Tone Glow 231: Nirosta Steel
An interview with Nirosta Steel (aka Steven Hall) about his friendship with Arthur Russell, gay clubs in New York, his shifting views on Buddhism, and his new album 'MY SKYSCRAPER' (2026)
Nirosta Steel
Nirosta Steel is the artist name for Steven Hall (b. 1957), a musician born in Scotland who moved to America when he was 15. Attending high school in Delaware, he’d eventually head to New York where he’d meet a slew of artists, most notable of which was the late Arthur Russell. The two were great friends and played music together, with Hall eventually singing on some of Russell’s disco tracks, including “Tell You Today” and “Is It All Over My Face?” After Russell’s passing, Hall and friends formed Arthur’s Landing to continue his musical legacy.
As Nirosta Steel, Steven Hall crafts tender, boisterous, life-affirming, and playful queer love songs. Some releases have come out under this moniker: COOL FIRE (1999/2014), a 1999 live recording at a Taiwanese queer bookstore; DRY ICE (2017), a collection of works recorded in the ’80s and ’90s; and a string of 7-inches and 12-inches. His newest release, though, is the monumental MY SKYSCRAPER (2026), a double LP comprising songs written and recorded between the early 1980s and 2025. The album’s wide range of styles speaks to Hall’s voracious listening habits, his musical kinship with Arthur Russell, and the globe-trotting life he’s lived as an adult, spending ample time in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and beyond. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Hall on July 2nd, 2026 via Zoom to discuss his Scottish upbringing, having orgies in his 50s, his approach to production, and more.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: What memories do you have of growing up in Scotland?
Nirosta Steel: I grew up in a small town called Milngavie, which is on the outskirts of Glasgow. A lot of the interesting things that happened involved visiting Glasgow. My father was an optician—he designed glasses—so that’s where I got my obsession with glasses. He actually had a workshop from Glasgow that was one block from the Charles Rennie Mackintosh School of Art. And although Glasgow was a tough place, it was very vibrant, just like New York was in the ’70s.
My family was involved in church so I was singing in church choirs. The school systems in Scotland have really good music education, so although my school was small, it had its own orchestra. I was doing several things: I was singing in church choirs and did some soloing with them, and that morphed into doing youth outreach in a town called North Berwick. That’s where things got interesting because, outside of the regular folk music, we were doing modern folk music that was inspired by The Beach Boys. We’d have acoustic guitars and sing on the beach—services would be like that. I was listening to The Beach Boys and singing harmonies.
That evolved into me eventually working with Arthur Russell. I would lock into harmonies, and I’m more comfortable singing harmonies than doing the lead. When Arthur was gone and we did Arthur’s Landing, someone had to sing the lead and, by default, I did it along with Joyce Kirby. So my background was church music, but I also studied the bagpipes and wore a kilt (laughs). And then in the school orchestra I played the French horn. My school couldn’t afford a French horn so I had a tenor horn—an upright E♭ tenor horn—which played the same parts. I was really trained in music but I abandoned all of that later. When I met Allen Ginsberg after high school and started playing guitar for him, it was just very regular stuff. Allen was the one who introduced me to Arthur Russell.
What sort of experiences in Glasgow stood out to you?
Every time I went there, the only thing I wanted to do was to go to the Charles Rennie Mackintosh School of Art because it was such an amazing building. I would just go there and peer inside it. I ended up studying architecture partly because of that. When I studied architecture at Columbia, I wrote a paper about Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Just the energy of Glasgow itself was very vibrant compared to the small town where I was living. That small town was on the edge of hills and was very quiet.
The other highlight on trips to Glasgow were the Glasgow vinyl shops. They had listening booths and they were soundproof. You could preview albums and listen to them. I got to explore a lot of interesting stuff from America, like Captain Beefheart and Lightnin’ Hopkins, who became a big influence on my playing—it was this very percussive way of playing the guitar. Also, Joseph “Bullfrog” Spence and his way of hitting the guitar. Joni Mitchell does the same thing of hitting the strings. And that’s a feature of funk guitar, which is my specialty—dampening and hitting the strings to create a beat on them. My way of working with Arthur worked because I was more of a drummer. And that’s what’s interesting to me about the guitar—the percussive aspect.
What year were you born? And how old were you when you were going to Glasgow and listening to these records?
I was born in 1957, and I was around 11, 12, 13. I moved to America when I was 15, but I already wanted to be in New York at that young age. Everything that was interesting was happening in New York.
Was this because of the records you heard?
Especially the art scene and dance scene. And those are the things I ended up getting involved with. I went to high school in Delaware, and it was a very liberal high school. What they did is they brought down some poets from New York, and then I ended up going to New York with some of those poets. The one writer I studied was this guy Larry Fagin. He lived in the now-famous Poets’ Building on 437 East 12th Street. Arthur was living on the top floor, Allen Ginsberg was living on the third floor, Larry Fagin was on the fourth, Richard Hell was on the second, Rene Ricard, who was my boyfriend for a while, lived on the fifth floor. He was an Andy Warhol superstar, art critic, and wild genius. John Godfrey, the poet, also lived there.
