Tell me about your synth journey, since that’s what we’re looking at right now.
The synth journey started when I lived in New York and I shared a practice space with Michael Cera. Our agreement was he could use my drums and I could use his keyboards, and it was very lax. He was one of the best roomies I've ever had. He had a [Roland] Jupiter-4, and I was learning, on a simple [Universal Audio] Apollo x4 interface, not how to just demo, but to be able to create usable tracks in order to share them with other people who could make them sound better. I started experimenting with the Jupiter-4, not having any idea how it worked, and I ended up writing the beginning iterations of my song, “Jupiter 4.”
You have a background of having gone to MTSU for recording. What motivated that choice?
I didn't know that many people that wanted to go to school for recording. I was in theater and choir in high school, and I know that I freaked out my parents by saying that I wanted to pursue music outside of school, but my mom's mode was always, “Have a backup plan. Music should be your backup plan. It shouldn't be your job.” [laughter] But I did some research, and I talked to my music teacher, who did madrigals with me and also did my AP Music Theory class my senior year, and he said that someone a year ahead of me went to Middle Tennessee State, who was also in choir and theater. My mom was also a teacher in my high school, so she trusted this pathway of there being some curriculum outside of music. Also, it was one of the fastest-growing cities in the South at the time, and I could get in-state tuition because they didn't have recording as a major in my home state of New Jersey – they called it “in-state out-of-state tuition.” That was what first attracted me to that school. To be honest, I went there for a year and I didn't get to take any music classes my first year, so that kind of dissuaded me from loving it. But I talked to people that got through the program, and they told me that what they learned was that internships were actually a faster pathway to getting an education, and that deterred me from continuing school. I had a friend that got through the program and went to Ba Da Bing Records in New York from her experience at the school, and she was the one that initially hired me as an intern at Ba Da Bing, which was my real education in the music industry. I never had hands-on experience at MTSU.
Oh, man, that's interesting.
But during that time, I did have a job. After I let go of school, I got a job at a venue, and that was my early education in more of the DIY scene, touring bands, and learning how to book and promote shows.
Huge education. People push sports on kids, but navigating being in a music scene really prepares you for life.
Yes. A big thing is finding your people as a kid, finding what your support system is, and just finding that thing that makes you passionate about something. Especially at the time that I grew up – I was born in ’81, so being a teenager in the ’90s – it definitely wasn't anything my parents had ever heard of being a thing that people pursued seriously, but now it feels like something everybody does, almost? [laughter]
Well, I think that’s a better world. Your vulnerability comes up a lot – it's one of your greatest gifts as a songwriter – and something that I've been personally grateful for has been your openness in sharing about your insecurities and growth in the world of recording, production, and collaboration. What has that looked like or felt like for you?
Learning how to write songs, learning how to share them with people, finding my audience, slowly opening up and letting people help me expand my sound, and learning when to ask for help in certain situations – that took me a long time to learn how to do. I feel like I've not only expanded my sound, but I've also learned a lot as far as the humility of admitting that I don't know how to do something and learning how to ask or let somebody do it that does it better. My kid is a skater, but sometimes he'll stop doing something because he's not the best at it. One of the best things to do is to put yourself in a room with people that are better than you, because that's the best way to learn and achieve and aspire. So, even though it can be intimidating, and I'm not always in that kind of spirit, I feel like every time I push myself into these uncomfortable positions – knowing that I don't know something – I take away something in the process.
And you've collaborated with some amazing people: your bandmates, John Congleton [Tape Op #81], Aaron Dessner [#141], Brian McTear [#92], and Daniel Knowles [co-producer on We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong]. What are some of the things that you've learned from people you've collaborated with?
