LUCIDMEDIA

Touring, Inspiration, and Setting the Record Straight: An Interview with Jolie Holland

Written by Nadine Bachan Friday, 10 October 2008 08:52

With her tour commencing on October 12th at the Belly Up Tavern in California, Jolie is spending the little time she has left on practicing before she begins her travels across the US, to Canada, and in Europe over the next two months. While she is well aware of how exhausting touring can be, she still holds a positive view of her busy days ahead: “I’m really excited. I don’t think I’ve ever been on the road with people that really love to be on the road as much as this band. Shahzad [Ismaily] will be joining us; he is a killer guitar player. And I’ve got my band, who I love. That’s Rachel Blumberg – she’s going to be playing drums the whole time. Sean Flinn will be playing the guitar – Sean Flinn is awesome, and Dave Depper on bass. I think touring can be insane. You don’t get enough sleep, but at least there is a rhythm to it. On days off, you have basically nothing to do. I love that about tours. [I wrote for this album] while I was on the road. I think it was because I had a little bit more time to myself, alone in a hotel room, or waiting for a plane.” This tour will bring some interesting changes for the talented songstress, who had before relied on one manager and good friends who came on the road to help out. This time around, with two people acting as the professional crew, duties will be divided between a tour manager and someone in charge of other business, including merchandise. Jolie approaches it all as a necessary part of being a musician:

“It’s just funny because for every album, everything is different and this is just such a bizarre job. Sometimes I really miss the old days when I understood everything I was doing. I just have to remember to ask my manager a million questions. You just can’t do this kind of stuff without a bunch of people helping.”

Developments haven’t only occurred in touring for Jolie. While completing her last three albums, Jolie acted as her own producer. Working on the Living & the Dead introduced Jolie to new dynamics in the recording studio, including entrusting her music to Shahzad Ismaily, the co-producer and a musical contributor to the album. “I had to go through that process and it was so nice to be able to rely on somebody else.” When asked if working with Ismaily helped her get a sense of a different perspective, Jolie replied with a chuckle and an illustrative parable: “Well, yeah…perspective being somebody who knows what they’re doing. [Laughs] I really don’t. I mean, I trust myself as an artist in that I can figure stuff out and make it work somehow, but that’s different from, you know, somebody who really knows how to cook. I can figure out how to make something, but it doesn’t mean that I’m confident about it and I don’t waste a lot of energy.” Jolie loved her time in the studio with Ismaily; producing the album together, they meshed in way that worked well for the record. She went on to praise his abilities, and was particularly happy about being able to step back from the microphone much more while he experimented and worked on getting better vocal sounds from her.

There was a particular note about Ismaily that Jolie wanted to put forth officially. Contrary to what some journalists have written, Shahzad Ismaily was not born in Pakistan. He is an American. His parents, who hail from Pakistan, immigrated to America in the 60s. Shahzad was born in 1972… in America… NOT Pakistan. Jolie has read several incorrect articles and cringed at the glaring error.

Working with Ismaily also allowed Jolie to reflect on her abilities as an artist and a producer:

“Oh man. I love Shahzad Ismaily so much. He is so super skilled at a million things…and I really needed his help. The way it is now, people are supposed to be good at everything. In the old days [there were artists] like Loretta Lynn; she wrote a few songs that were awesome, but she didn’t write all of her own songs, and she was never her own producer. There used to be a stronger division of labour in that sense. Now, everybody is supposed to be everything – write, perform, all of that. It is such a big deal - putting on a show, leading a band, writing the material. You have to be crazy to be a good songwriter anyway. To be naturally crazy and then to do all of these other things…it’s difficult.”

Jolie also had the chance to work with both M Ward and Marc Ribot on the current record. Although her time with them was quite brief (only two days with Ward and four days with Ribot), she truly enjoyed the experience and hopes to continue her musical relationships with them in the future. She recalls the circumstances under which she met the two noteworthy musicians: “It was like magic. With M Ward, we just met backstage at SXSW, and had a really great conversation. We just talked about wanting to work together and we eventually got chances to do so. With Marc, it was so great. I had written out a bunch of stuff – descriptions of how I wanted production to work, how I wanted the songs to sound. On some of the songs, I said ‘I would love it if we could get a guitar player that kind of sounds like Marc Ribot.’ [Laughs] The two people that were the prospective producers at the time were M Ward and Shahzad. So, Shahzad gave the demos to Marc Ribot, because he works with Marc, and Marc really liked it. One day, Shahzad just shows up to breakfast. We were all working in Portland and we had breakfast at this place close by where Shahzad was staying. So he just shows up and he says, ‘Oh, by the way, I talked to Marc and he wants to play on your record!’ It was just so awesome, like a little fairy tale. Listening to the record now, my favourite parts are listening to Marc play.”

