was the kind of album that snuck up on you. What seemed at
first like a collection of punchy indie-pop and unguarded
acoustic ballads eventually wormed its way into your life until it became an old friend, always
there with a wise word or a dollop of empathy to remind you that
we're all just trying to figure it out.
That's kind of like the key to all of it: I feel like I can't let the changes affect the way that I write. What
I have really tried to with this record is figure out how to not
think about all that stuff -- how to make the record that I was
going to make, even if nobody was listening. Of course, I'm affected by
it. But I'm just trying my best to... that's kind of why went off to
Long Island and made the record and just sort of took a bunch of time
off from touring and playing shows, and I reworked my whole band. Also,
when I made the record, I didn't have a label, and that was a conscious
choice, too. Just to be a person making music, with no
one checking in there, or asking me what I was doing.
Do you have a day job at the moment, or at the time?No, I've been fully employed by Waxahatchee for a little while now, which is pretty cool.
When did you get the sense that this is something you can make a career out of, for lack of better term?I
felt something was right when
Cerulean Salt came out. I quit my job
then, so that must have been two years ago now. Almost exactly
two years ago, I quit my day job where I was a nanny. There was no way I
could've kept a job because of how much stuff I had planned. And then, after all that touring, things sort of picked
up unexpectedly.
I know you've been making music for a long
time, both with this and with other projects, but when did you get the
sense that you can spend your life being a professional songwriter and
that would be just what you do? I don't really know. I don't
think I consider myself a professional musician until this year. It's
just something I always did. I started writing songs when I was about
15. I fell in love with it immediately. As soon as I started
doing that, it felt like what I wanted to do all the time. It was a social thing at first: just hanging out and playing shows with
all my friends. But I was always really proactive. I think to the outside world -- to my
parents, to my teachers -- I appeared to be such a fuck-up. I was drinking and smoking pot and just sleeping through school and
flunking out. But
all the while, I was writing records and booking tours and playing
shows and printing merch and making sure that my band was doing all of
this stuff all the time.
Do your parents now kind of trust that you made the right decision?Oh,
totally. It's a scary thing for your kid to be like, "Yeah, I
just want to play music all the time." A lot of parents are like, "Do
you think you're going to make money doing this?" And we were like,
"Fuck that, we don't care about making money. We just want to make
records." And that was a little scary for them, too, probably. So
it's nice -- I think it's nice for them to see us be able to keep our
heads above water and do what we really want to do. I mean, I think
that's all that anyone's parents want for their kids -- to be happy and to stay afloat doing something that they
love.
When
people write about an album, they obviously bring their own stuff into
it. But I remember a lot of
reviews for your last one talked about how this seems like a person
writing about living in a smaller college town, and how you can be in your own little world, and
it can feel like it's closing in on you. This album seems a lot broader in terms of the viewpoint. What were you thinking about
when you were focusing on the lyrics? I wrote a lot of
Cerulean Salt... I
mean, I already was in Brooklyn, but I was writing it about a time
where I was just in smaller cities. I lived in Tuscaloosa,
Alabama for a while, which is a college town, when I went to
Birmingham. A lot of that record is about that experience and that
time of my life, even though I had already moved away. And this
record... yeah. I try to keep things vague enough where I don't really
blow up anybody's spot, but a lot of things are about actual experiences
that I've had with actual people. With
Ivy Tripp, it's more about
observation -- things that I observed on a grander scale, and things
that I've seen, and things that I've just observed about certain
people's behaviors. That was a challenge for me, and that was something
I had wanted to try and see how it turned out.
So your sister has been
joining you on tour. How is it playing with her again, after both of you
doing your own thing for a while?It's cool. I mean, it's a
different dynamic. We've only ever been in bands before that were very
democratic. Everybody kind of gets to have their say. So I have to
delegate everything and it's interesting. It's like a new dynamic for
that, but so far, it's working out great.
Everyone gets a say, but you get the final say?Exactly. Which is kind of nice for me.
People will often knock indie rock, or
whatever you want to call it, as a boys club. In these past few months,
your album's out, there's a new album Speedy Ortiz, there's Courtney
Barnett, there's Joanna Gruesome. A lot of great, strong,
female artists making music. Do you think indie rock is seeing a bit
more gender parity?Honestly, I feel pretty
fortunate to be making music right now. I've experienced a lot of
bullshit in my life when it comes to misogyny in the music world. A
lot. Every woman, every queer person, every trans person, every person
of color has. Except for white, cisgendered men, everyone playing music
functions in a world of bullshit. So I don't want to downplay that by
saying I'm so lucky. It's been difficult for me and much more difficult
for other people, I'm sure. But, I think it's really fucking cool just
to be making music in a time where I think the best music happening
right now is being made by women. I'm sure everyone's still experiencing
some bullshit, but it is sort of cool to feel like, oh yeah, women are
kind of running things right now.
So what was it like seeing someone sing one of your songs in The Walking Dead?That
was weird. That song ("Be Good") is a song I wrote a long time ago and
I think that, for me, those scratchy, lo-fi, aesthetics makes it sort
of bearable, because it's so sweet and sugary for a song that I would
play. So that layer of scratchiness kind of makes it listenable. And
hearing it the way that it was played made me feel sort of
strange. But I think (
Walking Dead actress Emily Kinney) has a pretty
voice it was kind of cool. It was just a little strange for me.
Hearing it in that clean, straightforward way, did it still feel like your song?Not really. I think that's kind of the nail on the head. Yeah, it
just didn't feel like my song, really. Which is fine.
Did you actually watch the episode it was in or did you just hear what they did with it?I
didn't watch it. I don't have cable. When it was on, my mom or
somebody sent me a video of that part, so I saw the part, but I didn't
see the episode.
On average, when you talk to your fans or
people who don't know you but you're just talking to, how many people
pronounced your band's name correctly? Like, what percent?Hmm. 75 percent.
Oh. That's higher than I would have guessed. I had pronounced it wrong for quite a while before someone corrected me.Oh,
it's OK. Fifteen percent say it incorrectly, and then 10 percent sort of
look at me and try to say it, but aren't sure if they're saying it
correctly, and then I just tell them:
You say it
exactly how it looks.