Tone Glow 135: Julia Holter
Tone Glow 135: Julia Holter
An interview with the Los Angeles-based composer and singer-songwriter about Simone Forti, the permanence of death, and her new album 'Something in the Room She Moves'
Julia Holter
Julia Holter (b. 1984) is a Los Angeles-based composer and singer-songwriter. After studying composition at the University of Michigan, she would head to CalArts to study under the Wandelweiser composer Michael Pisaro-Liu. Her growing interest in various contemporary and experimental musics would lead to the release of various albums, including Celebration (2010), which showed a deep interest in field recording practices, and Cookbook (2008), which was a realization of a John Cage piece that involves “translating a book into a performance without actors.”
Holter would gain prominence in the 2010s with albums like Tragedy (2011), Loud City Song (2013), Have You In My Wilderness (2015), and Aviary (2018). These song-centered albums would see her finding new ways to weave in her experimental music practices. At the heart of all the work she does, however, is an interest in how music seems to “emerge”—be it from the parameters that she establishes, the ideas that she enters the studio with, or the current context of her daily life. Her newest album, Something in the Room She Moves, is her first studio album in six years, and is out on March 22nd via Domino. She says that the album is about “being in the passionate state of making something.” Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Holter on March 13th, 2024 via Zoom to discuss her new LP, her approach to songwriting, working alongside her partner Tashi Wada, and the permanence of death.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I wanted to start by asking about Simone Forti. What’s your relationship with her like and what does her art mean to you?
Julia Holter: She’s a movement artist, dancer, choreographer, writer—she’s been writing a lot recently. And she’s a lovely person who is an old friend of my partner, Tashi [Wada]. He can talk about Simone more articulately than I can, but he grew up in the same building as her via his father, Yoshi Wada. He befriended her more deeply as an adult while in Los Angeles as they both happened to live there. Getting to know her, seeing her perform, and reading her writing—and I’ve performed with her too, because she had an album released by Tashi’s label, Saltern—she’s the kind of artist where experiencing her work is all-encompassing.
It’s very essential work. A lot of it is about improvisation and the impulses we have. There’s always a sense of humor, too. It’s hard to explain her work, though, because it’s so philosophical. She has these pieces called News Animations where she’s moving around in a space and is vocalizing responses to the current events of the day. It really is about capturing the impulses of the body and the mind and how one responds to stimuli. I’m interested in the way she uses improvisation in so many different mediums. I’ve learned a lot about improvisation from her.
She has also composed pieces and is well known for her Dance Constructions. They’re all about how people relate and work together to make something happen. She’s really good about capturing awkwardness, of capturing all the things that one has to do to not be afraid of the difficult stuff of confrontation. And there’s also the awkwardness of the things that are hard to express. There’s no filter on that. It’s so human. When I spend time with her, all of my concerns that are petty just float away. She’s very honest and says what she thinks, and often has a very unique perspective. And she’s also very funny. So when there’s anything I worry about, it just feels so stupid. All that remains is the essentials.
Something I kept thinking about with your new album, Something in the Room She Moves (2024), is how there’s a real sense of space and location. It’s there in the arrangements but also in the lyrics, with songs like “These Morning.” One of the first things I ever heard from you was Celebration (2010), your field recording album on Engraved Glass. I thought of that when listening to your new album because the silverware tapping on “Evening Mood” brought me back to “bars in afternoons.” How has your relationship with nature and field recording changed over the years?
I’ve lived in Los Angeles for most of my life, and while I’ve lived in the Midwest for 10 years, it was also in cities. So, I’m a city person, and I have a funny relationship with nature where it’s a novelty to some extent. I use nature as a tool for symbols, but I don’t overthink it. People actually ask me that in interviews and I’m just like, I don’t know, I just live in LA. And then I realize I put it in my songs and it’s like, oh, it makes sense that you’re asking me that (laughter). The nature in LA is urban wildlife. We had a rat infestation, and I guess that’s like nature (laughter). I use nature, like a lot of people, as a way to express some type of dynamic.
