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Claudio Sanchez

Photo by Miikka Skaffari/Getty Images

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Coheed And Cambria's Claudio Sanchez Talks Comics, Kurt Vonnegut & What's Next For 'The Amory Wars'

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The hard-rocking frontman goes deep on Coheed's multi-dimensional storytelling, attempting to play D&D, his first-ever live music experiences and more
Katherine Turman
GRAMMYs
Sep 11, 2019 - 11:32 am

Coheed and Cambria don't simply make albums, they create musical and lyrical universes. Specifically surrounding the story of The Amory Wars—sci-fi-ish storylines that mesh with comics, books, videos and visuals to create a linear through-line among nearly all the band's albums. If that sounds like a Pink Floyd or RUSH fan's dream, maybe; but it’s also captivating for the everyperson who likes their rock heady and multi-dimensional. As evidenced on nine albums since 2002's The Second Stage Turbine Blade debut, Coheed and Cambria's unique conceptual approach can be grandiose but never pompous; poppy but never lightweight, creative but never unwieldy.

Comprised of Claudio Sanchez (vocals/guitar), Travis Stever (guitar), Josh Eppard (drums) and Zach Cooper (bass), the band began in Nyack, New York in 1995. Driven by Sanchez's fully realized tales, CandC's latest album, 2018's cinematic Vaxis—Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures, debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Hard Rock Albums chart and Top 15 on the Billboard 200 chart. The record kicks off with a spare piano and a spooky spoken-word "Prologue" that sets up the chant-along rocker "The Dark Sentencer," delving into gems like the pop-tastic "Old Flames" before concluding its 78-minute journey with the gentle guitar/vocals/strings "Lucky Stars."

The Recording Academy caught up with down-to-earth frontman via phone from the Brooklyn apartment he shares with his wife (and frequent collaborator) Chondra Echert and son Atlas Hendrix. The conversation ranged from his 100-year-old grandfather (a.k.a. Beep Beep) to Kraftwerk to Dio to co-sleeping. And, drum roll, please—Sanchez also revealed a brand-new CandC endeavor that will thrill fans.

Since all your songs and albums have such storylines, as a kid in school, what kind of writing were you doing; was English your best subject?

No, not really. It wasn't until I picked up a guitar that I actually started to write. My imagination was always very alive. Certainly when music was acting as the soundtrack to [words], whether it was like a mundane car ride with my mother or father, whatever was playing on the radio would conjure up visuals in my mind, whether superheroes or science fiction characters, I would always pictures, scenes, as long as the song was really strong, you know?

At that age, what were you reading?

I think it was mostly comic books. I wasn't the most active participant in school, putting it nicely. I did well, though; I did enough to, to pacify my parents. I wasn't a bad kid or anything. But for the most part I liked the story telling told in other mediums, whether it was movies, video games, or the ones that I would construct with action figures. Comics were a big one. I would frequent shops on the Wednesdays when new things would come out, Batman or whatever. When I got into high school, Kurt Vonnegut was a big one. I actually remember when I bought my first edition, at the used book store in Nyack. Slaughterhouse Five. I remember looking at the cover and seeing that it had two titles and being totally intrigued by that. I forget… the First Crusade or something? It was like Slaughterhouse Five or Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah. [The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death.] So from there to Breakfast Of Champions [(or Goodbye Blue Mondays)].

The two-title thing explains a lot about you now in Coheed! No one-word titles!

[Laughs.] No way!

You mentioned that a job you had as a teen really spurred the music and lyrics of what became Coheed and Cambria.

Yes, my pet store job, just 'cause the guys there allowed me to do what I needed to do to allow the band to grow. You know, they gave me the weekends off when I needed them. Working in that store inspired a lot of like little details within the Amory Wars, the Coheed story. Like the name of the solar system that the actual story takes place on is called the Keywork after the guys that own the store. I named the solar system after them. I chose the color of the interlocking theme of Keywork to be blue because I worked on fish tanks, and they'd have these blue backdrops. The main villain I named after one of the managers because he actually said, "Hey, if you ever do make this story, I want to be your villain." The fact that he sort of believed in me, that I would actually make this thing … So I named the character after him.

I know it was in Paris where you first created the Coheed and Cambria characters and more. Was it the city itself that that was influential or was it just being out of your normal environment?

I think it was a little bit of both. I went to Paris for about a month to visit a girlfriend at the time. I had never been that far away from home. Jersey was probably the furthest distance I'd traveled, literally, and here I was at 18, ready to hit Europe, with really no idea what to expect. Once I got there, the architecture had a lot to do with maybe feeling like I was in an alien environment. Originally the story with the title The Bag On Line Adventures Adventures of Coheed and Cambria after the bag shop I was living across the street from. I thought that that was appropriate because I was traveling and, you know, sort of the wild things that would come out of your bag.

Even though the bags had nothing to do with the story, there was just something about the shop that made sense to me. I loosely based the characters of Coheed and Cambria after myself and my significant other at that moment. But as I started to really write songs and flesh out the ideas of the story, Coheed and Cambria really started to take on the likenesses of my mother and father. And it really became like a science fiction story about my family; that's where all the little details from life started to spill into it. Like the pet store stuff. The Amory Wars; Amory is actually the road I lived on. And 78 planets of Heaven's Fence was actually taken from the year I was born, 1978. There's a lot of symbolism in the real story that sort of resides behind the science fiction.

Claudio Sanchez's Songwriting Changed

As so much of your art is interconnected; is it possible for people to just listen to the music and not even be aware of the books and comics, and vice versa?

I love that it can be consumed in any way; the consumer can choose how to ingest it. When it comes to the music side of things, I try not to force the concept. The themes are there. But I also want it to feel universal because it is, it's coming from someplace very, very deep, very real. I want it to feel in a way separate, but if you were to conjoin it with the comics, then there's a whole other experience. And vice-versa. It does happen at comic conventions where someone will come to the booth and say something like, "I really enjoy this story." And then wonder what the T-shirts are. Then they’re like, "Oh, wait a second, this is a band?" Sometimes that'll happen. You know, clearly the band is definitely the fuel for everything, but it does have its own legs in the other sort of dimension of the whole thing. I'm really all for however you want to perceive it. It's totally fine.

So releasing a single from the middle of an album is OK by you?

I don't think there's anything wrong with listening to the one song outside of the context of the whole. I've had a magic of watching MTV as a kid; the television that you would like turn the dial and instead of the remote! I remember seeing Madonna's "Material Girl." Michael Jackson's "Beat It." I didn't need to know that there was anything else. That was enough for me and I wanted to hear it over and over again! I get that sort of that method of consuming music.

Of course, Pink Floyd's The Wall and Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime are conceptual landmarks. What did you dig?

My first year of high school, that's when I started to go to concerts. My first two concerts were really, I think, what cemented me into the idea of this much bigger story in terms of music. The first one was Sabbath at the Beacon Theater with Dio fronting. This is my first concert. I didn't even know that the live sort of thing… I mean, I think I even know that was a thing! I went and I was like, "Wow, this is amazing the way the lights are interacting with the band." Then my second one was Pink Floyd on the Division Bell tour. That's when I started to fall down the rabbit hole of progressive rock and conceptual albums and things like that. ‘Cause after that it was The Wall, Dark Side [of the Moon], Animals. Again, just watching the visuals and music interact with each live, but even the myth of playing Wizard Of Oz against Dark Side, you know. Of course I tried it!

