You moved to Portland some time ago, but are originally from Nevada. Nature and pastoral imagery are such strong, rich themes in your work, how would you describe the move from Nevada to Portland, how are you finding it, and what is the difference in feel of the place and landscape? Fellow Nevada natives such as Joanna Newsom and Benjamin Oak Goodman have previously spoken about their special relationship to the place, the pines, going swimming, they have an acute sense of place, do you miss it?
We do miss it. My husband and I grew up in Nevada City, it’s a beautiful city, there are pine trees everywhere, and lots of places to swim in. It’s a goldrush town, it looks like it did in 1850, very old-fashioned, and it’s charming, but it is really nice to be away from where we grew up and establish our life in a place where we are not forced to be who we have always been, where we don’t run into everyone, everyone that knows your business and family. It’s nice to be in Portland, it is a very relaxed city, I can just see trees out the window, it’s really nice. I think it is important for the heart. Anytime I have lived in places that are separate from that, I feel an ache in my heart.
A sense of place is so important, do you think that as you get older you appreciate your environment even more, or was it that you were always very aware of appreciating your surroundings – sometimes finding the magical in the mundane?
I think that is what I do tend to write about. Feelings are compared to something like the wind or to nature somehow, that is the language I am using to describe something ordinary, those natural elements- and I think that is because of where I grew up, and it makes sense to me, the way to get my point across [laughs]. For my Mum she grew up by the ocean, but then she lived in the mountains in Nevada City, and she had to go back. Now she lives by the ocean on a little cliff and sees it everyday, that thing is an ache, it is a real thing, whether it is the mountains, desert or sea – I think those things are in us deeply, if we’re lucky, for a reason.
I really like that record you did with Alina Hardin – Alena & Alila (2009) you seem to love finding old songs and then imbuing them with new life, and honouring what has gone before.
It was really nice to do. Alina and I had been touring together, we had these songs we knew and were singing anyway. I wish we had more time to record it, we did it in two days, and we were between tours, so we didn’t have a lot of time, but part of that created the sound that it has, and it is so simple, us with guitars, singing harmonies – there is something special about the simplicity of it, capturing that moment together. It would be great to work with her again. She actually lives just down the street from me. She is like a little sister to me, she is one of my best friends.
The Headless Heroes project you did The Silence of Love, was really beautiful, it must have been exciting covering songs by people as diverse as Vashti Bunyan, and I am Kloot.
That was a very mysterious project for me, I was really just brought on as the vocalist, and didn’t have anything to do with the production or choosing of the songs. I was presented with this group of songs, This guy called Eddie [Bezalel] got in touch and said that he found me on Myspace, back when that was the thing, and he said “I love your voice, would you be interested in singing a song?”, I had heard a few of them, like Vashti and Jackson C. Frank, then some I had never heard before, but I liked it all, so I decided to just go for it. I sang those songs to an acoustic guitar and a few months later it came in the mail and it sounded like that! [Laughs] and I was blown away and it was a pleasant surprise. It kind of freaked me out, but I liked it. It was a weird studio project, someone’s vision, me singing the songs, then this crazy thing came out of it, but I think it is a great record. I don’t think that anything further will happen with Headless, but the sound that the record has is a really good sound, and it probably has already influenced some of my work, as that was my first glimpse of hearing my voice in the context of a lot of different sounds, it was a breath of fresh air, and exciting for me to hear myself in that way. As me and Wild Divine continue to make recrods, influences will continue to come through, my voice sounds nice in that context. ‘The North Wind Blew South’ is one we have been doing on tour, as it was my favourite song on that record, it would be a lot of fun to do that record live, as no-one has heard the songs live, as we never toured that record. I didn’t know what I was doing, they said they wanted to fly me to LA, and I said “I’m not doing anything else, why not?”, and it was a great experience to just go and use my voice and not be much involved otherwise, it worked out.
