Ladi Bird is Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut, which she also wrote, starring Saoirse Ronan as Christine MacPherson, who gives herself the name “Lady Bird”. It’s 2002 and Lady Bird is a Senior at her Sacramento Catholic high school. She’s determined to get out of her smalltown home and go to a prestigious college at the end of the year, but she’s already started distancing herself from her family.
Her mother (Laurie Metcalf) fruitlessly protests against Lady Bird’s decision, but she never listens. Their relationship becomes increasingly strained as Lady Bird joins the theatre program, gets a boyfriend, and finds a new group of friends.
The film is rooted in its setting with a soundtrack to match. Here are thirteen of the best songs from the soundtrack of Lady Bird.
With Fun In My Life – James Whitney
Hey It’s Love – The Commands
Hand In My Pocket – Alanis Morissette
Panis Angelicus – Adolf Fredrik Girls Choir
Little Of Your Love – HAIM
Days Of Steam – John Cale
Crash Into Me – Dave Matthews Band
The Crossroads – Bone Thugs-N-Harmony
This Eve Of Parting – John Hartford
Happy Birthday – Altered Images
Always See Your Face – Love
Rosa Mystica – The University of Notre Dame Folk Choir
Theodore Twombly is a soulful greeting card writer who is going through a divorce when he decides to install an OS (Operating System) as a companion. Samantha feels like a real person who understands Theodore’s feelings and has her own desires, but she’s not physically tangible. The two begin a romantic relationship, which helps Theodore better understand his failed marriage.
Joaquin Phoenix gives a tender, emotional performance as a man skilled in dealing with other people’s emotions and relationships, but not so much with his own. He’s easy to identify with because so much of him is bared for the audience. His worldview is the lens for the whole film; viewers never see things from Samantha’s perspective, which leaves the audience feeling as distant from her as Theodore does.
The warm hues give the film an intimate feel suitable for the topics it explores. The atmosphere is further accentuated by Scarlett Johansson’s gentle voiceover as Samantha. Nobody sees her – neither the characters nor the audience – but her presence is palpable. Rooney Mara, Amy Adams, Olivia Wilde, and Chris Pratt also star.
All in all, the film is uplifting and hopeful despite Theodore’s loneliness and melancholy. Here are sixteen memorable quotes about love from Spike Jonze’s Her.
Samantha: But the heart’s not like a box that gets filled up; it expands in size the more you love.
Samantha: You know what’s interesting? I used to be so worried about not having a body, but now … I truly love it. You know, I’m growing in a way I couldn’t if I had a physical form … I’m not limited. I can be anywhere and everywhere simultaneously. I’m not tethered to time and space in a way that I would be if I was stuck in a body that’s inevitably gonna die.
Theodore Twombly: Sometimes I think I’ve felt everything I’m ever gonna feel, and from here on out, I’m not gonna feel anything new … just … lesser versions of what I’ve already felt.
Samantha: The past is just a story we tell ourselves.
Theodore Twombly: I keep waiting to not care about her.
Theodore Twombly: Roberto, Will you always come home with me and tell me about your day? Tell me about the guy at work who talked too much, the stain you got on your shirt at lunch … Even if you get home late and I’m already asleep, just whisper in my ear one little thought you had today, ’cause I love the way you look at the world. I’m so happy I get to be next to you and look at the world through your eyes. Love, Maria.
Theodore Twombly: Dear Catherine, I’ve been sitting here thinking about all the things I wanted to apologize to you for. All the pain we caused each other. Everything I put on you. Everything I needed you to be or needed you to say. I’m sorry for that. I’ll always love you ’cause we grew up together and you helped make me who I am. I just wanted you to know there will be a piece of you in me always, and I’m grateful for that. Whatever someone you become, and wherever you are in the world, I’m sending you love. You’re my friend to the end. Love, Theodore.
Theodore Twombly: We grew up together … But that’s also the hard part: growing without growing apart or changing without it scaring the other person.
Samantha: You helped me discover my ability to want.
Samantha: I don’t like who I am right now. I need some time to think.
Samantha: … the DNA of who I am is based on the millions of personalities of all the programmers who wrote me. But what makes me me is my ability to grow through my experiences. So basically, in every moment I’m evolving, just like you.
