Jenn Wasner is painstakingly aware of the ways we ensconce ourselves in difficult positions. Cycles of shame and hurt can feel strangely homely because of how familiar they are even as we move forward in our lives. The most uncomfortable part is often not the hurt but the sudden recognition of our role in them; for Wasner, that was over 10 years ago, when she came to identify with the Enneagram type known as the Helper, who center themselves around empathy, kindness, and a strong desire to nurture others – coupled, of course, with an equally strong fear of being unloved and uneasiness to accept help. These patterns bear out on The Life You Save, her radiant new album under the Flock of Dimes moniker, which creates a warmly inviting, deceptively straightforward environment to accommodate its complex ideas around addiction and co-dependency. Two decades into her career – with several solo records under her belt aside from her work in Wye Oak and collaborations with Bon Iver, Sylvan Esso, and many others – the simplicity of its songs can feel subversive, and, more importantly, the only way to really sit with and wrench the truth out of them, paradoxical as it may seem. As she reminds herself on ‘Defeat’, “I’m inside it, after all.”
We caught up with Flock of Dimes to talk about the Yamaha FG75, Björk’s Vespertine, Altadena, and other inspirations behind her new album The Life You Save.
Yamaha FG75 acoustic guitar
I feel like I’ve really shied away from acoustic guitar specifically, and there’s a couple reasons for that. Coming of age in the music industry as a woman who sings songs, I was very fearful of being boxed into the female singer-songwriter trope, and I felt this deep desire to sort of prove to the world all the ways in which I was more than that. And also, purely from a sensory perspective, I never found an acoustic guitar that I enjoyed playing. Just the feel always was off for me. With acoustic guitars specifically, it’s either the most beautiful instrument you’ve ever played, or it’s kind of garbage. For me, there’s very little middle ground. I find the experience of playing electric guitar is so much smoother, and there are so many more sonic possibilities there.
I was on tour, and my partner, who’s a guitar player and is much more knowledgeable about guitars than I am, found this guitar at Maine Drag Music in Brooklyn. He was like, “These Yamahas are actually really great, and they’re relatively affordable. I feel like you might like it.” I picked it up, and instantly I connected with it in a way that I had not connected with an acoustic guitar before. There’s just this ramshackle charm. They’re very small-scale, more of a parlor guitar, and there’s a lot of character – I love the way it looks, the way it feels, the way it sounds. It was one of those moments where I was like, “There are a lot of songs here.” Since then, I’ve acquired a second guitar, a similar ‘70s Yamaha acoustic that I also love.
In parallel to that experience, I’m 20 years into my career – I’ve made a lot of music, I’ve made a lot of records, and I feel like I’m at this place where I have less to prove about who I am and what I’m about and what I’m capable of. And for that reason, it felt like a door was opened to this other world that I had consciously or unconsciously avoided. I fixated on acoustic instruments in the context of a world that is very of the moment. There’s a lot of humanity and imperfection in an acoustic instrument, it’s so temperamental. And of course, the context is shifting, right? When I was starting out, I was very pulled to these different technologies, but now I feel like my relationship to technology is more one of fear and trepidation, and in many ways, especially with things like AI beginning to take over the world, I intuitively felt that it was the most radical thing that I could do right now at this moment, to lean into things that are very human. In general, but also in the context of this record and what it’s about. There’s a ton of acoustic guitar on the record, mandolin, tenor guitar, cello – a lot of stringed instruments that have that warmth and humanity to them.
When did your shifting feelings around the instrument begin to overlap with what this record was shaping up to be thematically?
I think it was all sort of happening simultaneously. It’s interesting because my experience of making records is that while it’s happening. I’m working from a very intuitive place. All of this sort of theorizing about the context and the choices made is something that I’m able to do after the fact, and it all feels very true, but I don’t really necessarily go into it with all of those pieces in place. It’s more like I’m following an intuitive thread, and I’m also sort of following where the songs are coming from. I really struggle to not think too hard or apply too much theory or concept too early, because I think that can kind of shape the direction of the record in a way that’s not entirely authentic, or that it’s not quite ready to hold. I think it was more subconscious, and then after the record starts to shape up and you start to see the thing as a whole, it’s easier to figure out those conceptual threads.
