Growing up in Moscow, what music were you listening to?
I've realized I have these three pillars that were established in my childhood as far as music. The first and huge pillar is classical music. That was the very first thing that I ever listened to. My mom was a conservatory professor and she played piano, and both her and my dad played classical music. My dad played in an orchestra into his twenties – he played violin – so there was a lot of classical music in my life. The only concerts that I would ever go and hear were classical, and it was my favorite treat to get to see ballet and opera. They were really valued in the Soviet Union and everybody had them in their life. I don't know if it was just the major cities, but in Moscow it was, and I know in St. Petersburg (at that time, Leningrad) it was also a huge part of everybody's life. The other music that was super-duper huge in my life was the fact that my dad was an avid collector of underground, forbidden music from the West. He was part of a community of people who were always sneaking music in and trading. We obviously had a ton of The Beatles and Rolling Stones, Moody Blues, and we had a lot of Italian and French music of the '60s, '70s, and '80s. Whatever anybody could get their hands on. I was listening to everything. Because it was this underground sneaky other world, everything was almost like a mix tape. To this day, I have no idea what's on what album, I just know all of The Beatles. People were trying to make room and use every part of the cassette tape, so they would puzzle things based on the math of it, like how much could fit per side. I don't think we had any in our house, but a fascinating thing for people to know, if they don't already, is that in Soviet Russia, because The Beatles were so beloved and yet nothing came out officially, people had a lot of vinyl that was cut onto old X-rays. When Paul McCartney first came to Russia to play, people were asking him to sign their records, and it would be on somebody's broken hip! It was not high fidelity material for sure, it was super floppy, but you could still cut music into it and have those songs in your life. The third pillar was also very unofficial music by Soviet bards, and those were like [Vladimir] Vysotsky, [Bulat] Okudzhava, [Yuri] Visbor, [Sergey] Nikitin, and all these people who were these incredible brilliant songwriters. Usually, it would be a person accompanying themselves with a guitar and singing very simply, and the lyrics were some of the most incredible songs I have ever heard ‘til this day. On every topic in every way, especially luminaries like Vysotsky – who was a brilliant, brilliant actor and died very young – but he was the most beloved singer/songwriter of all of Soviet Russia. He wrote hundreds and hundreds of songs, and each one of them a masterpiece. Okudzhava, who was older than Vysotsky and had fought in World War II, was this Georgian singer/songwriter, and he wrote these incredible songs. A lot of them were about the war and from different perspectives, but those were the people that made me realize that you could write a song about anything in the world, and it's all open to you. Anything is possible, there's nothing off limits, and you could be any character. So, those are my three pillars that I stand on every day.
Where do you see the influence of your childhood listening show up?
I'm sure it's showing up in everything. I know playing all those pieces on piano and listening to that much classical music is just through and through. It's the symbolic language or something. In a lot of ways, I guess whatever skills you learn become the tools of your self-expression. So, if somebody learns carpentry, then their self-expression is going to come through carpentry. If somebody learns how to be a surgeon, their self-expression has to come through that. Whatever it is that you have as a skill in this world comes through. If you have a limited vocabulary, you're going to only be able to express yourself through those words. If you have a vast vocabulary, you get to have more of those tools. Somebody like Leonardo da Vinci, who was an expert in so many fields, his self-expression could travel through all those fields. I've met so many incredible musicians. I have friends who can hear something and just play it. They can play any jazz; they can figure out how to play any Beatles song. I don't have those skills. I'm not the kind of musician that somebody would want in their band. But what I think happens is whatever it is that I have played, and have listened to, and still continue to take in, ends up somehow becoming a part of my self-expression. If I learn a little bit more, then I get to have that little bit more. That's the wonderful inspiration to learn more and try more, because then I get to express that much more of my own self through whatever I learn. Processing and then expressing. It doesn't necessarily have to be anything from my childhood; it could be something from what I observed at a bus stop yesterday. But the skills to express that thing have to come from the things that I learned in childhood or adolescence.
I had a younger brother that played the Beach Boys in the house all the time. I was listening to much different music at the time, but that music penetrated my psyche and now it's something that I love and cherish. I find it interesting that the things that maybe you weren't even truly listening to as a fan end up seeping into what you become.
