Music
Julia Holter: Poetry and performance
The acclaimed artist on bridging the academic and the pop worlds and wearing lots of hats.
Julia Holter
© Christelle de Castro/Red Bull Content Pool
The inspiration for Julia Holter's new (third) album, Loud City Song, came from the 1958 film adaptation of the Colette novella, Gigi, as well as the city she calls home, Los Angeles. This ambitious record, released by Domino on August 20, is Holter's follow-up to 2012’s acclaimed Ekstasis. We met the RBMA lecturer last week backstage in Philadelphia to talk about Loud City Song, the so-called divide between academic and pop music and how she becomes someone else when she performs.
One thing that stands out on the new album is that the characters wear a lot of hats.
“Gigi wears hats a lot. I like concrete images, and that was one image I came up with. I like to give a sense of an overall world of the story, so the images are recurring. The record is sort of about the individual versus society, so people wear hats to hide from things. At the end, people take their hats off, and there's a whole apocalypse thing. But I don't like to talk about it too much, because it kills it.”
Do you think revealing the story will ruin it?
“I don't mind talking about it, but I hope it doesn't interfere with people's listening experiences. I made this record to be something you can listen to on a lot of levels. You don't have to hear it and know what I'm talking about. Same with Tragedy – you don't have to read the play to understand it.”
People talk about your music bridging the academic and the pop worlds. What do you think of that?
“I don't think of myself as working well in an academic context. I don't fit in there, so it's funny to me when people say that. I don't have a lot of explanations for what I do – I think I'm very intuitive – but the academic approach is that you can explain everything you're doing. But some people would argue with me, and say that the phrase ‘academic music’ doesn't mean anything at all, and I'd say that's true, too.
“But I do see this polarisation between pop and academic. I kind of think of it that way, and I understand it, but I don't know how I fit in. I think of myself as a poet-songwriter in the tradition of Joni Mitchell or Robert Wyatt, but my music is genre-less. I don't have an agenda, and I think that helps keep my projects independent. That's why I make music under my own name, and allow the project to be the character. And, when I perform, I'm not me, I'm a new character."
'I'm very dorky and uninteresting to watch.'
You become different characters while performing?
“Yes. I'm very dorky and uninteresting to watch. You have to make the song come alive, and it can't come alive if I'm singing it. I'm the composer, and then I have to become a performer. Right now, I'm doing this bizarre thing where I perform my own music, and I'm in my own videos, but I never thought it would turn out this way. I started as a composer, but now I've been doing this for longer than that. I won't always be the best performer for my music, though.
“But I can't be myself when I perform. It's not fun for me. Performing isn't like giving a speech at a wedding, which involves communication between you and an audience. But also performing isn't communication – it's something else. It's... I'm not sure what it is.”