With “bars in the afternoons,” that was a bar in Paris where I was recording people one day. I like creating a world, and I like for it to be cinematic. I started field recording with a MiniDisc recorder in college and there was a John Cage piece that Stephen Rush, my professor at University of Michigan, showed us. That was when I first became interested in field recordings, and then I elaborated on it when I studied with Michael Pisaro. He would talk a lot about the framing of field recording, and that’s definitely a John Cage influence. There’s the outside world that we hear and someone might say, “Oh you’re just listening to the street, what’s so interesting?” But it’s the framing of it. Yes, it’s just the sound of my street and some cars going by, but it has a certain duration. When you spend time forming something, it is now a piece, it’s art. It’s not just your street anymore. And there’s also an effort that goes into the framing of it. You’ll find an interesting street, or maybe you would do some chance procedure and find a random street. All of these things play a role. And you learn that all of the little details, if you sit and listen to it, are actually interesting.
What is also interesting to me is the way that sounds are different on a recording versus when you hear them out in the real world. It’s not just documentation, it’s a work that has sonic characteristics and textures and layers. So I was into that when I made “bars in afternoons,” and I threw a song into it. I wanted to make it sound like the bar filled up with water and that there was a person singing in it at the same time. I was trying to make a scene from a movie or something.
When you’re making a field recording, there are certain sounds or ideas that you latch onto that relate to your everyday environment, and that’s only something you recognize from going through this process. I’m wondering if this happens when writing more typical songs. Did that happen with this new album? “Sun Girl,” for example, is about your daughter. Do you feel like there are things you’ve learned about her or about life or love in writing these songs?
To a large degree, I like to work by not knowing what’s going to happen. “Sun Girl,” and most of this recording, was coming out of a desire to capture a specific mood. And each song is a different one. That was my main objective, and that’s what I started with. “Sun Girl” was just the chorus at first, but I also had this idea that it would have this playful quality, this essence. I wanted to have it feel like a painting, like when I mention “yellow” in the chorus. (sings) “My dreams as I dream in golden yellow.”
I had this color and I had this palette, but I learn what a song is only over a period of time—both the feeling of it and what should emerge. At first, I’m at my best when there’s a blank slate for me to work with. A lot of it is musical improvisation. I’ll be playing keyboard and singing and then when parsing through that, most of it’ll suck but there will be a piece that’s good and I’ll develop that. That line, “My dreams as I dream in golden yellow,” came to me. I had this initial thing, but I had to dig at it to get the rest. The fun part is the immediate idea—like, “ooh, what is this”—and the rest is more frustrating. I wrote “Sun Girl” like five times, and it was hard to figure out the specific sound. For other songs, they’ll be more improvised and I’ll figure it out that way, but “Sun Girl” had a specific goal. Most of the songs on the album were actually quite different.
Are you talking about a song like “Meyou,” then? That song is just you singing that phrase with these extended melodies.
Right. “Meyou” is sort of like “Everyday is an Emergency” from my last record Aviary (2018). I think it comes from my background in composition. And it’s funny to make it sound this complicated because it’s so basic, but I was just singing that “meyou” line. I had really wanted to work with voices, and I just had this word—“meyou”—and I would sing this line with people, and at some points we diverge and at others we converge. It’s a palindromic piece, and that’s it. With “Everyday is an Emergency,” I had come up with the title first, and I just wanted these sounds to sort of be unisons, sort of like a heterophonic texture. And there are no lyrics in that either.
I’m wondering about your relationship to your own voice throughout your career. What sort of things do you feel like you’ve learned about yourself in having used your voice? Put another way, what would you not have learned if you didn’t use your voice?
I was really confused when I was a composer and not a singer; I wasn’t really singing until I was recording, which is when I was 20. Singing and recording clarified things for me. I was always like, what am I doing? It’s healthy to feel that way, and you don’t always want total clarification, but I was a little more lost than I wanted to be. Before that, I had only sung Joni Mitchell or Beatles songs at the piano. That would be my way of singing; it would be imitating other singers, and that’s how I learned to play and sing at the same time. I hadn’t really sung, though, until I started recording.
At some point, I also went to India and did vocal lessons. It was very brief though, so it was not a deep dive; I am not a trained Hindustani vocalist. But I did study with a teacher for a few weeks. So those were my first vocal lessons. The voice really opened me up, and after I went to India, I got a harmonium, and that really opened me up to performing. I had performed in really miserable piano recitals—they were terrifying because I was not a good classical pianist—and I did it for years. I liked it, but I was an amateur. And there were really good pianists at my school, so I knew how to distinguish between what I could do and what they could do (laughter). I knew what my route was going to be.
It was liberating to record with a harmonium and not feel super formal about it. I had this portable keyboard instrument and I knew that I could just sing and play this thing, like a troubadour. I never thought that I’d become an artist that toured and played songs, but it sort of just happened. And I didn’t want to be that for some reason; I didn’t think I could perform.
