Story

Interview with Olenka

You received a grant to record Rhythms of Another Life. How did that come about?

There were four basic factors. First of all I was antsy to record again because it had been a couple of years since my first CD, Making Arrows. Secondly, I had just completed work on a grant I received from Quad City Arts for my “Concerts for Elders” project, which involved 18 concerts for seniors in the region, and I was itching to write another grant. This time I wanted to write something for the production and performance of my original music.

Thirdly, since I was born in Poland, spent time in Italy and grew up mostly in New York City, I was pretty heavily exposed to world culture and world music. But at this time I was living in Davenport, Iowa and that area is particularly steeped in the blues. I found myself having a difficult time “playing well with others” because the syncopation that I love and that pervades my music is so different from blues rhythms. So I decided that the best way to really communicate where I’m coming from was to record and perform music that showcased the syncopated world rhythms. The name of the project became “World Rhythms in Original Music” and it involved 20 educational concerts for Iowans, including some schools. It was good timing, too, because world musicians were getting barred from travel to the US and funding was being cut from school music programs.

Lastly, I just wanted to give people a reason to appreciate global cultural contributions. Since 9/11 I’ve gotten a sense of becoming kind of insular in America. As a world traveler, that was making me sad and kind of nervous. Call this project my contribution to good international relations.

The odd meters that you use in songs like “Tumbleweed” and “Different Drum” seem very natural to you, especially in performance. Was living in New York enough to ingrain in you an affinity for odd meters?

Well, that’s an interesting question: until a few months ago I didn’t really know why other musicians sometimes couldn’t hang with me when I would write something in 13/16 and groove with it. But an incident at Jamey’s [Jamey Reid, percussionist/co-producer] reminded me what it was that made me who I am when it comes to rhythms.

He’s a drummer, so naturally he had to practice. But I was staying in his house so out of courtesy he would put these sound muffling pads on the drums, put on headphones and practice along with some music. Meanwhile I’d be reading and drifting off into sleep. And although I could still hear the drums through the muffling pads, they didn’t sound like drums, really. What I realized they sounded like was train wheels.

It was like I was suddenly transported back to when I was a kid in Poland, when my family would take these long, awesome train trips across Europe. Sleeping to the sound of the wheels crossing the track joints -- it sounded like this long complicated repeating rhythm pattern. Naturally, there’s no such thing as 4/4 when it comes to train wheels – the distances between the axels and the other cars was never in such a tidy proportion to the speed of the train to make a tempo pattern divisible by four. It was like in the old days when drum loops were actual loops of tape. It was hard to get it cut so that it would repeat a pattern after an evenly paced fourth beat. Also, what you actually heard was not just the wheels of the car you’re on, but the other cars echoing, toward and away from you. Meanwhile I’m sleeping on this train and getting rocked into a trance with that gorgeous, safe feeling in the midst of rhythmic complexity. That was among my all time favorite experiences. I still love trains. Although my husband teases me that it’s because I like the tunnels.

What was the biggest challenge in recording the CD and completing the grant work?

First I thought I would have a year to complete the grant work, but it turned out I only had six months. After submitting the application that took me a solid week to put together, I got an e-mail from the Arts Council saying that my completion date was wrong, should they adjust it for me. I’m like, what do you mean “adjust it”? But this was right around the time that George W. was telling the country he can get in and out of Iraq in a couple of months, so I’m thinking, fine, if he thinks he can do that, I can do this in six months.

Then the bad weather hit. My sandstorms were snowstorms. The CD was recorded from January to March of 2003 in Bloomington, Indiana, famous for the Indiana University School of Music. But the actual location was percussionist/co-producer Jamey Reid’s house in the woods off Lake Lemon. Musicians had a hell of a time getting to and from the house in the snow, up and down winding, narrow roads, especially the hill just above the house. At the time I was driving my beloved but ancient rear-wheel drive Cougar. Jamey is used to his behemoth van and keeps telling me to just gun it. Meanwhile I know my car can’t be treated like that, otherwise the ’86 wouldn’t still be on the road in 2003! So there were serious delays. I got a lot of agitated reading done.

… what kind of reading?

