From the press release:

Now, onto the interview!

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Forgive me if I am very hesitant in talking, but I’ve got a new baby, and I need to think about what I’m saying, before I say it, because I’m so much in baby.  In the world of babies.  I need to consider what I’m saying before I say it, so I might be quite hesitant so forgive me.

How old is your baby?

She’s nine months old.  Yes, she’s amazing, peaceful.  Her first name is Io, which is ” I O “, which is the name of a moon off of Jupiter, but she’s known to us as Laily, or Lailoni, which means heavenly flower.  So her name is Io Lailoni.

 I was reading the press release for the new record and was wondering when your love of boats began.

I lived on a boat and sailed around the world with my family when I was a child.  That was when I was 11 years old actually.  Eleven, 12, 11 years old.  We lived on a 33 foot sailboat and sailed around the world.  And  it’s not that I love boats, it’s that I never really came back from the sea.  I’ve always been adrift.  I feel that there’s a conflict being adrift on terra firma, on the land.  So, actually, I’m returning to the sea.  I think the conflict will be lesser.

How much do you think the city of London itself inspired your latest record?

I’ve been there a long, long time.  We were on the canal boats for the last couple of years, really on the outskirts of London.  You wouldn’t necessarily even think that it’s London.  It’s the derelict, forgotten, really.  The canals go through parts that no one really even wants, or when the metropolis was redeveloped around that.  There’s so much beauty in the detail. For those couple of years. I traveled into London rather infrequently.  Actually, most of it was spent on the canal and on bikes. And under a wide sky.  You don’t really take that in London actually, you don’t often see it.

So it’s more that it’s — yes, it’s space in the forgotten places actually, in the abandoned places.  Our personal landscape.  When I say “our,  I’m talking about me and Chris, as in Ruby Throat.  Our personal landscape was very much…we had some devastating events happen.  We lost someone very close to us, and Laila was born.  So really, the album was informed by that, more than London as a place.  To me seemed very temporal, seemed non-existent even though we were very close to it.  We were very much in between, in the gaps, in space between words.  Blah, blah.  Yes.

I wanted to ask you about distortion, especially on the seventh song, “Black Rock.”  How do you decide when you’re going to use that?

That’s an old improvisation.  Well it’s an improvisation that became polarized.  Let’s put it that way.  We actually recorded that looking out to sea, off the canals, it’s like we left the canals and we ensconced the south coast. I’m looking at storms go through right now.

So, in deciding whether that has distortion–I’m trying to think.  That comes from an improvisation from playing live.

And how I decided that the distortions on Black Rock?  I don’t know if I do.   Yes, it comes from an improvisation.  Play, like we’ve been able to.  We haven’t done it for a while but that song was developed after a live situation.   Chris and I, we both use a big pedal so we could really build up a wall of noise between the two of us.  That’s where it comes from, and I like, I do love knocking pigeons into a wall of noise and climbing it.  I do love a wall of noise, I have to admit.    So that’s where and how it was decided.

Do you mind talking about the song “Arctic Fox?”

No, no, actually I don’t mind.   It’s a very, it’s a very literal song, actually written to a very actual person.  It’s as I told you before, we lost somebody, and that song was written to the person left behind.  I think that’s all I really can say about that, I think.

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So, according to your biography, you were five when you started writing songs. Is that right?

Yes, pretty close.  My first songs were all in Russian; my first language is Russian. I’m pretty bilingual by now. When I was small, I would write poems and songs in Russian. I would make stuff up, and for a while that was what I was known for. I did a few little concerts when I was seven, eight because I had this skill or gift where I could play the piano, and of course I couldn’t play it very well, but then I would improvise an entire song on top of that, with rhymes and everything, which were apparently interesting, and they didn’t sound like kid songs at all. So I think that was the first thing.

Do you still write in Russian?

Yes, I haven’t done as much of it in recent years since I focused on my career here and becoming the best songwriter I could be in English since it is an international language. But I’m actuallly working on my Russian album right now, and I also speak Italian.

Do you plan to tour Russia after that?

I was just there. My mom is still there, so I go as often as I can. I was just there discussing some possibilities to launch the project there.  I’ve gotten off to a decent start here, but now everything is so connected, it’s so international.

How do you go about writing a song when you have so many influences as you do?

I don’t think of my influences. People use the word ‘influences’ quite a lot. It’s probably more accurate for many artists and definitely for me to think of the word ‘inspirations.’ When I’ve studied something or I’ve learned something or I’ve gotten in touch with a specific style, once [I've] internalized it, it will work like an extra piece of software. I don’t set out to write a soul song on a classical-sounding song. Those influences are already working in the background by themselves.