What about performing is appealing to you?
I don’t know, I just like it. I’m not able to do many things, but I like to perform. Once you’re on the stage, it’s really nice. And I didn’t know that when I was younger because all I knew was piano recitals and they were so scary. I realized that when you perform your own music, it’s great. It was nice to just sing and there not be a rule about how it should be. I could use my voice without worrying if I was doing it right; I wasn’t thinking about winning an ASCAP award or something.
You mentioned earlier that when you started singing that you were imitating singers. Who in particular were you imitating?
Early on I think it was Fiona Apple and Tori Amos—very different singers but from the same time period. Radiohead too, but I can’t sing like Thom Yorke (laughter). Billie Holiday was a big one. My mom played a lot of her songs, and I had a standards book with a lot of songs that she sang. And then later on, Joni Mitchell, and I would play her songs on guitar when I was a teenager.
I know that the title of the album came from the Beatles lyric from “Something.” It’s funny because it reminds me of what you’ve said with regards to Simone Forti and with songwriting, how things sort of just emerge. It’s interesting how so much of what you’ve been talking about is based around this notion of you just living your life and that everything ends up being this natural overflow.
I came up with the title when I was naming a project file for the title track. It was a really early demo. I think it was initially “Something in the Room He Moves,” and I thought it was funny. And then I kept coming back to it. A year later, I had a kid and I kept singing Beatles songs to her because I didn’t have any other songs I could sing. There weren’t that many where I knew all the lyrics by heart, and I was also in love with that documentary, Get Back (2021). All of these things came together and made it make sense that it should be the title of my album.
What you said is right. I have this love of the subconscious, of preserving in time these moments that happened. Something about the Beatles is in my subconscious, but it’s not like the record is about them. I always think about the Frank O’Hara poems where he’ll just have a shout out to a random work of art that you’ve never heard of. And it’s a “shout out”—I don’t know what else you’d call it. It’s not a “reference” because that’d be too heavy-handed. It’s just a little momentary homage or something. But yeah, I love the Beatles.
I always tell people that my favorite Beatles song is “Something.” It has my favorite lyric from them: “Somewhere in her smile she knows / That I don't need no other lover.”
Yeah, that’s really nice.
Your lyrics are interesting because, if I were to simply read them, they don’t quite always make complete sense, including grammatically. And it’s only with how you phrase things, like on a track like “Materia,” that I understand the entire emotion of what you’re trying to convey. I think that’s really powerful. Is that something you’re doing intentionally? Is that something you’ve taken from other songwriters?
That’s a big part of what I’m interested in with songwriting. It’s the big problem with lyrics: they’re not a poem, and they’re not meant to work on their own. They’re in this awkward space and there’s always this impossible reconciliation between sound and literal meaning. It’s something that always drives me nuts, but I’m obsessed with it. For me, sound comes so easily and lyrics are always the hard thing, like (groans), “I don’t want to think about the lyrics!” And no one’s making me write lyrics, so it’s this weird self-imposed torture (laughter).
When I did my workshop—Words, Non-Words and Music—it was about this problem. For some people, lyrics are not a problem, and in fact some people write them first, which is really cool, but I think the awkwardness of a lyric is a big part of my music. And I think it’s a part of a lot of people’s music, even if they’re aware of it or not. There is so much music where if you take the lyrics out of context and make them a poem, they become so absurd. Like, even a Bob Dylan song—and he’s super lyrics-focused—there will be words that he wouldn’t have used if it were just a poem. When you take the music out of a song, it’s like when you watch a music video without the sound, especially when it’s pop music. Suddenly, things become funny and awkward—things become so dramatic.
The sound of words is such a big part of writing lyrics for me. You can think about famous songs, and maybe even one of your favorite songs, and you may think you know the lyrics but when you try [without any music], you can’t sing them. Or maybe you’ll realize that what you understand is not the actual lyrics but their specific feelings.
Was there a song on Something in the Room She Moves that was especially hard to write the lyrics for? Were there any songs that you were thinking very deeply about how they function in this weird liminal space that isn’t exactly a poem?
I worked on these songs for a long time and I had trouble with lyrics, especially on this record. It came to the point where I had to record the vocals and I didn’t have all the lyrics yet, and “Spinning” was one where I didn’t have all of them. I had some lyrics for every song, but I had to fill in the blanks.