Well, it's funny, I can see them as chapters of my life a little bit. The first time I collaborated with someone on a record, it was with Greg Weeks from Philadelphia. He had a studio called Hexham Head and an imprint on Drag City called Language of Stone. Ben Goldberg at Ba Da Bing Records introduced me to Greg, and I went to his studio with just my classical guitar. I wanted to keep it sparse, because I had never recorded properly before; I knew that I'd have to tour solo, so I didn't want to overexpand my sound. He asked me how I wanted to record the songs, and I said, “Let’s just do guitar and vocal all the way through, make sure we can get through all the songs, and then we'll revisit from the beginning.” We did that, and we went back to the first song and realized that I hadn't tuned my guitar to an E. [laughter] Very simple, humbling lessons. That was when I realized I needed to start tuning my guitar. After that, I met Brian McTear, who is another Philly guy, and he was friends with Greg Weeks. Greg Weeks introduced me to him, and he explained to me that he was doing almost like a visual Tape Op, where it was the writing, recording, and mixing of a song at his studio in Philadelphia called Miner Street Recordings [Tape Op #92], and that the song that we created would be shared on WXPN as a single. I brought in Jeffrey Kish and my friend Cat Martino, who was touring with me at the time. Again, I kept it minimal, but Brian McTear and his partner Amy Morrissey helped me with some things, like as simple as how the mic was placed for my vocals. Amy kept exploring why my vocal wasn't hitting the mic quite right, and she said, “However you're singing, you project naturally down,” so they got a clear sound by lowering [the mic] a couple of inches. This was a 10-minute demo that Jeffrey Kish helped me rein in a little bit, and the power of editing and talking out form was important in that session. Cat Martino came up with the sound for “Love More,” that swish with sandpaper. Those very simple things made the song stand out to me in this beautiful but minimal way. I had such a beautiful, open experience that I wanted to make Epic there. Leading up to Epic, I had such a great relationship with Brian that I felt comfortable enough to bring in a few of my friends. In that way, I felt like I was starting to get more into a producer role by bringing in musicians. Watching him move around the space, I remember thinking that when somebody really knows their studio it's exciting because they know where to put things. They know what works and what doesn't, or they know what doesn't work the way it's supposed to but how it can affect your sound in a way that, if someone just came in to use your studio, they wouldn't know. While I was making that record, I had reached out to Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon because they covered “Love More” at a music festival called MusicNOW in Ohio. My friend sent me a video, and I reached out to see if they would want to be a part of making Epic, because I knew that I was nearby, that they liked that song, and “Love More” was going to be on Epic. They were both making records simultaneously as well as touring, and they didn't have time, but Aaron kept the conversation going and said, “Well, if you ever want to write together, let me know.” So, I started sending demos to him, and the more and more I sent to him, he finally just laughed and said, “You know, I don't think you need to write any more songs. I think we need to make a record together.” So, I brought those demos to his studio in Ditmas Park [Brooklyn], and he picked out the ones that he felt [showed] a side of me that other people hadn't heard before. He was the first person to push more of the rock singer in me. When he heard “Serpents,” he encouraged me to play a bit of electric guitar and helped me learn how to explore his studio in a way where I could try things that I wouldn't be able to do in my own space. He brought some of his musicians in, I brought some of my friends in, and I could see the melding of worlds from where I was coming from and where his universe was. I took all that information and found the courage to produce my own record [Are We There] after that and brought in my touring band to flesh out the sound of songs that I had already written. It was a beautiful recording, with Stewart Lerman at the helm. I did vocal work for a score that he was working on for Boardwalk Empire. Then I did a duet with Rufus Wainwright, and he was running the board for that. He was just so encouraging in these very intimidating moments, and I had never worked in an environment like that before. I asked if he would want to co-produce Are We There with me, because he was almost like an uncle, holding my hand in the studio and giving me the reins. It was Stewart Lerman, his assistant James Frazee, and me in the control room, and then my touring band was my main band.
What I'm hearing a lot is that people took this interest in you and supported you. These people taking you under their wing and showing you the ropes a bit makes me think of your very psychology-related band name The Attachment Theory. How does attachment in all of its different forms show up for you in recording settings?
I mean… I don’t want to say “anxious.” [laughter]
Nobody does.
I'm insecure and I'm anxious, but [not as much with] the balance of my bandmates, especially right now. When you balance each other out, you don't feel that way – or it's okay that you are that way – because it kind of detonates any fear that you have going into it. I feel like, my whole life, I'm just learning how to be myself in front of people. It took me a long time to realize that if you can't be yourself in front of somebody, that's a major red flag. So, I've learned how to eliminate those situations as much as I can. [In] this iteration of SVE & The Attachment Theory, I became close with these musicians from touring We've Been Going About This All Wrong. We made that record coming out of Covid when we couldn't be in the same room together. These were all demos that I had tracked in my home studio that my front-of-house engineer Dan Knowles helped me organize, and I didn't want to re-record them, because I felt like I captured this moment in time that I wanted to encapsulate as much as move on from. He helped me make the most of those sessions, and we added on top of that. We weren't all in the same room when we made that record. Knowing that we had to tour this record, I wanted us to all be able to reconnect. I found a studio in the desert called Gatos Trail [Recording Studio] that was a house, and the studio was detached. It was a separate studio that we could set up in the round, run through all the songs, and figure out how we were going to do the instrumentation live. But it was also a way to reconnect as people. We could have breakfast, lunch, and dinner together; we could all sleep in the same house; be in the beautiful desert; and catch up with people as humans and not just work. We'd wake up, have breakfast, go into the studio, talk about the songs; we would break for lunch, come back, and turn to how we were going to translate these songs live. We got through the whole entire album for the live show, as well as older material that we were integrating with our new instrumentation. We had extra time at the end of the week, and I asked the band if they would just want to jam. I was inspired by the sonic palette that we had created from past records and the current record, and I knew that my engineer was tracking for reference, so we jammed and ended up writing two songs together. I remember wanting to keep that feeling going, what we were automatically playing in the round as a band, very naturally.