I went there when I was in high school to visit this friend, and just being in that building introduced me to a whole range of people. I was 16 or 17. He would take me around to dances, art shows. He was part of the St. Mark’s poetry scene, which I became part of. When I was going to school at Columbia, I was working as an editor of The World at St. Mark’s Poetry Project, I was editor of The Columbia Review, and we started an arts magazine called Shiny. I used to interview people I was working with, like Arthur Russell and Elodie Lauten, the amazing composer who became part of Arthur’s Landing.
Did you just move to America on your own? Was your family back in Scotland?
My father died when I was 11 or 12. My mother’s friend put a personal ad in the International Herald Tribune looking for a husband. She got many replies from around the world, and she showed the letters to us kids—me, my twin sister, and my brother—and we reviewed them, trying to find which husband would be suitable. We decided we wanted an American guy. His letters were very funny, and he had a boat. My mother met him—he came over—and they got married instantly. So we moved to America, which was always my dream.
I love the fact you were reading through the letters with your siblings.
I come from an unusual family. Scotland had a very liberal streak. I had a Presbyterian background, but my parents were very open and encouraging of anything that the children wanted to do. They were very open-minded about their attitudes about things, and I think that helped me.
Do you feel like anything about playing bagpipes and these other performances with the choir informed the way you thought about art?
It was all the same thing. It was all about learning. The best thing about music is collaborating, and it’s about enjoying the process as much as the result. I don’t get too serious about the Buddhist stuff, but that’s part of it—it’s about respecting the process and being as open as possible in that framework.
I read an interview last year where you said you took Buddhism a lot more seriously when you were younger than today. What did it look like back then?
When I was younger I saw it more as a religion, and now I see it more as a psychology or some suggestions as a way to live. There are certain aspects of it that are troubling for me. The Dalai Lama says it’s okay if you’re gay but not okay if you’re gay and have sex. When I went to Naropa, I studied with this guy, Chögyam Trungpa. He was my teacher and was totally accepting of whoever you were. The Dalai Lama was a lot more conservative. I saw an interview where they asked him if he had any regrets, and he did this (points towards groin) and he said that he wished he could know what sex is like. So that’s the two sides to it. The guy who’s supposed to be the leader of this Church is not accepting me, whereas the best teachers I had—including the ones I had in high school who took me around to places—granted me permission. And that’s it.
When do you feel you came into your own with regards to your sexuality?
It was never a question. In high school in Scotland, I kept a list of boyfriends and girlfriends.
You have that song, “List of Boys.”
That’s Arthur’s song, and it’s one of my favorite songs. It’s interesting that it ties in. I think everybody’s bisexual—it’s like autism, where everyone’s on the scale somewhere. I still get attracted to women, I just don’t do anything about it. In America it’s more of a hang-up, but in Europe it’s not a big deal. It was hardly even an issue. I think my mother told me before I told her… I can’t remember exactly, but I think she said she always knew. My mother was always accepting, so it was never an issue. And when I came to America, I was gravitating towards guys while I was in high school, and then older guys when I went out to New York. It was the queer thing of the older guy who was the mentor. I also saw myself as part of this lineage of the gay poetry world. I always thought that my poetry side was the serious side and the music side was not so serious. The thing about meeting Arthur was that I was able to bring them together in that way.
I’ve been in very long-term relationships. The first one was 15 years. The second was with DJ Danny Wang for 10 years, and we did some work together. That was an interesting time. And now I’m married and it’s been 7 years. It’s also been coupled with some wildness, but I didn’t really get wild until I was older. I was in Bangkok for a while, and things got really wild there. Some of the songs that are on this album are from that crazy time.
Who would you say was your first mentor?
Larry Fagin, who I was visiting. And then I met Allen in that building. Allen was kind of a teacher, but we were more just buddies. The people I met in New York treated me as an equal even though I was a kid, and they respected the stuff I was writing.
What sort of things do you feel you learned from Allen?
The thing about Allen was that he was a genius of organizing people, bringing people together. I met a lot of interesting people through him and it’s how I ended up at Naropa. The first time I met Arthur, he sang the song “Don’t Forget About Me” and afterwards I thought, this is my teacher. We were together all the time. There was something about him that was really engaging, and I wanted to learn from him. I was like this kid, even though we were around the same age. His vision and his artistry were so advanced, so I just wanted to observe that. He respected me, also, as an equal and it was shocking. It really encouraged me, as a songwriter as much as anything else.
What did you see in what he did that allowed you to synthesize these poetry and music sides of yourself?
