There is something nostalgic and yet modern about your work, recalling the best parts of Fleetwood Mac and someone like Townes van Zandt who also had that. Perhaps that common ground is bound up in a more truthful way of living and being and creating. There is an earthiness, but a need to honour the past, something that follows through to illuminate the present; old fashioned but modern, living radiantly now.
I really do love the music of Fleetwood Mac and of Townes, but maybe one of the reasons I am drawn to both of them is the way they honour the past or simpe things, but do it in a way that is not modern anymore, as it was done way back when, but the musical sensibility and sounds they are making to get that message across is amazing. Fleetwood Mac is one of the most famous bands in the U.S. but the lyrics are so mystical and about these things that I really relate to, it’s interesting to see how a band that was doing that in the seventies totally translated, and to masses of people, and they loved it. Now I think it is lost these days, I am trying to carry that on, and some people hear it, but it is not popular music. Popular music is about things that don’t matter, and that’s pretty sad.
Sometimes I think that even more than the lyrics for the masses, it was and is more the atmosphere that Fleetwood Mac create that translates.
I think that’s true, and I think the masses were not even necessarily listening to the crazy mystical lyrics, they were just getting the vibe of it, and the vibe is so good, you can’t ignore it! [Laughs] You think ‘this feels good, this feels groovy, I want to move, and I don’t know why!’ and they have that [Laughs]
It speaks to a more innocent time in a way.
Me too. I think that people are very distracted right now, all of us are, with all of these confusing things around that we are all supposed to incorporate into our lives, cellphones, the internet – it’s hard, you have to say I don’t want to have this in my life as much, it’s not good for me. And I think a lot of people don’t know how to separate themselves from that, and from that world. It’s a total challenge, I think that is why people are not engaging in a lot of music, people just go on to the next thing, the internet is an extension of a scatterbrained mind.
To be able to refuse all of that is a freedom in itself, to be able to make up the life you want, and not be beholden to anything.
I make an effort and try to be, but I also have to keep up with all this shit with modern technology, as it is part of my job to be on top of it, emailing and such, and I hate it, but no-one is going to write me a letter, it is just not going to happen. It is hard to keep the things I want to do – crafting and doing things with my hands, I get distracted and disappointed in myself, and do all these things I don’t care about, [laughs] but I have to try and do my best, and hope for the best, you have to remind yourself to do the things you really love and ignore all that other stuff.
You mention crafting and doing things with your hands, and from the first days where you were literally stitching together record sleeves; does being ensconced in domesticity give you a lovely sense of the ritual and the nurturing, those things that can be lost in the busy administration of daily life?
Oh yes. We moved into this house about two years ago, we bought a big old Victorian house, and I have been focusing on making the house nice, hanging things on the wall, sorting my little possessions, and for the last while that has been my craft – making house, and I have been really, really enjoying that. We keep saying that everything we have should be just amazing, so we collect furtniture, and hang crazy things on the wall – we have a set of antlers on the living room wall! And it is so fun to nest and make our home what we want it to be, it’s great.
It can be a real reflection of the soul, where you live.
Oh yes, it totally is, all the little pieces together, I hang my earrings on a little piece of lace, it’s lovely, it’s home.
Alela Diane plays The Button Factory on Sunday October 2nd. Win tickets here.
