out there and we have to fight for the one that we love.”
On her fourth record in three years, Wolfe tried to put more of herself into her writing, and for the first time she used lines that came from her own life. On the rather depressing folk ballad “They’ll Clap When You’re Gone” Wolfe talks of “blackened seeds,” a nod to a poem she wrote at the age of 8.
“It’s about feeling like an alien for a lot of years and being a loner and the feeling of not always being understood,” Wolfe said of the poem. “But I guess it’s a cathartic song. Not completely personal, but it’s like a sad song about dying and death and maybe getting a new lease on life.”
Wolfe has taken steps to feel more a part of the crowd, starting by revealing her face to her fans. Due to crippling stage fright, Wolfe, until very recently, used to wear a veil while performing. The Pain is Beauty album cover is actually the first of hers to display her face fully. “I was trying to be a little more brave,” she explained.
The look of this album — the vintage red dress, the pin curl waves — is also a first for Wolfe, who changes her appearance for every record. On this album, she wanted to explore the intensity of nature, namely the effect natural disasters have on everything around them, including humans. The dress is emblematic of lava, while the song “The Waves Have Come” was inspired by a documentary which featured first hand testimonials from those who survived the devastating 2011 tsunami in Japan.
“There were subtitles to know what they’re saying, but looking at their faces and seeing the loss, it struck me,” she said. “Imagining what it was like to see someone that you love get taken away. To lose your home and livelihood in that way, it’s such an intense way for it to go.”
When talking about the album though she used the example of a forest fire. She explained that on one hand it is a harsh and terrible thing that damages everything in its path, but on the other it acts as a cleansing process that helps disperse seeds and bring new life to the forest. The album’s lead track, “Feral Love,” filled with harpsichord and a machine gun round of drums, touches on this sentiment of finding something good in a world full of devastation.
“I just thought of the reflection of that in our own life,” Wolfe explained. “Inevitably life is really beautiful and it’s really hard and that process is like the fire because it allows us to start over if we fight. We can become stronger and have a more beautiful perspective on life.”
Chelsea Wolfe is trying to remember the name of the Werner Herzog film she loves so much, that one about Antarctica. Arctic Circle? Journey to the End of the Earth? She ruminates for a second. “Encounters at the End of the World, that’s it!” She says it victoriously but timidly, in a soft-spoken whisper that makes you wonder if the mysterious singer ever really lets her emotion show outside of her palpable songs.
“That movie was so inspiring for me. It’s such a magical piece of art focusing on something most people would overlook and showing how beautiful it can be,” she says, hinting at the deep worldview she grasps at behind those fierce blue eyes. The documentary was just one of the many films Wolfe fixated on while making her new album Pain Is Beauty, a chiseled record with electronic flourishes, sultry piano and string ballads, and even Goldfrapp-cured pop that, at its core, comes from and is about nature.
”A lot of the album has to do with the intensity of natural disasters and how that affects human life,” Wolfe says. Her latest obsession is with volcanoes and lava, so much so that it inspired the normally muted singer to choose a vibrant red dress for the album’s cover shoot. The finished piece is an eerie image that looks as if she could be bracing for (or welcoming) a car crash. “I wanted the effect of car headlights,” she says, “and the feeling of being a bit uncomfortable in the spotlight.”
It’s a feeling Wolfe knows all too well, never completely confident with being the center of attention even as her experience and exposure grows. “I wish I could be invisible and just play music and not have to worry about anyone looking at me,” she says, hinting at the black veils and chain masks she used to hide behind on stage. With her 2011 album Apokalypsis (translating to “lifting of the veil”), she felt it was a symbolic time to leave the masks behind, which prepared her for the stripped-down acoustic tour behind 2012’s Unknown Rooms. It was here that she really learned to open up, which she does now as she talks about her early upbringing in Southern California.
With her parents divorced, Wolfe grew up in two different households, spending most of her time with a creative mother who made jewelry and painted. But there were also the seminal moments with her father, a music man in a country band called El Dorado that opened for acts like Tanya Tucker.
At 9 years old, the budding singer/songwriter would sneak into her dad’s studio and record her own takes of songs like “It’s My Party” and the theme to The Neverending Story before moving on to original material, none of which she particularly liked at the time. It wasn’t until years later that Wolfe started to take her craft seriously. She was invited to tag along on a trip to Europe with a group of performance artists and found herself playing acoustic sets there.
