Part 2

What kind of musical settings and situations do you think are ideal for your lyrics?

I had no idea for years. Imagine these poems with, like, a guitar. No shade on guitar, it just had all these layers of cultural meaning that got in the way somehow. I was totally confused.

Eventually, I happened to find something with electronic music that wasn’t some sound-world I already knew about, and that seemed like a way to try to put some lyrics into a frame that was unfamiliar, but still created in the moment, like one might in a 70s guitar tune. (It took a while to get good enough with the tools to do that. That’s basically what happened for this record, and I hope there’s a resonance of the gap there that works – let’s call it a poetics of the gap to be more precise.

But I don’t like to sit still, and after this record and the one which follows it – finished, coming out Spring ’25, and based on a big poem that was published in Prelude magazine back home – I ended up going the opposite way. At the end of a road it’s nice to find a new one.

There’s a record I’ve written for solo piano and voice which leans heavily into the intimate, the physical, and in some sense the “unmediated”. And recently I had the challenge of figuring out what kinds of things I could imagine opera singers to say, setting the texts of local queer poets. I don’t think people can sing concepts, so it was a curious challenge.

I’ve also been doing some songwriting with pop artists. All of this seems pretty different. I don’t understand it at all. One common element seems to be there has to be this resonance of the gap I mentioned above, at least for me to be interested.

When working on music, when do the lyrics enter the picture? Where do they come from? Do lyrics need to grow together with the music or can they emerge from a place of their own?

I’ve tried both ways! That’s on this record, too. Tracks one, three, and six were totally improvised, both music and lyrics at once, and what you hear are those takes with minor editing and some layering on top. The others were poems I’d written and read out a bit in Brooklyn that felt resonant, though I used by design the first or second takes to keep that “snapping fire of stepping out of the spaceship for the first time” that Ralph J. Gleason writes about in the liner notes to Bitches Brew.

I keep being amazed by how little text you need to fill four minutes of music. My pal Ben Seretan is great at this use of repetition as a kind of mantra that expands in meaning. And then Poulenc’s Apollinaire songs are, like, a minute long!

[Read our Ben Seretan interview]

On the other hand, Leonard Cohen would famously write rhymed quatrains for years; there’s that great story of him meeting the guy who got him into songwriting, when he was already in his 30s, Bob Dylan: supposedly Leonard asked, how long did it take you to write “A Hard Rain’s A’Gonna Fall” – Bob said, fifteen minutes, and Cohen was depressed for weeks. Or that’s how I’ve heard the story.

I’m not convinced anybody can choose for themselves which way works and when. Marina’s point again.

Do you feel like the music triggers specific words inside you? Or is more of a feeling or a memory? Would you say there is instantly an entire idea in front of you or does the story grow as you keep listening to the music?

Definitely the latter if it’s happening in real-time, as in “[h2.1] Her Water Dream,” for example.



I remember a kind of dim sense of what was to come, more a bodily sensation than a “verbal” one, as in some kinds of embodied dream work. Because of the real-time aspect there wasn’t time for words or thoughts aside from whatever was happening. That was a bit surprising, I can’t quite describe the feeling. My eyes were not dry afterwards.

Often with that kind of thing I have to listen to it a lot after to even understand what happened. In this case and with the piano record I mentioned, this listening afterwards changed me, because they showed me things I didn’t know. I suppose that’s a best-case scenario, but like meditation, I’m not convinced it’s a horse one can lead well with the approach direct.

At least, with my level of ADHD, it’s something of a lost cause. And that piano record was, I guess, the feeling of a memory, to conjoin your fortuitous phrase.

More generally, in how far can music take you to places with your writing you would possibly not have visited without it?

Wow! What a question! Hm. It’s taken me to at least one specific place I find beautiful, which is when one doesn’t have to say much to be heard.

There’s also something I find extraordinary in the combination of musical intervals and words: say you sing “hello” on two notes a minor second apart (one piano key); and then you sing “hello” on a major sixth (the first two notes of the NBC theme blip). Why does that differ so much, what meaning is imparted?

There’s this incredibly perverse and precise interlinking of symbolic systems there that I think it’s too complex (for me anyway) to understand. Wagner took all of Europe on a mind-blowing dramaturgical journey – which, incredibly to my terminally-online brain, they found to be fast-paced and thrilling – by linking little musical themes with ideas in the plays, the infamous leitmotivs. I assume movies will keep doing that until time immemorial because it works so well.

But I think your question points to something I’d not really considered and find touching: the music gives a shape to time, and that shape, apparently, gives me something to ride and flow with, its own urgency, in order to discover some pretty important stuff to me, it would seem.

When you're writing song lyrics, do you sense or see a connection between your voice and the text? Does it need to feel and sound “good” or “right” to sing certain words? What's your perspective in this regard of singing someone else's songs versus your own?

