Sunday Service interview
transcribed by lina / milkymoon

HOW DID YOU LEARN TO PLAY THE HARP?

Well, I started when I was very young -- well, not VERY young, I was probably eight years old... but I was in love with it for years before I actually started playing it. And I happened to have a harp teacher in the town where I grew up... which is strange, because it was a very small town, and it doesn't seem like we'd have a harp teacher there. But we happened to, and so I was lucky enough to be able to take lessons. My first teacher ever, her name was Lisa Stein - she encouraged me to improvise and to compose from my very first lesson onward. She emphasized those things as much as learning the classical repertoire.

And then another one of my teachers, when I got a little bit higher up in my abilities, my second teacher, REALLY epmhasized the western classical music more... but that was really important because that honed my technique, because a lot of that music is really difficult to play and so i feel like the years that i spent doing that and playing orchestral pieces and like Debussy, and a lot of really technically complicated music, it gave me a better technical ability and it also gave me a better idea of how the harp works - all the mechanical and arrangement ideas that I've taken in over the years came a lot from that period of time.

I had another teacher who taught me a lot of West african music. Diana Stork was a teacher who i studied with in the summer time, at a folk music camp in Mendocino Redwoods in California, and i learned a lot of West African harp techniques from her, and those were probably the most important thing that I learned for developing my own compositional style, my own rhythmic ideas and that kind of thing. Especially the West African concept of "three against four" which is very different from, like, a Latin American poly-rhythmic sense of "three against four". The West African way of thinking of rhythm is really interesting to me, and I sort of have played with it more and thought of "five against seven" or "nine against ten" and all these arrangements of meter layered over meter that I think have a really interesting effect on the body, when the body listens to it. It's this really disjunctive, disorienting rhythmic sense - it's not as familiar to the ear, but I think it can have a really interesting effect and it can signify interesting things in a piece of music.


WHEN DID YOU KNOW YOU WANTED TO PLAY HARP?

I don't know... honestly I don't know if I've heard it somewhere or if I saw it somewhere, but I really was fixated on it. We first went to this teacher, the local teacher, when I was four years old, because I had begged my parents to let me take lessons, then at that time the teacher said I was too young. So I had to take piano lessons until I was eight.


IT REALLY TAKES HALF AN HOUR TO TUNE THE HARP BEFORE A CONCERT?

Yeah, well it's time consuming. It's not difficult, but it takes a good half a hour - I've something like fourty-six strings I have to tune. I think so - many harps are different, this is a rental harp, so I haven't actually counted the strings but I think it has fourty-six. Mine at home has fourty-six. Hehe. And it does take a long time.


DO YOU PRACTICE A LOT?

It kind of depends, I go through cycles. I've gone through periods of time where I practice six hours a day - but I've gone through periods of time where I only practice one. And sometimes I can get really frustrated or burnt out and not touch it for weeks on end. I do really feel like I go in cycles. I don't know - there are a lot of harpists who work much harder than I do; six hours a day all year long, you know? That kind of thing. And doing scales. I don't tend to do a lot of technical practice anymore, I don't really do scales, I don't really do etudes, I don't do much work on my classical repertoire anymore. But I'm hoping when I get some time off I can practice that stuff again, 'cause it is good to just keep healthy hands and healthy technique. Everything like that. 'Cause, I play hard. When I'm on stage in these venues, I play physically harder than I normally do, and it's easy to injure yourself if you're not really well-practiced.


DOESN'T IT TAKE A LOT OF CONCENTRATION TO SING AND PLAY AT THE SAME TIME?

Some of my pieces are more difficult to play for me than others. And so, certain ones - such as "Swansea" - that song was really hard for me to learn how to sing over, 'cause of the rhythmic - the downbeat keeps shifting around and it's rhythmically very strange. Certain songs are much more straight-forward rhythmically and it's easy to layer the vocals over.

But I try to, when I write lyrics, I try to think of them in a musical sense so that singing them is almost like just layering another contrapuntal line of music over the others, and hopefully it can feel as organic and natural as possible so I don't really have to think too much, I can just kind of do it. And I've gotten more accustomed to doing it over time, it's not as difficult anymore.


WHAT DOES "THE MILK-EYED MENDER" MEAN?

Well it's a reference to, you know, to mend something, is to fix or repair cloth with a needle and thread; you mend a hole in fabric, that kind of thing. So, the Milk-Eyed Mender was an old woman who is going blind and her eyes are the colour of milk from going blind, and she's mending something.


