Volume 059: Jennifer O'Connor
THE VOICE OF ENERGY VOL. 059
Greetings, friends. Back at you with another edition of the newsletter on what looks to be another grey, rainy day here in Portland.
In the craziness of the fund drive for XRAY (thank you all for your donations to the cause, by the way... I owe you the world for that) and work (I just started doing some writing for a university and working up interviews for a bigger story not out until January), I dropped the ball on sharing mixes from my 500 Greatest Songs series over the past couple of newsletters. To catch you up, I have three (!!) mixes for you to download.
The first is 90 minutes of roots music with some tunes blended by artists inspired by the older sounds you'll hear. Following that is an hour of rock, indie, and power pop that starts with "Highway To Hell" and ends with "Greetings To The New Brunette." The final mix only features 10 songs stretching over an hour because the first three alone take up about half the running time. It's probably the most eclectic of the bunch, but it might be my favorite so far. Enjoy. And if you want the tracklists for any of them—including the first mix I shared a bit ago—shoot me a message.
Gentle reminder that this newsletter will be going behind ye olde paywall at the start of 2022. Free subscribers will still get a taste but if you want the full prix fixe deal, please consider a paid subscription.
For now, enjoy my interview with the great singer-songwriter Jennifer O'Connor, and I'll see you on the other side.
Jennifer O'Connor
There's an intimacy to Born At The Disco, the latest album from New York singer-songwriter Jennifer O'Connor, that I wasn't fully prepared for. O'Connor has certainly gotten personal in her work before with songs that ran hot with her anxiety and lust or chilled with her heartache and loss. Yet on her seventh full-length (out now via her own label Kiam Records), she nudges open new doors, fearlessly reigniting memories of anguish and joy. Like recalling the awful things supposedly well-intentioned people said to her as she grew up that served to stifle her sexuality in "Pretty Girls" or evoking the allegorical rebirth at the core of "Crimes." Or offering up some plainspoken and heartfelt words to a loved one on "Lucky Life."
This was a path O'Connor had been slowly clearing for herself in the decade since she set out on her own following two fantastic albums recorded for Matador. As she dove deeper into herself for material, she felt emboldened to play around with more synthetic instruments like the keyboards and drum machines that anchor several songs on Disco. And she took to recording much of the music herself, creating a minimalist backdrop that perfectly mirrored the penetrating mood of her lyrics. With some help from friend and frequent collaborator Tom Beaujour, the completed album is both wrenching and healing—a combination that feels apropos to our unruly, unsettled present.
How does it feel to be putting out a record in the midst of all this insanity?
It’s so weird. I was planning on making the record and putting it out in 2020, and then everything happened. I had been making it at home, but I was planning on finishing it. I finished it and I didn’t really know what was going to happen this year. I thought I was going to have everything ready all at once with vinyl and everything, but of course, everything’s so late. I guess I thought it would feel a little more normal. But it’s been very strange. I was going to play a handful of shows around the release and then I decided not to because of Delta. And now it’s supposedly getting better so I’m supposedly doing everything now in April. There’s just not anything else I can compare it to. Everything feels like it’s in a vacuum. It’s not just my record! Everything feels like it’s in its own little weird tube. I’m glad I’m doing it. It’s emotionally hard in a lot of ways, but I’m glad to be getting it out. I thought about waiting but I don’t even know what anything is going to look like. Might as well keep going.
You’ve talked about Born At The Disco as being a love letter to music. So I was curious about what were the first songs or artists that you really connected with, that felt were all your own?
When I was really little, I liked Top 40. I liked getting 45s of what I heard on the radio at the department store. I loved Olivia Newton-John. I loved that shit. I loved the Grease soundtrack. Then I really got into George Michael in high school. I still love George Michael. I got into R.E.M. and the Replacements when I was a junior in high school. Then I was like, “What’s this songwriting stuff?” Paul Westerberg kind of knocked me over a little bit. And George Michael, too, who I think is one of the unsung songwriters. In college, I was a grunge person and also started to get into Joni Mitchell. Now I listen to hip-hop and jazz at the record shop. And disco 12”s. I eat it all up.
Mine was a big Xanadu household. That movie meant so much to me and my sister growing up.
On the title track, the bridge section, I’m talking about how, in our downstairs family room, we had a stereo and my brother and I would plug these little microphones right into the stereo and sing duets. We used to sing the duets on that Streisand and Gibb Guilty record. That’s one of my most formative memories.
From the press notes for this release, it sounds like many of these songs have been gestating for a while.
Almost all of it was written before the pandemic began, but the recordings weren’t finished. For some of the songs, I wrote additional parts like bridges and things like that over the last year. But it was, I’d say, 3/4 done before 2020. So it’s been a long, long time. Mainly because I was never really making a record. I was making all these hundreds of fragments of songs on my computer and then picking the ones I really liked and developing them. It was just over the course of a long period of time. Finally, I was like, “I’ve got to do something with this. Take the ones I like the most and turn it into something.”
Was part of that process developing some of the technical skills you needed to produce songs like “Born At The Disco” or “Pretty Girls” that use more electronic elements?
Yeah, I think so. I had really started doing it a little bit on the last record [2016’s Surface Noise]. I really enjoyed it. It felt like painting to me. Just working on a lot of stuff instrumentally first, which was a lot different than what I’ve done in this past. I’ve mostly written on acoustic guitars. This way, what I was making was almost visual to me—taking drum machines and synths and writing songs around that. It was a little backwards from how I usually do it. So, yeah, I think it took a lot longer because I was developing a new way of writing songs.