I read a while ago where Mark Wahlberg and his production company had interest in Amory Wars as a live-action film. What happened with that? Are there any other projects related to that universe?

Yeah, the Mark Wahlberg agreement expired, so nothing really happened with it. But at the moment we are working with an animation company on turning the Amory Wars into either a full-length animation or sort of a serial animation. We're in the process of that, as well as looking to adapt the stories into board games.

Wow! That's exciting.

You know, I notice our fanbase will sometimes come to the shows early, and I wanted like to do something that will get them involved with each other in these moments. I thought board games was an interesting thing, or even card games, these legacy card games a la Magic [The Gathering], you know? At the moment that's what we're in the middle of.

Did you play Dungeons and Dragons?

I tried. I did. The thing is, I played it a couple of times before I moved, and really enjoyed it, but then I could never find people to play with again. Like I'm pretty socially awkward. I have a hard time meeting people. I really do. I'm really horrible at that.

Aww. Well, any Coheed and Cambria game endeavor has so many ways it could go…

I'd want to do something really cool like either being part of the events of the story or maybe multiple games that are the events of the story. But I'm very excited. I think it's a really cool time to be a Coheed fan ‘cause all of these sort of things are percolating. I know that the fan base really desired something on another platform. I'm really excited for the animation. I think it could be really cool. So we're just sort of working our way through all the details and trying to put together the team that makes the most sense to really bring it to life.

Do you think it could be out as early 2020?

Oh, that might be a little too early. We haven't announced the actual partner, so we're just still trying to get that piece in place before we actually announce.

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Nicole Atkins

Photo by Barbara FG

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Nicole Atkins Explores Muscle Shoals & Jersey Shore Nostalgia On 'Italian Ice'

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"I made this record as kind of a cure for myself," the Garden State native tells the Recording Academy of her fifth studio release, out May 29
Hilary Hughes
GRAMMYs
May 27, 2020 - 9:13 am

Nicole Atkins calls them "little fate drops"—signs, cues, nudges from the universe that push her in the right direction. "I've always kept my eyes and ears open for them," she says. "I pay attention to dots connecting."

A cluster of them popped up in Nashville in June 2018. The singer-songwriter was at home after spending the last year touring behind her 2017 album Goodnight Rhonda Lee, a soulful collection of ballads and anthems tailored for repeat play on dive bar jukeboxes. Binky Griptite, a renowned guitarist known for his work with the Dap-Kings, was in town, and the longtime friends had plans to write songs for his upcoming solo album together. While out one night, they ran into another pal, Roxanne Oldham. She mentioned that they'd be throwing a 75th birthday concert in Muscle Shoals for her father, Spooner Oldham, the legendary session keys player whose work with Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and countless others made the Alabama town an American musical landmark. She casually invited Atkins to head south for the shindig: did she want to come, maybe sing something?

Her immediate answer was a hearty "F**K yes," and the stars aligned a few days later. Atkins is signed to Single Lock Records, which was founded by Muscle Shoals native John Paul White; he was on the bill for Oldham’s birthday bash, as were David Hood and the Muscle Shoals Horns, Oldham’s longtime bandmates. Atkins impressed the session vets with her belt and her verve, and they shared their compliments with the Single Lock crew. 

"Single Lock was like, 'You should make a record at a studio down here with those guys! It could just be the perfect thing,'" she remembers. "I thought, yes, it would be a perfect thing, what an honor! But I also knew, no matter what I made, unless I did it really my way, [the critics] would pin it as another tribute record—and I didn't want to do that."

Italian Ice, Atkins' fifth studio album out May 29, is forged by these "fate drops," which made it her most intuitive musical effort to date. Born and raised on the Jersey Shore, Atkins shared the stomping grounds of the Strokes, Regina Spektor and more as she came up playing bars and clubs in the East Village and Brooklyn in the early Aughts. She left the East Coast in 2016 when she and her husband (and former tour manager, Ryan McHugh) moved to Nashville, and Goodnight Rhonda Lee embraced the twang of her new town and exorcised the growing pains of her married, freshly sober life in a new city. By the end of her Rhonda Lee tour, Atkins' personal life had settled, but tensions mounting in Trump's America kicked her dormant anxiety into high gear. ("We're living in the garbage of Eden" is a sentiment she often felt on the road, and it’s the first chorus we hear on Italian Ice, via "AM Gold.") She countered it by turning towards the familiar: As a coping mechanism, she imbued her songwriting with the low-tide melancholy and nostalgia of her Garden State childhood.

"I made this record as kind of a cure for myself, you know?" she says. "I want to feel better. What makes me feel better? Asbury Park boardwalk. Oldies radio. Carnival rides. Spooky shit. That quintessential, Asbury Park summertime feeling. When people listen to this, if they’d never been there, I want them to feel like they were there. I wanted them to smell the pork roll. If they had been there, I wanted to remind them of that, so it’s not nostalgic but more romantic in a way."

She assembled a verifiable supergroup to back the boardwalk poetry she wrote as the world spun on a far more anxious axis: Griptite, Hood and Oldham, as well as drummer McKenzie Smith and Jim Sclavunos and David "Moose" Sherman of the Bad Seeds, make up Italian Ice's all-star band. Britt Daniel (Spoon), Hamilton Leithauser (the Walkmen), Seth Avett (the Avett Brothers) and Erin Rae co-write or sing on the album as well. ("It’s fun to be your own A&R person when you're 40 and you've met a lot of cool people," she says, chuckling about the musical murderer's row she assembled.) Together, they met Muscle Shoals standards while crafting an album that sounds definitively Jersey with its reverb of a boombox hoisted by a stranger shuffling by on the beach, echoes of surf-rock guitar and '70s funk blasting out the window of a car on the corner. For Atkins, it makes perfect sense that she’d head to the place where the albums that inspired Jersey's most revered musicians were made, an organic development that speaks to the ease each player brought to the record.

"On the Jersey Shore, all the musicians—Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes—they were doing the Muscle Shoals sound, but in their way," she says. "Since they started it, there’s 30 years in between then and now. No one ever mentions that that's a genre of music. And it is. And I like to f**k up genres."

Each Italian Ice track is a worthy entry into this canon, from the slow strut of "AM Gold" to the doo-wop charm of "Forever," or the hazy slow dance of "Captain" and deafening howls of "Road To Nowhere." Her patron saints are the ones named after East Village watering holes ("St. Dymphnas") and battered statues on the Asbury Park boardwalk that somehow survived the carnage of Hurricane Sandy. The latter directly inspired "In The Splinters," which she co-wrote with Leithauser: she sings of the world ending over a looping carousel turn of a melody, and channels the late-night sing-alongs around the piano of "I Don’t Want to Go Home" that her parents would warble at their parties.

"I wanted my own version of that," she says. "I wanted a good swash-buckling, drinking chorus song about getting knocked down, and getting knocked down, but you're still standing, and you look different, and you're chipped up, but you’re still f**kin' standing. I just thought about how people need this right now. I just want to make people feel better, and maybe they’ll know the lyrics by the time they get to tour it."