There was a problem that arose, and it only happened after I had a child. We actually have a lot of space where we live, but we still don’t have enough space where singing loudly is a thing that would be comfortable if other people were home. I always like to work at home and I never recorded vocals in a studio proper, like I’ve never rented one, but I got COVID right around the time I had to record vocals and I was gonna record them at home. We were gonna start mixing the following week. I lost my voice, I didn’t have all the lyrics, and I was kind of a mess. We had to do this thing where I was recording the vocals while we were mixing, and I was worried that I wouldn’t be myself when I went into this studio because it wasn’t my own space.
Once I got into this studio space, I recorded the vocals and it was incredible. This was a change for me. All the words that I had been trying to come up with for two years suddenly came out. It was a learning experience about knowing what you need to do for yourself. There are these ergonomic considerations that you have to think about, and you have to make sure you have a space for yourself where you can have all these things come out. I had spent two years mulling over what was going on in these songs, but I couldn’t fully go there until this moment. And that’s kind of what the song is about, which is really funny to me. It’s meta. I needed to find my “night” so I could make a song about the night.
I know this album is dedicated to your nephew, and you also mention your grandfather, whose lap steel guitar is played on the record. Do you mind sharing anything about them?
They’re on the album, but in what way is hard to say. In all cases, it’s hard when you lose someone. My grandfather was 100, actually, and both he and his wife passed away not too far from each other—like during the same general time period. Losing someone who is elderly is obviously very different from losing an 18-year-old nephew. That’s a complete tragedy. Even though they’re so different, there is this sadness and regret of wishing I had more time to spend with these people. There is this desire to connect, and that’s probably my most honest feeling, and I think I’m still in it. In both cases, they’re family members who did not live near me, so I did not see them very much in recent years. There is this disconnect that makes them hard because they were interesting and meaningful people.
This permanence is intense—the permanence of death. For someone like me, who is not religious but is maybe spiritual in an abstract way, that permanence of loss challenges the thing that I always look to for comfort, which is the way things change. This idea that we’re a speck in the universe and that nothing matters much is how I’ve always felt, and I find it comforting. The permanence of death confronts that somehow, and I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like the reverse of someone who is religious, where something bad happens and it gets them to question it. And how does that manifest in the music? I don’t know. And maybe it has nothing to do with the music.
“Talking to the Whisper” is the song for me that is most about grieving and about love in general. That’s something I learned from making this record, that deep love can be very painful. There’s a line, “Love can be shattering,” and that’s how real love is. It can be completely destroying. That awareness of love, whether it’s because you have a child or have a long-term romantic relationship with someone or because you have a strong relationship with your parent or your sister… that kind of awareness of the preciousness of that love—and how hard it is and that it requires work and changing yourself in good ways—all of that factors into my record. I wasn’t completely aware of it when I recorded it, but that seems to be what emerged.
What’s it like to play with Tashi? He appears on this record.
It’s really fun because we really get each other. And he’s been playing the songs for a while because we started playing them long ago. I play in his band, he plays in mine, and there’s an understanding, which maybe dates back to when we first played for a harmonium ensemble in 2007.
What was that like?
Our friend James, who is a composer I met in college, introduced me to a lot of friends I have now including people at CalArts like Michael Pisaro and Mark So and Tashi. James organized this harmonium ensemble with all the people who had a harmonium, and we would all write these pieces for us to play, it was like seven or eight of us. And there were some funny pieces that people wrote. There’s one where, at one point, we’re sliding around on the floor playing our harmoniums. It was all really experimental. There was one performance we did where we were playing a seven-hour Antoine Beuger piece. And that’s where I met Tashi (laughter). So we’ve been playing in certain ways, and we started dating later in 2015. We have a musical connection and I’ve been really inspired by his music for a long time, especially the way he works with harmony.
This all makes sense because you guys play harmonium on Pisaro’s Tombstones.
Right. And we were playing harmonium even before that (laughs).
And you were talking earlier about how important the instrument was to you.
Yeah!
I always end my interviews with the same question: Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
I don’t like surprises, like if someone is throwing me a surprise birthday party, I actually hate that because I like having some control. But I like being surprised by music and art. I like going to a movie and not knowing what it’s about. I think that’s a good quality.
Julia Holter’s new album, Something in the Room She Moves, can be purchased at Bandcamp and at the Domino website. More information about Holter, including her upcoming tour dates, can be found at her website.
Thank you for reading the 135th issue of Tone Glow. Try to make yourself a work of art.
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