interview with juliana daugherty
Firstly congratulations on your new record Light. It is an exquisite album and one of its many stunning features includes its fusion of folk and electronica. At times, such as Revelation, the two genres are mutually exclusive and other times like Player, the two traverse simultaneously. In crafting the exact sentiment you were aiming for in certain tracks, was it a case that only one style adequately produced the feeling you were hoping to express?
Thank you! It’s been a long time since I started work on Light, and I’m thrilled to finally have a finished product to put out into the universe. I worked very closely with my producer, Colin Killalea, on this record, and the whole process was intensely collaborative. When we started recording, most of these songs were in rough, unfinished shape, and since we were using a home setup instead of a renting a studio, we had the flexibility to really spend a lot of time figuring out what each song needed. There was a lot of trial and error, and a lot of throwing things away and starting over.
Colin is a brilliant musician for lots of reasons, but I think one of his areas of particular brilliance is knowing when to exercise restraint. He’s also an old and good friend, and he’s been an unwavering advocate for these songs since he first heard them—even when I had my doubts. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in these songs when I first started recording, and I think if I’d had my way I would have buried them all in layers and layers of synth pads and drum programming. But Colin was great at knowing when these additions were really necessary and when we needed to hold back.
The dreamy single Baby Teeth is a gorgeous track with its undulating strumming and delicate vocals but it belies a rather deeper meaning. Can you elaborate a little on the subject matter of the track?
“Baby Teeth” is more or less a breakup song. It’s about being with someone who believes the world owes them something, and who lives in a state of constant dissatisfaction as a result—someone I ultimately decided I couldn’t be with, for just this reason. I didn’t write the song until years and years after the relationship in question had ended, which I think lends the whole thing a certain sense of disaffection—in it, we’re observing an experience from a safe distance, rather than experiencing anything in real time. I think you can actually hear this feeling of detachment in the music, in the way that the vocals, synthesizer, and guitar flourishes seem to float away from the metronomic backbone of the rhythm guitar.
As for the record itself, in terms of the writing and lyrical content for Light, was there an overarching narrative tying the album together or an assortment of topics and inspirations that zig zag throughout the album?
When I started work on this collection of songs, my goal was to write as many songs as I possibly could within a period of about a year—the songs that made it onto the record were just my favorites from this group (and, in some cases, my producer’s favorites). In the end, I do think there are some overarching themes, though that wasn’t something I planned. I tend to obsess over certain experiences and ideas, and revisit them over and over in my creative work, and I know enough artists to recognize that I’m not at all unique in this. You almost have to be obsessing over something, otherwise where does the motivation to make art come from?
Being your debut record, what challenges did you experience throughout the process and conversely what fun surprises did you encounter?
I think the biggest challenge in any kind of creative work is getting your vision for a project out of your head and into the real world. I’m already familiar with this struggle, but making the record was the first time I’d had to rely so heavily on other people as part of the process. The most important takeaway here is that you have to be flexible—if you hold too rigidly to your original conception of a project, you’re going to miss out on all the possibilities for reinvention and expansion that collaboration offers.
The positive side of this is that it can be incredibly liberating to let go for a while and hand your project over to someone else. At one point in the recording process, Colin and I hit a wall—what we were trying to do wasn’t working, and we were out of ideas. So we took a few of the tracks to our friend Daniel Clarke, who is kind of a synth wizard. Daniel hadn’t even heard the tracks until that day, but somehow he knew exactly what they needed, and was able to rescue them.
Recorded in the tranquil surrounds of the Virginian countryside with producer Colin Killalea, do you feel that the essence of that environmental setting was in some way transferred onto the album?
Hard to say! I think physical environment probably always has some effect on creative output, but it’s not always easy to separate all that out. This record also doesn’t feel particularly tranquil to me. I can more easily see the influence of the environment I wrote the record in. I’ve heard a few reviewers describe the songs as “understated,” which I think might partly be a side-effect of my having written many of them at 2 a.m. in a house full of sleeping people.
Music has always been in your family with mother and father both musicians in their own right. What are some of your earliest memories of music and in what ways have those musical foundations come to bear on your current work?