That resilience, in a way, is the lifeblood of Italian Ice. Yes, we may be living in the garbage of Eden, but Atkins will follow her fate drops until she wades through this trash timeline and comes out stronger on the other side. The timing of Italian Ice’s debut is weirdly fitting, given that plans to tour behind the album in the season that inspired it went up in smoke thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. Still, Italian Ice is the culmination of so many things, and that’s enough for Atkins: it reminded her of who she is, where she comes from and where she’s capable of going.

"I always thought that I have to be struggling to make art," she says. "Now, without having that inner struggle that I couldn't control—I still have problems all the time, but I know that it’s a feeling and I can combat that by doing the things that will help you get out of it. If you want to sit in it, do it for awhile, but don’t stay there too long. I really can’t afford to let myself sit in darkness for too long, because I've seen what happens when I do. I had a lot of fun writing this record… I've been doing this a long time, I know that I’m not the best at it, and I don’t want to be the best at it, but I actively love it. I love writing and producing, and it just feels like instead of something I do, it feels like something I am. I don’t feel cheesy saying that; it doesn’t feel conceited. I've finally accepted that this is my shit, so let’s have fun doing this."

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Claudia Saenz, Chulita Vinyl Club founder

Claudia Saenz, Chulita Vinyl Club founder

Photo: Mariana Gonzalez

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Record Store Recs: Chulita Vinyl Club On The Best Music Stores In L.A., Oakland, Austin & Beyond

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In the latest edition of our crate-digging interview series, two reinas from the all-vinyl Latinx DJ collective reveal their favorite vinyl haunts across California and Texas
Ana Monroy Yglesias
GRAMMYs
May 18, 2020 - 11:46 am

With the unprecedented global disruption of 2020, it's important to support the music community however we can. With our series Record Store Recs, the Recording Academy checks in with vinyl-loving artists to learn more about their favorite record stores and the gems they've found there.

Texas-born, San Jose, Calif.-based Claudia Saenz originally founded Chulita Vinyl Club to share her love of records—especially Tejano, ranchero, Motown and soul—in a fun, tangible way. The collective, a crew of female-identifying Latinx vinyl-spinning DJs, has grown to seven chapters across California and Texas, including the (Northern California) Bay Area Chapter, which Saenz, a.k.a. Chulita Tear Drop lives.

The fabulous record-spinning DJs of Chulita Vinyl Club have brought their joyful, soulful music to parties around the country, including Coachella 2018! Twice a month, they release all-vinyl mixes from the squad on their SoundCloud, the most recent (listen below) coming from la jefa Saenz herself.

We caught up with Saenz and one of her fellow Bay Area cohorts, Los Angeles-born, Oakland-based Mar Velez, a.k.a. DJ Marvelouz, for the latest edition of our Record Store Recs interview series. Read on to find out where they get all their great vinyl gems from, and learn about some of the indie labels, artists and new records they have their eyes on.

Read: Record Store Recs: Jean Pierre Takes Us To Chicago, Brooklyn, Frankfurt, Amsterdam & London

Please pick three to five record stores you love. (The links below have online shopping options.)

Saenz:

Breakaway Records in Austin, Texas

Janie's Record Shop in San Antonio, Texas

Needle to the Groove in San Jose, Calif.

Velez:

Amoeba Music in Hollywood, Calif. 

Record Jungle in East Los Angeles

VAMP in Oakland, Calif. 

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Mar Velez & her vinyl collection | Photo: courtesy of artist

What do you love about these shops? What kind of goodies have you've found there?

Saenz: I started devotedly collecting records while living in Austin, in about 2014. I was living on my own, working my first big "real" job, a post-grad trying to make ends meet. I had my own place for the first time ever, but I couldn't afford wi-fi and didn't want it either. Collecting records and surrounding myself with music became my new obsession. Breakaway Records, a cherished record shop in my neighborhood, became my second home.

They have records for sale on their website now to help their sales and keep the shop afloat during these times. They have a 45 grab bag that I would totally get if you were looking to start your collection or add to it. I would trust Gabe and Josh's hand-picked selection.

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If you're looking for a historic West Side San Antonio establishment for tejano, norteno or conjunto jams, Janie's Record Shop is the place to go. You walk in there and you're surrounded with tejano history in the form of records, tapes and CDs and, not to mention, say hi to the legendary owner Juanita Gonzales, aka Janie all while tejano jams are playing on the shop speakers. I have shopped there many times and felt giddy with joy with all the records they have in stock.

Needle to the Groove is one of my favorite records shops in the Bay Area. I got the Leonor Gonzalez Cantos De Mi Tierra Y De Mi Raza record there and it's been one of my favorite buys. The record shop has a wide selection of all carefully selected genres and the owners and clerks are super helpful with finding what you need. They've also got a great shop online with the same great collection.

GRAMMYs

Claudia Saenz selects a record | Photo: Arabela Espinoza

Velez: This might be an obvious favorite for a lot of music lovers, but I grew in South Central Los Angeles and every time I took the bus or got a ride from friends to get to Hollywood, a trip to Amoeba was an entire adventure for me. The hour and a half journey was worth it because what awaited me was rows and rows and rows of music to discover. Amoeba has just about any possible genre you could be looking for and of course your mainstream standards. 

One of my most treasured finds is the El Gusano record that I got at the Amoeba in Hollywood about ten years ago. The band is from San Antonio. I liked the name of the [1975] album, Fantasia del Barrio, and loved the story behind the album. The album was inspired by one of the member's deployments to Vietnam and him fantasizing about returning to Texas and his Chicano upbringing. At the time, I don't know where I could have found this album that opened me to a Chicano experience out in Texas. The album is a dreamy psychedelic treat.  

Record Jungle is a community treasure in the east part of Los Angeles. I love how quickly the records change in the store. I could dig there one weekend and literally the next weekend they have a whole new stock of albums. The owner is super dedicated to keeping records rotating in the store.

VAMP is a groovy little store in Oakland run by Fernando and Misty. The store specializes in vintage clothing and vinyl from soul to reggae to rap. Fernando and Misty have both been collecting records for a long time. They themselves are DJs and spin at some of the local bars and music venues in Oakland and the Bay Area. I particularly love how they carry a great independent record label out of the Bay Area called Discos Mas.

Discos Mas is pushing out vinyl from some of the greatest names in today's Latinx music scene, including cumbia sonidera giants Los Daddys and local [San Jose] artists like Philthy Dronez and his quebradita, "Vamos a la Playa." The music and artists that Discos Mas is featuring and releasing really capture the nostalgic sounds of timeless Latinx music genres like cumbia, salsa, rancheras and put a contemporary twist that is a stamp by today's generations. It's an incredible label and VAMP is the place where you can get the latest. 

For at least one of your favorite shops, share a recent record you bought there and what you love about the record/artist.

Saenz: At Janie's Record Shop, I got a 45 record of Los Aguilares on the Joey record label. The Aguilares are a legendary conjunto group from San Antonio. I also unabashedly got the record because one of the sides of the record was titled "Claudia." It is a really nice tune to dance to and I am so glad I picked it up.

Velez: I've picked up several Discos Mas records from VAMP recently [see photo below], including Los Daddys' "You Soy Cumbiambero," Philthy Dronez's "Baila Mi Vida" and Los Guapos Sensibles' "Cumbia del Amanacer."

Discos Mas

Discos Mas scores from VAMP | Photo: Mar Velez

What's an upcoming or recent release you have your eye on?