I do get it now. I think that there were maybe a lot of things that I wasn't actively listening to on purpose, but they were around me. Even coming to America and hearing a lot of American rock that didn't make it to me, or things on the radio. And definitely in my neighborhood, just listening to a lot of Latin music coming from out of cars or out of apartments, and all those rhythms coming into me. In a lot of ways, we're really porous, and I don't think it matters what the genre is. What matters is the quality. If something comes in contact with you, and it's on a certain level, your entire system goes ”Wow!," and you have this wonder about it. If people are open enough. A lot of the time we decide the value of something based on our own taste and preference, and we forget that we are very limited, and sometimes our palate does need to be expanded. I went through that when I was a teenager. My dad used to work at Cornell University Medical College, and he was doing scientific photography for them for their medical and surgical research. They had these free concerts where incredible classical musicians would come through, and all these people in scrubs with beepers would come in and listen for an hour on their lunch break. This amazing pianist was coming, and my mom snuck me out of high school. She said I was sick and I got to go to this concert. It was amazing, but we had this full-on argument on the way home where there was this late, maybe one of the last Beethoven piano sonatas, and I was like, “It was terrible” because my ear was not used to more modern classical music, which is shows you how ahead of his time Beethoven was. I had a hard time the first time I listened to Bartok. It felt crazy to me. I was saying this to my mom, and she was like, “You don't understand it yet,” and I was like, “Of course I understand it. I don't even want to understand that. It's bullshit!” And she was like, “Okay. You’ll learn to get it later.” And I did. I fell in love later. That's some of my favorite music. I had to listen to a bunch of it, and then one day I absolutely fell in love. Maybe it was the prepared piano pieces of John Cage, something where I had an out-of-body experience listening to it. Had I remained closed to it, and been like, “Oh, it's not for me," I would have never been able to expand to it. But it's not necessarily easy. Certain frequencies in metal are hard like that. That high end is hard on me. That's not my happy place in my body. I love things that don't have that particular timbre. But once you build up a tolerance, and you work to expand your palate very consciously, if you get lucky and you listen to something wonderful you don't have to work at it – you just love it and then you're the richer for it. It doesn't mean you have to be so porous that you are Pollyanna and love everything, but if you're honest with yourself, you push yourself a little bit, you don't make your ear lazy, and you don't just relax into a, “Well I know what I like, and what I don't like,” you stand to win a lot because you can expand your sonic palate, or taste, or color, or architectural, or social or any palette. I think music is a gateway to a lot of those expansions.
I love that you were able to have a meaningful debate with your mom about the music.
She was the one bringing the wisdom and the meaning. I was a teenage idiot, but then I did come back and had my, “You were right.”
To my dad's credit, he used to take us to metal shows and sit through them. He always found something to appreciate about it, which I still look back on favorably. Being open and being able to continue to learn as an adult is important. You get busy with other things, and you don't have that passion or the time to be digging through a record store. I’m a little sad that those times are gone. There's access to everything online, so that little bit of discovery is different.
Yeah, it's overwhelming sometimes because there's so much you almost do have to dig. Except I do think that something about when the digging becomes sort of motionless. You scroll dig, right? But there is something to touching a record, or flipping through them, and picking things up, and reading the little things, and seeing how it feels. It's almost like people get that somewhere else maybe when they're picking a potted plant to put in their apartment. You pick one, or a pet, but you don't get to do that with music anymore.
There are kids that have an identity around it, and that's cool, but it used to just be the way it was. Where did you do your early recordings in New York City?
My earliest recordings I did all with my friend, Joe Mendelson, who at first had a studio right by Times Square. It was not a music recording studio. It was his and his friend's little post production studio, but he had an upright Yamaha in there and he was this amazing friend that I made. He was my only professional musician friend in New York City. He was part owner of one of the bars I played, called The Living Room. I recorded one record [11:11] that I self-released in college, and that was with Richie Castellano. He was a fellow student, but he actually knew about recording as opposed to me, who pretended I knew about recording. And then Joe Mendelson was my friend in New York and he let me record whatever songs I wrote. Just on piano and voice, for free, which was amazing because I had no money for any recording. I was playing bars and cafes and any place that would have a piano in it. There was this one gentleman who came to one of my bar shows, Alan Bezozi, who was friends with Gordon Raphael [Tape Op #26], who had just produced The Strokes. Everybody knew about Gordon except me, because I didn't have any money for records. I didn't know about The Strokes either. I didn't know about anything other than whoever played at the bars with me and, of course, The Beatles. So, that was the next time I recorded, when we made Soviet Kitsch. That was over a span of two and a half weeks. It was all to tape. We recorded a bunch of it in New York, and then a little bit of it in London where Gordon was living. I was a purist and I didn't believe in editing. [laughs] I thought it had to be live to tape like all the incredible jazz musicians I had discovered in college. I also absolutely couldn't deal with any high end at all at the time. I could only have closed hi-hat. There was almost no tolerance for any kind of a cymbal. I liked everything low and tight and not jingly. Then again, expanding palette, I had to learn the wonders of all that. The next time I got to record was after I was signed, and that was my first record that had a real budget and time. I got to play with everything I'd ever wanted to play with, which is like every kind of electronic thing, synths, drum machines, loops, and combine all these fun things that I'd only listened to but never had the chance to play with. It went from there, trying with every record to do whatever it is I didn't get to do on the last one. I realized how long it takes between records with touring and everything, so then I was like, “Okay, I have to think of this as going to a master's program. I'm going to pick a few producers and have master classes with them and get to play with everybody.” It's interesting, because I do best with people that are collaborative. I’m not necessarily like, “Here. I'm clay. Mold me.” I have so many ideas, and the desire to express what it is that I envision. The people that I've had the chance to work with have been the most skilled and incredible, yet open and not pushy people. I felt I got to do everything I wanted to. I started experimenting much more with what I'd come from, which is classical, a lot of orchestral, and things like that.