Samantha: What if you could erase from your mind that you’d seen a human body, and then you saw one? Imagine how strange it would look. It’d be this really weird, gangly, awkward organism. And you’d think, “Why are all these parts where they are?”
Theodore Twombly: Sometimes I look at people and make myself try and feel them as more than just a random person walking by. I imagine how deeply they’ve fallen in love, or how much heartbreak they’ve all been through.
Catherine: You always wanted to have a wife without the challenges of actually dealing with anything real …
Amy:I think anybody who falls in love is a freak. It’s is a crazy thing to do. It’s kind of like a form of socially acceptable insanity.
Samantha: It’s like I’m reading a book and it’s a book I deeply love. But I’m reading it slowly now. So the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you, and the words of our story … but it’s in this endless space between the words that I’m finding myself now.
Kings of Leon may have started teasing their new album almost a year before it was officially announced in early January, but most people didn’t become aware of its existence until just days ahead of its release. That’s when the Tennessee four-piece suddenly became part of the larger cultural conversation surrounding crypto art, becoming the first major rock band to release an album in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT) and thus prompting a swathofarticles longer than any review of the album itself could reasonably be. It’s ironic to think that a band with such a consistently regressive approach to rock music would want to have any stake in the future of the industry at this stage in their career – especially when their name sits alongside that of someone like Grimes, ever the futurist – but then there’s always been a rift between the band as an institution and the band as a group of musicians, and innovation has hardly been the primary force behind either of them.
Needless to say, When You See Yourself is not the sound of a band making history. For a typically revivalist alt-rock act like Kings of Leon, it’s barely even the sound of a band chasing history, or attempting to relive the heights of their own late-aughts hits. If you’ve followed the Followills’ career up until this point – this is now their eight studio outing – it may not surprise you that their latest effort is as unremarkable as it is broadly serviceable. But in half-tempering their arena-sized ambitions, they’ve ended up with a collection of songs that, remarkably, favour subtlety over soaring riffs and shallow choruses, even if the end result still borders on bland indifference. ‘When You See Yourself, Are You Far Away’ serves as a promising introduction to the album, a near 6-minute opener that puts more emphasis on building momentum than arriving at any particular destination or climax.
Kings of Leon still trade in the same predictable formulas, but this time a few noticeable variations lend an atmosphere of understated languor that reflects the album’s loose thematic thread. ‘100,000 People’ conjures a late-night vibe redolent of the group’s pensive ballads, but its dreaminess is aptly juxtaposed with the core sentiment of love persisting through time – even if the “you do” refrain inadvertently revives the by-now irrelevant ‘Southern U2’ tag, practically killing anything the song had going for it. ‘A Wave’ is a low-key highlight buried in the middle of the tracklist, shimmying through a cooing, M83-esque synth that producer Markus Dravs (known for his work with Coldplay and Arcade Fire) nicely blends with the rest of the song’s neon palette. Elsewhere, on tracks like ‘Time in Disguise’ and closer ‘Fairytale’, Followill’s vocals get lost in the mix in ways that hint at a sense of aimlessness without really evoking it, and the same can be said of his vaguely inscrutable lyrics (“I’m going nowhere, if you’ve got the time”).
As is to be expected, When You See Yourself does have its more energetic moments: the anthemic ‘Echoing’ would have fit snuggly on the band’s previous album, 2016’s WALLS, while ‘The Bandit’ harkens back to their Youth and Young Manhood days and almost carries that same youthful energy. The mid-tempo late album cuts ‘Supermarket’ and ‘Claire & Eddie’ are pleasant while they’re on, but it’s hard to see any of the songs here competing with the band’s strongest or most memorable material, even in a live setting. Followill’s invocation to “come a little closer” on ‘Time in Disguise’ mostly has the effect of reminding the listener that they’ve yet to top the best song in their catalogue. On ‘Claire & Eddie’, he brings to mind another one of their hits as he sings, “Fire’s gonna rage if people don’t change,” and you’d be forgiven for not realizing he’s talking about the destruction of the Earth. It’s the following line, stripped out of context, that’s more telling: “A story so old, still so original.” Kings of Leon could have a firmer grasp on that second part.