Switching subjects, I’m interested in the character Beatrix [from the title Beatrix Runs]. How would you define her?

As you probably know, there’s a map in the packaging that is on one side a picture of me. On the other side, there’s an actual picture story-map that was hand-illustrated by my graphic designer and artist Missy Washington. It’s the map of the story as I envisioned it and I’d been writing it, and I’m almost done with it. What we did is we digitized that map, and when the new website launches next week, it’ll take a moment to dial in, but basically it’s going to be an interactive map. We’re going to start posting pictures and content. The two videos I’ve done so far, ‘Dreamer’ and ‘Meant’ are part of the story. The Beatrix character is part of the story. She undergoes a series of adventures and some time-traveling. On the map, you can actually see where she fits in with that.

How much input did you have for the video in ‘Meant?’

Pretty much all of his. The director, he and his team actually shot the entire iTunes sessions video, so we got all the songs on video. Then we got to be friends and he wanted to work with me on the ‘Meant’ video.  He already had an idea in mind, which was very close to the idea I had in mind for the video. I felt that it would make sense since it’s a Beatrix story and there’s a storyline, it would make sense to have a video that follows the Beatrix storyline or adds something to it or has an element of it. We were pretty much working on all of this together. It was very much a labor of love because we wrote it and my designer helped with the costuming and set design, so basically everybody pitched in to make it happen. I was happy because it really felt like a very communal experience.

I did read about the iTunes sessions, which are being released today. What was it like recording them in Capitol Studios?

It was fantastic. First of all, it was thanks to iTunes who invited me to do this, and I was just off tour, and I was fighting off a cold, and I was absolutely, utterly terrified. I had always wanted to work in that room, which is Capitol Studios Room A.  I’d be walking down the corridors and seeing all these pictures, and these are the microphones that Frank Sinatra and everybody else used. I sat in for part of the recording session with my producer Greg Wells, who produced Beatrix Runs with me.

I was very intimidated, also because I was recording live with a string quartet, and there was also a percussionist and a guitar player, and I was playing and singing live with them. And the whole point of the iTunes live session is there is no overdubbing or editing at any point. There’s no tuning or any of that. Plus we couldn’t even do it because we were in the same room. The string section was right next to me. I had never recorded with a string section before. The thing is, as I watch the videos, you’ll see I’m completely oblivious to the camera. When I watched the video, I said, ‘I’m so serious!’ You’re so used to seeing music videos where the singer is kind of playing to the camera. But we were short on time. We had to do eight songs–six are being released, and the other two are being saved for later–we only had about two takes per song.  When I watched it, I said, ‘I wish I had looked at the camera or smiled,’ but that wasn’t an option because I had to be so completely in the zone.

And you covered that George Michael song ‘Hand to Mouth’ as well?

If you listen to the original, it’s very very different, but I always wanted to do my own version. The original is a lot more jazzy and kind of mid-tempo. I wouldn’t say there’s a playful mood to it, but the arrangment of it kind of lightens the gravity of the work. Which is often a good thing. I do have quite a lot in my own writing where the lyrics are dark and the music is upbeat. But in this particular case, I just really wanted to take it to that place of gravity. And the music director and bass player of the session wrote some amazing string work, so that was also lucky.

http://elizaveta.typepad.com/

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What was it like reuniting the Avengers and then trying this more singer-songwriter style?

I’ve been doing my solo career all these years alongside that. It’s not unusual for me. I think there was one Avengers tour where we did four or five shows on the west coast, and then I did one Penelope show, and went out to do more Avengers shows. That was hard. That was a little weird, just because all the songs are completely separate. It’s like [having] one drawer full of a hundred songs and another drawer full of a hundred songs, and closing that one and opening this one, trying to remember all the lyrics. It was pretty funny.

It’s kind of crazy that, all the songs I’ve written in my life, are all there somewhere.  In the case of this summer, I’m pretty much ready for anything. Although when I get back from this [solo European] tour, it’ll be seven days on the West Cost with the Avengers. The Avengers’ material is ingrained in my head. Since we don’t write new songs, all I have to do is know that I will remember it. With the solo stuff, it’s newer and a little bit harder to remember.

When you write songs for your solo work, do you sit down and write out all of the musical notation? How thorough are you in documenting the songs?