[Laughs] Science fiction mostly, of the psychic or spiritual variety. Julian May’s Jack the Bodiless, John De Lancie’s Soldier of Light, and some eastern metaphysics that Jamey had in his library. He’s a fairly disciplined Buddhist. I like mythology but also read a lot of theology. I was raised Catholic, and although I’m an “ordinary time” Unitarian, I’m drawn to seek out the theologians that agree with my issues. And they’re out there, they just often get censured by the Vatican. But that’s okay, history isn’t over yet.

How did you choose the songs on the CD?

Ah, that’s always a huge stormy process, kind of like the weather. Jamey, Scott Kellogg [the techno/recording engineer] and I locked some horns over it a couple of times. There were 25 songs that were candidates. I have over 80 songs written just waiting to be recorded. “Heading Up”, for example, made it because I’m stubborn, although it’s kind of a P.S. on the record. The good thing about having such a huge repertoire is that I can choose the songs thematically, unifying them by lyrical content, instead of essentially saying to the audience “this is what I experienced and wrote about between the years such-and-such”. I can’t relate to wanting to know that much about an artist, unless they’re DaVinci or something. It seems like there’s a glut of singer-songwriters, so for me their work needs to focus on something I can grab a hold of, other than just themselves. So the songs on this album were written over a period of 20 years. But like I said, I have at least four more albums worth of material already written and ready to go. The collections are already arranged by themes.

The theme for this one became ‘otherness’, unfamiliar voices and perspectives, something challenging us to understand other points of view. This included the perspectives of women and foreigners. Although I am now a naturalized citizen, I am an émigré, and I have no lack of ‘immigrant songs’. I also profoundly feel that women, particularly strong, intelligent, spiritual or sensually and sexually unapologetic women, are also ‘other’ in our civilization. The song “Angels”, for example, is pretty hardcore in that respect, to the point that I chose not to play it in my workshops for schools.

Another unifying characteristic for the songs was, obviously, world rhythms, and I was fairly confident that they were already present in my entire repertoire, and if they weren’t, then Jamey would make something fit. I had just written a song in 13/16, “Different Drum”, after playing around with a traditional Finnish song. The one-bar clave rhythm was also all over the place in my music, which is a basic syncopated pattern counted 1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2.

There’s also this precious little Ziplock baggie of micro-cassettes, which I really ought to put in a safety deposit box. It has little gems of songs that I haven’t gotten around to polishing for my live repertoire. But I pulled two out of there that had never seen the light of day but were thematically perfect. One of them became the single “Tumbleweed”; the other was “Peace Avalanche” which worked so nicely with a gamelan percussion part that Jamey played on the marimba.

What was the process of coming up with those little riffs?

Usually I’ll write funky, syncopated parts for bass and then the musicians, producer, and sometimes the engineer will take those parts and suggest instruments, sometimes cutting the parts up and creating riffs and bits of counterpoint accents. Sometimes the musicians would shake their heads and struggle with the parts, which I of course don’t know are challenging because they’re natural and just fun for me. They would basically be struggling with the syncopated accents because these rhythms are not instinctive or predictable for most people. But once you hear them and feel that funky little upbeat accent, they become like a new carnival ride you can’t wait to get on again. The word “cool” usually gets thrown around at that point.

What is your recording process like?

Basically, the thing that I do differently is that I consider the recording process part of the creative phase. The arrangements happen in the studio so the musicians need time to respond to what the other musicians are doing. It would be prohibitively expensive, and nerve-racking, to pay a studio by the hour for that, so we recorded on a laptop in Jamey Reids’s and Scott Kellogg’s houses, using a good microphone and inviting various musicians one at a time to layer the sounds. Then I saved the top dollar for the mixing studio, which was another layer of creativity thanks to Dave Weber of Airtime Studios.

Some songwriters ask me: “Why don’t you just have a band and practice the parts, then come in to a studio and do what they do live?” But there is no band because I don’t want to be tied to a set orchestration. If a certain section needs a vibrophone for two bars, that’s what it gets, as happened in “Dawn”. You can’t tell a vibrophone player to sit out the rest of a live show. What I especially want to stay away from, because there’s enough of it already and because I’m essentially a world fusion songwriter, is the stereotyped guitar, bass and standard American drum set. World and hand drums are always the first choice for drums and percussion for me. But they get mixed phat enough that they become a major, high-protein back-bone of the rhythm section, which is I think partially why people compare my arrangements to Peter Gabriel’s. Then if we want a certain flavor, we plug in a standard American drum kit, a sampled kick drum or other samples.