Oxford-based artist Jaya Mansberger spent her formative years in Nepal and Kauai, an island in Hawaii. Having graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London, she produced psychologically charged portraits before delving into abstract artwork. Jaya also teaches art to young people in Oxford.
The painter has always felt compelled to make art; her first memory related to drawing involves her trying to capture the domed shape and colourful flags of the Swayambhunath Stupa in Kathmandu at age 5. As a child, Jaya also developed a passion for drawing mermaids when living by the sea in Hawaii, and hopes to explore these aquatic creatures in her art again soon. When attending secondary school in Oxford, Jaya’s art teacher encouraged her to apply straight to art school at age 18, and the creator is happy she listened.
Although art usually helps Jaya cope with the state of the world, the pandemic has strongly impacted her art practice. During the first two lockdowns in the UK, the painter lived on a narrowboat on the Oxford canal and was unable to access her studio. Unfortunately, the artist could not make nor store artwork, and had to put her project – a new series of figurative oil paintings – on hold. That being said, Jaya continued to use her sketchbook, and has enjoyed painting the wildflowers growing along the canal towpath with watercolours. She describes painting outside in the sun as an uplifting and useful diversion from doomscrolling.
When detailing what inspires her to make art, Jaya lists: “Intensity, of feeling and vision. Sensuality. Beauty. Grace. Gentleness. Tenderness. Subtlety. Different psychological states. Hope and/or despair. Mystery and the poetic, which have been increasingly erased from our society.” She certainly succeeds in expressing all of this in her breathtaking artwork, making the viewer feel immersed in swirling skies and ethereal atmospheres. Take a look!
Over the years, London Fashion Week has grown significantly. Even in the pandemic stage, the evolution couldn’t stop, and it stood out to be one of the best fashion weeks ever. If you’re a model trying to run down the runway, a buyer, or just a fashion connoisseur, you really have a lot of things to look forward to. Fashion has indeed become big business in today’s time, and you surely don’t want to miss it.
The London Fashion Week, as per statistics, employs around 800,000 people, thereby contributing a lot to the economy of the United Kingdom. It has turned out to become one of the biggest creative industries in the country. The London Fashion Week is indeed allowing the growth of the country.
The London Fashion Week gets held biannually, allowing the designers to express themselves and bring out the best on the platter. It also plays an essential role in bestowing financial standing. Well, the attires and clothes displayed at the London Fashion Week are costly, but they’re surely the ice-breaker.
Over the years, the London Fashion Week is one of the Big Four events that has drastically changed. It has been here for almost four decades now and has some of the most prestigious and historic icons attached to it, such as Queen Elizabeth, Princess Diana, and Margaret Thatcher. The London Fashion Week has it all, from glitz and glamour to big-budget presentations. No matter what you want, you can find it all here.
History
The first London Fashion Week got held in 1984 February, after the British Fashion Council’s foundation. Initially, it wasn’t a grand event. The inaugural of the event took place at a car park in West of London.
Although there was a designer showroom space, all the catwalks happened under a tent. But, this eventually changed with time. Back in 1984, only 15 catwalks were held, which is significantly lesser than the Big Four. However, in the initial phase itself, the London Fashion Week stood out to be an instant hit.
Vivienne Westwood was the prominent designer to feature in the London Fashion Week. The event, as said, has turned into a global phenomenon. The designers, journalists, and buyers from all over the country and world participate in the London Fashion Weekend.
While only a handful of guests were a part of LFW initially, the number has grown significantly. Around 5000 guests were a part of the London Fashion Week in February 2020. Hence, even in the pre-pandemic period, it got estimated that close to 100,000 people had visited the place. One can easily understand the demand for the growth of London Fashion Week.
Around 72 catwalk shows and presentations got held during the February 2020 LFW. But not just the runway. The number of designers is surprising too. Almost 250 designers made it to be a part of the event. The high-luxury clientele has contributed a lot to the popularity.
Compared to other parts of the Big Four, the London Fashion Week is the youngest, and in a short period, it has achieved immense popularity. The New York Fashion Week started in 1943, Milan in 1957, and London eventually in 1973. Around 105,000 visitors make their way to the London Fashion Week, just second to the New York Fashion Week.
