Julia Holter and her band, unusually for an American touring act, played two Dublin gigs on their last visit to these shores in 2013. On everyone’s two favourite nights of the week to go out, Sunday and Tuesday, she performed with her three piece band in the Unitarian Church and Whelan’s main room respectively, each to a equally engrossed audiences, despite the incongruity between the two venues. The record she released that year, Loud City Song, a tangential interpretation of the musical Gigi layered in opulent orchestration, had received universal acclaim and the live shows, though markedly smaller than the scope of that album, managed to fill both spaces expertly.
Last year Holter followed up with Have You In My Wilderness, and the public acclaim seemed to go up another level, with the record placing very highly on many publications’ end-of-year lists, even topping the poll at both Dadrock bibles Uncut and Mojo. But the lush orchestrated piano ballads of Have You In My Wilderness, which call to mind late-era Talk Talk and early-era Kate Bush, have their roots in the extremely lo-fi back pages of Holter’s career. Two of the central tracks, Sea Calls Me Home and Betsy on the Roof appeared on 2010’s Live Recordings, in very rough fashion, possibly recorded with the mic on Holter’s laptop, a technique she admitted to using when interviewed on Red Bull Music Academy.
“I’d been planning to do that, to make a record with them. I’d been planning to make a record around those songs, starting with those songs in my mind, and I was thinking about ballads, because they have a little more a structure of a pop song – like a verse and a chorus,” says Holter.
“This one was trickier because there were songs that I didn’t make demos for, because they were older and I had already recorded them. In a way, those recordings are ‘demos’ but they’re not – they’re just versions with me recording myself on keyboard solo. So basically, I notate arrangements based on what I think might sound good, which is sometimes harder than just [having something] in a demo and then transcribing it.”
For Holter, capturing the intimacy of the creative process and transducing that energy into a finished record has become more complicated as the scale of her records have grown. “I write things at home, in my room, usually at the piano. Well it depends, there are different ways. I definitely can’t write in the studio… it’s more of a solitary mindset [than performing]”
She explains a feeling that will be familiar to many musicians: “What happens is that I get really wedded to demos [and their arrangements] but if they don’t have anything to become fixated to, it can be [difficult] to figure out what I want. Those ones, Sea Calls Me Home and Betsy on the Roof, I wouldn’t necessarily love right away, and I would have to get used to. I think that was why this record was a little bit more challenging to produce, because I would have to be more open-minded about the arrangements.”
I ask Holter if she is able to reflect on the album differently from the vantage point of six months. “I always have issues with what I do, there’s always something. There’s always something that I want to change. But usually I don’t have a strong idea of how something should change. I feel like this thing is living as a creature.”
That creature will be brought to life again when Holter visits the Button Factory this week, she’ll be working with a different band, this time aiding her own keyboards and vocals will be Dina Maccabee (viola), Devin Hoff (upright bass) and regular drummer Corey Fogel. If her performances two years and half years ago are anything to go by, you won’t want to miss out.
Julia Holter plays the Button Factory on Wednesday 17 February, with tickets costing €18.50.
Words: Ian Lamont
