By Travis Lund
Contributing Writer
If you’re at all familiar with the prolific output of the Boston folk scene over the past two decades, Kris Delmhorst’s name probably rings a bell or two. A perennial favorite at the Boston Music Awards, Delmhorst has released five solo albums, two EPs, two excellent collaboration records (Vinyl Avenue String Band; Redbird), and toured extensively all over the US and Europe. Her breathy vocal delivery and poignant, edgy songs have engendered a large following, and garnered praise from Performing Songwriter, The Irish Times, NPR Radio, and many other corners. The Groove got the recent opportunity to catch up with Kris just before she begins a brief tour through New England and Europe, including a show this Thursday at the Red Room at Café 939.
Groove: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today. You’ve obviously drawn your songwriting style from a wide range of influences, including non-musical areas, so I’d like to begin by throwing out a few categories and get your responses, be they favorites or just things you’ve been into recently. Firstly: Authors.
Kris Delmhorst: Oh, that’s tough. I’m not someone who has a lot of favorites, I’ve read so many things. Also I just had a child, so I haven’t been reading a lot lately for obvious reasons, but most recently I’ve been rereading a lot of Faulkner, and some Cormac McCarthy and Marilynne Robinson.
Groove: OK, how about poets? Strange Conversation (Delmhorst’s 2006 album which consisted entirely of settings or interpretations of poems from many different writers) was a great record, but I’d guess you have some others you enjoy as well.
KD: Yeah, a lot of that album wasn’t necessarily people I read a lot of, or my favorites. I really like Sharon Olds, Kenneth Rexroth. I love EE Comings. Phillip Levine. There are so many, I’d have to go to the bookshelf to really get into it.
Groove: Lastly, and I guess most pertinently to our readers, favorite songwriters?
KD: Oh man, so many! Again, I’d have to go to the record collection and flip through it. I’ve been on a big Wilco kick lately, just because he [Jeff Tweedy] is such a fantastic songwriter. Also the band is amazing, but he’s just a really incredible writer. I’ve always been a huge Tom Waits fan. I was listening to an interview with Michael Stipe recently, and that reminded me how much I love REM. Cole Porter, Joni Mitchell, Sam Phillips. I really like Nick Lowe’s albums. Ricki Lee Jones. There’s also kind of a group of younger people who don’t have a huge catalogue over four decades like Tom Waits or someone like that, but who have maybe one record out, and that record is really good. Jollie Holland, Sam Dean; also some people that I’m friends with and have played with a lot, like Jabe Beyer, my husband Jeffery Foucault, Jennifer Kimball, the list is really kind of endless.
Groove: The Boston folk and singer/songwriter scene is a really vibrant and prolific community, and you’ve been around it for quite a while now. I was wondering what changes, if any, you’ve noticed since arrival up to now?
KD: I think the biggest change has been just the digitization of music. That wasn’t exactly what you were asking, but that to me is the biggest thing that’s happened since I moved to Boston around ’95. As far as the scene here goes, I think the biggest thing that’s happened is that the gap has narrowed between folk music and the more rock club oriented scene. Now it’s people who play Passim one night and they’re at The Paradise or the Middle East, too. The folk coffeehouse scene versus the rock scene feels a lot more boundary-less, a lot more amphibious to me. And it’s such a tight-knit, small community, you’re going to know everyone regardless of what kind of stuff they’re playing.
Groove: I wanted to talk about your songwriting process quickly. Even on Appetite (Delmhorst’s first album, released in 1998), there’s a real depth to your songwriting. Lots of interesting angles and approaches, and much more variety than your typical young songwriter, who mostly has songs either saying “Hey, this new relationship is great,” or “I just got my heart broken.” How did you avoid the usual pitfalls?
KD: Ha! Well, a lot of what I write is about [relationships] too, but at least hopefully I manage to write about it in an interesting way. I think maybe a big part of what you’re asking is that I really didn’t start writing songs until my mid-twenties. I mean, god forbid if I’d started writing at seventeen, I would have sounded like your typical seventeen-year-old songwriter. I’m not saying it’s wrong or bad to start young, but I think having lived a little more and experienced more really helped.
Groove: I understand your first musical experience was with the cello, and then later learning to play fiddle. I was wondering if that had an effect on you as a guitarist, as far as how you look at the fretboard or go about composing?
KD: I think so. I mean, obviously, I play chords on guitar all the time, but the single-note approach from the cello is still with me. I’ll write what are basically bass lines, and then play as many other notes as I need, to sort of flesh it out. To me, the cello has a lot more of a direct connection with singing, just because when you’re using a bow, it’s like your voice in that no matter how well you play, there’s only a finite amount of time, of a note, that you can coax out of the bow, just like you only have so much breath. There’s a real kinship there, and you don’t have frets, so you’re tuning by ear, just like with your voice. I’ve been trying to write on cello a little more for that reason.