Saenz: Lido Pimienta's Miss Colombia was recently released and it was a bright sound that was even stimulating to hear during these quarantine times. Miss Colombia is a beautiful collection of songs of resisting and dealing with healing all through Lido Pimienta's angelic voice. I have of course already heard the album through streaming platforms, but I can't wait to get the record to add to my collection.

Velez: A release that I am looking forward to is one by a longstanding cumbia sonidera group out of Mexico City, Grupo Kual?, "Amor Regresa Ya." Musica sonidera originated out of cumbia Colombiana. Mexican sonideros made their own style of cumbia by slowing down the RPM when they played the vinyl records, many from Colombia. Over the years, the genre has expanded.

One of the most notable groups is Grupo Kual, that came from the lineage of one of the greatest architects of the sound, Alberto Pedraza. Nearly all of cumbia sonidera music is on CD. They're the kind that you buy in the flea markets or swap meets where there's like one hundred songs on a CD. However, thanks to labels like Discos Mas and a new label called Discos Rolas, whose releasing it, Grupo Kual is releasing their first-ever 7" album [via Discos Rolas]. 

What were the first CDs and first vinyl you remember purchasing when you were younger?

Saenz: Early on, and full disclosure, CDs were shared amongst my siblings, but I remember having Selena's "Ven Conmigo" and the [GRAMMY-winning] Selena Live! album as my first CDs.

Velez: My first-ever CD I purchased was Britney Spears' …Baby One More Time. My dad took me to Best Buy to get it when I was like in fifth grade. Surprisingly enough, I still have it. And I recently bought it on vinyl as well! Beautiful clear vinyl for this amazing pop album. 

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Hayley Williams

Photo by Lindsey Byrnes

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Hayley Williams On Going Solo, Alanis Morissette & Trusting Her Intuition

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To coincide with the release of her solo debut, 'Petals For Armor,' the Paramore performer spoke with the Recording Academy about learning to trust her body’s intuition, trying to make friends in adulthood and establishing boundaries on social media
Nina Corcoran
GRAMMYs
May 8, 2020 - 9:00 am

These days, nothing is going as expected, especially for Hayley Williams. The GRAMMY-winning Paramore frontperson is stuck at home in Nashville tending to a house full of plants, her bright-eyed dog Alf and the near-weekly release of singles from her debut solo album, Petals For Armor. With quarantine lockdown intensifying her already isolated headspace, Williams has ample time to stress about the release of a record she never planned to make in the first place. 

When talking about it over a weekday phone call, she sighs and laughs simultaneously. "Weird times," she says. "Today I’m PMS-ing, but I’m fine. It’s fine. It’s totally fine!" Usually a string of reassurances like that would strike as self-deprecating or tongue-in-cheek. For her, right now, it actually reads as honesty.

For starters, Williams has nothing to hide anymore. After concluding a string of tours in support of Paramore's synthpop full-length After Laughter and divorcing her longtime partner, she returned home only to discover it was time to address her struggles with depression and anxiety more formally. At the suggestion of her therapist, she began penning songs as a form of musical journaling. The results were passionate and transparent, the type of tracks where raw energy pulses through them, and Williams realized she had unintentionally created a set of songs worth sharing. Her bandmates suggested she turn it into a proper solo album. As an artist who was signed to a major label at age 14 where she established she would only record music with her friends as a proper band, not as a teenage pop star, the idea felt inconceivable—every song she had written for the past 15 years had been released through Paramore, save for one-off collaborations—until she decided to wing it and see what happened. When you’re Hayley Williams, an unintentional origin story can result in a pop album as creatively diverse and empathetically rewarding as this one.

To coincide with the release of Petals For Armor today, Williams spoke with the Recording Academy about learning to trust her body’s intuition, trying to make friends in adulthood and establishing boundaries on social media.

Petals For Armor opens with a pretty spot-on assessment that "Rage is a quiet thing," which reappears later in the album as well. In cultural conversations, rage is always addressed as a physical, visible, loud thing and never as something discrete or hidden. Looking back, do you remember the first time you felt truly overwhelmed with anger?

Oh, wow. Goodness. How deep do we want to get? I think I felt it in a few different iterations from a really young age. As you get older, you learn how to articulate some of those feelings in new ways. For me in my early years, I isolated a lot, I was very confused about my parents' divocre, and I was also confused about my mom’s second marriage and the abuse that happened there. I wasn’t a witness to it as much as I felt it. It was an uncomfortable time in life. For me, the way anger manifested was like heat in my body, almost like a blackout where I wouldn't remember the last few moments. You sort of dissociate in a way that doesn’t feel all that weird until you get older and, in hindsight, realize your body was trying to tell you something.

Absolutely. For whatever reason, I seemed to grow up without ever getting really angry. I would get upset or frustrated, of course, and certainly would debate with friends or family. But I never felt genuinely angry until I was in my mid-20s and experienced that full-force realization of, "Oh wow, women experience so many horrible things that men thankfully don't have to go through, and we’re just supposed to deal with it, to keep up with everyone else despite having unique setbacks." It’s weird to realize how long you’ve been carrying a silent rage before it finally boils over.

Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. In a way, I wish there would’ve been a way for me to understand what it was that was happening in my body and in my brain. But at the same time, you have to wonder, you know, our bodies are so intelligent and maybe they were protecting you and I from something we just weren’t ready to feel, in whatever ways that looked like for each of us. Now that I’m older, and now that you’re older, you recognize it. Hopefully that has taught us something that helps us move forward and grow. Some days I feel like I haven’t learned sh*t though.

While listening to this album, I’ve been thinking a lot about artists who sing about their anger or depression, especially in the '90s with Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette, and how it defined their career almost to the point of redirecting their own narrative. For a lot of women I know, seeing that resulted in this impulse to be like, "No, I'm not like them. I’m a tomboy. I don’t let my emotions consume me." What those musicians were getting at, though, is ultimately how their personal experiences funnel into a larger desire for reparative justice and long-overdue equality. 

Thankfully people have a lot more space and empathy and understanding now for these types of things. People like Fiona Apple or Alanis Morissette—and the thing about Alanis is she had such a massive moment in the ‘90s that was defining for women in rock music and alternative music—were suddenly accepted and then immediately were pushed away. That momentary acceptance that we all had culturally for someone like Alanis Morissette definitely faded into this fear of hysterical women. Our anger can so easily be misconstrued as hysterical. It’s as simple or as insidious as someone being like, "Well, are you about to be on your period?" And you know, that doesn’t have to be offensive because, yeah, sometimes I am about to be on my period and I want to rip your face off. But other times, we've let that become the reason that women shouldn't be taken seriously when it comes to our emotions. Your point is so, so valid. They were talking about so much beyond anger. Anger is just the cap, it’s just the surface of so many meltier, slimier feelings that are harder to explain—and that’s why anger is our go-to. It’s covering insecurities and other feelings that can be tough to explain. 

How would you define your rage here? And do you feel like you're being heard now that you've shared some of it through this album?