That's really cool. You were forming that bond and your own unique attachments to each other through that incubating experience.
Definitely, yeah.
These conversations about you forming a band in your 40s made me return to the thought that, for many people who are socialized as women, music-making can be really solitary. It's inspiring to witness all the ways that you've called in these collaborators.
Over the years, it's been revealing itself slowly, like why I started solo and why I was so protective of that. I was also scared to let that go. I think it came in waves at different times. When I first started writing, I had to do it in secret. My boyfriend didn't like the music that I made at the time, so I would only play when he was out of town on tour in his own band. From a very young age, I've known that music has been very healing for me, and I still am figuring out why. The things that I usually write about are because I'm going through something intense. When I first started writing, it wasn't to share it; it was just to get it out, because I didn't feel like I could talk to anybody about it. My intention was never to become an artist. [laughter] That evolved over time. My friends would hear [my music] and say that they thought it was worth sharing, then I would share at open mics and things like that, and it touched other people. But also, as I've gotten older, some people have worried about my vulnerability and how much I share, especially as I became a little bit more in the public eye, and sometimes people felt too close to me, or sometimes it was too personal. I've just had some reflection on what it means. There are different ways to share and to express my feelings without being so personal, so I'm playing with this idea of the different ways to do that. Now, if I'm in a room where I feel safe with a group of people that I can be myself and express myself with – even if I'm embarrassed about my process, because it's definitely very stream of consciousness – if I'm feeling something, or I have a chord progression on a keyboard or guitar or whatever, and I just have a Part A and a Part B, and if I'm feeling a melody starting to evolve, I'll just sing and explore what that melody can be. When I really like the Part A and Part B, I'll see if I can get it to go somewhere else, then that's when sounds and words and phrases start coming out. My initial demos are 10 to 20 minutes long, and I'll listen back, I'll write out phrases, and I'll try to analyze what it was I was trying to feel. But it's a very vulnerable process, and I feel like the people that I have surrounded myself with – that have seen me in my highs and lows on tour and travel and through Covid – they understand me and they care about me, so they're not going to make fun of my process. But it's a very intimidating thing to do. I had never shared that process with somebody else before, so being able to be in a room with musicians that have traveled with me for years now and show them that side of myself – as scary as it was, it helped us evolve as a band, because I could let the other part of me go, of trying to play all the time or trying to write all the time. [Now] I can have a conversation about where it can go beyond my own knowledge.
That’s really cool. I want to check in and make sure that we're not leaving anything out that you really wanted to mention.
If I'm speaking directly about the time period that I'm in right now and this creative space that I've been exploring, I feel like surrounding myself with musicians that are better than me has helped me to let go and expand in other ways that I didn't know was possible. I try to do something different on every record; I try not to make the same record twice. I don't know what will come after this one, but I couldn't imagine a better group of people to be around and feel supported by in this industry – one that can be very off-putting. I never set out to make waves in music. I just love making music, and I feel grateful that I get to play with such great people on tour these days.
That’s a beautiful perspective to have. I appreciate it.
I will say this for any solo musician trying to write something, having the Sequential Circuits DrumTraks, and having either the Korg Delta or ARP Omni-2 – just having a beat and being able to play chords – I feel like I've written so many songs in that way. Yes, I'll overdub with drums or something, but being able to have a pad and a drum machine rolling – where it's very cyclical – helps me learn how to turn chords on themselves and has been helpful to me in the writing process. Also, I have a [Universal Audio] Bock 251 mic that I have been using on my vocal. That’s what Dan Knowles used on my vocal for We've Been Going About This All Wrong. I usually use the classics, but this one had a different kind of clarity that was exciting to me.