Arthur had a chip on his shoulder about wanting to be taken seriously as a writer. In fact, I was studying poetry at Naropa. I took a class on William Carlos Williams from Allen Ginsberg—that was his specialty, as a lot of his poetry came out of Williams, the whole idea of this American vernacular way of speaking and breathing that Allen was insisting on, and also using the subconscious. That went into what me and Arthur were doing, whether directly or indirectly. Arthur was also teaching Allen about simple music theory—he just wanted to write some simple songs. But in some ways, Arthur was also teaching Allen about Buddhism. Arthur was more realized than anyone I’d met in terms of how far along he was in being graceful and having some deeper understanding.
Do you remember the first show you played?
I don’t. I’d have to ask Tom Lee, Arthur’s partner. I can remember some of the early places we played were Tier 3, the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club—Mickey Ruskin was a downtown genius. He discovered a lot of punk bands at his club—he had a good ear. The Mudd Club too, and The Bitter End. The big one I remember doing was the Walker Art Center and I did the lighting. The famous video of Arthur with the sheen of light in the background, that’s me doing the lights. We were just bouncing these stage lights off these sheets of Mylar to get that effect. I’m very proud of that.
Did you get stage fright back then?
No. I was already doing poetry things at St. Mark’s and I was already performing with Allen—we were touring along the East Coast—so I never had a problem with being nervous. I was singing solos at 11, 12 years old with the church, too. At this time, Arthur was playing acoustic guitar and singing in a country style, listening to George Jones and John Martyn, so people who weren’t just making folk music, but also really pushing things in terms of production. We were trying to follow the effects that John Martyn was doing, things like the Big Muff and the Rockman Sustainor, which defined Arthur’s sound later on—he wanted to find this heavy metal guitar sound for the cello. But when I met him, he was looking for another acoustic player and someone who could sing harmony with him. We played without drums, and it was just the two of us playing acoustic guitars and harmonies. It was his songs, but eventually he’d let me play my songs as well.
He would sing the lead in his very flat playing style. This was influenced by Chet Baker, in terms of the instrumental way of singing, and Woody Guthrie, in terms of there being no artifice, nothing fancy. He would sing lead and I would try to lock my harmony in (holds up two hands parallel to one another) and follow him exactly (moves his hands together at the same, slow speed). Sometimes I’d go into unusual harmonies that would be baroque or Gregorian. In “GREY BOY (A CAPELLA MIX),” you can see those harmonies I’m trying to build, sort of like a church thing. That’s where my church background comes in, as well as all my years of listening to Beethoven and Bach. My favorite thing to ask Arthur to do was to play Bach on cello, which he could do perfectly.
The two tracks on the album where he’s doing the drums, “FRESH FEELING” and “SPECIAL WEAKNESS,” when we were doing the tape transfer in Orlando last year, the engineer was listening to it and said, “This guy hasn’t made a mistake!” People who are professional drummers use click tracks, and when you listen to those two tracks, they’re only one take and Arthur doesn’t skip the beat. And I’m improvising. Each track is like three or four or five songs, and every time I made a change, Arthur was right on top of it. I was thinking lately that this is how close we were—we were almost like one person at that point in terms of our rhythmic approach. We were so locked in together, and it’s mesmerizing to think about that.
What year were those songs recorded?
Those two tracks and “TRIANGULARIZE” were from the ’80s and part of Bright & Early. We had them mastered on vinyl but they just never got out. The other tracks on that, Steve Knutson released on Audika. I think those two tracks, “Apple to the Orange” and “Every Face in Every Window,” are the best songs we ever made. There’s something about these two acoustic instruments coming together and creating this wall of sound. It’s about the effects, but also the people working with him, namely Bob Blank, the legendary producer, and Mark Friedman. Those two engineers enabled Arthur to get those sounds. It’s startling how fresh and big it sounds. My guitar sounds huge! In terms of the process, those Bright & Early tracks came from us rehearsing almost every day for a couple hours and then going into the studio. We were playing with complete confidence in each other, and we had an engineer who was ready at any moment to start the tape. That was Bob Blank’s expertise. As soon as you came to the studio, he started rolling the tape, even when people were setting up. You never knew what was going to happen with Arthur. And Arthur and Bob would spend two or three hours of a session just getting the bass drum to sound right. It was almost mystical.
You mentioned that you two listened to John Martyn. Are we talking about Solid Air (1973)?
Yes! We were obsessed with Solid Air and would listen to it over and over and over. His vocal performance alone is really heartbreaking, and his acoustic playing is a big influence on my playing and also Arthur’s cello playing. It has that percussive nature, and he went through these different effects to find these unusual sounds. We were really interested in producers and listening to albums that were well-produced. We wanted to get this shiny production.
What else were you listening to?