Oh gosh, I love singing covers but I’m so uneven at doing so because this dictation thing is always happening to me and I can’t turn it off. I want to sing and release more covers because, I dunno, music is great.

That said, it took me two decades and coming out not to hate my voice. I started singing in choirs when an arm injury put me out of the jazz piano game, and it was so terrifying just to sing. Later, without realising it, I kept trying to have “a woman’s voice” but could never pull it off. Actually it was Nick Cave’s Ghosteen and Billie Holiday that sort of showed me voice can be a character.



Then I got more sophisticated in my understanding of gender and feminism and realized any voice I have is mine, and it’s a woman’s voice. Then it seemed I had at least the interesting trick up my sleeve of being a baritone female singer. Who knows what will happen with that. Maybe I’ll take time off and be a countertenor. (I’m kidding.)

Words fit music or they don’t, I guess. Because English has both Germanic and French layers and all kinds of Latinate and Greek words associated with class and education and had its grammar radically simplified as a trade language, there’s a lot to play with – even if the vowels aren’t as pure as Italian or the syntax as usefully mysterious as classical Chinese or German.

I think Hemingway is a guy to look at for excellent use of the Germanic core of English; to me the old French and German words often sound and feel a lot more relatable than the others in song especially. I think this is because song brings so much feeling to the table, and such feeling can often be dissonant in an unpleasant way when faced against a word which doesn’t refer to the simple world of proto-Indo-European roots (house, car, cow, love, sad). It can be like somebody sang Ligeti's Nouvelles Adventures without getting the joke.

Another way of saying this is that images create images in the minds of the listener and concepts create only concepts, which aren’t images and tend to close off rather than open possibility in this context. Maybe it’s because concepts are timeless and music happens in time, like our experience of images. I think this doesn’t work not because it’s bad but because there’s no space for the listener to think and feel for themselves and so no place for their own experience of meaning.

I notice a lot of well-meaning artists try to bring critical-theoretic concepts into song lyrics and the only one who I feel who does it well is Jenny Hval. I have direct recent experience of asking an opera singer to sing a Latinate term from critical discourse and immediately regretting it. It’s not that it was bad, it was just funny in the wrong way.

I would love to do a bureaucratic opera where everyone in a postapocalyptic office bunker quotes business language and critical theory while the world burns. (Opera commissioning bodies, I’m serious here, ring me.)

Anyway, as Elaine Scarry points out in Dreaming By The Book, specificity is more skilfully approached through the diaphanous.

In how far are you consciously aware of the meaning of the lyrics you're writing during the creative process? Do you need to have a concrete concept or can the words take the lead?

I don’t want to sound like I’m being flip or glib, but: I don’t think any writer is fully aware of the meaning of what they write. That’s for other people to find. The writer just has a clue of what the words mean to them. In the hearts and imaginations of others those will be different. The “you” in a pop song – that lover’s traces on one’s skin – has a different face for everyone.

What is the value of song lyrics or hip hop bars outside of the music?

Gucci Gang. No, seriously: depends. I gather that often famous songwriters don’t feel like they write “real” literature and probably novelists feel bummed out the other way around.

I think this kind of question, about the value of an art medium or of a component of an art medium, is hard to answer because of the variables involved. What’s the value of cadmium yellow? What’s the value of the Ring libretto? It depends for who and when.

For me: pretty dang high, but if the lyrics were composed for the song as opposed to some Schubert-spitballing-a-tune-from-a-poem kind of thing, it’s a bit like a picture of a dog versus petting a dog. I’d rather pet the dog. It’s that thing about interlinked symbolic languages I mentioned above, and the mysterious emergent properties of that complexity.

How do you see the relationship between harmony, rhythm and melody? Do you feel that honing your sense of rhythm and groove has an effect on your lyrics-writing skills?

Every day of my life as a musician I am glad I started off as a drummer. (In Salsa and Worship bands in the Inland Empire, if you can imagine such a thing.) Later I learned about the North Indian classical system: everyone studies spoken/played rhythms for sometimes years before they can start playing with pitch. And Stravinsky was a great drummer.

But I have to say, gosh, I’ve never thought about it effecting my lyrics. For poetry there’s scansion but in free-verse that’s a bit looser a thing. For lyrics I’d have to say that it is, after all, good to know where the beat is. Often singers that study singing in conservatory or in genres where the idea isn’t to have fun and dance and fuck have trouble with this.

The rhythmic structure of “Her Water Dream” and the vocal relationship to the pulse (sort of a Rasheid Ali on Coltrane’s Interstellar Space type beat, in retrospect: pulse without time) is actually very complex if you map it out. But fortunately I didn’t so it flows.