Oof. I think there are still mornings I wake up where I’m a little nervous about certain things that I mention on the album. Today, the single "Dead Horse" is coming out and I woke up excited because it’s something new I get to release into the world like a child, you know? But I’m very nervous because you’re not in control of other people's perceptions, ever. It doesn’t matter what you do; you just can’t. You can only speak honestly about your experiences and choose whether or not you’re going to magnify that and let the world in. For me, it’s so second nature because I’ve been putting albums out for so long now—you know, this is what I do, this is how I get the full-circle experience of healing and expression—but it has been intense and wonderful to feel that I am basically serving justice for my own self in my own way. It’s very individualized and very, very personal. The things I’m talking about on the first EP have a lot to do with the generational trauma and abuse that was in my family for multiple generations. I wasn’t aware of it so much as I could hear it, like a low hum in the background, until I was able to name it and ask my mom direct questions about these things she’s experienced that basically every woman on her side of the family has experienced. 

I feel a sense of relief and I’m proud of that, but it comes with knowing that not everyone will understand this when listening to the album. Like yesterday, I posted a very passive-aggressive thing that allowed me to find humor in the fact that there are a lot of men on the internet who try to mansplain how to put out an album when they’ve probably never even made an album in their life. You get polarized responses. You get people who are cheering you on and then you get, "Oh man, she’s a man-hater now." And honestly? Yeah! Maybe both! Maybe I’m all of it and every shade in between. That’s the problem with any type of public domain. You're allowing other people to define you and you're also kind-of having to consent to it. I can’t direct it, but I’m certainly still in it and I want to be expressing myself in these ways. 

Speaking of "Dead Horse," you’re digging deep into your past experiences on this album in a very transparent way. I've always thought one of the most common tragedies of life is when people feel locked into an unfit relationship, whether that relationship is emotionally abusive, mentally draining, or just profoundly boring. It sounds like your marriage was disillusioning at best, but you tried to make it fruitful despite that. What were some of the signs that you knew your relationship was no longer the right fit? One time my friend said the moment they realized they weren't in love anymore was when they no longer enjoyed their partner's scent. 

Yeah, that’s so real. That's very animal isn’t it? That's such a real thing though. That’s a great place to start any response that I might have to say about this. Our bodies do not lie. I don’t know if it’s cultural, but over time, who we are in the present day is very disconnected from our bodies. We're so cut off from our animal instinct. I do think there’s something to the fact that people who have been close to one another and there’s something pleasing about the other person’s scent is so… I mean, I think the only reason it even feels awkward or silly to talk about is because we’re so disconnected from our bodies. That is, for me, what I noticed for years. Things weren’t right. There wasn’t a congruence with my mind, my heart, my spirit, and my body. That’s not to say that I’m some evolved, perfectly balanced human right now, because I’m not, but I can check in now and slow down and ask, "What does this mean to me? How do I really feel about this and not deny obvious truths?" My stomach just hurt all of the time. It hurt all of the time. I don’t know how else to put it. I didn’t feel comfortable yet I also felt like I was owed some sense of normalcy and also I owed it to my family or the world. I tried to create that by settling for something that ultimately did not feel right. 

It’s heartbreaking to think that we do this, though. I’m from the South and there’s this whole idea of what the church says is right and wrong, and how we view marriage through a religious lense. I don’t subscribe to that. I don’t really think you can adhere to all of those rules and be a healthy person and a good person. Look, I believe love is hard. Love is a choice that we continue to make. I’ve been married to Paramore since I was 13 and it’s been a f**king hell of a rollercoaster, but I'm in it and I reap the emotional benefits of the commitment that I've made. I know it’s possible to stick it out in relationships. My grandparents have been together for 55 years. I see it in the world and I know that it’s real, but I didn’t have it and I tried to force it to be that.

In a New York Times interview, you said you were "scared of losing access to [your] sadness" at one point. What is it about that vacancy that feels alarming? 

I’m not making a blanket statement about everybody, but for me, for my personality, for my identity, I actually enjoy romantic, tragic beauty. I find a lot of comfort in stories like that, in twisted narratives, and it adds meaning and depth for me in a world that, if everything were perfect and sunny, would be so boring and disenchanting to me. Everything would be too shiny. I really wanted to treat my depression and take it seriously. I was fine going to therapy, but when it came time to consider medication, that was my one and only hesitation. I get through this life by writing and expressing. So much of that comes from the dissonance that I feel. What happens if this medication numbs it all? I’ve heard friends talk about that with ADD medications or depression medications. For creatives, that’s a really valid concern. There’s the argument that you don’t have to be sad to make art. I guess I believe that, but I do feel like I have to be able to access all of my emotions to live. So far, what I'm taking makes me feel like I do still get depressed, but the difference is that it no longer feels like my identity is the depression. I don’t feel stuck to the bed like I don’t want to get up anymore. It’s some weird in-between. I'm still trying to figure it out, but I’m thankful that I went for it and decided to start acting on it.  

Oftentimes you hear people say the hardest part of dealing with any problem is realizing that it's a problem in the first place, but I think the hardest part is realizing that you need help dismantling it, that it’s unrealistic to do it on your own. Based on previous lyrics, you've always been open about grappling with depression. So what changed? What helped you realize that checking in to a therapy retreat for your depression was worth trying?

Oh boy. Ooof. 

We can skip this if you want! 

No, it’s okay! These are actually the conversations I like to have, it’s just that normally I’m having them in my bed on the phone with a friend or my mom. I think I’m good to answer this. So, when we came home from After Laughter, life was a lot better than it had been before After Laughter—or at least seemingly so. I had been busy for years: touring, hanging out with my friends every night onstage, hanging out with them backstage, doing cool sh*t like going to a Broadway show and seeing Japan. Life was very sensational. Then you come home. 

I missed home so bad, but I got here and it was quiet and still and there wasn’t a schedule, no dates in the distant future. It was pretty sobering. Suddenly I had no company but my own, unless I wanted to be a freak and go out every night as if I'm in my early 20s. I just realized that I needed to handle some sh*t. I needed to figure out my dog and if I was going to be able to take care of him full-time now that I’m not touring 75 percent of the time. I needed to hunker down more in my house and try to make whatever necessary adjustments to it to make it liveable on the regular. But I also wanted to be in a relationship. I wanted to be able to date, to be able to experience partnership, and to do that in a healthy way—but I was so far from healthy that I kept sabotaging any good opportunity for any relationship, really. That's one of the first lyrics I wrote for the record, actually. In "Why We Ever," I talk about me trying to sabotage this great relationship. It’s me being like, "Okay, I’m ready to move forward into my adult, human woman life. I’m not going to make the same mistakes I made before, blah, blah, blah," but then I became hypervigilant and had to go back to the beginning to figure out why. That was what did it. I realized my depression spills out onto anyone I care about. It’s not just about me in the back of a bunk crying after a show. It’s real life, and if I want to take part in it and be someone’s partner, then I have to take responsibility for myself.

Gosh, that was a long answer. Sorry. I think it’s because I’ve not really talked about this and it’s kinda hard.

Oh, it’s such a long process to understand yourself, nevermind to explain it all to someone else. Are there any exercises or phrases from therapy that have since stuck with you? 