You've gotten to work with some amazing producers like Mike Elizondo, David Kahne, Jacknife Lee, and Jeff Lynne. What were some of the things from each of those people that you learned or enjoyed about their process?
There's so much. They're all entirely huge. I know it's one of those cliché or very obvious things to say because we're all a universe, each one of us, but they’re like these entire universes, each one. I'd say what's most interesting is life wisdom. A lot of working on records translates into the way people might feel when they go sit with a guru somewhere. They're learning about how to live. I love when I'm sitting with someone like that. I'm interested to see: What is music to them? How do they listen? How do they perceive things? Where do we connect? Where can I open myself up more? Where do I have resistance to where they're open and we interact? Where are they resistant to how I hear? It's not a conscious process at all. It's just flowing. But what tends to happen is we get into a playful mode, and then there are special things that happen with everybody in their own way. I also get to hear a lot of stories and experiences. With Mike Elizondo, I wanted upright bass and bow. He was like, “I played upright bass in an orchestra. I just haven't played it in a while.” All of a sudden, he was practicing and playing this incredible upright bass because Mike is some magical bassist. Everybody, obviously for a good reason, thinks of him as a producer and a writer, but he's also this beautiful bassist. Having him play and put that soul into it was very special. It was funny to hear him say, “I don't know if I can do it," cut to: “It’s so incredible!” It was one of those things where I was like, “Oh, I hope he kept that in his life because he's so good at it." I loved singing with Jeff Lynne. We would sing harmonies. His voice was this super high angelic voice, and I loved blending with him. There was this “barn," but it's like the fanciest most beautiful “not barn inside” at all barn. We would sing in the barn and record there because there's a piano. Another thing about Jeff was that in every single room in his house, including the kitchen and his little office, there were mic inputs everywhere. Every single thing is linked to the studio, and he's figured out the best sound in every room and the best thing to record in that room. It made me inspired to think of your whole world as one big musical place. David Kahne, we spent the most amount of time together and we talked so much. In a lot of ways, he became like a relative. He was my first experience of possibilities of different sounds. He would pull up a sound and it would be so amazing. We'd be talking about one song, but the sound he'd pull up would make me think of a totally other song that I hadn't even planned to record, and then we would record that. He was also the first person to really give me that glimpse of taking songs off of the piano. I would play parts on piano, but we would use it as a trigger. To hear myself in those other worlds, where songs functioned differently when they're on different instruments. Again, that palette opening thing. That was cool. “Hotel Song” had been an a cappella song. I still can't sit down and play “Hotel Song” on piano. I didn't write it on piano. I can't feel it like that. It was just me and some claps, and I played it originally to David just to a bass drum. What was fun is then we were able to layer things onto it to make it how it turned into the record. All a backwards experiment of putting things onto it. I love whenever I tour with a band because I do two different modes of touring. Sometimes I do solo, and I play every kind of song on piano – many that are not even on any records. But when I play with the band I love doing "Hotel Song.” It's one of my happy songs to do. In a lot of ways that was discovered while recording with David. I don't think I would have even had the thought to put other instruments on it. It wasn't that in my mind. With Jacknife Lee, he brought in this amazing guy. He was like the Hendrix of tuba. He was amazing. I've loved tuba, and we were joking around and I was like, “I don't hear bass," and he said, “What about tuba?” What were the chances of this virtuoso coming and rocking my world with this tuba? Leo Abrahams [Tape Op #111] was amazing. He's this gentle, British, soft spoken, musical monster who could play anything on guitar. Brian Eno [#85] asks him to play guitar, and there's the reason for it. It's because he's special. We did all these other soundscapes, and it's fun to arrange with him. I feel I've had a couple of times in my life where when I tried to work with somebody it didn't click. Something happens where my soul doesn't want to perform for them. I think the magic of being a producer is that you create this space where this other person's soul wants to sing for you in the room, and for it to resonate with you, and trusts you, and wants to play imagination with you. I value that in all of those wonderful producers that I worked with, because they were able to create that. They were able to create that feeling where the songs were able to be themselves, so it didn't matter what instrumentation we were doing or who we were getting to play on it. A lot of the time I end up playing a lot a lot of the things on the records, but I love getting other players also. A lot of the time we will have two or three drummers on one song, then picking and choosing. That's my favorite; to sculpt and to mold. I always try to get some of that feeling from the producers to also allow the other people’s soul to perform for me. It's a real gift to get to have somebody come and play on your song. Something that's going to be just that moment, that they're going to bring something, and all their skills that they have gotten up to that day. And all the life experience and it's all gonna get to be there on your record. It's cool.