Music has always felt like a mix of math and magic to me. My most significant early memories of music are of being constantly within earshot of someone practicing, which I think mostly left me with an awareness of the fact that music was in large part work—repetitive, methodical, sometimes boring work. My bedroom from age eight onward was directly above my Dad’s basement trumpet studio, so most of the time I spent in that room was backgrounded by the sound of Dad playing long tones through the vents. I myself wasn’t a particularly talented or dedicated student of music until my last couple of years of high school, but I was always interested, and tended to fixate on particular pieces of (usually classical) music.
As a kid, I was obsessed enough with the Glenn Gould edition of Bach’s Goldberg Variations that I painstakingly taught myself to play the whole Aria by ear, though I had no skill or particular interest in the piano (and still don’t, to this day). I think I just wanted to learn it so that I could play it, and listen to myself playing it, over and over again. I also went to more than the requisite number of symphony concerts. I’m not certain that my parents would corroborate this, but my personal recollection is that I was always enthralled with these concerts on some level—with the ritual of them, if not the music itself. Hearing an orchestra tuning up still makes me feel tingly.
As to how this background has come to bear on my current work—I’m not sure. I’ve forgotten just about everything I know about theory, but I think I have a good ear, particularly for harmony. It’s always felt very natural to me to sing a harmony along with whatever I’m listening to, and I think this informs my writing—not just the harmony parts, but also the melodic choices and chord structures. I also think maybe it’s significant that I didn’t spend my formative years obsessed with classic rock or jazz or funk or 60s folk or whatever the gateway drug is for kids who grow up to be musicians. There are so many important songs that I’ve just never heard, probably because I was mostly listening to Prokofiev. So I’m coming at it from the side angle of someone who’s still trying to figure out what a “song” is. I’ve had a number of musician friends tell me that my chord progressions/song structures are weird, which I hadn’t noticed.
Musical lyrics are deeply entwined in precise expressionism which often takes the form of poetry but you have formally studied poetry and perhaps would have deeper affinity for the art form than most. When it comes to constructing lyrics in a poetic way, how do you approach a new track considering your musical ability on the one hand and your lyrical/ poetic side on the other?
Lyrics almost always come last for me. When I’m writing a new song, I’ll typically start with a tiny unit of melody and obsess over it until it grows into a more complete sketch. My demos are all me singing nonsense words over a melody—I don’t fill in the actual lyrics until later. Sometimes moments of meaning or near-meaning find their way into the nonsense, though—maybe it’s superstitious of me, but I always feel like it’s important to attend to these moments, and I often use them as the starting point from which I build the rest of the lyrics out. For me, it’s most important that the feeling of the song be right—the lyrics have to fit in with this feeling, of course, but they aren’t the first thing I attend to. Oddly, it’s the process of composing a melody, rather than writing the lyrics, that feels most like writing a poem to me.
You feature some simple yet stunning artwork on Light as well as throughout the rest of your work. Clearly a strong element running throughout your creative processes, can you give us a little insight into the types of artwork you focus on and their meaning / symbolism to you?
The artwork for Light is by Tracy Maurice, a Montreal-based visual artist whose work I love and who also happens to be a friend of a friend. I knew that I wanted the cover image to be something pretty naturalistic, and that I wanted it to relate to the themes of light and darkness, which are central to the record. Tracy came up with a few possibilities, and this was the one that seemed to fit best. I think the artwork echoes the music in a lot of ways—the basic components of the images are familiar, organic objects, but their presentation makes them feel much stranger, almost otherworldly. Tracy is exceptionally good at creating this sort of effect.
There are a conspicuous amount of cat photos featuring on your Instagram account, can I ask what is his / her name and just how much … has helped influence you’re your debut album albeit subtlety and as a source of inspiration when pondering a new direction or aspect on Light?
My cat’s name is Monday. I love him dearly— I can’t say he’s a big influence on my creative work, but he’s a great lap-warmer and a reliable source of comedic relief, which is certainly helpful whenever I start to take myself too seriously. He is a dedicated murderer of small lizards and can also do “sit,” “shake,” and “lie down” for a treat. He doesn’t care about music.