YOUR LYRICS ARE VERY PLAYFUL AND WHIMSICAL

I don't necessarily agree with that, I understand that, but maybe I've become a bit averse to that interpretation, becauce it reminds me too much of children and childhood, and I feel like people are a little bit too hasty to interpret childlike or innocent meanings in a lot of the lyrics. In fact I would say that the lyrics for me are the single most thought-out aspect of anything that I do -- I spend more time picking the words. I like them to have not just single meanings but sometimes double meanings.

I like them to have particular syllabic emphasies - you know, to have certain syllables of words stressed in certain points so that it lines up with the music or it syncopates with the music in really particular ways.

I like there to be really good balance to the lines, you know, like, syntactic parallelism where - you know there's a famous Dickensian one where he says; "He fell out of his chair, and into love", where both of those things one can fall out of and into but one is a noun, like a solid noun, like a chair, and the other is a concept, like love. Those sorts of games with syntax are really interesting to me to play with.

So that's all these mathematical ideas, you know, rhyming and illiteration and syntactical mechanics - but at the same time, I also try to write from the gut. And a lot of the content is very intuitive, and most of it's biographical -- it's not necessarily literal, but it's not made up, it's not from a fairytale, it's from my life. Although sometimes I think of it in fantastical terms, so it's not literal, but it is all things that are comments on what has happened to me.

But they're never chosen arbitrarily, and they're never chosen whimsically. they're always really important to me, and they all contain meaning. I know that it can't necessarily be an obvious meaning and it's not imperative to me that the listener understands exactly what I mean. It's OK that it's an impressionistic sense, you know? More like a flash of images instead of a literal, linear storyline. It's OK that it's there but it's important to me that there's some weight and some meaning behind all of the lyrics - that it's not just this lighthearted fairytale narrative, you know?


YOUR FIRST TWO EP'S WERE NOTICED BY WILL OLDHAM, WHO SIGNED YOU TO HIS LABEL

Actually, the idea with the first EPs was to do nothing with them. Basically I just wrote the music at home and I recorded it just so I wouldn't forget it - similar to just writing a thought down on a piece of paper so you don't forget it - they were just archiving it for myself, I didn't think of them as EPs, I thought of them as homerecorded CDRs full of music. And they included mistakes, they included things that I knew I would wanna change later -- all that stuff.

And then I handed a few of them out to friends, just to see what they thought, and didn't have any plans to perform -- I mean, this was still while I was going to college and studying composition. I had just started changing my mind about what I wanted to do musically, but I had only changed my mind about the music, I hadn't really thought about performing. That world hadn't really appealed to me, or even occurred to me.

But I got some really nice feedback from friends. And the way any of this started was basically that one of the CDRs got passed along to Will Oldham... and he asked me to tour with him. So through him I started getting to tour and then through him, I also was connected with Drag City, because that's also his label. So I didn't really pursue labels, I didn't send anything out, I didn't think "I want to be a recording artist". I just kind of fell into it. And they offered to release a record for me, and so...


WOULD YOU LIKE TO COLLABORATE WITH OTHER ARTISTS?

I'm not terribly interested in playing harp on other people's music right now. Partly because I feel like many people view the harp as this kind of gimmick. You know, like they have songs that are fully realized, complete songs, and then they think "How do we make this special? - Ooh, let's bring the harp in!" and they kind of want a harpist to play a glissando and play some heavenly noise in the background. I'm really interested in the harp as a fully actualized, self-contained way of presenting songs. That there is a bass in the harp - there is a way to create a rhythmic sense without drums - there's a way to have all sorts of textural variations and expressive variations.

I also don't want to feel bound to the harp, I'd be interested in bringing other intruments in at some time. But I think the harp has been viewed in one particular way for so long, and has been limited for so long, that I feel like I am really interested in stretching the boundaries of what it's capable of doing and how it's perceived.


ARE THERE OTHER HARPISTS OUT THERE LIKE YOU?

The only one that I know of is Zeena Parkins who tends to play pretty experimental interesting new music, and she's been doing it for some years. She's best known in the kind of "popular" context for playing harp with Björk. But she's done really interesting music on her own - much more interesting. She's done stuff with Fred Frith who was a teacher at the college I went to, so that was how I was introduced to a lot of her experimental music, through that music program. She's obviously coming from a different perspective aswell, than I am... doing a lot of noise experimentation, electronic experimentation, manipulation of organic sounds and that sort of thing. I think she has different goals and definitely a different aesthetic than I do - I like and very much respect her work, but I don't feel a close affinity with it. Other than that, I don't know of anybody - maybe there are some people underground.