The London Fashion Week has played an essential role in enhancing the impact and career of fashion designers. Some of the most influential designers of the country made their way to the London Fashion Week. The debuting fashion designers have also earned fame and reputation. The debut fashion designers have earned instant fame, which has helped to scale up businesses also.
The Lakme Fashion week was an instant success, but despite that, there are several challenges that you may face on the way. However, you need to analyse the immediate terms attached to it, which is why you will need to be careful with it. Furthermore, they are trying to shape up and bring innovations in the changes.
The London Fashion Week hosted in February 2021 had catwalk shows and presentations attached to it. The show got hosted virtually, which eventually helped to bring challenges. The collections held in February got held online. You need to understand the digital showroom as well as one-on-one appointments. The small hiccups further helped to runaway’s success.
London Fashion Week has come a long way. Despite being a new or young fashion event, it has helped businesses. It also contributes to the country’s economy. If you want to be a part of the event, make sure to keep a check on the event’s schedule.
If any band had been guaranteed to use the freed time of COVID-19 lockdown to release new music, it would have been Cloud Nothings. The hardened indie-rock four-piece from Ohio – led by their creative spirit Dylan Baldi – have been relentless in their output over the last decade. The Black Hole Understands arrived last July, just months after COVID-19’s first onset. Now they’re back again with The Shadow I Remember, and it’s a record concerned with growth and change; what else would it be about this deep into their career and also with the sheer strangeness of the pandemic to contend with?
On the production front, the album also marks the return of the celebrated Steve Albini, who worked on the group’s acclaimed 2012 LP Attack on Memory and provides a crisp zip to Baldi’s scuzzy rhythms. “Is this the end of the life I’ve known?” Albini asks to open the album on ‘Oslo’. It’s both a sign that it was a product of quarantine and a moment of introspection; the piano line that murmurs underneath is as melancholic as things on the album get. Ohmme’s Macie Stewart then joins in to ably assist on the following track, the classically furious ‘Nothing Without You’.
Baldi wrote relentlessly before whittling down his collection for The Shadow I Remember, which makes it all the more surprising that some of the songwriting lets the record down. The middle section, comprising ‘Open Rain’, ‘Sound Of Alarm’, and ‘Am I Something?’, is marked by easy sentiments and banal rhetorical questions (“Oh, I need to make time for me, for me”). Baldi has always been an earnest lyricist, but his writing here can at times feel emotionally shallow.
‘It’s Love’ provides a return to form, its title somewhat of a red herring as Baldi spends the majority of the track screaming roughly about how “It’s a hard life.” ‘A Longer Moon’ and ‘The Room It Was’ close the album defiantly, both ballsy blasts of fuzzy raucousness that the band have always traded in well.
For a band so renowned on the live circuit, missing touring will be like missing a limb; perhaps it’s no wonder that Baldi has been so feverishly committed to songwriting, if only to fill the empty time. But the lack of innovation for a band capable of pushing themselves is all that stops The Shadow I Remember from being an essential part of their output. It’s business as usual but nothing more.
Sydney Sprague is a singer-songwriter from the relative musical outlier of Phoenix, Arizona. Her songs unfold with the consistency of a particularly pained section of a diary from one’s teenage emo phase (“everyday is national emo day if you cry hard enough,” she posted late last year alongside a cover of Fall Out Boy’s classic ‘Sugar, We’re Going Down’), when love and relationships are matters of catastrophic proportions: her debut album is fittingly titled maybe i will see you at the end of the world. Sprague’s raw confessions recall contemporaries like Beabadoobee, but where she looked to the alternative grunge of the 90’s, Sprague is clearly indebted to the angsty 2000s pop of Avril Lavigne.
The album’s opening track and lead single also has the potential to be its breakout hit: ‘i refuse to die’ is a headbanging slice of rock cathartic angst, Sprague evidently full of resolve to not go to the end of the world quietly. ‘Object permanence’ then nicely features fellow Phoenix artist Danielle Durack, before ‘steve’ – all distorted guitars and huge choruses – seems made to soundtrack the climactic moments of an early 00s rom-com; it’s almost disorientating listening to it in 2021.