I did a type of therapy called EMDR, which I still am not sure if it’s something a lot of people are aware of or if it’s obscure. But I’m now a year and a half into it, off and on. It’s not something you should do all of the time because it’s heavy. It helped me to go back into memories that, as an adult, I probably perceive a lot differently than I experienced them as a child. It’s about being able to comfort yourself and protect yourself. That’s where the line in "Simmer" comes from: "Nothing cuts like a mother." My mom, by the way, is a fantastic, strong, insanely independent woman. She’s been through so much sh*t and she’s come out of it so strong. But at a certain point, we all have to learn to mother ourselves. That was one of the biggest lessons for me: She can’t always give me every security that I need. She was dealing with her own sh*t, not that it was my fault or even her own. That’s just how life goes. We need to learn how to self-soothe. In a lot of ways, I’m still learning how to do that. The basic sense of what that feels like is at least a little more comfortable for me now. I’ve been able to work through some traumatic sh*t because of it. 

Petals For Armor is divided into three sections, and you can hear the musical and lyrical shifts as each third starts. It almost sounds like different mindsets of the healing process. Was that intentional? 

It wasn’t intentional, but I do think it’s because healing from any sort of trauma, addiction, or whatever is universal. It’s like how writing about love will resonate with so many different types of people’s experiences with love because it’s a universal thing we all experience. I didn't intend on it while writing, but I did know that I was going to seperate it. I could feel how songs from early on in the songwriting process felt darker and aesthetically belonged together. In a lot of ways, I know it’s dumb to answer any question like this in an interview, but it just happened. It felt like it was supposed to happen. Whether it was me writing with Joey [Howard], Paramore’s touring bassist who’s an incredible talent, or in the studio with Taylor [York], things just came up that felt right. I knew they were right when they happened. I just had to get out of the way to keep the space clear for that. 

After Laughter was such a colorful, buoyant musical shift for Paramore. Did that album act as a creative springboard and loosen your creative expectations for Petals For Armor? There’s such a wide range between the lovely Radiohead-like production of "Simmer" and a club-ready song like "Sugar On The Rim."

Yeah, the way Paramore has moved has been so half-hazard. Whatever we felt like, we followed it. We didn’t really let outside opinions dictate where we should go in our career. It would have felt very inauthentic to follow Riot with another scene-sounding emo album. We weren’t even that band by the time the last single came out. I remember us struggling about getting popular off a song like "Misery Business" while already looking and being different people by the time "That's What You Get" came out. That’s how we've moved through everything. By the time we got to After Laughter, we were so overdue for a shakeup and to feel out on a limb again. I was so proud of it and it felt so liberating to talk about these things. I don’t even think I was aware that I was writing about my depression until afterwards when speaking about the songs, because at the time of writing I didn’t know I was depressed. It created incredible conversations that challenged me to heal—some of that happened very publicly and some of that happened over champagne in a hotel room with Zac [Farro], Taylor, and I crying about sh*t that’s ancient history. That album was a massive gift to each of us as individuals and as a band.

Petals For Armor almost plays out like an exercise in self-love: from learning to admit your troubles, to breaking them down, to recognizing your strengths, to expressing gratitude. Out of all the songs, which one are you most proud of? 

Goodness. It’s hard to pick a baby. I think that today it would be different than tomorrow and tomorrow would be different than the next day. But if I’m answering for today, I would say a song called "Crystal Clear," which is the last song on the album. It was very accidental. I had been begging, begging Taylor for music that came from him first. That’s typically how we write Paramore songs, but that’s not how we wrote a lot of songs on Petals, even the songs written by the both of us didn’t start in that way. So I had been begging, like, "Hey, let’s do the ol’ razzle dazzle! We’ve been doing the whole ‘me’ thing and now I want to hear you!" I wanted to hear what he had been feeling like in hopes that it would take me somewhere new. He showed me the beginning of "Crystal Clear"—at that point, all he had was the beginning of it and it had a lot of Phil Collins drumming to it. We wound up finishing the whole song that day. Not every song is a gift that is that smooth and simple, but it felt so right. I loved what I learned from writing it. I loved the lyrics because I was able to tie in some references from After Laughter that have to do with love and bring people up to speed with how I’m viewing it today, which is that I feel afraid, but I’m diving into it again anyway. I’m proud of it and scared of it, but I love that song. There is a special guest on it, but it’s very personal and I don’t know if he’s someone who's ever had a song on the radio or anything, but I’ll be able to talk about it more when we get closer to its release. 

Reading through other interviews, it sounds like there was some very reasonable fear about going solo—not the act of making music outside of the band, but by releasing these songs publicly not as a band. What helped you realize it's okay to release solo material? 

It was two conversations. One was a conversation that had happened so long before we had even come off the road touring behind After Laughter. We were making the "Rose-Colored Boy" music video and our manager took us out to dinner. It was a really emotional conversation. Taylor’s family had just lost a loved one. We were in the middle of an album cycle that was deeply personal to us. There were a lot of good things happening, and I think when good things and growth are happening, there’s lots of growing pains. We were trying to make sense of how we could be in this wonderful moment in our career and this beautiful moment in our friendships but also could feel sad. The truth is we were tired as f**k, which is not a big deal if you really think about it—of course we were tired, we had been playing music since we were 13. But Taylor mentioned to us, "I really think it’s time, when we wrap up After Laughter, to take some real time off. Not to throw away what we’ve done and what we’re doing now, but to give ourselves space and to find ourselves outside of Paramore." What if we just want to relate to each other as people? What if we want to know what it’s like to go to another country but not be on tour, just go see it, just to go walk around? Not to walk around and then return to soundcheck depressed, or be in London for five hours for a photoshoot and then leave? What if we just want to find ourselves outside of the band as adults? What if I want to learn how to cook something? Little did we know we would be stuck at home. [Laughs.] But I really felt every word he was saying because we had a conversation two years prior about me wanting to quit the band, before we wrote After Laughter. He said, "Look, we can stop or we can keep going, but I’ll support you either way. If we decide to keep going, we can look out for one another in a better way than we have in the past." So I made good on that promise and really backed him up and Zac did as well. He was right. It was time for us to go home for a little while and trust that we would know when it was the right time to make another Paramore record. 

All that said, fast forwarding to whenever I started making this record, I knew that this did not belong to Paramore. I really wanted to make good on my word that we all deserved time away from it. When I realized I was writing more than I thought, there were two options: sit on this stuff to see if it would work for a Paramore record eventually, or I can ask for help now and see how I feel when I’m done. By the fourth or fifth song, it was obvious that this was an expression that was necessary. Taylor really encouraged me to release it as an official project. When I told Zac about it, he said the same thing. I just saw his text the other day while scrolling through pictures because I took a screenshot of it for myself. He was like, "Dude, you've got this. You gotta do this." Taylor was the one who told me I needed to tell our manager so I could have that support system ready to go too. He kept reminding me that it was real. I would deny it and he would say it was real because I had already written the songs. And he was right!

Such good friends! That’s how you know, such genuine support.

Right? They’re the best! It’s been a really good time for us. Not only did Taylor produce it and he grew so much just as a musician. He became such a force and I don’t think I fully realized all that he could do. And Zac is absolutely killing it. He moved to L.A., he started a record label, he’s producing his own albums. Everyone is really flourishing. It’s a sign. It’s that thing we were talking about earlier. You feel something in your body and you can either listen to it or ignore it. I think we’re seeing what happens when we really listen to our guts and respect one another. Now we’re all having this really special moment. It won’t last forever, but it will definitely have a lasting impact on who we are. 

Petals For Armor is peppered with all these nice friendship moments, too, thanks to cameos from Paramore members and friends like Boygenius. It feels like receiving a big, communal hug. Were those organic to weave in?