Rick James and Prince. I was the one who turned Arthur on to funk. I was really into anything that involved George Clinton. What fascinated me was that he was like Allen Ginsberg—he was the nexus of all these geniuses. I got really interested in all the people he worked with. I was obsessed with Jerome Brailey and all his solo work. And there were great record pools on 8th Street. They would get all these demos, and I would look for these things. There was also Walter “Junie” Morrison who was involved with One Nation Under a Groove (1978). He did these albums on his own where he was playing and producing everything, and he was often doing it on acoustic guitar. So this was really heavy funk music he was playing on acoustic guitar, and I was learning from that. That’s what I was trying to do with Arthur and also with Arthur’s Landing. I would play with a classical guitar.
The other big influence was Al Green, his album Belle (1977). It was produced in his home, and he’s playing acoustic guitar on that and it’s the most amazing guitar playing. I’m really interested in how people could get really funky on the acoustic guitar. So any high-level production… the funk music that Bob Blank produced. He worked with Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, who I was obsessed with for a while. Yellow Magic Orchestra. And any R&B and disco stuff. Anything by Giorgio Moroder. Allen Touissant, who wrote “Happiness” and played with The Pointer Sisters. We listened to his self-produced albums. I always loved his arrangements. Arrangements that were coming out of Philadelphia, too—Teddy Pendergrass. Basically, anything I was really jealous of, I would study. Donovan, Joni Mitchell.
With Joni it was about her guitar playing and her freedom towards subject matter. I got a dulcimer in high school, when I was 16, and taught myself to play those songs on Blue (1971). I knew it backwards and forwards. I recorded a cover of “River” but it’s never been released. And I started experimenting with different guitar tunings because of her. When I started playing with Allen, he got very irritated when I played with unusual tunings because it made him very confused, so I stopped doing alternate tunings then. Joni is one of the few heroes I got to meet. She came to Naropa to meet Chögyam Trungpa.
How important was it for you to experience music in a club setting?
It totally came out of being at clubs. There was a very deep connection with gay clubs. There was one in midtown called the Barefoot Boy. There were certain places you’d go where there were gay DJs with gay followings and they’d play the best new stuff. There was one on the West Side Highway that had the best music. I went there with Arthur and they played “Set It Off” by Strafe and everyone just melted. There were songs that came on and people would go wild. We were obsessed with that song and how it was produced. Arthur would go out to clubs constantly to see what would make people move and he’d try to translate what people heard. The big thing in live spaces was guys who could play the tambourine well. They’d go into the crowd and play the tambourine, and they were often playing a Latin or syncopated rhythm.
There was also the International Stud, which had a backroom for sex that was dark. They’d play pornos and they had a jukebox, and the jukebox played the hottest disco music on the scene. People would go there to have sex but also to hear music. And that’s when I first heard “Kiss You All Over” by Exile. I met the keyboard player years later on AOL, and he told me he was the only gay player in the band. He was really fascinated by the way it became a gay disco hit because it was a crossover between rock and disco. The other one was Foxy’s “Get Off.” That was a straight band who became a cult gay band because it was a hit in the clubs.
When I was living in Santa Monica, I would go to clubs and listen to “Love Hangover” by Diana Ross. When that came out and played in the clubs, people went wild. It was so long and so sexy. Hearing stuff that Bob Blank produced, like Instant Funk, we knew it made everyone dance when we went to the clubs, and that’s why we wanted to work with him. He had this magic way of recording the bass drum and bass guitar, and disco is all about that, so anyone who could do that well was a magician.
That story about the place with the backroom reminds me of your live album at the Gin Gin Bookstore in Taipei, COOL FIRE (1999/2014). You have songs near the middle, like “Twinkle Angel,” where you’re referencing descriptions for gay porn, and you can hear the porn playing in the background.
“Twinkle Angel” was the name of a porno company that specialized in young Asian gays. They were quite popular in New York in the early 1980s. The lyrics of that are lifted from descriptions of a porno video. With the background sound, I was dating a Japanese guy in New York who was an ikebana teacher. He came from this very formal, conservative arena. When we had sex, he made these animal noises and he couldn’t help it! I thought, wow, I really want to record this. Without him knowing, I recorded him making these noises. Afterwards, I told him and asked if I could use it for the music and he said yes—he thought it was quite nice. At the time, I was working with Jim Shum, who was a famous producer in Hong Kong and Taiwan. I played him this tape and he loved it. He’s a straight guy but he thought it was really interesting, and it was his idea to play it in the background. [Editor’s Note: the original 1999 CD credits the moaning man as Scorpion].
We were raided by the police during the performance because someone thought there was an orgy going on (laughter). The police had already visited them recently because the glass front of the gallery had been smashed a week before my performance. There was some real resistance in the neighborhood to them being there, so it was a political act to even perform. When the police came, it was because this was reported as an obscenity, and they started laughing when they arrived. And they stayed for the rest of the performance! (laughter). At the time, things in Taiwan were starting to open up and this place was at the forefront of that.
