Pages tagged “jolie holland”

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Jolie Holland has long existed in the shadows of other singer-songwriters. Maybe it all comes down to her voice: There’s a unique quality to it that can be initially off-putting to some, but once you’ve spent time with it, honed in on how she twists and turns her annunciations, what emerges is an artist who is expressive on many different levels. Her music is often times characterized as timeless, and her catalog largely possesses an aesthetic that defies any sort of “flavor of the month” notions. 

After spending a long time in the Bay area, Holland recently relocated to Brooklyn to complete her fourth record, The Living and the Dead, which dropped Oct. 7 on Anti- Records. Paste recently sat down with Holland in a small park along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, sharing morning caffeine amongst children playing on swing sets and benches, to talk about her upcoming projects.

Holland enjoys herself on fourth album

Jolie Holland writes songs packed like retablos with autobiographical details and Dia de los Muertos figures, but it’s her voice that animates them. She slurs her words and blurs her phrasing, chewing her consonants and creating a distinctively drunken drawl. Holland’s fourth—and perhaps best—album (featuring contributions from collaborator M. Ward and guitarist Marc Ribot) foregoes the smoky speakeasy atmosphere of 2006’s Springtime Can Kill You for a more contemporary roots sound, which provides a more evocative backdrop for her signature vocals. Despite singing such despairing lyrics, she sounds more commanding and confident than ever on “Mexico City” and “Your Big Hands.” The bleak murder ballad “Love Henry” and “Fox In Its Hole” revisit her old noir-jazz vibe, but sound more connected to the here-and-now instead of some vague there-and-then. Holland half sings/ half laughs the closing cover of Guy Lombardo hit “Enjoy Yourself,” sounding like she’s truly taken that advice to heart.

Listen to Jolie Holland's "Love Henry" from The Living and the Dead:

Muddying the Waters: Retro-minded songwriter’s latest suffers from vague ideas, blurry edges

Jolie Holland has a problem with consonants. On her new album, Springtime Can Kill You, she swallows her p’s and b’s and slurs past her t’s and d’s till her delivery becomes a barely decipherable, mealy-mouthed mumble.

No doubt this was a deliberate artistic strategy, but it’s a choice that hints at the deeper problems of this disc. Holland’s songwriting as well as her performance implies a belief that vagueness is always best. If I can keep the lyrics nebulous, she seems to say, the melodies minimalist and the rhythms unassertive, there’s more room for the listener to inject his or her imagination into the song. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how most pop music works.

The best pop songs provide us with a lyric, a tune, a beat and/or a harmony that’s so clearly defined, so pleasurably focused that we can’t resist it. We’re drawn in until we become a character in the story the song is telling. The very best pop songs never dictate how we should feel about the sharply sketched story we’re suddenly a part of, and that open-endedness can be the most exhilarating part of the experience.

But that open-endedness isn’t worth much if we haven’t been grabbed by the clarity of a song’s images in the first place. That’s the mistake Holland and so many other indie artists make; they’re so anxious to give the listener room to respond that they forget to provide something worth responding to.

The word “dream” shows up a lot on Holland’s new album. She introduces her own song, “Nothing Left To Do But Dream;” she interprets “Crazy Dreams” by Vancouver slam-poet/singer C.R. Avery; she sings of “my crazy dreams” on “Stubborn Beast” and, on “Mexican Blue,” of lying nearby as her lover “dreamed” in bed. She also mentions “shadows,” “a mysterious bird” and a “ghostly girl,” as if she were filling up her songs with dry-ice smoke. Actual dreams, however, are fascinating not because they’re hazy but because their images don’t readily yield their meaning.

Holland’s vagueness extends to her music. Her mumbly vocals are backed by chamber-rock arrangements that add cello, French horn, pump organ, lap steel and accordion to understated drums and guitar. Everything moves in slow motion, as if that lent profundity to the proceedings, and even then the vocals rarely keep time. Perhaps Holland believes that singing off the beat creates tension, but it merely diffuses what little energy these songs possess.

