Jolie Holland is in Brooklyn, New York, at her apartment
south of Prospect Park, when she answers the phone, turns off some
tinny-sounding music in the background and says hello. She sounds
tired, and explains she is getting over a cold. Her speaking voice,
with just a hint of a southern accent, is surprisingly quiet and
youthful—in marked contrast with the confident and mature voice she
evidently possesses, as she puts it to use on her new album the
Living and the Dead. She’s coming to Halifax for the first time on
Friday, January 30, to headline that night’s In the Dead of Winter show
at St. George’s Round Church.
Holland has been on the move for more than a decade, starting when
she ran away from Houston to Austin. “I pretty much left Texas when I
was 20, for good,” she says. Since then she has lived in New Orleans,
San Francisco and Vancouver, and though she has been in Brooklyn for
more than a year now, Holland recently moved across the park. “I was
moving while I was on tour,” she says, “so whenever I’ve not been on
tour I’ve been pulling stuff out of boxes. I’ve been really
uprooted.”
A self-taught multi-instrumentalist, Holland grew up in a house with
a piano, but only remembers taking one piano lesson. “I was really
young, not even 13,” she says. “The teacher was just checking out what
I was doing, she wasn’t even teaching me anything.” With some help from
friends showing her how to play, Holland learned guitar and violin as
well. As she puts it, Holland was “scrambling and trying to figure
stuff out. Not knowing what I was doing, but doing it anyway.”
After a brief stint in 2000 as a founding member of Vancouver’s The
Be Good Tanyas, Holland headed back to San Francisco and recorded a
batch of homemade demos that made Tom Waits a fan, caught the attention
of Anti- record label, and became her debut album Catalpa in
2003. Her first studio album, Escondida (2004), added to the
buzz surrounding her singing and her songwriting, with songs like the
dark vaudevillian, classic jazzy-blues number “Old Fashioned Morphine.”
Holland’s momentum continued with 2006’s Springtime Can Kill
You, a collection of broken-hearted love songs, most of which were
born during a train ride.
Holland is the kind of lucky songwriter who is able to write a song
just about anywhere if the inspiration hits her. She wrote many of the
songs for the Living and the Dead while on tour with Springtime
Can Kill You, and wrote a few more in the space of a week leading up to
recording. She composed the lo-fi “Fox In Its Hole” and another song in
their entireties in a hotel room, and another song in an airport. “They
just showed up,” she says.
As on Holland’s previous albums, the Living and the Dead channels influences from old American music of all kinds, including
folk, gospel, reggae and blues. This time, though, you can also hear a
prominent strain of straight-up country-rock, or “rock” as Holland
calls it, with more than a pinch of Daniel Johnston thrown in for good
measure. Holland sounds like she has settled into her voice, singing
from a less affected and more endearingly natural place. It suits her
beautifully on a number of mid-tempo rockers with great melodies and
jangly guitar hooks, propelled by Rachel Blumberg’s (Bright Eyes)
drumming, M. Ward and Marc Ribot’s (Tom Waits, Elvis Costello) guitar
playing and Shahzad Ismaily (Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy) on bass, percussion
and guitar. Holland and Ismaily co-produced most of the album, while M.
Ward took the reins on “Your Big Hands.” It’s an impressive lineup.
“I’ve been really lucky,” Holland says. “Part of putting together a
band is choosing somebody who is going to do what you want them to do
anyway.”
Holland’s voice soars on album opener “Mexico City”—written from
the perspective of Joan Vollmer, William Burroughs’ common-law wife,
who was involved in the early beat movement and died tragically at 27
when Burroughs accidentally shot her. Holland says that she has always
been interested in Vollmer (a photo of her appears in the album’s liner
notes). “Corrido Por Buddy” recalls Lucinda Williams both in craft and
delivery and builds on the themes of friendship and tragedy in the
first song—“Oh Buddy, I wish I’d been a better friend,” Holland sings
to a friend that didn’t make it through his drug abuse. But the song,
and the album, is also about survival: “When I was really down, there
were three little words/From a couple good people that kept me holding
on.”
Holland was commissioned to compose music for a documentary about a
man who lived in the last remaining flop house in the Bowery
neighbourhood of Manhattan. “He’s sort of a genius but, you know, kind
of withdrawn from society in a way,” she explains. The documentary was
never completed, but “Fox In Its Hole,” and “You Painted Yourself In”
came out of that project. “The funny thing is one of my best friends
stayed at the hotel, the flophouse, a year after I had written the
song,” Holland says. “I went and visited her there and we went and
played music on the roof.”
The singer has a knack for finding dark, creepy old tunes, and
the Living and the Dead has its share. “Love Henry” is a tale of
a rich woman murdering her lover in a fit of jealousy. “Somebody said
that song was older than the bible,” Holland says. “And there’s
Ethiopian versions of that song.” Holland and Samantha Parton (The Be
Good Tanyas) close the album with a cover of “Enjoy Yourself,” in what
sounds like a kitchen.
Arguably, the most exciting songs on the album are the ones that
Holland is most secretive about. “Your Big Hands” opens with crunchy
guitar and a sexy, concrete description of someone. Holland won’t say
whom (“I hardly tell anyone,” she says), but she does say that part of
“Palmyra” is about the same person. “Sweet Loving Man” sways back and
forth in a way that is both old and new, while in “The Future,” Holland
mourns a lost love, but also declares her independence with maturity
and affection.
It seems unlikely that Holland will be ready to settle down any time
soon, but for now she enjoys collaborating with people in New York.
“The ecosystem is so big here, you can just play so many different
kinds of music and you’re not limited by your own personal shtick or
what the public expects of you,” she says. She’s been playing on world
music albums, working on a duo project called The Gentleman Callers
with her friend Matt Bauer, taking gamelan classes (Indonesian music)
and has plans to work on essays on gospel music from the Sea Islands.
Being a wanderer isn’t without its advantages—friends took her in
during an unplanned stay in Austin over Christmas, and she has friends
in many other places as well. There’s a good chance the next time
Holland packs her suitcases, it will be to head to Portland. “I really
feel drawn to Portland a lot,” she says. “My band is there and my
closest friends are there.” Wherever she ends up, it will almost
certainly inspire more songwriting: good news for those following her
journey with open ears.
Check out all the In the Dead of Winter Shows in our events section.
This article appears in Jan 22-28, 2009.