You’re able to achieve a lot of atmospheric effects with the pedals that you use on the album, but a lot of the dynamic range comes from just the way you play the acoustic, like the urgent strumming of ‘The Enemy’ juxtaposed with the patient finger-picking of ‘Not Yet Free’. How often were you changing your approach to certain chord patterns as you were feeling out a song?
Here’s a great example of electroacoustic tactics in a way that might not necessarily be obvious to the listener: the song ‘Defeat’ took a lot of different forms before it turned into what it is on the record. It almost had a Fleetwood Mac ‘Dreams’ kind of strummy acoustic guitar pattern – it’s still in the track, but it is actually audible as a percussive, almost shakery thing. If you listen to this song from the beginning, that’s an acoustic guitar — it’s actually run through a vocoder that doesn’t have a carrier signal on it, so it turns into this brushy thing. There’s a repeating note, and it’s very clipped – that’s a ukulele note, but we used Ableton to clip it really hard on the attack, so it just sounds very abrupt. There’s all these little moments of acoustic instruments being used in unexpected, sort of non-traditional ways. I think it can be tempting when you’re using these instruments that have so much history and context around them, to use them in really traditional ways, and I was more excited to apply the same possibility for experimentation that I’ve always had within my music to these new instruments.
Björk’s Vespertine
I’m jumping to this inspiration because I feel it has the most direct influence on ‘Defeat’. I saw it in a list of your all-time favorite records, but are there any specific ways it came up on this record?
You’re quite correct to jump to that one, because ‘Defeat’ is really the song that’s the most indicative of my obsession with that record. I had talked a lot with Nick, who produced that song with me, about what makes that record so special, and for ‘Defeat’ in particular, we were very intentionally using Vespertine as a reference. Obviously, the drum programming that he did that enters in the chorus is heavily inspired and beautifully executed by Nick, who is a brilliant genius. There’s the idea of drums that are very fragile but still hit hard – there’s this tininess, this thin fragility to those drums. There’s no big, booming kick drum, there’s nothing that’s taking up a lot of space in the low end. It’s almost like the complexity and the fragility is the thing that drives it. Vespertine is a great example of a record where there’s tiny drums that slap. That was what we were going for with the production of that song.
Did toying with the production end up illuminating the lyrics in a way that is clearer now?
Yeah. I almost cut that song, honestly. That song was about to be on the cutting room floor before Nick and I were able to find a version of it that made sense. The really straightforward way in which I wrote it almost made the lyrics feel a little bit too trite, whereas the context that we found with the track as it exists on the record I think creates a space in which the directness of the lyrics makes sense and doesn’t feel too on the nose. I do think thematically it’s a really important track for the record to have, so I’m really grateful that we were able to find a way to make it work.
The Enneagram
Some people really have a hard time with personality frameworks, and I get that. Also, I think people get really caught up and fixated on this idea of, is it real or is it not real? For me, I just don’t really care as much as I feel like it’s very helpful for me to use have a framework, use a framework, and observe my reaction to it. That’s really useful as far as understanding more about myself. But the Enneagram is essentially – this is a gross oversimplification, but there’s nine personality types, and each type basically has certain motivations and tendencies, and it also exists on a spectrum. I’m a type 2, which is commonly kind of referred to as the Helper.
I discovered the Enneagram back when I was still living in Baltimore, which was over 10 years ago at this point. I was going around creative circles in Baltimore and reading about it, just being struck, in not necessarily a good way, by some of the descriptions in my type. Sort of an undeniable feeling of recognition, but in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily have even wanted to admit to myself – uncomfortable. And since then, it’s become a really useful framework for me to become aware of my patterns. I don’t think I would have been able to make this record and progress in my life, personally and in my relationships, without this particular framework. It laid the groundwork in many ways for the things that I needed to discover and uncover about myself and the decisions I was making in all of my relationships . It was a really integral part of the growth and self-exploration that needed to happen before I would have ever been able to make a record like this.
The song ‘Pride’ is a really direct reference to my type, because pride is the passion of the two, and the passion is essentially your primary vice. Something that’s really holding you back, something that needs to be confronted. And that song is an exploration of what that means. The duality of that word is really interesting, too, because it’s one thing to be like, “I’m very proud of what I’ve done, I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished.” But the definition of pride that I’m speaking from in that song is from the place of being too proud – too proud to ask for help, too proud to admit that you don’t have it all under control, to show that you’re hurting.