Usually, for my material, I start with lyrics, or sometimes I’ll start with a melody and put lyrics to it. Generally, interestingly, using my autoharp (’cause I don’t play guitar), I’ll write out the chords ’cause I have to write those down. But I don’t write melody because once I fix words to melody, they don’t come unstuck.  They become one thing. I don’t usually write the melodies down. I will do a cassette recording or digital recording just in case the melody escape my brain. For the album, there’s a string quartet on some of the songs. I hired somebody to write out the string parts.  Bass players and keyboard players like to have a little freedom. [For this tour], I’m flying out on Wednesday, and then we’ll practice Wednesday night and Thursday during the day, and Thursday night is when we’ll play. It’s going to be really interesting, and one has to be open-minded about what people are going to do.  With The Avengers–Greg and I and the reformed band–It’s pretty close to the record.  Nobody ever came up to me and said, ‘oh this part goes like that.’

Switching subjects, you’ve been around long enough that you’ve witnessed a lot of changes as to the place that women hold in the music industry. I was wondering what sort of changes you’ve noticed and what the current situation it.

When I started in 77 with the Avengers, there were very few rock bands that had women in then. There were plenty of female pop singers, but as far as women being instrumentalists and women having bands and women writing their own material, there wasn’t a lot to look to. And I think that punk kind of blasted the doors open on that idea. Not only women, but anybody. Even if you had never picked up an instrument before, you were welcome to give it a try. You didn’t have to be able to play thousands of notes every minute on the guitar. Prowess was not something that people were necessarily looking for at that time. Punk opened doors for women to join bands and become instrumentalists and vocalists. Years later, when I was writing my own material and doing quieter stuff, there was a moment where there were lots of women singer-songwriters happening as well. And whenever that kind of thing happens — you have your Tori Amos and your Michelle Shocked and your Alanis Morissette, or people who suddenly become popular in any genre, the labels immediately start looking for a million more Tori Amoses or whatever. So it kind made the possibility of a lot of people being heard that might not have been heard.  That were women.  When people ask me to list my top twenty artists, a higher percentage of them are going to be women than your average music listener. I’ve always been a fan of Patti Smith, I’ve been a fan of the female point of view in popular culture.  Somewhere in there, I don’t know if it came before the giant singer-songwriter boom, there was Riot Grrl, which was also important.

In the long run, women being accepted as musicians kind of go up and down. They kind of rise and then wane. I’m always happy when it’s on an upswing because, as I said, I’m a fan of the female perspective.  It probably affects people that are thinking about being in a band. You see people you can relate to up there doing it, and you think ‘well, maybe I should try that.’ Since we reformed the Avengers and started touring, there’s been a lot of women who came up to me and said ‘ you gave me a lot of confidence and you got me thinking maybe this is something I can pursue.’  That’s been really gratifying to hear over the years that I’ve inspired a lot of female musicians.

As far as where women are now in the music industry, it seems kind of fuzzy. The music industry is in turmoil right now. There are so many ways to access music aside from the normal channels that were around in the 70′s, 80′s, 90′s.  People can listen to something that somebody wrote and recorded three days ago.  You can listen to it around the world because it’s been posted on the internet.  The music industry as I think of it as a business model has always been a little suspect. Musicians work with it. A million years ago, they said ‘home recording is killing the music industry!’ And then ten or so years ago they said, ‘file sharing is killing the music industry!’ I kind of thought, ‘well, maybe the music industry needs to be killed and reinvented. But it goes on. And whether or not women are respected or encouraged to be a part of it really depends on the moment in time and who’s selling. That’s the bottom line for the music industry.  It might be wrong to look at the music industry for a sign of how women are doing in the music industry, because it’ll always be based on sales. Right now, I think, because it’s so easy to get your music out there, there’s much more chance of independent-thinking people just going ahead and creating music and putting it online.

I read that you went back to college.

That’s been a long trip, too. I kind of thought, ‘oh, wow, this is a great idea. I’ll get my degree.’ So I went back to college and I had to get all my general ed requirements. When I was in college before, I just took art classes and no science and no writing and no social studies, no history. So I had to do all that. That was a real challenge. Nowadays, I got As in everything because I’m much more focused. But just putting myself through commuting to the city college in San Francisco and transferring to San Francisco State, where I am now, to study biology and all this stuff.  After I finished up all the general ed, I transferred to San Francisco State, where my major is studio art with an emphasis on painting and printmaking, which is really wonderful because it’s gotten me back into visual arts, which is something I did when I was first in school. It’s very exciting to do something like that. For example, the cover of On Market Street is a portrait I did in oils.

I took this semester off because I knew I would have these records coming out and the European tour and all these interviews to do, so this semester I’m actually not in school. I think I’ll finish up in the fall and graduate in the fall.

Are you planning any art shows or installations with your paintings?