Sprague shows herself equally capable of reducing the tempo. The sighing and swaying ‘you have to stop’ and the quiet strum of ‘quitter’ are a time to pause in the middle of the record. The songs here are obsessed with ideas of fatality and futility – at times on a track like the sparse but melodic ‘wrongo’, Sprague’s vocals tumble out as if she’s in a rush, so overwhelmed by the emotions of the words. “I am slipping, losing track,” she begins the track ‘time is gone’. On ‘staircase failure’, she considers the escape of becoming an estranged wife, sadly pondering, “What’s the worst that could happen?”
When the end of the world does come, though, Sprague sounds more accepting of it and of love ending than she did at the start of the record. “Maybe the time was just not right/ Give a little space to clear my mind/ And maybe I will see you/ At the end of the world,” she sings, a necessary comedown from the frenetic energy that began the album.
Listening to maybe i will see you at the end of the world, you can sense Sprague’s sincerity. At 28 years old, she’s had to wait for her chance in the spotlight, and it’s partly why there’s a winning sense of cohesion to the album. It’s never overstuffed, never overbearing. She’s a raw storyteller, but can also be sharp and serious in ways that set her apart from her contemporaries. There’s an impressive commitment to a lyrical undercurrent on the record, which takes her through the full gamut of emotions that fill the chaos of the dissolution of a relationship. One wonders whether the angst will carry onto a second album, but there’s certainly enough to fill this one.
Throughout the week, we update our Best New Songs playlist with the new releases that caught our attention the most, be it a single leading up to the release of an album or a newly unveiled deep cut. And each Monday, we round up the best new songs released over the past week (the eligibility period begins on Monday and ends Sunday night) in this segment.
This past week, Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak came through with their first collaborative single as Silk Sonic, the undeniably retro-leaning yet irresistible ‘Leave the Door Open’, which oozes as much charisma as you’d expect from these two artists combined. What perhaps would have been harder for anyone to predict was Japanese Breakfast’s pop pivot on the lead single off her third album, ‘Be Sweet’, a vibrant synthpop tune that bursts with colour and boasts the catchiest hook I’ve heard so far this year. Meanwhile, New York singer and producer Candace Camacho deals in more subdued, reflective tones on her new song as duendita for Mexican Summer’s ongoing Looking Glass series, the fluid and lush ‘Open Eyes’; No Rome, the 1975, and Charli XCX joined forces for a song that recreates the whirlwind sensation suggested by its title (‘Spinning’) without sounding grating; Pom Pom Squad subvert the male gaze of The Virgin Suicides on a track named after one of the characters in Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, stirring up a storm of pent-up emotion; and finally, Jordana teamed with Ryan Woods for ‘Doubt of Revival’, a collaboration that’s propelled by a crunchy bassline but whose beating heart lies in Jordana’s vulnerable lyrics and cathartic harmonies.
Listening to Indigo Sparke’s music can feel like watching a star flicker in the dark country sky: from afar it can seem small and insubstantial, but once you consider the amount of energy that ripples through it, the moment can suddenly feel overwhelming in its intensity. Amid the soft glow of finger-picked guitar and delicate touches of piano, the Sydney-based singer-songwriter often uses that kind of cosmic language to relate her own experience on her debut album, Echo: “I have pulled apart the cosmos/ Trying to find you inside,” she sings on ‘Carnival’; on ‘Wolf’, she implores, “Come upstairs, let me show you all the parts you haven’t seen/ There’s a hell, there’s a heaven, there’s a universe exploding,” before comparing her lover to the moon. Recorded between Los Angeles, Italy, and New York, the follow-up to 2016’s Nightbloom EP was co-produced by Adrianne Lenker, with whom she was briefly involved in 2019, and frequent Big Thief collaborator Andrew Sarlo; the result is a mesmerizing record that’s charged with emotional intimacy without ever losing its poetic, intangible qualities. “Everything is dying,” she tenderly intones against the ghostly echo of an instrumental, “Everything is simple.” These are the final words on the album, but while it’s easy to focus on the stripped-back nature of Sparke’s music, it’s the everything she seems perpetually more entranced by.
We caught up with Indigo Sparke for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight interview series to talk about her earliest musical memories, working with Adrianne Lenker, and the restlessness to belong to something greater.
This might be a bit of a weird question to start things off, but are you somewhere where you can see the sky?