There’s a certain amount of pride involved in believing that you have what it takes to solve other people’s problems for them, or that you know better, or that you don’t need others to help you. ‘Pride’ and ‘I Think I’m God’, the last track, are basically about confronting that shadow side of the Helper archetype. There’s an ugliness to thinking that you are somehow good enough and strong enough and smart enough to fix everyone’s life. That was a key for me to understand how to let some of that go.
Altadena, California
You wrote a bit about Altadena in your newsletter back in January. How did living in Altadena intersect with the process of making The Life You Save?
My partner and I were living in Altadena a couple separate times while we were exploring the possibility of making a more permanent move. This record is very much equally a product of my previous home in North Carolina, and my community there at a recording studio called Betty’s, and everyone that surrounds that place, and being here in LA, working with my friend Adrian Olsen at his studio, Montrose. The first time we tried to finish the record, which didn’t quite stick, we were living in Altadena, and I actually wrote, just before we were about to go into the studio, very rapidly, two of what I would say are the most important songs on this record. I wrote ‘Long After Midnight’, and then two days later, I wrote ‘River in My Arms’. I can’t imagine the record without those songs.
Sometimes when you leave, you arrive at a new place, and something gets sort of shaken loose. All of a sudden, you’re in touch with some part of your creativity that was missing or harder to access in the older place. I really associate this record and this process very heavily with living in Altadena. Ultimately, we did decide to move here, and sadly, as soon as we got here, the Eden Fire happened – the week we moved. We’re in Pasadena now, so we’re very close, but we still go almost every day to the businesses that have survived. It’s been truly heartbreaking, because that was a place that I think we both felt, for the first time, like we could live here, we could do this. We fell in love with the place. Obviously, our hearts are broken for the people who had homes that they lost and lived there for much longer than we did. It’s been a strange experience, but I’m so grateful to have had the time that we had. I really treasure that time, and there’s something about the magic of that place that absolutely unlocked the remaining pieces of the record.
You’ve said it’s the first place in LA that felt like home, which is an idea you turn over on the album. One of my favorite lines is, “I keep going till I’m slowing/ ‘Cause the going feels like home.”
Yeah, the going is one of the only homes I feel like I have, honestly. It’s a strange feeling, but it’s true – it really does feel familiar. There’s a familiarity to it, even as it exhausts you. I’m still drawn to that tactic. Having left my home in Baltimore and then found a new home in North Carolina, and now I’ve left that place – not entirely, obviously I’ll still be there – but there’s a built-in sort of itinerant feeling when so much of my work has to do with travel. There’s a part of me that really loves it, and there’s a part of me that feels very adrift.
Live vocal takes
This is a kind of a classic thing people say, where they’re like, “I really want my vocals to feel really real and flawed and live.” It’s a very easy thing to say, very difficult thing to actually do. I have a really good ear, so I know when something is off, I experience it as a mistake. I also know that if I’m going to allow myself to do the thing I set out to do, I’m going to have to almost trick myself into letting it happen by creating a set of rules for myself to inhabit. I don’t believe that mistakes are bad and to be avoided. I’m certainly guilty of over-perfecting some of my music, or attempting to over-perfect it, and losing something in the process. It’s something I’m really learning, still, how not to do. Because when I listen to other people’s music, many of the imperfections and the flaws are the things that I’m the most connected to and feel really moved by. It’s just that when it comes from you, it’s almost impossible for your brain not to internalize it as a mistake.
Not all takes are live, but a good portion of the record, they are fully live. I think setting that rule in place kind of subverts my natural inclination to want to over-fix, because it happens so quickly – you fix one little thing, you redo one little thing, and next thing you know you’ve completely railroaded it into something else entirely. When I listen to the record, I still hear things that part of me wants to fix, but I’m glad I didn’t. I think one of the things I’ve gotten better at as a producer of my own music is learning how to subvert myself and learning how to trick myself into not wanting to over-perfect.
Were there any moments of recording vocals that stick out in your memory?