Ah, this is interesting to hear. I was in Beijing last year and I spoke with a lot of people involved in the underground music and film scenes there. They spoke a lot about the amount of censorship that happens, how you can’t show films with nudity or sex, how people snitch on others regularly with these things, how lyrics and stage banter have to be vetted by the cops.
The pop singer I worked with in Hong Kong was arrested for performing at a political rally, so that kind of stuff was very serious. He was blacklisted. And he’s a big pop star—Anthony Wong, who also had the group Tat Ming Pair. The radio stations weren’t allowed to play his music because of his political views. Fortunately he was released, but maybe it was because he was so famous. A few years ago he came out and I was very proud of him. He still does concerts, too.
I lived in Hong Kong during the transition [in 1997], when China took over, and it was a sad affair how it was handled, the way that Britain sold out Hong Kong to China. I was born British but I’m ashamed of that handover. The Hong Kong people didn’t get any rights, and they couldn’t get British passports, so they were really left out to dry by the British government. A lot of the arts situation was really decimated in a certain way—a lot of people just left. But when I was in Hong Kong, there was still interesting stuff going on. The theater company I was working with, that I was doing music for, was maybe 80% gay. They were very popular, too. Another theater director I worked with, Edward Lam, was gay and he’s become even more popular. So things have opened up. Lam was also a pop star and wrote hits for other HKG pop stars.
I’ve done a couple albums in Mandarin. One of the singers I worked with became a big pop star after I introduced her and her girlfriend to Anthony. They had music on his label, People Mountain People Sea. This was Ellen Joyce Loo and Eman Lam, and they were like 15 and 16 when I met them. They became popular in this group called at17 and were named after the Janis Ian song. Eman’s brother is also a pop star in New York. He translated a bunch of my songs into Mandarin that she ended up recording. The Mandarin track that’s on MY SKYSCRAPER (2026), “MOHAN,” that’s a Beijing opera singer [Hung Chiu Fung]. We did a whole album together. That’ll come out eventually. He actually studied Western opera and Beijing opera, and he could sing the full-power falsetto of the Beijing opera. In the studio, my producer Jim Shum said, “Why don’t you just sing some Beijing opera over it?” And it just worked. [Editor’s Note: Hung Chiu Fung also appears on Anthony Wong’s “淫紅塵 (Lust for Red Dust)” and Nirosta Steel co-wrote Wong’s “淨土 (Pure Lands)”].
Do you mind talking about your relationship with Asian art, Asian music, and Asia itself? How has it shaped your own work?
The first long-term relationship I had was with someone who was born in Indonesia but ended up living in Hong Kong. He was Chinese. With him, I went to Hong Kong to visit his family, and I ended up getting an apartment on an island outside of Hong Kong, going back and forth between there and New York. I fell in love with Hong Kong, and the person I was involved with at the time, Jonny [Fu], he knew these people in the music and art and theater scene and introduced me to those people. Anthony Wong was part of this gay theater company that I got involved with and I did a series of performances with them. They’re called Zuni Icosahedron. [Editor’s Note: Zuni Icosahedron is a famous theater company whose collaborators have included “Godfather of Chinese Rock” Cui Jian, actress Sylvia Chang, and filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang].
The guy who did their sound ended up being Jim Shum and he became my best friend and producer. He was doing sound and soundtracks at the time—this was the late 1980s—for the Hong Kong film industry, like for movies and TV commercials. The movie business in Taiwan was booming so he just went over there and said I should come over, so I went there after working with people in Hong Kong for years. I was sometimes working with traditional musicians, too. I was very lucky to go to the Walled City in Kowloon, which was this famous city that was kind of lawless and partly underground. There were these Cantonese musicians at a barber shop there who were in their 60s. I would just go there and listen to them, and when the Walled City closed down, they went to another place and let me play with them.
The thing about playing with these Cantonese musicians was that they didn’t teach you. They just said to play. “Listen and play.” I ended up doing the same thing when I lived in Foshan later on. I met these older guys who would do Beijing opera on the weekends. There were very few people listening and I was the only foreigner. It was mostly older people. Some of them were famous Beijing opera performers, and then eventually—I don’t know how—I got on stage with the musicians and it was the same thing. They showed me the music and it was all numbers. “I can’t read numbers,” I told them. And they said to just sit there, watch the guy next to me, and follow him. In terms of how that goes into my music, I’ve listened to a lot of traditional Asian music, so that’s definitely important. Arthur was fascinated by gamelan music and this idea of getting this trance or drone-like situation, which is very much related to dance.
When did all this happen?
So this was when I was in my mid-20s. It was in the 1980s. After I’d been going back and forth to Hong Kong, I met those Cantonese musicians. I ended up in Mainland China years later; I was working with the Beijing opera guys around 20 years ago.
Can you tell me more about your involvement with Zuni Icosahedron?
