FRI., JUNE 06, 2008
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eMusic Q&A: Shearwater, Pt. 3
by Adrienne Day
Dynamically, the first track off of Rook, "On the Death of the Waters," is really interesting. It starts slow then whooosh, you're deep in it. The first time I heard it, I actually jumped.
Oh good! That can be kind of a cheap trick, so I didn't want to do it more than once on the record. But I really wanted to draw you in with that song, and bring you in to the world of the record as fast as possible. I wanted that to be like a wave crashing over you.
That's exactly what I thought of when I heard it. How does that relate to the name of the song? Is it a reflection on the state of the environment? The state of the world?
I meant to reflect that in some ways on Rook. Everything is in flux. Everything is changing. We are in for a big reorganization of things. I don't want Rook to be one long lament, but a way of trying to come to terms with the old world going away, and a new world [emerging that] may be completely unfamiliar to you. The thing that's so scary is not that the world will end, but that it will change beyond your ability to identify or interact with it. At this point, our power over the world is so great, it really depends on what we want.
Creating a new world seems to be one of the record’s themes — how do you think we might be able to do that? Can you expand at all of your feelings on the act of “reconstruction"?
We're already doing it. We are making a new world right now. Whether it will be pleasant for us to live in is another question! But if we can't make it, life will go on without us, which is I think one of the hardest things to accept. Most apocalyptic religious traditions seem to presume that the end of the human world is the end of all life, which is silly.
Just to bring it back to the music... do you address these issues on Rook?
Probably in the most oblique way possible [laughs]. But yes. The album closes with "The Hunter's Star"; the first line is, "From the wreck of the Ark... fading day of our star." I tried to bring it back to where it was in the beginning, this image of [Noah and the Ark]. The myth is such a powerful one, because you have the world being destroyed by cosmic forces, yet people are able to preserve the world as it was, except it has all the bad stuff in it, so we save everything in this boat and wait for the waters to go back down.
And that's the theme you pull through the rest of the record.
Yeah. But there is no arc. There is no way back to the past from the new world that we're making.
You are very interested in birds and nature — why write songs about them? Why not be an ornithologist or biologist?
I don't have a good answer to that question. I guess we can reach a lot more people doing this. Just having those videos up the past few days, more people have laid eyes on the Striated Caracara, or at least thought about them, then probably the whole world in the last couple of years. I want to draw attention to that species because I love it and care about it. But also, academic life, or what I've seen of it, doesn't appeal to me as much. There's a lot of drudgery and not being out with the animals, or things you care about at all.
But you're stuck in a van for two days — that could be considered drudgery.
It's not all fun either. But the performance part of it is really fun. I love singing. [Laughs] And there aren't too many career opportunities for a singing biologist.
You recorded a cover of "The Rainbow" by Talk Talk, and their influence on your music is pretty clear, especially on songs like "South Col." Why choose such a diffuse song that's also eight minutes long, and what is it about Talk Talk that you admire?
"The Rainbow" is fairly straightforward, structurally, so it wasn't too hard to get our heads around it, but it's also got a lot of room in it for improvisation — some of the other songs would have been less forgiving of the things we did to it. I love Talk Talk's sense of freedom, of trust in their own intentions, and of Mark Hollis' embracing of his voice as its own instrument. Their music is solemn but also very light and beautiful, and there's always a dark undercurrent always running beneath it. All of which push my buttons...
Were you raised with religion? There's lots of Biblical imagery on Rook, but I'm not sure if you're using it to illustrate the ending of the world as we know it, or if it's a more general theme in your work.
I was raised Episcopalian. I don't go to church anymore, but if you were raised Christian in the West odds are that Biblical stories are living in your subconscious, which is probably where they come from when I'm writing. I certainly didn't have a Bible open! The Bible is our common myth, and so I think using its symbols to communicate artistically can work pretty well if you're careful. Eudora Welty said that she used mythological themes and characters "like salt and pepper" in her stories. The opening line of Rook, "From the wreck of the Ark," was one of the first things that came to me when I was working on the lyrics, and I liked the way that it suggested both a re-making of the world and its destruction.