“It was nice to have people willing to just stop and listen, and let me figure out what the hell I was doing. After a while I started to figure out my own voice more. When I came home I was inspired to start from scratch and approach music again in a new way.”
In just three short years, Wolfe’s career has produced three lauded studio albums that have drawn varied fans from the folk, metal, and indie communities, all of whom have let her continue to figure out what she’s doing with her music, such as experimenting with an electronic album and moving into the realm of film scoring. And for Wolfe, that’s just how it has to be in her world.
“I’m a claustrophobic person, and that goes for my creativity as well,” she says. “I need lots of space to move and roam.”
[This article first appeared in Under the Radar’s September/October 2013 issue.]
“Who is more frightened: those bursting out of their darkness of woods upon all the space of light, or those from the open tiptoeing into the forests?” ponders D.H. Lawrence in his semi-autobiographical masterwork, Sons and Lovers. It’s a passage that American noir-tinged singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe is quick to attach to her track ‘Feral Love’: the opening salvo of her recently released fourth album, Pain is Beauty.
An album of contrasts, Pain is Beauty is by no means the dark and drab affair that the dourness of that quote might have you believe. Instead, it’s a record of contrasts that crackles with all the intensity of a bonfire on a crisp November night. Whether dabbling in more beat-driven electronica or piano-led elegies, what ties it together is the sort of mythic, grand storytelling you might expect to find in a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale.
In the midst of a tour with instrumental post-rock trio Russian Circles, we met Wolfe in the corner booth of a North London pub to discover the ways in which she first connected with music, the love of poetry that informed her passion for writing, and what she’d spin on her final night on Earth.
PlanetNotion: You’re currently on tour with Russian Circles. How’s the Pain is Beauty material been going down with audiences?
Chelsea Wolfe: It’s definitely a lot of fun getting to play the new material. I can tell a few people have heard it before and are singing along, which is cool. I think it’s new for a lot of people so I can never really tell how they’re feeling but I guess the best sign is that no one leaves when we play so that’s good [laughs]; people aren’t walking out the door or shaking their heads or anything so…
PN: And you’re both co-headlining, as well as you having performed on their new record, Memorial. What is it about them that appeals to you as a touring partner and as a group to collaborate with?
CW: Well, I think their music is really cinematic and it’s really special that they can create so much emotion without any words. It was an honour for me to sing on their album.
PN: Has there been much on-stage collaboration on this tour?
CW: Yeah, we actually do the song ‘Memorial’ together each night as their first encore. So, when they get an encore – which is every night – then I’ll get up and sing that with them.
PN: Pain is Beauty’s been out for two months now. With a little bit of separation from the process of creating it, how do you feel looking back on it?
CW: I’m happy with the album; we’d been working on a lot of the songs for three years, so it was nice to finally put them on an album. This was actually one of the first experiences where it came out pretty soon after it was finished; it didn’t take that long to record but the mixing process was probably six months or so because I actually love that part of it: it’s when everything comes together. You get to obsess over tiny little sounds that you feel need to be there, that are missing and that we have to go back and find.
PN: To my ears, it’s a really poetic record lyrically. Growing up, were you quite a prodigious reader?
CW: Yeah, I definitely always read a lot as a kid, and I wrote a lot too. The first thing I did creatively was writing pages upon pages of poetry. Eventually, I started translating that into music.
PN: What sort of books did you read when you were growing up?
CW: I was part of this club at the local library where you’d have to read so many books and then you’d get a prize. I was definitely constantly reading and logging my reading hours to try and win. I always loved reading.
PN: In terms of what you’ve read then feeding into your work as a musician, are there any novels or authors that have particularly inspired the music you make?
CW: For sure. There’s definitely at least one book or author that inspires each round of songs. D.H. Lawrence has inspired a lot of words for me. The way that he writes about nature is really detailed and really colourful, and the way that he relates nature to humanity is something that’s really inspired me. It’s something that’s reflected in this album a lot.
The song ‘Feral Love’ is pretty directly related to a passage from Sons and Lovers where the character asks which would be more frightening: the men of the forest who are suddenly in the open space, or the men of the open space who are confronted with the forest. I just thought that was a really interesting way to look at humans in this very instinctual, animalistic sense.