This guy Danny Yung, the director, came to New York when I was doing Shiny magazine. I was the music and arts editor for this after my time at Columbia, and I did an interview with him after they had done this performance. I was really interested in what they were doing, so they invited me to Hong Kong. I ended up working with them at these big theaters and a smaller arts center there, and through them I started working with people in that theater group like Anthony and Jim Shum. In terms of working with traditional musicians, when you hear the Mandarin album I’ve done, you’ll hear the traditional Chinese flute player we brought on who was recording in the studio next to us.
I only wrote two songs with Arthur: “Lost in Thought” and “GO FOR THE NIGHT,” which is on MY SKYSCRAPER. There’s a version of “Lost in Thought” that was done in Mandarin. When I recorded it in Thailand, we used a traditional Thai violin for that. I don’t like to make [the Asian influence] overt in the production, but it’s definitely there. Also, in Hong Kong I worked with a pipa player. We did a performance at an illegal, secret underground disco in a basement. I was playing the guitar and he was playing the pipa over this disco music, and people were literally right in front of us, dancing and bumping into us (laughter).
You mentioned earlier that you had a stint in Bangkok. Do you mind talking about that?
In working with my friend Jim, we got a job working in Bangkok. The first time I went there with Jim, he said it was going to blow me away, and he was right—I was really blown away. Thai people are so friendly, and they never get bored. If there’s nothing happening they’ll start dancing or tell a joke or get something cool to eat. The Buddhism I saw in Taiwan and Hong Kong was more materialistic. It was about praying for success, which is okay, but in Thailand there was a different version of it that had this Indian influence. It was more of an everyday practice, and that taught me a lot.
The first guy I dated in Bangkok told me, “You Western people waste so much time worrying.” He said, “What’s in the past? It’s gone. What’s in the present? It’s you right here. What’s in the future? You have no idea.” He was like a monk teaching me, but he was a regular guy. So it was this idea of putting that into practice in everyday life. There’s also this thing where nightlife could be seedy and dangerous, but around that time I was going to clubs and getting really high and getting really into a trance with the music.
How old were you when you went to Bangkok?
I was around 50. I had a brief experience with drugs around 18, 19, 20 from going to Studio 54 and Ice Palace. The whole disco experience was part of that. And then after that it was only weed for the rest of my life until that time in Bangkok. There was this opportunity where I was around people who were having orgies and I went. There was this idea of the orgy as a performance. There were these guys who arranged orgies and they were very skillful in how it would progress, the coordination of the different people, and especially the music… to be high and listen to this really trance-y music, wow. The music I was working on was really informed by those experiences. I wanted to get that sort of floating world, underwater feeling in the production and the performances. “ENGLISH PARTY” was written in Bangkok, and that was done as a demo for Madonna. I knew this guy who was working for her, and he really liked my solo stuff. I put together a little demo tape and I wrote that song for Madonna. The guy who played the guitar [Tor Thani] is this Thai guy from the university there. There are three tracks on the album where I’m not playing lead guitar; it’s that and “GO FOR THE NIGHT,” which is Larry Saltzman from Paul Simon’s touring band, and “BOSS TRIX (BENNY’S SONG),” and that’s Drop Out Orchestra. They’re doing guitar, bass, keys, everything. I have a rhythm guitar in the back there. “THAITITANIUM” was made in Bangkok, too. And then there’s the version of “Lost in Thought” that had the Thai violin. That was on the first version of the album but it didn’t [make the final cut].
What’s the range of years then for all this material? Though, it’s clear that you treat all these songs as living and modular.
There are songs from COOL FIRE and they’re from the early ’80s. And then one of those songs, “FIRST LOVE,” I recorded last year. The guy who did the music video, Ian Lewandowski, liked my work and we met before. He’s now doing a documentary about The Saint nightclub, which used to be by the old Fillmore East in the ’80s. He wanted to use a couple of my songs for that documentary, and “FIRST LOVE” was one of the songs he liked. And then for fun, I did a disco version of it by accident. I was working on a different disco song, and I was trying to find some beat, and I just sang over that song for practice and it ended up fitting into that song. There’s also a Latin version of that song I never used.
The thing with Arthur was that if a song was good, you could do it in any way. There are songs from COOL FIRE that I’ve been doing for decades, and there are songs of Arthur’s I’ve been doing for the same amount of time. It’s interesting how certain songs evolve. Like, his song “Love Comes Back” was one I couldn’t sing without crying, and it ended up being the song we always opened our sets with for Arthur’s Landing. That’s the song he would sing when he was dying. He would sit at home, and he could barely sing, but he’d sing that song to his boyfriend Tom. There’s this line, “Being sad is not a crime.” I couldn’t sing that line for years. And then “Don’t Forget About Me,” the first song he sang for me, I couldn’t sing that for years because it’s a really difficult song to sing. Some of his songs have simple structures but interesting syncopations, which make them complicated.