To go back to the beginning of Adrienne Day's interview with Jonathan Meiburg, click here.
Oh good! That can be kind of a cheap trick, so I didn't want to do it more than once on the record. But I really wanted to draw you in with that song, and bring you in to the world of the record as fast as possible. I wanted that to be like a wave crashing over you.
That's exactly what I thought of when I heard it. How does that relate to the name of the song? Is it a reflection on the state of the environment? The state of the world?
I meant to reflect that in some ways on Rook. Everything is in flux. Everything is changing. We are in for a big reorganization of things. I don't want Rook to be one long lament, but a way of trying to come to terms with the old world going away, and a new world [emerging that] may be completely unfamiliar to you. The thing that's so scary is not that the world will end, but that it will change beyond your ability to identify or interact with it. At this point, our power over the world is so great, it really depends on what we want.
Creating a new world seems to be one of the record’s themes — how do you think we might be able to do that? Can you expand at all of your feelings on the act of “reconstruction"?
We're already doing it. We are making a new world right now. Whether it will be pleasant for us to live in is another question! But if we can't make it, life will go on without us, which is I think one of the hardest things to accept. Most apocalyptic religious traditions seem to presume that the end of the human world is the end of all life, which is silly.
Just to bring it back to the music... do you address these issues on Rook?
Probably in the most oblique way possible [laughs]. But yes. The album closes with "The Hunter's Star"; the first line is, "From the wreck of the Ark... fading day of our star." I tried to bring it back to where it was in the beginning, this image of [Noah and the Ark]. The myth is such a powerful one, because you have the world being destroyed by cosmic forces, yet people are able to preserve the world as it was, except it has all the bad stuff in it, so we save everything in this boat and wait for the waters to go back down.
And that's the theme you pull through the rest of the record.
Yeah. But there is no arc. There is no way back to the past from the new world that we're making.
You are very interested in birds and nature — why write songs about them? Why not be an ornithologist or biologist?
I don't have a good answer to that question. I guess we can reach a lot more people doing this. Just having those videos up the past few days, more people have laid eyes on the Striated Caracara, or at least thought about them, then probably the whole world in the last couple of years. I want to draw attention to that species because I love it and care about it. But also, academic life, or what I've seen of it, doesn't appeal to me as much. There's a lot of drudgery and not being out with the animals, or things you care about at all.
But you're stuck in a van for two days — that could be considered drudgery.
It's not all fun either. But the performance part of it is really fun. I love singing. [Laughs] And there aren't too many career opportunities for a singing biologist.
You recorded a cover of "The Rainbow" by Talk Talk, and their influence on your music is pretty clear, especially on songs like "South Col." Why choose such a diffuse song that's also eight minutes long, and what is it about Talk Talk that you admire?
"The Rainbow" is fairly straightforward, structurally, so it wasn't too hard to get our heads around it, but it's also got a lot of room in it for improvisation — some of the other songs would have been less forgiving of the things we did to it. I love Talk Talk's sense of freedom, of trust in their own intentions, and of Mark Hollis' embracing of his voice as its own instrument. Their music is solemn but also very light and beautiful, and there's always a dark undercurrent always running beneath it. All of which push my buttons...
Were you raised with religion? There's lots of Biblical imagery on Rook, but I'm not sure if you're using it to illustrate the ending of the world as we know it, or if it's a more general theme in your work.
I was raised Episcopalian. I don't go to church anymore, but if you were raised Christian in the West odds are that Biblical stories are living in your subconscious, which is probably where they come from when I'm writing. I certainly didn't have a Bible open! The Bible is our common myth, and so I think using its symbols to communicate artistically can work pretty well if you're careful. Eudora Welty said that she used mythological themes and characters "like salt and pepper" in her stories. The opening line of Rook, "From the wreck of the Ark," was one of the first things that came to me when I was working on the lyrics, and I liked the way that it suggested both a re-making of the world and its destruction.
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