It is possible to over-define a song, so that every note is highly polished and perfectly positioned, so that every space is filled and the listener is manipulated into only one possible reaction (e.g. Mariah Carey.) But it’s also possible to under-define a song, to leave both the words and music so murky, so blurry that the listener has nothing to grab onto. This latter approach—that so plagues Holland’s record—is based on a faulty premise and the sooner that premise is punctured, the better her music will be.

If the New Americana written about in this issue needs a promo CD, there’d be few better choices than Escondida. While it’s easy to imagine the sounds of Holland’s second album floating from your grandma’s old phonograph, there’s little nostalgia here. Instead she digs through the dusty attic of American folk, blues and jazz, costuming her unique creations in pleasingly familiar forms.

Jolie Holland’s voice is a gorgeous, ancient thing, round and dulcet as Satchmo’s muted trumpet, distinct and self-assured like an antique bell in a church window. She churns out pre-war folk and blues with an offhand effortlessness (think Gillian Welch channeling Victoria Spivey) and lyrical turns that invite favorable comparisons to labelmates Nick Cave and Tom Waits. But the most remarkable thing about the Houston native’s latest, Escondida, is her uncanny ability to inhabit songs like a ghost, communicating a deep sense of resignation, as if she instinctively realizes no matter which path she chases this music down, they’re all tramped flat anyway. Capitulation hasn’t sounded this good since Muddy Waters sang “feelin’ mistreated, and I don’t mind dyin’.”

On the opening track, “Sascha,” Holland is a coquette on a cool evening stroll, cutting her eyes about and flirting, with a hurt in her voice belying not only the heartbreak she sings of, but also the darker turn to come. A bleak love ballad, “Black Stars,” gives the first indication we’re not in O Brother territory anymore. A line like “When you arrived / It was as if / We both had died” turns star-crossed romance into a suicide pact before the first ill-fated kiss. “Old Fashioned Morphine” is Blind Willie Johnson’s “Wade in the Water” and the gospel standard “Old Time Religion” knit together with a Burroughsian thread. Morphine, the anesthesia of last resort, replaces “religion” in a telling shift away from transcendence and hope.

It’s as if Holland set out in search of new pathways to follow, only to discover that hordes of Kerouac-wannabes had already turned those beckoning open roads into four-lane tollways lined with featureless strip malls. This claustrophobia wears off the museum-piece sheen plaguing modern purveyors of traditional music. The tragedy at the core of Escondida feels like it’s happening now, not at the arms-length tributary distance that even the most heartfelt rendition of “Man of Constant Sorrow” seems incapable of bridging.

Ironically, it’s this collapsing hope which enables Holland to share space with the original doyens of the dead end, where freedom is deferred and emancipation gives way to 40 acres and a mule—the point of utter finitude. All filtered through the perspective of a white, suburban, female citizen of a strange, valueless century, Holland’s songs become fractured prayers to a hybridized God of the Christian South, the Void at the bottom of an existential crisis, and an abstract pantheistic deity of unknown origin.

“Goodbye California” is a suicide note, gospel rave-up and Zen meditation wrapped into one. The “I’ll Fly Away”-style chorus in praise of a nirvana-like “immaculate calm” is an odd conflation of worldviews that has to heard to be believed. Holland rejects both irony and nostalgia, but doesn’t know what to set in their place. She wraps the proceedings with the incredulous head-wagging of “Damn Shame” and a haunted take on the traditional “Faded Coat of Blue.”

Literate, spooky and utterly compelling, Escondida is not only an astonishing album, but the announcement of a singular, visionary talent.

It isn’t much, this tiny cubbyhole in the back of a four-room San Francisco apartment. Crammed with countless collectibles, plus a vintage player piano and several toy accordions, it’s barely big enough to house necessities like a bed, stereo system and writing desk. But for peripatetic folk-punker Jolie Holland—who by her own estimation has “never stayed in one place longer than two months”—it’s home, sweet home. As soon as she owned a car, she pinballed from her native Houston to Austin, New Orleans, Northern Louisiana, and Vancouver (where she formed, then quit, The Be Good Tanyas) finally settling in the Bay Area seven years ago. “This is the first time I’ve ever lived somewhere where there’s no forseeable end in sight,” proudly purrs the 28-year-old songstress, a bespectacled spitting image of Thora Birch’s kooky Ghost World brat. The monthly rent: A nominal $400. “But I used to pay only $150 across the street,” she adds. “Which really helped me get my album together.”