So regarding dates, “FRESH FEELING” and “SPECIAL WEAKNESS” are from the early 1980s, which would make them the earliest. And then everything else is stringing through those years. The newest thing is “FIRST LOVE.” Many of the songs have been updated or exist in several different versions. When I gave the mixes to [Ulyssa label co-founder] Eric Deines, I put in the a capella mix of “GREY BOY” as a joke, and he loved it. That ended up being an interesting thing. Peter Zummo plays trombone in the full version. And then there’s a Mandarin version of that song, too. One thing about the response to this album so far is that it’s been very surprising. Eric made some very bold choices in terms of the stuff I sent to him. He chose stuff that I thought was way out there.
What’s it like for you to sing a song in Mandarin? How does that feel compared to singing in English?
Mandarin is a much better language than English for singing. Not only does it have a lot of soft sounds, it has a lot of open vowels. Even when something is translated literally, the sound of the language is right in your face. I don’t sing in Mandarin—I speak more Cantonese—and I have a dirty Cantonese nickname “Dai Gow” which means “farmer,” “rustic type,” “big dog,” or “big cock!”
Another aspect in working with translation is that when people translate my songs, I always tell them that they don’t have to translate them literally. I love that when a song is in a different language, it can have the same feeling while having a different meaning. There’s a song that says “I’m so tired” but then it’ll translate to “I’m so sleepy”—subtle things like that. “Lost in Thought” has been done in Mandarin, English, French, and Thai. I love the idea that a song can modulate and go into these different frequencies. It’s my favorite thing.
Do you mind talking about the image on the back cover?
These guys I’m working with, Eric and John [Williamson], they’re like naughty high school boys (laughter). My boyfriend is a lawyer, and he’s an artist as well. He was worried about the picture because he felt that it wouldn’t be able to be sold in China, or that it would get stopped at customs, or that some record stores wouldn’t sell them. Eric’s response was, “Come and get me.” (laughter). They’re just being naughty. So the idea is that we’ll have a sticker over the image—that was also Eric’s idea. They asked for a bunch of photos when this whole thing started and I sent them a bunch of photos but I sent some X-rated photos by accident (laughter). But they loved them and wanted to use them. I’m okay with it. It’s silly. And it’s silly and funny to be a pop star at 69. And to have these songs about sex—a lot of that passion has to do with my younger life, though I’m still active and it still inspires me.
One more thing is that in terms of Al Green, I talked about rock and disco coming together, but he has this one song where he says, “Belle, it’s you that I want, but it’s him that I need.” [Editor’s Note: The “him” in the song refers to God]. To me that’s the most homoerotic song ever written. When you think about where gospel, passion, and sexuality come together, that’s where I want to be. I have this song, “He is Awesome.” It’s based on a gospel hymn, “Awesome in This Place.” I first heard it at a church in Brooklyn. My percussionist friend, Mustafa Ahmed, was playing in the church band. I want to be where sexuality and religion meet. It’s the idea of not necessarily being religious but having that same graceful attitude, and also this idea of play.
There’s this anthropological term called “deep play.” Arthur and I would talk about this. Birds learn how to fall and fly at the same time. It’s the idea of playing and learning at the same time, and that’s the state I’m looking for. I want there to be no distinction between rehearsal, performance, and studio recording. There should be no difference—they should all be one. It’s as if you’re walking continuously from one to the next, and it’s all one party from beginning to end.
How has your relationship with sex changed as you’ve gotten older, and how has its importance to you shaped and manifested in the art you make?
That’s a really interesting question. Well, I was about to say that I just slept with a fan while my husband was out of town (laughter). I thought that when I got older, the sex part would settle down, but much to the annoyance of my husband, it hasn’t (laughter). As I said about Eric and John, he thinks I’m like a high school boy, though it’s in terms of infatuation. And this is very close to inspiration as well. I thought that when I got older that I’d get more into kinky stuff, but that hasn’t happened. I also thought that sex would become less important, but it’s still really important. My mother said about my grandfather, who died in his 90s, that he still had sexual desire when he was dying. I don’t know if that goes away, but what modulates is maybe your appreciation of it. What I learned in Thailand is that they see passion and love and sex as a sport, as a game. It’s this idea of making it playful.
I’m surprised that your mom told you that.
Well, especially with my mother, we were always very open about things. I could talk to her very openly about my relationships, and she was also very clear about being open about everything.
We’ve talked about your relationship with music and poetry, but I’m curious if you were ever interested in film as there were gay and lesbian filmmakers who were making a lot of independent work in the 1970s and 1980s.
The guy who took the photo for MY SKYSCRAPER is my friend Kirk Winslow. He was connected with a lot of filmmakers. He introduced me to Warren Sonbert.
Oh, he’s incredible. I’ve programmed his works.