The recording engineer on this CD, Scott Kellogg, is also a techno musician. So he took the 7/8 metered “Tumbleweed” home and came back the next day with this wonderful 7/8 drum and guitar loop. He also programmed the drums on “Different Drum”. He wanted to start with the most difficult things first, so he started with what goes against the grain for a techno brain – the odd meters. And I think we ended up with something pretty revolutionary. Europe is heavier into techno than the States, but I don’t know about techno in 13/16: that might be revolutionary anywhere you go. Interestingly, some people say that’s my radio single!

What was your favorite part of the process?

The mixing. It took a solid week, sometimes fourteen hours a day. The mixing stage is the first time we got to hear the results coming together on some monster speakers. Plus Dave Weber of Airtime Studios is a wonderful producer in his own right, and his ears were fresh because he wasn’t the recording engineer. He came into it asking the question that engineers always seem to ask independent songwriters: “So do you want a folksy, quirky…” To which I believe I immediately shot back with “God forbid!” And once he settled into the guiding approach of “I want people who hear it ask themselves ‘why isn’t this on the radio?’”, then he really let loose with the full capacity of his studio. I particularly loved the moments when he would suddenly mumble to himself “…I’ve got an idea”, and start fiddling with the gear. That’s how we got that subtle backwards pre-reverb in “Angels” and the Chapman stick looped in new ways with parts of the techno drums of “Different Drum”. We also did some additional recording there, adding new vocals and piano in “Angels” and “Peace Avalanche”.

What was the funniest thing that happened?

I think I’d have to count two. One of them literally made it onto the album. It was when I was doing the zapateado, or heelwork in “Angels”. I kind of stumbled and Scott got it down on a track and said it’s okay, he can use it as a techno sample for something, but he will splice it with a shotgun sound right at the moment where I stumbled. That was too much and we all just fell out laughing hysterically and couldn’t get back to work for a while. Meanwhile the tape was still rolling! That laughfest ended up as a nice little rolling-of-the-credits at the end of “Heading Up”, which is the last song on the CD. It’s as though the over-the-top guitar solo was built around it, but it was just a perfect canvas for it by accident.

The second thing that would probably make that list was the “Plyve Kacha” scramble. The song almost didn’t make the record. When we thought we were done with mixing, Jamey and I took the master of the CD to a jam party with other respected musicians in town, including members of Moon Soup and Ransom Haile. Everybody loved the sensuality of the grooves, but Ransom made a bold comment, as is his style. He said that he could entirely see spending some quality horizontal time with his ladylove listening to this record, but when “Plyve Kacha” came on, the groove was so rock as opposed to the world funk of the rest of the CD that it would cause him to… loose his condition of readiness, shall we say. Although he didn’t put it that way.

That was pushing the panic button if I ever heard one, so we spent the rest of the party planning and re-writing the parts of the song, or risk leaving it off the album. Andy Cobine, the host of the party, was enlisted to replace and electric guitar with a mandolin. The next morning, a Sunday morning, mind you, we went back to Dave, brought bass player Dan Dolan back, Jamey redid the drums and added a tube shaker playing the one-bar clave, Dan played a funk-inspired bass part, and the song was saved. If radio were more foreign-language and nature-metaphor friendly, “Plyve Kacha” could be next single after “Tumbleweed” and “Different Drum”. It ended up sounding so good that I put it on the sticker that goes on the CD announcing the featured songs. It has a sound that I would like to continue experimenting with in the future.

What else would you like people to know about this CD?

That these songs tackle themes that are meant to challenge us to enlarge our worldview. I believe that by this process we can grow and be transformed into something stronger and more capable of understanding and of compassion. The songs are also dedicated to the present and future generations who must go through the growing pains of discerning what true and sustainable peace entails.

Also, I would like to ask everyone to support arts funding! And thank you!