Jolie has happily contributed to the works of other artists as well. Recently, she played on her friend Stephen Jecusco’s, record, Purgatory. Currently, she is collaborating in a duo with Jason Leonard on a project that she considers them to both to be parents of. She believes that collaborating is something very special and something you can’t fake.

“Collaboration is a big word. Sometimes all I do is show up and play what somebody tells me to play. Collaboration is such a big deal and it’s really hard to do. I didn’t want to say that I had collaborated with Marc Ribot because we just worked together for two days.”

While on tour for 2006’s Springtime Can Kill You, Jolie listened to Daniel Johnston, an American singer/songwriter, for the first time. She also became more interested in Willie Nelson’s music. The style and form of both Johnston and Nelson inspire Jolie to compose what she calls ‘more direct songs’. While many of the songs on the Living and the Dead are indicative of this revelation, Jolie insists it isn’t suggestive of change in her musical style indefinitely:

“I want to emphasize that the songs on this record are just the songs on this record. It’s not like I’ve completely changed or something. I wrote a lot of songs that were more musically convoluted that’ll be on the next record, but I just thought these songs sounded best together.”

There are a few songs on the Living and the Dead that were particularly drawn from Jolie’s personal life and, interestingly enough, the personal lives of others. “Palmyra” is a song that can be divided into two parts: the first half is about Jolie’s own private hardships, while the second half was inspired by the experiences of friends who lived and were involved in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward during the Katrina disaster: “My friend Laura Freeman wrote a really beautiful song called Palmyra and my song was based on hers in a way. She used live on a street called Palmyra in the Ninth Ward and I had some friends who were doing relief work down there. I also had some friends whose houses were totally flooded out. It was just such a disturbing time. They said that it was such a violent scene. One of my really good friends was taking some medical supplies down there. She was driving down Texas and she was put in jail for a while because she had medical supplies on her. The whole thing was very upsetting and some of my friends are still dealing with court issues. It was such a big deal in my life, even though I wasn’t involved, so some of my friends’ stories got wrapped up in there. One of the stories in there was when my friend was walking through the Ninth Ward trying to help a man find his wife’s body. It’s so sad, and it’s all third person. I mean, I can’t even touch his story and it affected my life that much.”

Jolie feels that art, any kind of art, is derived from the personal. While the songs “Palmyra”, “You Painted Yourself In” and “Fox In Its Hole” are about other people, Jolie feels that there are always elements of herself, even in more subtle and slight ways, in every song she writes. Her belief is you cannot really write something unless it’s also about you. Otherwise, it’s not going to be all that good.

Jolie has also included covers on this album of songs that were especially dear to her. “Love Henry” was a song she first heard covered by Bob Dylan when she listened to his 1993 album, World Gone Wrong. He expressed to her that it is a song that is actually older than the Bible and known worldwide. “Enjoy Yourself”, a cover she first heard by the band Wingless Angels, was recorded while surrounded by friends: “It was really fun to put [Enjoy Yourself] on the album. It was me and Sam [Parton], who’s one of my best friends. Shahzad was also there and you can hear the water running in the background. It was really nice to put that on there after all the very produced tracks…it was nice to do something that was really plain.” With a lot of positive buzz around the Living & the Dead, Jolie’s future is certainly bright. She recently completed shooting her first music video for the single, “Mexico City”. She recalled it as a fun experience. She was able to take a group of friends to the town of Joshua Tree in California for the shoot. She expects the video to be completed very soon. She has also begun connecting with her fans through her MySpace blog, which she hopes to keep up while on tour, provided she isn’t too exhausted at the end of the day. Through this album, Jolie has made great strides. While she has embraced new ideas and methods in her song writing and producing, her focused and passionate principles regarding her musical vision remains true: “I think about the music that really gets to me. I think about what’s important to me in the music that I really love the most. It’s something that paints a really big human picture and that includes all those life experiences that really get you in the gut.”

Jolie Holland will be performing at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern on Wednesday, October 29th.

For more information on Jolie, visit her official website at http://www.jolieholland.com/ and her MySpace page at www.myspace.com/jolieholland