My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden on Concept Albums and Marching Bands

Shara Worden is an artist. A real artist. She approaches My Brightest Diamond with more concept than just a musician with a song. From onstage theatrics to well-thought-out lyrical themes, you get much more than the usual experience while listening to one of her records. On her fifth LP, This Is My Hand, Worden incorporates bigger sounds and bigger choruses into plenty of moments that can be justified as avant garde. A marching band gives opening number “Pressure” a near hip-hop feel, all while our frontwoman soars over it in near operatic fashion. “Love/Killer” builds with unease for the majority of the song, breaking free just in time for it to somehow recall Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” at the same time. It’s an amazing talent, which we were able to talk with her all about recently.

Paste: With a record like this, do you have to go into it thinking about concept, lyrically speaking?
Shara Worden: For this album, for sure there was. I started out reading, just kind of asking what the value of music is. The industry has changed so much and when you go to make a record these days you really have to think, “What am I doing? What is this for? Why am I doing this in the first place?” But I love it. Then the next question was, “What does music mean to me and what do I want to say and why do I want to say it?” So I started reading and researching and gathering and listening and taking in lots of information like Daniel Levitin’s book, The World In Six Songs, in which he talks about the six themes throughout human history in songwriting. So I thought, “Okay, there’s my six themes.” And then I was thinking, “Alright. Here we are. We’re all gathered together in this concert. How can I facilitate community? If we were this imaginary tribe gathering around in a concert, let’s sing, let’s dance, let’s hear ghost stories from the shaman. Let’s engage with one another.” So I made a little list of what the audience could do. And then I had my little themes. And then I coincidentally became obsessed with marching bands.

Paste: It kind of reminds me of what Pete Townsend was trying to accomplish in the ‘70s with his Lifehouse project. Thinking of it in terms of “what can music mean and how it can relate to an audience.” Of course, he wasn’t able to realize that back then. It’s also a thing of like, only artists will think of it like this. For us fans it can be as simple as pick up the record and hit play and hopefully have that instant connection. There is so much more pressure on your end.
Worden: It’s fun!

Paste: The album ends with uncertainty in the song “Apparition.” Why?
Worden: That’s the ghost story. That song, I studied opera in college and there was this song by Claude Debussy called “Apparition” and the text is by Mallarme. I always loved the beautiful image of this person who sees a kind of ghost and the ghost has a kind of halo, a “hat of light.” And they drop these flowers and he says, “You are a spoiled child.” But he’s also kind of enraptured by this ghost. So I translated the text and that’s the last song.

Paste: And like an apparition, the album builds up to just…disappear. There is a strong uncertainty feeling of, “Where does this go now? Where can she take this after this?”
Worden: It’s like in yoga practice when you have the corpse pose at the end. You’ve come on this journey and you need a little bit of transition time before you go into the next thing. And that last song on the record, I often think of it in that way.