I have a little art show up right now, actually. It’s in a little gallery space in San Francisco Public Library of prints I did last semester in a printmaking course. I did a series of portraits in silkscreen and collage of people that I worked with. That was pretty fun and interesting. [I used] all sorts of pictures and ephemera that came from my work life, including old pages of books and stuff. I think people can see it on my Facebook page. I haven’t posted it on my website yet. Then I have a couple of pieces in a show in Denver related to Bruce Connor and his photographing of the punk scene. It’s in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. There are other galleries doing work in conjunction with that, and another gallery has five of my pieces up that are prints and sort of collage pieces and drawings.  And I think four of those are actually from 1978; they wanted to get art that was made back in the day. So that’s up.  After the Avengers West Coast tour, I’m going to go out to Denver to do a public conversation with the curators at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.

Penelope Houston Homepage

 

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Are you at home in Portland?

For the moment. We’re gonna go record for the public station in a little bit, but it’s good. It’s sunny. It’s nice.

What are you recording for public radio?

There’s a show on Satuday and Sunday nights called In House, and they have bands come in and record and play there.

Is it all the same people who were on the record with you? The consortium?

It’s the touring band right now. We all live here in town. The record was made with a lot of different people in a lot of different cities, so this is the current lineup.

I was wondering about that. Have you been recording over the years or did you spend your time just writing the songs and then find musicians and record once you had settled on how everything was going to be?

I recorded over the years, and I kind of recorded as I went in different places — Chicago, with friends who live there, and Montreal, with friends who live there, and Portland with friends who live here. It was a nice opportunity for me to to get to play with people who are really amazing, so it was good. That’s how I ended up making the record. It wasn’t just “I got my eleven songs” and now I’m gonna do this. It was more like “this one’s done. Let’s take care of this.”

Were there songs that didn’t make the final cut?

Not really. There were some that were getting close that I just didn’t finish. “And And And”  was the last song to be finished. I had the record done — It wasn’t mastered done, but I felt like it needed one more song, and that one was lingering. I finished it and I’m happy I did. It rounded out the record a lot.

It sounds remarkably cohesive for something that was recorded the way it was.

Thank you. That was something that was important to me, so I thought about that as I made it over the years, making sure those things were taken care of and paid attention to.

I understand from your website, that you’re pretty much doing everything yourself aside from publicity and the actual pressing. How did you come to that decision?

It’s half and half. I’ve been doing it a little bit as an experiment because the way the business has shifted it allows artists to do their own releases. It makes a lot of sense for someone like me. That said, I didn’t really have much interest from labels or booking agents.  So it was like, well, I do want to finish this record, I do want to tour. I know a lot about this business. I do want to tour. I’ve always been self-managed. I’ve always taken care of a lot of it, so I’ll just take more of it on.  It’s a lot of work. I’m not sure how sustainable it is if there’s not a shift in one direction. I would love to be balls-to-the-wall  one hundred percent doing this right now.

I was talking to someone yesterday, and I made a little more of an effort to be transparent with my business with friends, finances, ways that we’re all trying to solve problems as the music business changes. It’s a little bit weird to say in interviews, ‘No label made sense to me and nobody wants to book me.’ So it’s like ‘Hi, I’m a loser, thank you for taking the time to talk to me.’  I think the thing that’s interesting for me is that yeah, it’d be great if I had those resources, but if I’m having trouble like that, what does it mean for other artists? It’s an interesting time. I’m putting a whimsical eye on it.

I was interviewing someone yesterday and asking her about her tour, and she said she couldn’t afford to take a band out on the road with her. Hearing things like that breaks my heart, that artists have to change their aesthetic desires because of the way the economy works for musicians.

We had a really privileged time in the last twenty years. I was always amazed that someone wanted to give me money to put out a record. There are a lot of people I know that are touring solo, if not all the time, then part of the time, because they can’t afford to take out a band. I love playing solo, I love doing both, but it is an economic necessity.  One of the things I wonder is if there will come a point when people who go to shows will want to see bands play and not solo artists. There certainly are a ton of bands on the road, so there’s people who are making it work or not, so it’s a challenge for me, for sure. I think it’s important sometimes to be, like, well if I had a shop and was selling flowers and hand-sewn tablecloths, there would probably be some hard weeks when people didn’t come into the store. So just putting it in perspective like that is important, I think.

How did you do your fund raising for the record?

I worked.

Oh, the old-fashioned way.

No, I don’t mean that to be an asshole. I would work, and then I would go in the studio. And I would work and I would go in the studio. I was encouraged to do a Kickstarter, but I never did, because I was too busy, which I know sounds stupid. But I still might like to do one because there’s more I want to do around the record. I think that those sorts of solutions are working for friends of mine.  I’m not sure how long they’ll work, but it’s a super great resource to have. I just never felt okay with doing that, and now I’m seeing that that might be the only way to work the record properly.