Not right now, but I was just under the sky. I actually just went and had a farewell dinner with all my friends. We went to a pizza evening and we were sitting in the park, and the sky was like – it had been raining all morning, so it was very translucent and blue.
That sounds really beautiful. I love that you said that, because I was just going to ask if you could describe the sky for me.
Yeah, it was kind of very, very pale blue. But then it had these washes of pink through it. You know, like sometimes after it’s been raining a lot the sky gets so crystal clear. It’s really pretty.
It’s actually related to something I wanted to touch on later on, but I was hoping we could go back in time a little bit first, because I know you grew up in a musical family. Do you mind sharing some early memories of feeling connected to music?
I think some of the music that calmed me at the earliest stage was Erik Satie. I can’t quite get a clear visual about when the first time that was played for me or what was going on, but there’s an emotional memory in my body, so I can still put that on and it still calms my nervous system in a way where it takes me back to like feeling like a five year old.
I was talking about this actually yesterday with two of my friends, we were talking about some of the first concerts that our parents took us to. And my mom took me to see Rufus Wainwright when I was really young. And he was there with like, fishnet stockings and high heels and I said to my mom, “I’m so in love with him. I just want to marry him when I get older.” And my mom was like, “That’s beautiful, darling, but he’s into men.” [laughs]
It’s funny, I get that feeling a lot with Erik Satie too, actually. I think heard his music in a TV show recently and it just took me back to discovering him at an early age and having an emotional connection to it. How would you describe yourself at that age?
I was a very intense child. I had a lot of feelings – I think I felt the world so intensely, and I still do, but back then I didn’t have the tools that I have now to regulate my emotions, so I was either in so much extreme joy and I was ecstatic, or I was just so devastated if, like, my piece of toast broke half or something. [laughs] I was having a very visceral experience of life. And I think I was quite a restless child. I remember always having a lot of energy and not knowing what to do with it, and my mom tried – I was playing soccer and I was like, skating and doing a lot of sports to try and use this energy at the time. Music was difficult for me; I don’t think I had the patience for it. I remember having to do piano lessons, and I remember getting really good. But I remember just chucking the biggest tantrums every time before I had to go to my piano class. I think just having to sit still was really challenging for me. And I was at a Steiner school, so it was very involved; we were making bread and building woodworks and so that was quite a good thing for me. I was a little bit of a wildling child, honestly.
You mentioned that music wasn’t really an outlet at first, and I know you also worked as an actress before you decided to pursue music. I’m wondering what inspired that change or drew you in that direction, and also whether acting has influenced your approach music in any way.
I think, for me, being able to use a character as a doorway and as permission to access the deep internal psyche of another character is really exciting, when they were meaty characters – characters that had a lot of layers and had a lot of secrets. It was a really nice excuse to be able to go into that world and especially in theater, because it’s so much more instant – it’s more like playing live music, because you have the alchemy of the audience and yourself and that changes every night. But I think just having a safe space and a container that was theater or was the acting class allows you to reflect and access all these different parts of yourself that you could then bring to that character adaptation.
However, it became really challenging for me when I graduated from acting school and I got an agent and I started auditioning for things. And you’re constantly just in this process of putting your self-worth in the hands of another person to determine whether you’re right or wrong or you can be the vessel for that character portrayal. Which kind of starts to wear on you in some ways, because a lot of the time it doesn’t actually have anything to do with your capacity or your capability to portray that character and the depth that’s needed; it’s a lot to do with how you look or how tall you are, all these other external physical factors. Or you get typecast as, you know, the girl next door or these characters that to me at the time felt quite boring. But I think that’s changing now in film and television and theater, because there’s this beautiful women’s movement and feminist movement where there’s so much more being told through the female gaze. So there’s been really substantial women characters because, I mean, women are so substantial, there’s so much to them and they’re so multi-layered that now there’s these roles being written that you can really sink your teeth into. But I find more joy in watching other women play those roles than the idea of me playing one of those characters.
And I think, leading on from that, I guess at some point I found music – my dad gave me a guitar and I started playing, I was just teaching myself to play guitar. And I think the beautiful thing about that was that it helped me bring it from an external place back into a very internal, private place. No one was watching me, no one was telling me, “You can’t do that,” or, “No, you should do it like this,” or, “You got the role!” It was me being able to free-flow my experience into this space with this instrument. And that felt so much more satisfying and it really felt like I had found my breath. Up until that point I had been surface breathing, and then I’m like, “Oh, okay, this is what it feels like to breathe something that you love or be in the world with purpose.”