Absolutely. ‘Long After Midnight’, for sure. That’s a full live vocal take. ‘Not Yet Free’. ‘I Think I’m God’ was maybe the craziest recording experience of my life. That song is fully live, and it’s me and Alan [Good Parker]. Alan’s playing cello; the bass in that song is actually cello. This was in North Carolina at Betty’s. My friend Ali [Rogers] was engineering. We set everything up, and I wanted to get in a headspace, so I’d brought along this letter. It’s a letter from someone I love who has struggled, something that every time I read it, it just hit me right in the heart. I read this letter, and as I took it out, out of nowhere, one of those North Carolina summer rainstorms just came through. The skies just opened up, it started pouring. I’m close to tears, there’s this crazy rainstorm, we sit down, and we do the take. And then the rain stopped, and that was the take. [laughs] It was wild. It felt spooky. I had turned all the lights off and lit all these candles, and the whole thing almost felt like a weird spell. I’ve never had a recording experience like that before. I almost couldn’t believe it worked. Magic is real, I guess.
Playing house shows
You’ve been doing these tours where you play in people’s living rooms. How has that experience affected you or your perspective on songwriting?
Honestly, it has been such a gift to discover this method of performing and moving through the world. I love it so much. I’ve been hearing about it for years, but I sort of resisted trying, because there’s so much in this industry on the business side that nobody sees. There’s all these weird gatekeepers to success, and there’s all these rules about what you do and don’t do if you’re trying to grow and build. I’ve always been a little bit of a weirdo with that stuff. I’m ambivalent at best about attention. I don’t have the kind of ambition that I feel like a lot of my peers have. I’ve experienced what it feels like to grow a band and enjoy performing less and less and less, so I’ve learned over the years the extent to which the one-size-fits-all proposition of the music industry really doesn’t feel comfortable. I’ve made a lot of choices to try to stay afloat in this world without compromising too much.
I think there’s this idea that if you start doing these house shows, you’re washed up, your career’s over, and it’s just what you do on your way out the door. But I honestly couldn’t feel less like that’s true. For me, for my personality, I feel like I feel the best when I’m able to interact directly with people. I’m a very social, relational person, so it just means so much to me – these small, intimate spaces that always sound really good. You get to talk to people, you get to hear their stories about how your music has affected them and touched their lives. You get to feel like a normal human being moving through the world. It just feels safe and connective and authentic. It’s all of the things I love about making and performing music, and very few of the things I hate. It just feels very aligned with who I am and how I like to do this.
Feeling as impacted by this experience as I have, I feel like it’s going to be the primary way that I tour moving forward. Knowing that does influence the kind of songs that you write, because of course you want to be able to perform, and I feel like it’s naturally trickled down to the way that I’m writing. This record is very much a representation of how I am in this world, where it’s assured and ambitious in some ways, but it’s not super flashy. I think it’s probably a grower, and it takes time and attention to unlock. That’s very much an embodiment of where I’m at with my career and how I want to play music for others.
Cass McCombs’ Catacombs
This record is one of my all-time favorite records. It’s had so much growth and staying power in my life. The first time I heard it, my reaction was that this is beautiful, but it’s also what I was saying about what I hope is true about my record, where the songs are so thematically and lyrically complex. There’s so many wild and thorny ideas and concepts, yet it all exists in this very warm and straightforward space. It’s a record that I’ve come back to many times because it feels good to listen to, and I feel like Cass and his band on that record really succeeded in creating a space in which some of these ideas could really thrive in this way that I am amazed by. It was very much an inspiration from the beginning. It’s rare that I do this, but there was a part of me, before I even really had the songs for this record, that was like, “I think the most radical thing that I could do in my career right now would be to make my version of this record.”
I think it’s such a flex. It shows such confidence in your words. I think Cass, like me, is a very lyric-based songwriter, for the heads. I’ve always admired his lyricism, and that was really where I wanted the focus of my record to be. I like the idea, given the subject matter of my record, of intentionally creating a space that was warm and inviting and not alienating. For me and for the listener, because I feel like a lot of this stuff is heavy and difficult to hold, to stay with, and there’s a part of me that just wanted to make sure it was as sonically accessible as possible. Also, there’s a lot of pedal steel on that Cass record, and I love the pedal steel. My partner, Alan, who plays all over this record, is a great pedal steel player, so that instrument has become such a part of my daily life, even just casually hearing it in the house.
I think there’s an assuredness in not being like, “Look what I can do.” I feel like there’s so much music like that out there now, and I have no issue with it – it just feels like it’s coming from a very different space. I certainly had my phase of my career where I was way more in a look-what-I-can-do kind of moment. But I’m not really there at this moment. I’m thinking more about how I want to feel when I’m having to engage with some of these uncomfortable, painful truths.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Flock of Dimes’ The Life You Save is out now via Sub Pop.