It seems like your personal musical process is forever evolving.
Yeah, it really has been. It's ongoing. My effort to figure out how much control I can let go of while still being able to express myself and feel myself expression is safe. That's the constant battle inside my own self. With the last record, Home, Before and After, John Congleton's also a wonderful producer and a unique human. We were scheduled to start on April 1st, 2020, which is like, you know, the stuff went down.
Stuff went down, like a global pandemic.
I couldn't understand how somebody would say, “Well, send me this,” or, “Send me that.” How do people work like that, sending each other music? How are you not in the same space together? That was another layer of learning about how to get my palate open enough to trust that we could work remotely and have the patience. Because it's not instant gratification like when I'm in the space with someone. But now, there are a few days and I might have to live with it for longer than I want it there. I have to imagine it gone, and trust that it'll be gone. I get very passionate, so it was hard for me but it was also a huge gift in a way even though it was such a crazy way to work. He was in California and I was in New York. I was recording. I never even stepped outside. I was so afraid of getting sick because I was pregnant, my dad was sick, and I was thinking, “I have to stay healthy.” If a piano tuner came to tune, I would air out the space for three hours. I never shared the space with our wonderful engineer, Ariel [Shafir], and I never even saw his face. I only saw him in a mask ‘til after the record. We worked in this new crazy way, but it opened up this new way. I had more trust. Some things that maybe I would have had a knee jerk reaction to if I was allowed to change it right away, I figured out, “Oh well, it's not the thing, it's this aspect of it.” Or maybe, "Now I love it because that forced a little bit more time with it." Don’t panic. If you hate it, just give it time, and if you still hate it, you'll always be able to take it off. John had the patience of a saint, because we were having these crazy sessions where it would be listening on one app while looking at each other on another app, but then to talk we still had to do some other app… It was a whole other thing. Then it would be, “Okay John, at two minutes and 12 seconds and 11 milliseconds, the rest that comes right after the hit needs to be pulled down probably two and a half dB.” But like that throughout an entire record. That’s an insane way to do things. Somehow we got to that end and it worked. What I love about it is I can't hear any of that. I just hear the songs. I can't hear any of the hardship. In the end, anything that's on my record I've listened to it a billion times. I've touched everything. I've thought about everything, and whatever is there I feel good about at least in that moment. Don't ask me a year later, because I will have not listened to it and probably never again, but in that moment I will feel totally good about it. So, it feels like there are all these different ways to work, and that's so cool. I would have never tried to work in this way if it wasn't forced upon me. I forced it myself because I didn't want to wait anymore. Now another way of working is open to me because I had to trust that it would be okay. I would have never thought that I could do it. I never thought I was a good candidate for any remote anything.
It's interesting, because it ties into what you were talking about earlier, listening and not having a knee jerk reaction to something that you didn't like.
Well, that definitely wouldn't have existed if I didn't work with this person and that makes it extra special. I remember, even early on, some people being like, “Why don't you self-produce? You have all these ideas.” I love having the ideas, but I love having the ideas while working with another person. It's funny, because in a lot of ways, writing, it’s all on my own and I don't write with other people. That seems to me like a daunting thing. But I do love recording with other people.