Do you feel that it’s less like inhabiting a character, in the sense that you’re more honest with yourself when you’re accessing these different parts of yourself?
There’s like two parts to it for me, I feel. There’s the part where I’m in a really private space where I’m writing music and I feel like I’m not doing that for anybody else. I’m just expressing something that’s naturally flowing or like I’m witnessing something. It feels very uninfected in that space. But what happens when you’re transmuting that – once you’ve made recordings or you’re playing a live show, then you have to transmute it in some way. It alchemizes differently once somebody else becomes involved in that or an audience steps in or you’re recording the songs.
For this new album, you co-produced it with Adrianne Lenker and there were other people involved as well. How would you describe that collaborative process? Did it affect the songs in any way?
I think it was just a continuation of our love, actually; the experience of our love, our friendship, our partnership at the time, our love in that space. It was just a continuation of that, so the whole process felt very natural and easy. And I think when you know someone so well, you don’t have to do so much talking, you don’t have to explain things so much – you can just kind of intuitively feel where the flow of energy is moving in symbiosis together.
So it didn’t really feel like someone was stepping into the process in that way.
I think because her and I felt so unified in that period of time – we were more like a unit, we felt more like we were of the same animal. So it felt different when we were working with [Andrew] Sarlo or Phil [Weinrobe] or Shahzad [Ismaily], that was more of a different experience because I didn’t know them so well. They weren’t as familiar with the music as she was.
To change the subject a bit, I was wondering if you could talk about your travels across America, how that informed the songs and what you feel like you learned from that experience as a whole.
I think I learned a lot about how much space I need as a human being who feels intensely. [laughs] Because I felt like all my feelings had a place to exist. There was so much space in those deserts; I felt okay, I felt at peace. And it was like there was enough space and room and time and nature to be able to reflect on so many aspects of myself and so many stones of thought that I was turning over in my mind, and constantly am, and I think we all are. Living in a city or being in a place full of concrete that’s fast-paced and you don’t hear the wind whipping through the valley, like, it’s very difficult to find space to hear your own thoughts and feel yourself in a deep way. And I think that’s the beauty that landscape gifted me. Something about being on the road just gives so much room for reflection; my favorite thing to do is driving along endless stretching highways, looking out the window and listening to ambient music and or not listening to music. There’s something about that, again, it’s like something alchemizes.
And I think it relates to something that you’ve said about the album, which is that it’s an “ode to death and decay. And the restlessness I feel to belong to something greater.” Again, there’s that word, “restless.” But I’m interested in how these two things are connected in your mind.
I think, in my personal experience of life, I’ve had moments of feeling very connected to something greater. Call it what you will, call it God, call it the universe or cosmic energy or whatever. There have been moments where I’ve felt deeply in tune with that. And there have been moments where I’ve been so disconnected from that, where I felt really cold and harsh in the way I’m interacting with the world, or times where I’ve been in really destructive places. And I think that they do inform each other in some way, because I think once you have a deep understanding of impermanence and death and decay, and that understanding really settles in your body in a physical way, you have two avenues: You can go into a dark and destructive, shadowy place, or you can choose something that’s light-filled and have faith and believe in something greater and believe that there is a purpose to being here in life. And I’ve oscillated between those two places. It’s like coming to a crossroads, you know, you’re in a juncture point. And I kind of came to these deep understandings, and I had over a period of many, many years, through so many different life experiences – death was a very real part of existence, decay is very real, it’s everywhere, it’s happening all the time. And then it’s like, what do you choose to do with that? Do you choose love? Do you choose expansion? Do you choose to soften? Or do you choose fear and to harden and to go down a path where you become small and not trust? And it’s painful, that path. Both are painful, actually; to expand is painful and to shrink is painful, but you find more love when you expand through the change and the pain.
And I think something about being in those landscapes – it’s very hard not to believe in some kind of greater mystical cosmic energy. There’s such wide skies and wide landscapes where it’s just – my chest was blown open, I didn’t even really get a choice. You kind of blend and merge with the landscape.
