Jolie Holland interview

I have an addictive personality. Once I find something I like, there’s no turning back; that is until my obsession has run its lengthy course. Smoking, deep-fried cheesecake and drinking an obscene amount of Red Bull have all made their way into my life, before I played them out beyond comprehension and ended up hating them. Of course, the same type of thing happens with music. I’ll get into a band, listen to them incessantly and despise them six months into my unnatural binge listening. I’ve been listening to Jolie Holland’s music for a few years now and for some reason, it refuses to get old.

Her voice, her timeless melodies and clever, beautiful lyrics won me over a long time ago, but have since refused to let go. I don’t know exactly why this is. My only explanation is that Jolie Holland is that amazingly good. Jolie has a new album out, a new place to call home and a way of making music that lasts long after the infatuation has expired.

I’ve always been attracted to good lyrics and yours definitely fit into that category. I’m a writer but not a musician and have always wondered about the process of a songwriter whose lyrics are just as poignant as the music. Do you write the lyrics first and then come up with the melody?
It’s pretty much lyrics and melody at the same time. And then from there the rest of the lyrics are based on the rhythmic durations and I think you can really see that in 'Palmayr' (off her new album, The Living And The Dead), how the rhythm and the words are kind of integrated. That’s a pretty good word, integrated (laughs). Congruent. They’re very congruent.

Writing is such a personal thing and yet playing with others is so collaborative. Is it difficult to maintain the essence of a very personal song while bringing it to life with others?
I’m completely bored by the idea of art that’s not personal, so I can’t even try to do anything good that isn’t personal, you know what I mean. If I wasn’t bringing personal stuff to the music I can’t imagine it being very good at all. It’s hard to have any kind of perspective about yourself, but the feedback I’ve gotten from the musician’s I’ve worked with, it’s just there, like all of the emotional content is there. I’ve got that feedback from Shahzad (producer). He works with Will Oldham. He told me that there aren’t people who are always emotionally present in any type of performance, whether it be a rehearsal or whatever, every single time the way Will Oldham and I are. I thought that was really awesome to hear. To me, if the feeling isn’t there, than it’s not the song. There’s no way I can just run through something without actually being in it. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

Playing live, can it be difficult to just turn it on and capture that deep-rooted feeling?
No, I mean if a song doesn’t have enough emotional complexity for me to get into it, I just won’t let it out of the bedroom, you know. I made that decision a long time ago. The musicians that I love are the people that have real longevity and who always bring their songs out honestly, every single time. Like, I just can’t imagine Willie Nelson bitching...like, “I don’t want to sing that song again.” You know what I mean? I was in bands where people bitched about singing some songs again, and I just felt like, “Whoah, you wrote that song two months ago and you already hate it?” That’s not a good song.

So you must be super critical of all your stuff.
Oh yeah, totally. It’s amazing I write anything at all. The filter’s just always on really high.

From beginning to end, is writing a song a long, drawn-out process?
Oh no. It’s really short. Like 15 minutes. Cause I really like stuff that feels fresh. So it has to feel fresh. And my perfectionism comes in from knowing when a song just feels right. And I do a lot of planning. I do a lot of playing with different types of forms that I’m interested in. And I’m always thinking about form and content. Like, “That’s a good thing to write a song about,” or “That’s a terrible thing to write a song about,” or “That’s a beautiful construction,” or “Oh my god, that construction is so sloppy.” Or it’s just borrowing ideas from other people. Like 'Sweet Loving Man' is really based on forms of songs by Memphis Mini and Freakwater and Will Oldham. Yeah, every song has pretty specific parentage form-wise. But then the actual sentiment of the song, it has to be really immediate. Like the content of a song has to be like a gesture drawing, even though I might spend years coming up with the form.

With that said, do you ever feel pressured to write a song?
I think a long time ago, I realised how I don’t like songs where people think, “Oh I need to write a song.” I was listening to other songwriters that were doing stuff like that, and I just don’t like their output. I’m already such an intense perfectionist, so I really try not to bully myself into writing songs because those are the songs I never really end up liking anyway.

So you just moved to Brooklyn, right?
Yeah, I lived on the West Coast for almost 10 years and I recently moved to Brooklyn. I moved to Ditmas Park. But I’ve only been there for like two days, cause I had to come back to Portland. But I love my space, but I don’t know my neighborhood yet.

What brought you to Brooklyn?
I don’t know (laughs). I’m from a big city and I just never think to move anywhere but big cities and I have a lot of friends in Brooklyn. I’m really enjoying it, it’s so great. The musicianship is so amazing in New York so it’s really awesome to be there.

How much does environment affect your music? Will moving to Brooklyn affect the way you write songs?
I don’t know. Traditionally it hasn’t. I finished writing “Mexico City” and “Palmyra” in New Zealand and they’re obviously not about New Zealand at all.

Jolie Holland's new album, The Living and the Dead is out now on Epitaph.
www.jolieholland.com

Watch Jolie perform 'Mexico City', the opening track from her new album:

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Jolie Holland interview (text) by Jay Riggio is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.