Alela Diane interview
I was lucky enough to chat to one of my favourite current singers the magical Alela Diane at her show at the Scala last week for Hive Mag. She was surprisingly tiny, even more gorgeous in the flesh and absolutely lovely to talk to. You can read the results below:
Having emerged from the same Nevada City folk scene that gave us Joanna Newsom, Alela Diane is a singer-songwriter who seems to change and grow with every record. She’s been through a lot of changes since her last album having married her guitarist and formed a new band that sees her move away from her folk roots into a more country rock sound. We caught up with her at her show at London’s Scala to find out about her fantastic new album Alela Diane & Wild Divine, her dad and husband being part of the band and her unique journey into music.
So Alela, has the tour been going well so far? Because there’s a song on the new record [Heartless Highway] all about the disillusionment of life on the road…
I was particularly run down when I wrote that song because we had been on tour for far too long. But this tour has just been a couple of weeks. I got a little run down and I did get a cold and my eye swelled shut, but other than it’s all worked out and it’s been fine. My body just gets run down, I get really tired and then my immune system just kind of fails on me and then all these weird things happen. [laughs]
This new record sounds like you’ve been listening to old country rock albums.
I think a lot of it is that I do listen to a lot of older music, kind of 70s things, and that probably does come across on the new record.
Every album you’ve made so far has been quite different, was that a conscious decision?
Yeah, in a way it has been. As an artist I feel like it’s important to make steps forward and do something different because it’s just really boring for me, and probably for everyone else, if I were to just make the same record over and over again. Even To Be Still compared to The Pirate’s Gospel felt like a bit of a departure and then this record from To Be Still does sound quite a bit different. An album is a record of a certain time and what we’re doing right now. And I think it’s more fun that way, at least for me.
Were you afraid at all that some of your folk fans might not like the new sound?
I definitely know that there are those who think I don’t need so much instrumentation behind me or prefer to see me with just my guitar singing. I totally understand that and you know, maybe down the road that will be what I feel like doing. But right now I just kind of realised while touring To Be Still that I really wanted to have a group of people and a band behind me with some songs that were just fun to perform. Touring To Be Still in a lot of ways just felt like a grind for me because we were doing the same thing every night and there wasn’t a lot of life to it. I don’t think I had the right musicians with me and I don’t know that that really came across to the audience but for me personally it felt like I needed to find the right band. I needed a different drummer and we set out to do that for this record. We found the musicians and started collaborating more on the songs prior to recording and have really settled in with this group of people. It’s been good.
It was one of those things that when you’re in such close quarters with people all the time, you have to be certain that personality-wise you’re all on the same page because if you have somebody that doesn’t seem that they’re happy to be there they’re driving everybody else down. And then you all have to get on stage together and that can be challenging if you are not feeling very happy with each other. It was fine for the most part but our back-up singer Alina [Hardin] had been singing with me for a while and the drummer was her boyfriend and then a week or two before we left on tour before the first tour of 2009 they broke up. So we had a broken up couple in the small van with us for an entire year.
Yeah, and in not a good way. Just dealing that energy and the heaviness of that and they were always doing mean things to each other, it was just like, this is not cool. So we’re not dealing with that anymore and the band I have with me now everybody’s really great. We’re all getting on really well and having a really fun time on stage and just when we’re hanging out.
The reason I titled this record “And Wild Divine” was to just present it in a way that this is a bit different than the other records, this is me with a band, so that you know right off the bat that it is going to sound different, you’re not shocked that it sounds a bit more full and more like a band than any other thing that I’ve done. I’ve been co-writing a bit with my husband [guitarist Tom Bevitori]and a little with my dad too and that’s been nice because I think that that allowed for me to come up with melodies that I wouldn’t have come up with had I been playing the guitar.
I don’t get fed up with it because I understand that it is a very curious, kind of funny thing to people.
It’s not that weird, no. I mean my dad’s a great guitar player and he’s totally been a part of what I’ve been doing this whole time. You know, I recorded in his studio for both of the first records, so it just feels natural for us and he’s very happy to be part of it and he really enjoys travelling around. It’s pretty neat and we have a great time. Having my husband and my dad in the band means I have my support system around me. It’s great because you kind of need that when you’re out on the road.