How much do you feel that the sound of what you were making musically informed the lyrics that you wrote? I feel like the title track especially is hitting this very particular nostalgia button in you, and I’m wondering if the music brought that to the fore.
Some of them I think definitely the music influenced what I wrote about, but [“Born”] not so much just because that was more of a traditional type of song for me, but for some reason I wanted it to sound like a Giorgio Moroder/Donna Summer-esque song. Even though it’s a traditional verse/chorus/verse chorus song I would normally write, but I heard that Moog sound that I heard in a lot of stuff that Moroder wrote. I think that’s the last song that I got sounding the way I wanted it to. I felt like it was something that was really going to tie the album together and it did for me.
“Born At The Disco,” in particular, feels like you dipping into your past as you’re talking about the impact music had on you as you were growing up. And there’s a bit of a reflective theme to the whole album. Was that a deliberate move on your part or something that just came out naturally as you were working on the songs?
I think that came about more because I was just thinking about it a lot. The age that I’m at, and losing my mother a handful of years ago, and thinking about where I came from originally and my family. That coupled with the sound of that time in my life, a lot of it was late ’70s/early ’80s, when I developed this bond I have with music. It’s linked in that way.
In the bio for the album, you’re also quoted as saying that this record stood out for you because you “wrote songs that scared the shit out of me.”
I think I’m being really honest about the record and writing things that I’ve never really written about before. About family stuff, about my own wanting to grow up about certain things, about some gay issues. I don’t really love to spell things out too, too much for people. But I looked at a lot of stuff that I haven’t looked at before on records. That’s what always interested me about writing. It’s continuing to be honest and not writing about the same things over and over. I feel like I tackled some harder things for me as a writer with this one.
Because I was thinking of that song and “Pretty Girls,” which were two tracks where it felt like you were really pulling from your past in a really deep way.
“Pretty Girls” is kind of a dark one. The music of that one is really cool and I like the way that it came out. I made this sort of intense, almost violent sounding song that I think brought out the lyrics. I was trying to make it very repetitive in the lyrics and the music. Those are basically things that I’ve heard said maybe to me or I’ve heard other people say, and has kind of repeated a pattern in my brain over the years. I was trying to mimic that with the sound of the track.
Was it important then to balance those sentiments with songs that are softer and more positive like “Lucky Life,” which is a beautiful love song?
I guess it would seem like that. I don’t think it’s intentional. I just think I have all those things going on in me, musically and personally. I think all of my records are like that. There’s poppy stuff, then there’s ballads and some dark rock stuff. I think it might be naturally how I make records. Probably because I like so many different kinds of music. I want to hit all the spots. I want to do different things and I know I only have so many chances on an album. Although sometimes I do think I should do more of one vibe on a record. Like an all acoustic record or an all instrumental record. Maybe eventually.
All the work you’ve released over the past has been on your own label, Kiam Records. And you’ve directed both of the videos that have come out for this new album. How has that been to be in complete control of everything regarding your work?
It’s really hard, honestly. And it’s also fun and cool and rewarding. But it’s a lot. It might be becoming too much. The first one I put out after being on Matador [2011’s I Want What You Want], I just wanted to get it out. And this new one, I was like, “I don’t know what the hell’s going on, so I’m just gonna put it out.” It’s hard to get it together to do it all, but it feels like the best option for me at this stage. To keep doing it that way. I am fine with the idea of possibly not doing it all myself when I make another record. It’s not like I can afford to pay a staff at this point. There’s just so much to do and there’s so much involved in it. And I also run a record store now. It’s a lot of hats. Sometimes I worry that things are getting lost, that they could be done better if there was more help involved. But I do the best I can. With Kiam, I haven’t put out a handful of records by some acts on the label just so I can get my record done and out.
You mentioned your record shop before. I was really happy to see that it survived lockdowns and pandemic restrictions.
We closed for about three months, but we got going again and did curbside pickups for a while. Then we re-opened and we’ve been really busy. We’ve been very fortunate in this business and not running a gym or a restaurant. Sometimes I can’t believe it’s been that good for us in that regard. It’s really hard in a lot of ways but I feel like I’ve been very fortunate.
Now that the new album is out, do you have any plans for Kiam Records for next year and beyond?
I don’t right at the moment, but I’m sure I’ll start doing more with it next year. Next year is technically the 20th anniversary. It was 20 years from when my very first record [her 2002 self-titled album] came out. So I might try to do a couple of things with that, with some of the artists that I’ve worked with. Then I’ll take it from there. We’ll have to wait and see about that.
Have a smattering of my writing work to share this time around. The big deal—for me, at least—was getting to interview electronic artist Tim Story about the work he did resurrecting his friend/collaborator Dieter Moebius for a sound installation and album. But I also enjoyed getting to profile L.A. artist Marina Allen, Kills Birds' leader Nina Ljeti, and Southern Oregon country artist Margo Cilker for my Oregon Arts Watch column.
That is all I have for this week. Next time around, my interview with Robert Görl, founding member of industrial duo D.A.F. about that project's final album and so much more.
Artwork for this installment of The Voice of Energy is by Agnes Grochulska whose exhibit Archetypes is on display at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art through March 6, 2022.