Something that struck me about the album was the parallels between people and human interactions and then the universe and space and the sky. And it made me wonder if you often find yourself thinking about not just landscapes and nature in those cosmic terms, but also people and human interactions. Why do you think you’re drawn to that kind of imagery when it comes to evoking those relationships? Is it just the intensity of it?
I think that deep, intense human intimacy and interaction is actually a portal for experiencing what you experience in nature. I feel like sometimes the only comparison to use to express the extreme greatness of the feeling that you can have in an intimate relationship is by comparing it to something that really does exist in such an extreme state. Because words just don’t seem to hold all the meaning that they need to sometimes when I’m trying to express things; I often find that language is such a barrier. There’s like a language barrier and then there’s this flesh barrier and sometimes I’m like – I wish I could just take all of this away and strip it all back and show you the landscape of my inner world, like, just show it, you know?
Yeah, that’s definitely something that resonated with me about these songs, just how raw and intimate and authentic they are. And one in particular that I wanted to talk about was ‘Carnival’, because I just love the poetry and the language in that. Could talk about how that song came together and what it means to you?
I actually just cannot remember the birthplace of that song, where it came from inside of me. That’s one of the songs that I feel most deeply about as well, actually. And oftentimes when I’m feeling very close to something or someone, I tend to have a bit of dissociation, where it’s difficult for me to recall the finer details of the moment. I just feel it so deeply when I listen to that song. I feel like I managed to get my heart out in a particular way that when I listen to it, I’m like, “You were really vulnerable and authentic with that expression.” Just this deep fucking desperation to not, in some ways, ever want to grow up or lose the intimacy or closeness that you have with a parent or caregiver. And this terror of stepping out into the world as an adult and having to move through all this pain and heartbreak and everything that we move through as human beings. We’re so fragile in the human condition and what we have to experience. There are moments where I look at myself and I look at everyone I know and it’s just these little children, and I’m like, “I just want to take care of you all,” including the little one inside of myself. I just wanna be like, “Come here, honey,” like, “It’s okay, you’re gonna be okay, I know it’s so scary out there, isn’t it? It’s so scary.” And I think it just hit on that tenderness for me, there was something about it where I was really acknowledging this little girl inside of me who was just like, I’m so scaredand I just want love and I just want to be okay in the world and I want to find that intimacy with a partner and I – you know, when you’re holding on in naivety, where you’re just like, you don’t want anyone to disappear, the people that you love.
Yeah. Wow. There’s something – it’s interesting that we started off talking about early childhood memories, because this feels like coming full circle, in a way. It’s like there’s this childlike essence in all of us that remains the same, no matter how old we get. So, with that said, I only have one last question, which is whether you’ve thought about where you might want to go next and explore more of in your music.
I’m really excited to start working on another record. I’ve been writing during the last year and I’m feeling really excited to explore music in a way that has a bit more of my rage and my rawness and my grit in it; emotions that as human beings we look at as more distasteful or ugly. I’m starting to understand and learn more that human emotions are all valid and normal to have and the more that we can look at them and embrace them, the more beautifully they transmute. It tends to be it’s just how we express them; sometimes those emotions are so intense, they can be expressed in such a violent and disgusting way. So I think I’m really interested in how they transmute into music in a way that’s beautiful but still has the realness of that experience in it. Because a lot of my music in the past has kind of felt like it’s been reflecting more ethereal or feminine sides of myself, but all of these different worlds exist.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Zara Picken, known as @zaraillustrates on Instagram, is an illustrator based in Lincoln, UK. Zara graduated from the University of West England in Bristol in 2008, and has been a professional illustrator ever since. The artist’s work offers a range of styles, from softer hues and layered shapes building elegant subjects, to bold, bursting colours creating simple but striking compositions. Much of Zara’s work is inspired by mid-century design, which is usually characterised by uncluttered and smooth lines and fun geometric forms. The illustrator adds her own edge to this, harmoniously integrating characters and objects resembling paper cutouts and sharing an engaging visual world with her audiences.
Over the past decade, Zara Picken has created illustrations for editorial, advertising and publishing, and has been commissioned by many international clients including The Guardian, Wired, BBC, and Times Higher Education. Check more of Zara’s work out and browse her print shop on her website.
