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A Conversation with Kris Delmhorst (continued)
PM: When I listen to your records, what strikes me always is how musically substantial you sound.
KD: Well, that's nice of you to say.
PM: Please tell me a little about your string education growing up. Isn't it rather unusual, for instance, for a young person to be studying both cello and violin?
KD: Well, I actually didn't study violin. I studied cello only--and piano also.
PM: Ah.
KD: But fiddle--I wouldn't even actually claim to play violin, but the fiddle is something I picked up later on.
PM: Cello and piano, that's a little more acceptable, right.
KD: Right. It was the standard thing. I had to pick an instrument in, I think, fourth grade. And I had actually already started piano lessons, and I was always really interested in music. Almost everyone had to pick up an instrument at some point, but I was just--
PM: Was that a public school thing or private school--
KD: It was a private school. My mom worked at a private school, and I went there the whole time.
PM: Where was that?
KD: In Brooklyn. And so I got really into it, and I actually ended up doing a weekend program at Manhattan School of Music all through high school. I studied it very seriously and I was really into it. That was my overall musical education--on the one hand, I was studying hard, and on the other hand I was a voracious listener to every kind of pop music. I mean, pop and rock and blues and jazz, and everything, absolutely everything. And I was just a real geek about it, like all of us were.
PM: Yeah.
KD: And I would spend all my time in record stores and got Rolling Stone and Spin and read them religiously, and bought things based on reviews, and sort of traced different lines of music. And so I was involved in that self-education at the same time. What turned me on the most was songs, lyrics, song structure and all that stuff. And it just took me an exceptionally long time to actually have the bright idea of writing them myself. [laughs]
PM: But you were ret to go once you began.
KD: Yeah.
PM: So how do you think your legit string background has manifested in your guitar playing or your songwriting?
KD: Well, I think cello has always felt to me the most like singing. It has a lot more to do with singing than it does with playing the guitar, for me, because the bow is just like the breath, basically, and it's the single note melodies for the most part. And cello is a much more fluid thing than guitar.
PM: That's so interesting, because your voice really has a cello-like quality.
KD: Yeah, I think that my sense of melody and of phrasing probably comes more from the cello than anything on guitar. But when you have a classical education, there's a lot that you have to overcome, I think, because you get so used to just--well, having a page in front of you.
PM: Right.
KD: I was always a little more comfortable without that page there. But still, for me, I had to actually switch instruments to make that leap. So when I took up the fiddle, that really freed me up from the whole body of music that I knew on the cello, which I had to get far enough away from that it could be useful to me. I took tons of theory and all that stuff going through Manhattan School of Music, and that is, especially in terms of playing with other people, incredibly valuable.
PM: Yeah, because most songwriters don't have any of that.
KD: No. And obviously, I read music without thinking about it, but that hardly ever comes up. I mean, I probably see a page of music about once a year, if that. But it's more like just knowing the chord structures and how those are put together, that makes a huge difference.
PM: Right. Yeah, absolutely, because there's a lot of music that goes down in the course of your tracks that obviously involves musicians who really know what the hell they're doing.
KD: Oh, yeah. Well, all those guys are amazing that way. I mean, they're really pros.
PM: So besides you, and Dana Colley on vocals, Julie Wolf is the only other woman on the record. I'd love to hear something about Julie. She pops up on a lot of good records.
KD: Oh, Julie is a piece of work. She's fantastic. Well, you probably know she was in Ani DiFranco's band for I think about five years.
PM: Uh-huh. Is that past tense?
KD: Yeah, it is. And those guys were on the road all the time. I met Julie through some mutual friends, probably through Catie Curtis. And we'd always hit it off, but we never had spent a lot of time together and we never really played together. But then someone told me that Ani just sort of went back to being solo, and she just let go of the whole band all at once. And then suddenly Julie was sort of at large, and she was (and I think still is) living in the Bay Area. I had a show at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley, and I just ended up calling her to see if she was around and if she wanted to sit in, and so she did. I had a guitar player with me, and we played as a trio, and it was a blast.
And then when I was getting ready to make this record, I was a little bit nervous about the fact that I was making it in the same spot, producing it with Billy again, and I knew that there would be quite a few of the same musicians on it.
PM: Yeah.
KD: And at the time I was really worried about it having enough of a separate identity from Five Stories, which as it turned out wasn't even going to be a problem, because the songs just went in a different direction anyway. But at the time I really wanted there to be at least one significant new element to it, and so that's when I thought of Julie.
There had been keyboards on my first one, but it was mostly me plunking out a few notes, and just doing some droney things. And we got actual keyboard players to play on a couple songs, but I really liked having that sound in there. And I had thought someone who really knew what they were doing would make a big difference. Also it just seemed like Julie's presence would be a really nice thing to have on that record.
PM: Yeah, so what's her personality like, in terms of her presence?
KD: Oh, she's just great. She's just the most positive, cheerful, enthusiastic musician. Especially for a collection of stormy songs, she was a great person to have in there balancing the whole thing out. She just came in for about three days. It was actually right at this time last year. We flew her out from the West Coast, and she played on everything, and it was great. It really put the record on a path that kind of carried through the rest of the time. continue