Warren Sonbert was also connected to my boyfriend Rene. There’s that one film, Hall of Mirrors (1966), and it’s just Rene with these different glass mirrors and the song “Walk Away Renée” plays. So that’s my connection with Warren Sonbert. And then when I was in Taiwan, I did a soundtrack and location recording for this movie called 18 (1993). Jim was the major sound recorder and I was the assistant. That movie was co-produced by the Taiwanese government and the Taiwanese mafia. It was a story about mafia guys, and they had real mafia guys who were extras in it because they wanted to be in the movie. For me it was incredibly sexy to be around them because I loved gangster guys—I always thought they were sexy. So I did the soundtrack for that, but the soundtrack was never released because the mafia didn’t want to release it. It’s somewhere on VHS.
I also acted in a couple movies in Taiwan, and I did a TV commercial for Mitsubishi. We were doing location for a movie in Taiwan and the director kept staring at me and said, “You look like Lawrence of Arabia, would you like to be in a TV commercial?” So they fired this guy they hired on the spot and hired me instead (laughter). So I worked in commercials and had bit parts in movies as the foreigner, and that’s because there were very few foreigners at the time.
Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you want to mention?
There are two tracks on MY SKYSCRAPER that stand out for me in terms of production. Drop Out Orchestra did all the production for “BOSS TRIX (BENNY’S SONG).” And “GO FOR THE NIGHT” was a group production with Brennan Green and Peter Zummo. Those two tracks stand out as being more lush and what I would aspire to. I like both ends of the spectrum, the other end being this raw, acoustic, live thing. That’s my specialty. And when I produce, I think every track on this release has no edits of the vocal or the instrumental performances—they’re all done live or improvised. This idea of something being fresh is really important; I will never do an edit of my own stuff. I’ll do it if I need to when I’m working with other people, but not with my own music. There’s also the idea of being in your own world and producing it all yourself… you can work with a team of producers and mixers, and I loved doing that with Arthur’s Landing where we brought in guest singers and players and there could be 13 or 14 people on stage. And then doing that in the studio—it was fun. I like both ends of the spectrum: raw and acoustic, and then heavy, heavy production.
I was out of town when you played a show last month in Chicago. I know you played at the art gallery Kiosk. Do you mind talking about that?
That was really nice because I’ve not only worked in a lot of art galleries, but that was actually the first thing I did after college. We had an art gallery, which meant we had a free space, so we put on performances. We brought in friends. I love the idea of performing in an art gallery, and acoustically they’re usually really good. I loved the idea of people milling around and for this to be background music, to be this casual thing. We did this with Arthur’s Landing, too. We’d be doing the soundcheck when people arrived, and I wanted people to have this feeling of, “Oh, we’re here while they’re setting up.” And then I would do this very slow prayer of Arthur’s “Love Comes Back,” and that would get people to come back and be focused, and then we’d launch into the disco—like 1, 2, 3, pow. I like those kinds of dynamics.
I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask this to you as well. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
I have an interesting voice that people, for some reason, really like. With COOL FIRE, my friend Marcus put it on Bandcamp for me. I forgot to tell him to take out the talking parts, but he put in everything, and people really like when I’m saying something on there because I have this soft voice. It kind of betrays my age. I have this soft voice and, when I sing, it still has this soft quality. Also, when when my husband was listening to “FRESH FEELING” he thought it was Arthur on the vocals—when I corrected him he said, “But you do sound like Arthur.”
The reason that Eric connected with me in the first place—as well as these younger artists who are fans, like Chanel Beads—is the gentleness of my voice. That’s what he told me. That’s partly a result of the production and microphone technique, and that’s something I’m good at. It’s a big part of what I do. I found a particular microphone, a Sennheiser e835, and it really cuts through everything. I brought that to Chicago. It’s not an expensive microphone, either. What I did in Chicago was play while people were arriving and they were wondering what was going on, and then I played certain songs that caught their attention and they were kind of listening, but I made it feel okay that they could keep talking. And then we had a break and I did it again. I wanted to do COOL FIRE first, and then after people had been drinking, I would turn on the drum machine and do some Arthur disco songs. But I ended up mixing them together because I felt like it. I’d do an acoustic, quiet song and then turn on the drum machine. I was mixing his and my songs.
That’s the story of my life. I can’t get away from this connection I have with Arthur’s music, so I’m kind of in his shadow but also in his spotlight. I don’t want to be disconnected from him either. It’s not only a spiritual connection, it’s visceral. Arthur used to talk about muscle memory and how that fits into what you’re doing when you’re improvising. It’s this idea that you already have this technique in your hands, so just use it.
Nirosta Steel’s new album, MY SKYSCRAPER, is out now via Ulyssa.
Thank you for reading the 231st issue of Tone Glow. Just use it.
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This guy is a genius
Amazing piece!! Thank you