PN: Was there any specific moment where you decided to turn your initial interest in poetry into something more musical?
CW: When I was growing up, my dad was in a country band and they had a home studio. They’d record and practice in there and that was probably one of the most influential things for me because I learned how to record and my dad set me up with this old, analogue 8-track. He taught me how to set up some beats on the keyboard and I started writing songs. The things I was writing probably didn’t make much sense – it was stuff beyond my years at the time – but I knew I wanted to write. It came really naturally to me.
I would always beg my dad to let me go in the studio. My sisters would sing back-up for me and we recorded a lot. From then on, it was just something that I always did naturally but I never really imagined I’d be a musician because I was painfully shy and I didn’t ever want to be up in front of people. It took me a really long time to come to terms with that and reconcile the two things; my love for writing and recording songs, and my stage fright and dislike for being in front of people.
PN: Is that something you feel you’ve overcome to a certain extent?
CW: To some extent, yeah. I still struggle with it but I’ve realised it’s something that’s part of being a musician and I want to be able to have that experience, and to be able to present the music in a live way.
PN: Have you thought much about what you’d like to do after Pain is Beauty?
CW: I have a million ideas but I’m not entirely sure of which direction they’ll go. I’ve been recording some demos of songs and I’m constantly writing words or music. When it comes time for me to put together an album, it’s more of a gathering process; some of the songs are really old, some are brand new. It’s about fitting them together in the right home. I don’t know where it’s going to lead but I’m sure I will soon enough.
PN: When I think of you as a musician, I picture you drawing on a hugely eclectic range of influences. It must be difficult knowing what’s going to work and what isn’t from a stylistic basis.
CW: I never really know if anyone else is going to make sense of it because things in my head sometimes fit together – Pain is Beauty has songs from a bunch of different genres; electronic songs, acoustic songs, piano songs – but, for me, they have some kind of bloodline running through them. It might not come across like that for everyone, though.
PN: On a final note… If you had one evening left on Earth, what would you choose as a final record to listen to?
CW: Honestly, I think I would just take that time to gather the people I love together and play music. I think Hank Williams Sr. is someone that has a really beautiful sense of melancholy and reality, and that would be something really nice to listen to if you were trying to come to terms with the end of things.
Pain is Beauty is available now on Sargent House. You can buy it here.
Watch Chelsea Wolfe performing acoustic versions of two of her new songs, ‘Lone’ and ‘House of Metal’ from the album Pain Is Beauty for La Blogotheque’s Take Away Shows in Paris.
Chelsea Wolfe will be performing on November 19th in Los Angeles at UCLA’s Royce Hall with special guest Anna Calvi. Get Info/Tix here
Chelsea Wolfe says that she doesn’t write about personal experiences in her music. She doesn’t like to put certain aspects of herself out there. All of that is well and good, but when you are a journalist trying to pry the deeper meanings behind her choices out of her, it can feel like pulling teeth. In person she is imposing in stature but withdrawn in her relationship to the media. She clearly doesn’t enjoy talking about herself – her answers often include the phrase “I won’t talk about…” – and really it’s a very endearing quality in a person. But the end result is that it is very hard to really know Chelsea Wolfe from a simple interview. On the other hand, obscuring herself has always been a key part of her image, and according to her, it’s something she’s been trying to change, at least in the physical sense. On the cover of her latest album, she stands with her face in a more natural and uncovered way than ever before.
For the past few months, Wolfe has been touring in support of her fourth and most heavily synthesised album yet, Pain Is Beauty, with the UK being her latest stop. She says that the European audiences are “harder to read” than those in her native America, where she is more accustomed to seeing fans sing along with her lyrics, indicating that they have listened to the new record. However, what I saw at her performance at Camden’s Electric Ballroom was an audience entranced, large and still. Whether or not they were singing along, from where I was standing it looked like the new material was having an impressive effect.
Over the last few years she has been writing with Ben Chisholm, who plays keyboards in her band, and perhaps the heavy electronic tilt to the album can be attributed to him. The sounds are crushing at times and airy at others, but there is always a lingering darkness that permeates the material. Wolfe’s love of reverb and space also brings a certain wistfulness that juxtaposes well with the intermittent crunching of electronics, then mixes beautifully with the delicate recessions of noise. All in all, it’s quite a departure from her previous album Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs, but still doesn’t skimp on the soft and simple sides.