I think I definitely did. In school I made every effort to get perfect grades and I dressed kind of conservatively in high school, because my parents were kind of wild, I thought well I’m going to be normal, you guys are weird. That was my way of rebelling. As a child, I never envisioned myself doing this, I didn’t think I’d become a singer. And then when I got a little bit older I started playing guitar and it became clear that I was just one of them, to just accept that. But I think that their playing music around the house played such a big role in why I do what I do.
It’s true, yeah. I don’t think the timing was right before then. I just didn’t really have anything to say and then when I did start writing songs it was kind of because everything that I knew in my life and in my childhood kind of all crashed down and crumbled and I needed to do something with all of that, the darkness and the sadness: my parents divorcing, our family house being sold, moving out on my own for the first time and my first boyfriend broke up with me. I was just devastated from every angle and songwriting just became a way to get that out of myself and put it somewhere else into a song. And prior to that I don’t think I had anything to say and didn’t feel it was what I wanted to do.
I think they were. It was pretty out of the blue for people. I know that both my mom and my dad were like, “Woah, Alela’s writing songs?” They were really surprised at first.
Exactly. And that was shocking for them as well, because I was singing about how the house was gone, our family crumbling. My lyrics do tend to be quite literal, literal in a little bit of a fantastical way, like the way that I describe those things are maybe a bit flowery but to anyone who knows me they know exactly what I’m singing about. In The Rifle there’s a line that says, “Brother I’m so sorry that you watched the paintings burn” and that actually happened. My mom was a painter and when my parents got divorced she had my brother and his friends burn all of her paintings and they had a big bonfire. Because she just needed to get rid of the past, she was so devastated and she didn’t know what to do with all this stuff. She had to move and she had piles of this old work so they all just got wasted and burned her paintings. I feel like that is a line that most people would just think, oh that doesn’t happen. But anyone in our family or linked to our family could hear what I was saying in my songs and know just what I was singing about. So I think that was a bit shocking to people that knew me. Especially for my mom and my dad, “You’re putting this out there, anyone can hear this? You’re exposing us!” [laughs]
Isn’t she amazing? She’s magical. She was going out and doing that when it was really not popular. She was singing kind of bluegrassy, folk music in the late 70s and into the early 80s and that was kind of a weird time for that type of music, because her music is so delicate and so pure and honest and sparse. But I really love her music. My parents had listened to her which is how I found out about her. While I was recording To Be Still I was listening to a lot of Kate Wolf. She’s from California and I feel like you can really hear California in her music. And I do think what I like about her is just that pureness and the honesty in the lyrics and in the way that she carries it out.
Yeah, I think that it’s important for me and the music that I cherish the most is the music that you can really tell is coming straight from the heart, so I think that throughout my musical career I’m always writing about things that are important to me and that I do care about. Because that’s why I think the music exists, it’s because of the lyrics for me and talking about things that I feel are important to me or could help people get through something in some sort of way. I think that’s a big problem with popular music right now, the commercial radio at least, it’s just like all of those folks are just singing about things that really don’t matter at all. On the cab ride over to the venue today they were playing Rihanna and she was just singing the most obscene stuff that was just totally about sex. It’s just trashy and it’s heartless. I really think it’s a shame. I really think there are artists right now who are really going against that and getting back to the roots of honesty and singing about things that actually matter to people’s hearts. And I think that that’s good. But there’s far less people doing that then there are the opposite.
That was popular and they were singing about real things! What happened? Something has been lost.
She has been recording at my dad’s studio in Nevada City actually and she should be done soon. And I think that the problem is that she was signed to a record label out of Nevada City and they just kind of closed down and went under. So she’s making a record on her own and she’s looking for someone to put it out. What she does is amazing and definitely deserves to be heard and she already has fans overseas so I really hope that someone picks her up.
We have, yeah. Our parents were in bands together when we were little girls, that’s how I know Mariee because my mom and dad and her dad were in a bluegrass band together. So Mariee and I would see each other at their little gigs. I’ve known her since I was about three or so. But, it’s possible. I think that musically over the years here, we started off in a very similar place and I think we’ve just kind of gone off in our own directions, which I think is really great and I think that maybe at some point we’ll kind of converge again but I don’t know. It would be fun. I was in the back of the van yesterday really bored and listening to some really old things and I heard a recording of Mariee and I singing The Cuckoo, because we would perform that when I was on tour with her, and I was like, “Yeah, singing with Mariee!” Because I haven’t sung with her in a long time and I really love doing that. I really hope we can make that happen again.
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