Catalpa—the self-released, partially home-taped record in question—generated enough of an indie-scene buzz last year to land Holland a distribution deal with the Anti- imprint (home to Tom Waits, a big Holland booster). Named for a flowering tree with white bell-shaped blossoms and heart-shaped leaves, the album is steeped in the primal minimalism of the singer’s idols—Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and the Carter Family. Gothic dirges like “Alley Flowers,” “Ghost Waltz” and “I Wanna Die”—make the similarly stripped-down Gillian Welch sound positively Polyphonic Spree in comparison. Other haunted cuts like “The Littlest Birds” and “All The Morning Birds,” she says, are very inspired by nature. “I lived outside for almost all of 1996. I lived in a tepee and this,” she says pulling out a photograph of a Conestoga-topped pickup truck, “and was a professional street musician for years. I played violin on the street for money, and it was barely subsistence level.” Her food? “One samosa a day, and the rest came from dumpster diving.” Fans have repeatedly told Holland that Catalpa sounds like a scratchy old Victrola cranking up some dusty ’78. She’s pleased with this response. Currently, she’s on a retro-gospel kick, collecting antiquated songs like the Lomaxes gathered field recordings. Is the nomad happy to finally have a home and hearth? In retrospect, she’s taken a Zen-like view of her wanderings. “I didn’t settle down for a long time, and now I’m glad I didn’t. It definitely took a toll on my health, but me keeping moving was exactly what I needed to do to make everything that’s happened, happen. I’ve always had some weird sense of destiny that’s kept me hopping around.”

The sound conjures up images of dusty Delta roads and cotton fields, Alan Lomax out in front of a tarpaper shack with a field microphone and a primitive tape recorder capturing for posterity the songs of an obscure blues master. Then the voice sings, “Some people say you got a psychedelic presense/Shinin in the park with a bioluminescense.” Wait a minute. Rewind. What in the world is this?

What it is is Jolie Holland, and the album is Catalpa, a series of homemade demos that mix mountain music, the roughest and most ragtag of early Delta blues, and a songwriting talent of poetic grace. Holland, co-founder of the Canadian female folk ensemble The Be Good Tanyas, recorded these songs for her own amusement and edification, never intending them for public consumption. But the recording took on a life of its own, as friends passed it along to other friends. Eventually it was released on Jolie’s website and at her shows; now it’s being released for the first time for wider distribution.

There are echoes of America’s musical roots everywhere on this CD—the rough bark and bite of Son House and Charlie Patton blues tunes, the plaintive blue yodel of Jimmie Rodgers, the ragged but right mountain harmonies of Mother Maebelle Carter and the Carter Family, even the jazz slurs of Billie Holiday. Holland’s voice is a remarkably supple instrument; and her phrasing and the way she sidles up to notes is nearly miraculous. On “Roll My Blues” and “Black Hand Blues” she is an unadulterated Delta blueswoman, while on tunes such as “I Wanna Die” and “Alley Flowers” she channels the rough vocal timbre of early bluegrass stalwarts such as Hazel Dickens and Wilma Lee Cooper. As an added bonus, when you can hear the words, they sound like the product of a very thoughtful, poetic young woman, and I look forward to hearing Jolie’s songs when they’ve been properly recorded.

And therein lies the caveat. To be sure, these demos sound like demos. The sound quality is atrocious throughout, and there is an informality that occasionally borders on rank amateurism. But that’s also part of the charm of Catalpa; it sounds about as contrived as a picking session out on the front porch because that’s largely what it is.

You want the slick version of this stuff? Try Bonnie Raitt or Alison Krauss. But for those willing to look past the horrendous sound quality, the false starts, the throat clearing, the bum notes, and the occasional approximations of pitch, Jolie Holland is the mother (Maebelle) lode. Catalpa is flawed like a diamond is flawed, and it shines with a one-of-a-kind brilliance.