It’s a very electrical album, and a big difference from your acoustic last one. Was it important for you to have that contrast?
Chelsea Wolfe: Things happen really out of order for me to be honest. I was writing some of these electronic songs even before I released the acoustic album so it’s not so much that I’m doing one thing after another, it’s more about what I’m feeling at the time. When I was putting the acoustic album together I was kind of culling songs from over the years and writing a few new ones – a similar process to this one as well, taking a few songs from a few years ago and writing new ones. For me, making an album is more about finding the right songs that fit together and come together in a theme and concept, even if they sound a little different.
I’ve read reviews of Pain Is Beauty that describe the atmosphere as “suffocating” – how do you feel about that?
CW: To me it actually feels really open. I was really inspired by intense nature and landscapes, and I’m always inspired by open spaces and giving room for things to grow sound-wise and visually. I have a bit of claustrophobia myself which I think translates into my music. So I wouldn’t describe it as suffocating to be honest. To me there are a lot of songs on the album that have a sense of forward motion. I’ve always been inspired by trains and chugging forward and trying to overcome something. So for me it has that vibe, it has that forward motion, running, driving towards something.
I’d love to know more about the landscapes you move through on the album. Some use space and others are very dense. If it was a road trip, can you tell me what the journey would look like?
CW: Well, I was definitely focusing on the intensity and the darkness of nature. One of the first songs I wrote for the album came to me after I had seen footage of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan – just that massive overtaking – and watching documentaries of the people who experienced that loss and the sadness that they felt. ‘The Waves Have Come’ came from that. And after that I began to be inspired by the intensity in nature like volcanic lava and forest fires and that regenerative process that comes from forest fires and the way it reflects on humanity.
Is it important for everything that you do to have specific meaning behind it?
CW: I don’t know. I think that what I do is pretty instinctual. I prefer not to overthink things because I think if I did I would never end up releasing anything. I tend to just follow my instincts when it comes to imagery or whatever is inspiring me. I just fit it together in a weird way, and I have to let it go at some point or else I would hold onto it forever.
What are the emotions that you feel personally when listening back to the album?
CW: Well there are definitely a lot of elements of tormented love. It’s about a sense of overcoming and healing and the constant hardships that life brings our way and love brings our way, and if we overcome that we can come out the other side with a more beautiful perspective on life and a greater strength.
You’ve said that the songs were inspired by literature like 1984, as well as the Japan tsunami. How much is your writing from personal experience and how much draws from external sources? Do you feel that it has leaned from one side to the other throughout your career?
CW: The way that I write sounds like it comes from personal experience, but I don’t really like writing about my personal life, so it tends to be about somebody else or coming from outside, like from a documentary or a movie or a novel or from stories that other people tell me. The song ‘The Warden’ ended up being like an alternate ending to 1984 because I found it so frustrating that after this whole struggle and this love story that he gave up the name of his love when he was being tortured. I wrote about the other end of that, a more idealistic ending where he fought till the death to save the one he loves.
What does it say about you as an artist that you don’t want to bring in any of your own experiences? Many artists are just the opposite.
CW: When I first started trying to get out there and make music – I’ve pretty much been writing songs and playing music my whole life but I never imagined doing it as a career or anything – when I was in my early 20s there were people in my hometown who encouraged me to make an album with the songs I was playing around in coffee shops and stuff. I didn’t really feel ready, but then I got caught up in this wave of recording and interviews, and I was really uncomfortable with all the fame. Most of the songs on that were very personal and about relationships and in my mind I felt very petty and I just wasn’t happy with it so I just trashed the album and didn’t do music for a long time after that. I felt like I wanted the first thing that I released into the world to be something that I was really proud of, so I took a step back for a while. And once I re-approached music I had to do it in a way that wasn’t so personal for me to feel comfortable releasing it into the world. Well, of course some of them are, but I would never talk in an interview about exactly what a song is about. I like to keep my music and my life separate.
What sort of effect do you think growing up next to a cemetery had on your creative development?
