Literally none of the songs on the Calpurnia EP were drawn from personal experience at all. I feel like now I really draw from personal experience and try to write how I feel. I didn’t really know how to do that at that point. I think I was too young to figure it out.
Music Quotes
Sometimes with labels you can start to be pushed in a certain direction. With self-releasing, the band always comes first and so does creativity. Sometimes it can get a little more muddled when you have more people that you’re trying to make money for.
I’m a very hard critic on myself in everything I do. With loving myself and music and my talent, I’m my worst critic.
Frank Zappa’s house in the canyon, which I visited several times, looked exactly like a troll’s kingdom. Fuzzy haired women lounged in long antique dresses, and naked children ran to and fro while Frank sat behind piles of electronic equipment discussing his latest ideas for orchestrating satirical hippie rock music. Never a druggie, Frank openly […]
The most dangerous thing is improvising with a band and thinking, “Okay, now’s the time to play that diminished scale,” and somebody in the band is thinking, “Now’s the time to play a major chord.” Those kinds of accidents do happen.
If you listen to Indian classical music, it’s not just pentatonic. Some of the ragas that they use are very chromatic, all sustained over a root and a 5th that doesn’t change, and by using these chromatic scales they can imply all these other kinds of harmonies.
For years I had something called Music On The Desert Road, which was a recording of all kinds of different ethnic musics from different places in the Middle East. I used to listen to that all the time – I liked that kind of melodic feel. I listened to Indian music, Ravi Shankar and so […]
Fortunately, I learned how to orchestrate. So when I write, I’m usually hearing what the song is and the orchestration. So something like “Walk on By”: as I’m writing that, I’m hearing the flugelhorn, which became identifiable.
I thought songs were so simple that I could do five of them a day, but songs that sound simple are deceptive. It’s a very complicated process.
I grew up being the girl in the sidelines, singing the harmonies. That was my musical theater upbringing. Some of my fondest memories are of being in the rehearsal studio, practicing.