Groove: On your latest album, (2008’s Shotgun Singer), you chose to hole up in (fellow Signature Sounds recording artist) Erin McKeown’s house and do most of the work solo. How did that experience differ from, say, (2001’s) Five Stories, which was produced by (Morphine alumnus) Billy Conway with a full band in a studio? What motivated you to take that approach?
KD: It was super-different. On this last one, I don’t want to say I did everything myself, because I definitely brought other people in to play on it, but I kind of made the core of everything before I brought it to the other people involved, and then they worked off of the structure I’d already created. I mean, I love working with a band in the studio, and for those earlier records, which were done at High-N-Dry, this loft space in Cambridge that doesn’t really exist anymore, we basically had everyone in a big room, even the engineer, and just recorded everything live. The vocal tracks would end up being like 65% drums. I learned to embrace all of the flaws with doing a record that way, and not worry about getting everything right and punching stuff in as much as just letting moments happen and capturing those. The reason I did the new record alone was just to get out of some of the constraints that being in a studio puts on you—when the clock is ticking and it’s costing money. I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but I get much more conservative in that situation, because if you want to go explore a tangent or something, that clock is running, and also you’re afraid of getting the musicians burned out trying different things. And playing with a band, I tend to just revert to what I know how to do, what I know works on guitar, which isn’t that much… so for this record I wanted to take away the time constraints of the equation and get out of what I know how to do, and explore the isolation in my process as a musician and a writer.
Groove: Well it came out brilliantly. It’s a great record.
KD: Thanks for saying that. You know, at first I didn’t know I was even going to be making a record, I just though of it as a more elaborate demo process than anything I’d done before. But then I started paying closer attention to how everything was sounding, and adding parts and layers, and it turned into an album. Actually, what I did was record one take with vocals and guitar or something, because they go together for me, I’ve never been a “pen-and-paper” writer, I need the guitar there; but then I’d remove the instrumental part of the recording, and go rebuild the layers underneath the voice. I’m learning, but I still really don’t know much about the technical side of recording, I did the entire record with just two microphones. I was listening to a lot of homemade recordings while I was in the middle of recording, and they gave me courage when I was kind of wondering what the $#%@ I was doing and thinking, “No one’s going to want to hear this.” I think the homemade stuff is great, Pro Tools is kind of great because anyone can do it now, but also you get some bad stuff out there.
Groove: Let’s talk about your gigging philosophy. As a singer/songwriter, you perform solo quite a bit, but you also play with a full band at times. How do those situations differ for you in terms of approaching a show?
KD: Recently I’ve been playing solo a lot more, I usually have at least one other person on stage to add another layer to the sound. It’s definitely a different thing for me, but it’s been great. I feel like being by yourself can be either the best or the worst thing. If it’s bad, you have no place to hide or kind of cover up behind what the band is doing, so that can be difficult, but when it’s good it’s amazing. You can focus so much more on your relationship with the audience and what’s happening there, instead of the relationship with the band and what’s going on on-stage. You really notice the room and you attune yourself to that, you can play different songs and change the setlist on the fly, and respond a lot more to the audience. It’s one of those things where the only way to experience the feeling is to be there. There’s a lot in music that can be had virtually, but that interaction is something you only get in the room. One of the things I was worried about with this last record was being able to play those songs live by myself. I thought initially there would only be maybe one or two songs that would work, because of all the layers, but it turned out that most of the stuff translated pretty well, although there are still a few things I can’t do solo.
Groove: What advice do you have for aspiring songwriters trying to get started?
KD: I guess just play a lot, as much as possible, and play what you really like to play. Try to get into different situations with different people. When I first moved here, I was playing two or three open mics a week, and I met a lot of the people I still play with today, who are still playing as well. That’s one of the great things about Boston, there are so many opportunities, and you can really go and find your kindred spirits. Don’t do anything you don’t want to do. I know when you’re just starting your career, you feel like you have to say “yes” all the time, but don’t do anything you don’t want to do, musically or from a business angle. Just get yourself clear on what you’re trying to do and don’t veer too far from that. Don’t go any farther away than you have to. I knew I didn’t want to be on the road all the time, because I needed a home and real friends that I could have real relationships with, and a garden I wanted to grow for sustainable food, and I’ve never been out on tour longer than a month at a time. For some people, I understand that being on tour all the time works, but it didn’t for me, so I didn’t do it. So just figure out your best way to approach it, what you want to do, and then do that.
Kris Delmhorst plays the Café 939 Red Room Thursday Oct. 29 @ 8:00 PM.
Liz Durrett supports. $15.00