CW: I was always really interested in the reality of things – the two sides to every story – and I always had a darker perspective on things. Even as a kid I would watch the world news for hours just to get a sense of what was going on in the world. Then we moved into this house where, just beyond the backyard, behind the fence, was a big cemetery. The funerals that would happen right behind my house were Indian funerals. There would be a lot of chanting and a lot of wailing and I would peek through the fence and watch it when I was in middle school. So I don’t know if it directly had an impact on me or if it was just something that inspired me without me knowing it. But that sense of mourning and the way that they express it probably inspired me. The first album that I released, The Grime And The Glow, definitely had a sense of mourning for the world. Physically and image-wise it was trying to portray some sense of a funeral march.
The red dress on the cover of the album is apparently representing molten lava – how did that come about?
CW: I knew that I wanted that to be reflected in the colour, you know, the colour is just so inspiring. I also wanted the album cover to finally show my face and be reflective of my struggles with stage fright and trying to overcome being able to perform when it isn’t something that comes very natural to me. So on the album cover there is a spotlight and my face is showing but I’m also sort of holding myself, a kind of uncomfortable feeling. I used to wear a veil over my face because I wanted to be invisible when I was on stage, but now I’ve started dressing up and getting into fashion and using it to become that character that feels comfortable.
Does your fascination with death still come across or is it more about the tormented love and healing? What are your thoughts on death?
CW: I’ve always had some sort of affinity for the ends of things and thinking about the ends of things. It depends on the song, I try to explore it in different ways. Sometimes when I think about death I’m thinking of it as a physical character that can teach you things and sometimes I’m thinking of it in a finite sense and other times I’m just asking questions that I can’t answer. I don’t really like to state my personal belief, because I change my mind too often, but I imagine something peaceful. Whether it’s a rest or another world or some kind of eternity, it doesn’t seem like a scary thing.
Do you have a favourite cultural or other external source’s version of death?
I wouldn’t say I have a favourite, but I would say that I have experienced things before in very beautiful areas of nature. When I was in Hawaii once, I took a hike up to a big cliff that overlooks these green hills and the ocean. It was in the winter time and everything was green and lush and I could just imagine then what a peaceful thing it must be to die and become a part of nature.
Photograph courtesy of Krist Mort
Photo by Darla Teagarden, wardrobe by Black Swan Theory & Bloodmilk, Austin, TX
From day one, CVLT Nation has been a fan of Chelsea Wolfe and we are super happy to share with you our first interview with her. Chelsea’s new album Pain Is Beauty is out now on Sargent House.
What was the recording process like for Pain is Beauty and how did the experience differentiate itself from prior recordings? Also, the album incorporates a stronger electronic element, bearing a different sound from what fans have come to expect. What powers and influences brought about this change?
CHELSEA WOLFE: I met my bandmate Ben Chisholm about four years ago, right around the time when I desired to bring some sort of electronic element into the band. He’s into analog synths and electronic beats and he’s really brilliant and multi-talented. Needless to say, he was a perfect fit. I found that we wrote songs together easily and we started messing around with some electronic songs that I originally thought we’d use for a side project…but I realized over time that I really didn’t want to put limits on this project, so we eventually started playing some of those songs live and I had a lot of fun with their energy. I knew they’d be the base for this new album.
Photo by Kristin Cofer
With each new album cover, you have obscured your features less and less. With Pain is Beauty you are front and center, wreathed in spotlight. How does this visual motif factor in with the album’s sound?
The title “Pain is Beauty” is pretty open to interpretation, but for me it’s about a process of overcoming. There is a regeneration process in forest fires in which the fire creates room for new growth on the forest floor, and I see that process reflected in humanity as well. Life will always bring us hard times and challenges but when we go through the fire and fight to overcome we can come out on the other side stronger, and with a more beautiful perspective. In relation to music, performance and visuals, I’ve always struggled to reconcile my love for writing and recording music with my stage fright and dislike of being up in front of people, so in the past I would obscure myself in the artwork and onstage, wearing a veil and trying to become invisible. I knew I needed to be brave and get over that a bit, especially with the ideal of this album being about overcoming and healing, so I tried to convey that in the artwork.
Having seen you at Club Congress in Tucson, I was curious to see how the new material translated live. Needless to say, I was impressed. That being said, what steps did you take in bringing your new sound to your audience in such an intense form?