I was wondering about that, like if there’d be videos, or how much else would happen about their record.

I wanted to see what level of interest there was at all. I’m at that point. We’ve sold some digitally through Cash Music, which is amazing. It’s just a rolling release.  Vinyl’s been out for a while, digital’s been out for a while, cd is coming out this week.  So we’ll see what happens. We want to do videos, and I’d like to do ads.

Switching subjects, I was reading about the panel you did at the Portland art museum. Can you tell me more about that?

I’ve been working with the Future Music Coalition and with ATC, which is Air Traffic Control San Francisco, which is the group that came out of the Beastie Boys concert for Tibet. I’ve been working with them in a volunteer capacity in different ways. Partially because when I was not putting out records, one of the things that I did was I curated art shows. I have a real strong interest in cities and in artists working in cities and the business of music and the business of arts. There’s such an interesting intersection right now between tech development and musicians and money. It’s a really difficult thing to talk about. I thought the Emily White and David Lowery hoo-ha of last week was great because it really expanded the vocabulary to talk about it, and that’s really what I’m trying to do. So I worked with PICA, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, and they did a whole symposium with choreographers, dancers, visual artists, and filmmakers from New York. The theme without was sharing economies and new economies. I just basically got together four musicians who are working musicians and run their own businesses basically, and they were coming from four different ways of raising money and thinking about music. It was just a chance for us all to come together and talk a tiny bit about these questions of how we do business. We had Cool Nutz. He’s this hiphop guy who’s been working in Portland for 2O years on his own music and doing a festival and doing management and tour management. He’s just been involved in every aspect of the business. He has his own record label. Holcombe Waller, who’s been working on a theatrical music piece, though at heart he’s a singer-songwriter. Laura Gibson, who works about half the time in Europe and half the time in the US.  John Savage, who’s this amazing flute player here in town and makes avant garde music.

Do you do any visual art yourself?

I do photography, and I’ve had a couple little shows. I love design and I am always involbed in the design of anything that comes out, like records. But I’m not like, a painter or a graphic designer.

Who are some of your favorite visual artists?

So many! There is a photographer named Walter Niedermeyer who I love. He’s from the Italian part of Switzerland. There’s this South African artist named Gego who’s no longer alive. She’s a sculptor and did some print work.

What was your songwriting process like for this record?

I realize when you take this long to put out a record, everyone thinks, oh, you’ve scrapped it four or five times and re-recorded it. I really didn’t. It’s just like a regular recording schedule spread out over a long period of time. But it’s just sitting down, playing guitar, and starting to put something together. Because I was driving a lot from Austin to Marfa in west Texas a lot, which is seven hours, I did a lot of writing in the car. There’s a lot of different iterations, like me singing with a cd in the background. Pretty caveman-like, actually.

What was your Marfa experience like?

It was great. I loved it. I love that time there. We worked with a great institution, Ballroom Marfa, and I worked with two other curators, and we had a ball. It was a lot of work. It was nice to live in that town, but it was also nice to have a really insane project. We comissioned six new sound installations and then we did a group show — we had about six art pieces that were already made.

Do you ever do any sound installations yourself?

Yeah.  I haven’t for a while because I’ve been working on the record and focusing more on music. I did one at a gallery in New York. A lot of times someone will come to you and say ‘we want to do this theme.’ And this theme was a garage, so I put together — it wasn’t only sound, it was people responding to the idea of a garage — so we asked people to do recordings in garages all over New York, mostly Brooklyn, so we built a player mechanism for that. We did a mobile audio truck. A lot of them were sound editing. We put together this audio magazine, which was sort of a combination of radio producing and just basic sound design. I really loved that. It was called the Relay Project.

Can you tell me about some of your favorite writers or your favorite books?

Yeah, that’s a great question.  Cynthia Shearer wrote a book called the Celestial Jukebox. I love Barry Hannah, who’s a writer from Mississippi who passed away a couple years ago. There’s a woman called Thalia Field, and she just put out a new book which I love. I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction, a lot of tech books, a lot of sound and listening books. I’m kind of getting back into a phase about that.

Rebecca Gates Website

Despite releasing four albums, playing festivals aroudn the world with bands like Tinariwen, and recording with the likes of Joan Wasser (Joan As Police Woman), NYC-based Morley has stayed tragically under the radar. She possess a voice wise beyond her years and an inspiring global vision, not just through her music, but through her activism and willingness to reach out to people. Here, we discuss that, and her new album, Undivided.