You have to get deep into some nightmare-core Xenakis/George Crumb notation horror to get certain things that just flow easily for everyone if you just record the sound. I was talking about this with my friend Theodosia Roussos about this recently: sometimes you just have to play a line yourself for this reason. Try to write down James Brown. Good luck. But we feel it. Maybe that’s as simple as that with lyrics and rhythm.



Another tune to consider this on is “[h1.4] as horizon”, which relates to the undergirding in precise but floating ways; or “[h2.3] on that last shore,” in which there is pulse, again, but the meter is uneven.

Harmony is another thing I think no one really understands, but I do recall Paul Simon’s note that if your lyric is sad, put it to happy music, and vice versa. Perhaps this is again the poetics of the gap.

With regards to harmony, I’m not convinced that e.g. Schenkerian analysis or graduate-school set theory get us far, although they can be nice in a pinch. I think you could sit down a clever 10-year old who liked puzzles in front of a piano and she'd invent serialism and all that if you told her to make games. She wouldn't be trying to "secure the supremacy of German music for the next 100 years" like Schoenberg pitched himself as doing, either.

Anyway, music notation is a bit of a vestigial organ: it was made for seven notes in simple rhythms and we misuse it for twelve notes in crazy rhythms, and so the numbers and letters of music theory can get thorny and redundant. Jazz harmony, Nashville notation, figured bass, tab: they've all got their perks and blind spots. If you're young learn them all but remember that you already know what everything sounds like, you just need to put a name to a face. You've already met all the people at the party, so don't think too little of yourself. Everyone peeks at name tags.

Ear training is good but everyone has a lot of ear training without realizing it or music couldn’t work. Adults hold an astonishing level of musical knowledge in their heads, but notation-based, classist systems love to convince them they're ignorant when in fact they've already heard everything. Hindemith didn’t solve tonality despite his staunchly-reasonable integer theories of dissonance. Rock bands like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizzard are putting out microtonal jam records and trans women like Zheanna Erose are writing in 31-EDO to dedicated fanbases. Not to mention Wendy Carlos. So who knows?



Recorded sound and amplification have existed for less than a hundred years of our species’ millions and we’re still catching up to what they mean. We only got subwoofers fifty years ago and look what Atlanta did with it. We're coasting the epiphenomena, trying to find ways to make them mean and sing something special and unique to us, I think. European Classical musicians all used to improvise and before recordings mistakes were common and nobody really cared: it was about élan. You can hear this in recordings of the early Artur Rubinstein, before the lure of perfection seduced musicians and audiences: riding on talent and perfect memory, he only started practicing seriously when he got married and realized he had mouths to feed.

Classical music took exactly the wrong lesson from recorded sound, but the Belleville Three [Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson] figured it out in high school.

[Read our Kevin Saunderson interview]

Here’s another example, this one from music education. Bach and Haydn and everyone else for hundreds of years learned music with partimenti which were kind of cheat sheets for chord progressions like learning Beatles songs used to be. (I sometimes imagine young Haydn, an impoverished choirboy with a golden voice, on scholarship at St. Stephen's here in town, scribbling away at pages like these, long before The Creation.) You’d memorise them and mix-and-match. Bach had all his students begin with these and used them in his own works, however elegant the filigree around them became.

But nobody teaches partimenti anymore – even in the fancy schools. Early music keyboardists learn them a bit but nobody listens to what early music students have to say, unfortunately. European Baroque music was more like jazz than what you hear on classical radio now, and vocal groups in the Renaissance could improvise four-voice counterpoint in perfect harmony by ear. Where did that go? Why totally ignore how the guys we’re copying learned to play and think about music when we teach their music now? It’s perverse and makes composition seem more mysterious than it is.

Guitar tabs, MIDI chord packs, and rap battles are a better example of musical common practice than your usual Royal Society theory exams, and more historically justified, too. John Dowland, slinking around Queen Victoria's court dressed all in black, was the original goth. Give him a modded Jazzmaster and he'd write "Lovesong" (The Cure).



Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of poetry is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

No. Not at all. A mother breastfeeding her child is better (and different) than any poetry or art. A dog playing in the grass. Things before ideas. No ideas but in things, as old William Carlos Williams said, although I don’t know if he was as staunch a materialist as it sounds like from this distance. Anyway, I am – so there you go.

But about coffee? My friends Felix Schwentener and Matthias Oldofredi recently played the greatest DJ set of all time by amplifying an old espresso machine by itself through a Technics mixer in the middle of a rave and serving the coffee to everyone. This has forever changed my view of coffee in rave culture and the expressive possibility of latte art.

More seriously, I have to thank you for this rich final question. I studied Rinzai Zen Buddhism for many years and in a way it’s all about this. What was your original face before your parents were born?