Yeah, totally! The only contributions that I think people would qualify as a feature are the Boygenius song and the guitar player of my favorite band, mewithoutYou, his name’s Mike Weiss, he played on "Creepin'." There was no reason to seek out a feature-heavy record. I feel like we’re inundated with them. That’s fine for people who feel like they thrive creatively in that setup, but I don’t think I do. I thrive with people in my intimate circle of friends. Every now and then, if it feels like it came about natural and feels right, I’ll have an opportunity to collaborate with a new friend or someone I look up to. I really like how this one came about. I ran into Julien [Baker] at another friend’s show in Nashville. She was hanging with Lucy [Dacus]. Phoebe [Bridgers] was meant to come in the next day because they were working on… something. Maybe they were each working on separate things. But that was so kismet. It turned out mewithoutYou were playing a show in Nashville which we planned on going to anyway, but when I realized what that could mean I realized I had to ask Mike if he could stop by the studio. I think it happened in one day where everyone was in town. We did all those tracks—Mike’s guitar and the girls’ vocals—in one day because they all hung out together in the studio. It feels natural because these parts are from friends or people I already know.

Since taking a break from touring, it seems like you've been investing lots of time in cultivating and nurturing friendships, old and new. I recently moved to a new city and work from home, and it’s surprised me how hard it is. There's not really a guide for how to make friends in adulthood, especially when you're not someone who holes up at bars. What's been the hardest part of that process for you?

First of all, I really feel you on the new town and having the kind of work situation where you’re not regularly meeting new people at. For me, moving to Nashville during my divorce, I didn’t really have any other way to be other than incredibly vulnerable. I didn’t have any energy to fake it or be animated. A lot of times when I’m out in public, I’m an introvert, but I really care about making people comfortable. I go out of my way to make others comfortable because I was the kid who was always uncomfortable growing up. That makes people think I’m extroverted, but really I just don’t want other people to suffer by feeling the anxieties that I feel. All of a sudden around my divorce, I lost the energy to act that way. If somebody asked me how I was doing, they better buckle in, because I was going to tell them how I was doing and I didn’t give a sh*t if we were in public. I don’t recommend this for everyone, but I met some of my closest friends in adulthood in that way. I was at a party at Zac’s house for someone’s birthday. His wife and I got to talking when I met her that night. We were in a corner of Zac’s house just, like, meeting each other for the first time and asking each other questions. It turned out we had both been through similar divorces, both had been in similar living situations after, and it was like, sh*t, I don’t have to go out of my way to make people comfortable. I just need to rest in this moment and trust that if I'm meant to find new people, then I’ll find them or they will find me. All I need to do is own my story and be present for it.

You’ve established a relatively healthy relationship with your fans on Twitter and Instagram while still making yourself available, whether it’s sharing memes of yourself or embracing accidental typos. You also know when and how to take a break from social media, which is equally important. Do you have any advice for artists who are struggling to find the right balance between the two? 

Oh man. Social media is so hard. It’s not going to get any easier either; it’s only gonna get harder. That’s where I’ve had to implement those lessons of listening to myself, to that very small voice that’s generally wiser than I am. I get to a breaking point where it either turns into anxiety or some type of jadedness where I need to forget my phone exists and only talk to people I know in real life. If it’s advice for other artists, I would say, we’re taught to believe that if it’s not out there it doesn’t exist, but you definitely still exist. Even if you’re not posting some probably bullsh*t thing, you definitely still exist. I have to remind myself that all the time. I exist far more in real life than I do on my phone. We’re just accustomed to seeing people through a screen now but that doesn't mean it’s a reality. 

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Blake Mills On Staying Creative During Quarantine, Turning People Into Songs

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The guitar wunderkind collaborated with Cass McCombs on his borderless, minimal new album, 'Mutable Set'
Morgan Enos
GRAMMYs
May 6, 2020 - 8:59 am

Over the course of a decade, Blake Mills has worked with everyone from JAY-Z to Fiona Apple. But live streaming, he says, has rendered him the most anxious he’s been since high school. 

As musicians hunker down and switch on their webcams during the coronavirus pandemic, Mills has felt pressure to follow suit, but he hasn’t found it easy—which also goes for writing new material. "[It’s] like you’re sitting by a pond with a fishing pole and you see a fish in the water: "Oh, that’s interesting,'" he tells The Recording Academy, describing woodshedding at home while in isolation. "There’s no [immediate desire] to turn that into something."

The guitarist recorded his new album Mutable Set, which will be released May 8 on his label New Deal Records, well before COVID-19 bound much of us in our houses and apartments. Still, the intimate yet expansive vibe of songs like "Vanishing Twin," "Farsickness" and "A Window Facing A Window" feels germane to a moment in which, between four walls, the barriers between hours, days and weeks seem to have evaporated.

"This record deals with an awareness of two things—people and experiences in life that are precious, and whatever waits down the moat for something to drop," he said in a press release. ‘[The title] is a [theatrical] term that deals with anything that could change or be lost all together."

Mills has specific people and things in mind that are mutable sets, but he's not hungry to divulge the details. "I think there’s a reason it went from reality into a song," he explains. "To preserve that, you’ve just gotta let it now be a song rather than a person."

Read on for an interview with Mills about that person-to-song alchemy as well as creating while in quarantine, co-writing with Cass McCombs and achieving more with less while recording Mutable Set.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How are you holding up in Los Angeles?

It’s kind of peaceful and stressful at the same time. It’s definitely taking its toll psychically, from a creative standpoint of having all this time and wanting to do something useful or artful with it, to make some purpose out of it. 

But [according to] everybody I’ve been talking to in the creative community, it’s not a hugely productive time by and large. I feel a little less guilty about not feeling super productive, but I’m trying and waiting for that to turn over.

There’s a lot of pressure on creative people to be perky and resourceful while in quarantine.

Everyone seems to land on live streaming. It does give you a quick reward of serotonin. It’s so different than performing for an audience or having people over or something like that. 

But even just thinking about writing or trying to start a project, or if I’m playing guitar and there’s something interesting happening, there’s some part of my brain that’s like, "I should try to document this. I should try to record this or do something with this." Then the rest of my brain is like, "What is the point?"

Are you referring to the live streaming process or the demoing process?

More probably the demoing process. Or just the writing process. When you’re messing around and you stumble upon something musically that seems kind of interesting or at least better than what you’ve been playing for the rest of the day, in a normal creative environment, you’re like, "What does this mean? Should I do something with this?"

And in this environment, it seems a little more like "Oh, that’s nice." Like you’re sitting by a pond with a fishing pole and you see a fish in the water: "Oh, that’s interesting." There’s no [immediate desire] to turn that into something.

Something about a stranger’s kitchen jam session chirping through my phone speaker feels impersonal and disconnected.

Yeah, it is. There’s exceptions to that rule. There’s a label called Sahel Sounds that works with a lot of artists in Africa, like in Mauritania and in the Sahara Desert. A lot of those artists have never left the country; they’ve never gone on tour. So they’ll sometimes get recordings through WhatsApp or cell phone recordings of these guys playing at a wedding.

And it’s some of the best musicianship I’ve heard in a long time. There’s this guy who plays the [lute] ngoni named Jeich Ould Badou. This guy is unbelievable. Every month or something during the quarantine, the label would put up an EP [as part of the Music From Saharan WhatsApp project]. 