My band and I had a couple months this summer to work the new songs out, but when it comes to actually playing them at a show, it’s a different story and the kinks have to be worked out. The first few shows of that US tour were really tough because it was something very new. Even if we play the same songs, each tour is a little or a lot different and it takes some time to fall into the groove. Anyway, I love the combination of electronics and live instruments…drums, guitars…so we found a balance within that and we pour as much energy into the performance as possible.
You released Apokalypsis, Unknown Rooms and Pain is Beauty in relatively quick succession, should we expect any releases throughout the coming year?
I don’t know yet – I’m constantly writing and culling songs and there are a lot of ideas and a few different sound projects I’m slowly working on, but I don’t like to rush myself or my music. Honestly, I would like to explore doing a couple more Pain is Beauty tours next year in a different form before I release something new – maybe something more intimate and quiet. We’ll see…
Additionally, are there specific writers whose work finds its way into your lyrics and mentality when it comes to your music?
Any book I read that I’m really into ends up being reflected in my music. I love when writers have a special sense of detail that opens up my mind in a new way. When I read D.H. Lawrence books – even though he is known for his commentary on family relationships I believe – I usually take away perspective on the relationship between humanity and nature, and his attention to details of nature, color, and life rhythms. That sort of thing finds its way into my lyrics and mentality for sure. “Feral Love” was inspired by a passage from Sons and Lovers where a character asks – who would be more afraid, the men of the forest who were confronted with the open space, or men of the open space suddenly confronted with a dense forest? It made me think about instinctual life and love, human as an animal; a survivor.
Photo by Kristin Cofer
What is your earliest memory of knowing music was your calling?
My earliest memory is of being around 6 or 7 years old in my backyard during a sudden downpour of rain. I initially started to run inside but decided to stay in the rain and just listen. The sound of the rain, some ambulance siren in the distance and dogs howling at the sound of the siren – it all came together in such an perfect way, so I went inside and wrote a few pages about it. My childhood life was foggy, confusing and secretive so I would watch the world news for hours to find some reality. I would cry for hours after watching stories about rape camps in African countries or some other horrible event, feeling that the world was so fucked up and I couldn’t do anything about it. I just knew I that understood human sadness in a certain way and decided to write about it because of my incapability to be some sort of activist as I was unbearably shy about talking to others. I felt like I could at least try to shed light on the two sides of every story, the reality side, the dark side. When my parents divorced, my dad eventually got another house and built one of the rooms into a home studio for his country band. I’d hear them recording or working out Fleetwood Mac covers and asked my dad to teach me how to record. I recorded a weird cover of “It’s my Party” at age 8 or 9 and it sparked something in me…from then on I never stopped recording and writing. I still like doing cover songs, too!
If you could have a conversation with one of your dead heroes, who would it be and what would the conversation be about?
I think it would be great to talk for hours with Vladimir Vysotsky or Selda Bagcan – I could learn a lot from either of them.
You are really supportive of underground clothing & jewelry designers. Why is this important to you?
I’m just drawn to certain designers’ aesthetics, and some of them happen to be more underground. I adore Ovate and I also love Ann Demeulemeester. I love when designers create a world you can become part of through their clothing and it’s so rad when you can continue to collect a certain designer’s pieces because they just keep creating more dreamy things each season. I’ve never been one to collect records or other objects; clothes and shoes are the only things, I guess. It’s been really great to meet some of these wonderful creative minds when I’m in different places on tour, like An and Filip of AF Vandevorst in Belgium, J.L. Schnabel of Bloodmillk in Philadelphia, and Katie from K/LLER Collection in New York.
Photo by Darla Teagarden, wardrobe by Black Swan Theory & Bloodmilk, Austin, TX
Talk to us about the challenge of expanding your fan base without alienating your core audience?
I have no idea if I’m doing this right. I feel very lucky to have a group of folks who follow my multiple personality disorder of a musical project. I’ve met so many lovely people at my shows. I love to experiment with new sounds but I have folk roots and will always return to singing with my acoustic guitar no matter what other sounds I mess around with for a while.
How did your relationship with Sargent House start, and why them and not another label?
They embrace outcasts first of all – so someone like me who was just kind of floating out there without any real support. Cathy Pellow at Sargent House took me in and helped me get on a path where I could actually get things done, like tour! When I moved to LA it wasn’t with the intention of finding a label there but it must have been meant to be, and I am very happy and lucky to have released my last two albums with Sargent House – it’s a truly supportive place for art, music, creativity.