That degradation process that goes through that particular app, plus a cellphone and a copy of a copy of a copy… it gives it a certain kind of patina that is not dissimilar from when people try to make a record sound like it was done in the 1960s nowadays to give it a sense of authenticity or nostalgia or whatever. 

I’m definitely bothered when I’m working on a project and I put time into getting it to sound a certain way and then the medium interferes with that and changes it—like most people probably would be. But I also think it’s kind of silly. Like, "You should have heard Frank Sinatra's voice when we tracked it that day!"

You can go into a lot of different rabbit holes about the nature of musical documentation. The Neil Young arguments, the David Byrne arguments…

Exactly. And they’re not wrong. They’re talking about something that does matter. But it’s like talking about a thing that you ate one time. You send somebody to a restaurant to eat it and they’re not going to have the exact same thing that you ate, you know?

Mutable Set sounds like a continuation of your ambient 2018 album Look, but with vocals. What compels you to remove borders and edges from your music?

I think at the time Heigh Ho came out [in 2014], it seemed really disconnected from my first record [2010’s Break Mirrors]. And when Look came out, it seemed really disconnected, obviously, from both of those. 

I tend to take a lot of time between records primarily because I write slowly. But also because I often don’t feel like there’s a real reason to make a record until it feels like it stands apart in some way. Or at least until a general atmosphere around what a record might sound like or how I would want to record it… those kinds of things have to emerge before it feels like it’s time to make another record.

It’s a lot easier to articulate what you don’t want something to sound like than being able to decide what you do want it to be. If there’s a lack of borders or anything on this record, it’s probably a result of the process of this one being different from previous ones. 

I’m not somebody who’s beholden to analog tape being the prime sonic medium for recorded music like a lot of people I know are. But I do think it does lend a lot of character. The sound of a record made on tape is due not only to the fact that you’re listening to analog tape, but the decision-making process that goes into working on tape—the speed to which you’re forced to work. 

Going back to degradation for a second, tape compression works in such a way where the more you add to it, the more compressed and sort of muddy things can quickly sound. A lot of time on this one was just spent more on getting a performance vocally and instrumentally from myself at the onset to where there was enough information in that performance that I didn’t spend too much time trying to create the record with overdubs on top of it.

So you tried to focus more on the core performance?

Yeah. More of the core performance. If that was just a solo performance from me or if it was a trio, depending on what went down on this sort of base layer, most of the overdubs and layers on top of that were going to be pretty minimal because, again, with tape, it felt more profound the more sparse they were. 

And you start to listen to the lyrics, the performance, the quality of the voice or the playing, more when you’re not given other things like guitar coming in here or percussion coming in there. You [wait] for those things to happen, but when they don’t, it forces you to digest it differently.

It seems like you’re using silence as an instrument like never before.

Yeah, I guess so. The lack of "more."

And you used a much more traditional process than I presumed you did.

I would say it was pretty traditional. This record is [my first where] I’ve done this much collaborating on during the writing. It’s something that’s familiar to me when I’m producing or [being] approached by artists to co-write, but it felt very different doing it for my own music. I felt a little lost so I tried it with a few friends and different people, and I really found a stride with Cass McCombs, who I’ve known and worked with for maybe seven or eight years. 

I’d say about half of the songs on the record ("Never Forever," "May Later," "Summer All Over," "Vanishing Twin" and "My Dear One") came about from me showing him something that I had. Maybe a version of the lyrics that felt like, ‘I’ve got this verse and I kind of like the way this one is fitting, but the second verse doesn’t mean anything to me and I don’t feel like it belongs in the song. But when I tear it up and throw it out, I can’t see anything else there because it’s been there for so long.’

A lot of music hangs out in the attic for a long time and it takes a while for me to be able to know if it’s a good idea or not and I kind of have to keep coming back to it.

It seems like a new development to have an outside party put a fresh set of ears on your songs.

Most of the time, I’m sitting on various elements of songs and I’m not sure if they fit together. Certainly [there are] ideas that feel like they have some good parts and the rest of it, I wouldn’t need it. But somebody else coming in with a fresh perspective is usually more on the instrumental side of when I’m making one of my own records, in terms of how the music comes across and, therefore, how the song comes across.

But to bring somebody in on the writing side, I think what happened in this case is that a lot of the decision-making is maybe a little more in the foundation of the song. The performance and presentation can be stripped back and just be more minimal and allow for some of those decisions to have a pathway to come through. The singer can communicate things that are not necessarily being said.

So what were those decisions? What did Cass bring to the songs specifically?

He has an innate style as a lyricist. He has a respect for the economy of a phrase and using fewer words and experimenting with what happens if you take this out, you take this out, you take this out. To have as little as possible in there and still have it be evocative. We both love music that does that. 

In this case, what was great beyond just the obvious suggestion of ‘What about this here?’ was to have somebody whose tastes are so aligned working on an idea. It’s really hard to put a value on that and to say exactly what they did. 

When somebody walks into your house or your studio, it allows you to recognize where you are in a way you couldn’t before. Like, when the plumber shows up, you realize, "Oh my god, my house is a mess." Once you find a rhythm with somebody on something, it allows you to take stock of where you are in a way that you couldn’t really see beforehand.

Would it be accurate to say that you felt lost in the weeds with the material and he helped you shape it up?

Yeah, definitely. He came in, he got where I was coming from, and I would play him an idea. I’d have this one line and I’d record it on my phone and then he would go on about his day and start sending variations on ways to sing that line. That would inspire a new section for me. Then I would send that to him and he’d come back and have variated lyrics for half of that section. 

And that’s just the process of one song. It happened very naturally and then never happened like that again on any other one. So it’s a very fluid collaboration. 

How did you choose who would accompany you on the record?

I would say most of the people that are on the record [saxophonist Sam Gendel, string arranger Rob Moose, pianist Gabriel Kahane, bassists David Boucher and Pino Palladino, drummer Abe Rounds] are people I’ve just worked with a lot in the past. The exception being [keyboardist] Aaron Embry, who is someone I’ve been a fan of for many years but had never crossed paths with. 

I just thought this would be a good excuse to reach out and make that call. I love his songwriting and I know that his approach to this music would come from the standpoint of listening to what’s happening in the song, not necessarily from the frame of mind of ‘We’re here making a record.’ 

Everybody who played on the record are people who think outside the box without having me tell them to do so.

You've said that the title of Mutable Set implies the temporary nature of everyone and everything. Any particular people, places, or things that you’ve lost — or fear to lose — come to mind?

Every one of these songs is about something or someone to me. And I know who those people are and what those things are. I think it’s important that those things and those people are not publicly attached to the songs. As a general statement, for art in general, I think it’s important to preserve the anonymity in songs so that people can hear the way the story is being told through the song rather than trying to put it together like some sort of police report.

I like that kind of aspect of when people are putting real experiences into an abstract medium. I think there’s a reason it went from reality into a song. To preserve that, you’ve just gotta let it now be a song rather than a person.

You’re left feeling the essence of loss without specifics.

Maybe those details are important for certain people, certain songs, or certain stories. Not for these songs. But that’s just for this record. That all could change on another group of songs for sure.

Tori Amos On Maintaining Faith, Vision & Conviction In Troubled Times

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