Weyes Blood

Last time we spoke you were still in New York. Tell me more about your move and how you’re feeling.

[A rooster crows over the phone.] I’m temporarily staying at an arts centre in downtown Atlanta called the Goat Farm, and get woken up by roosters! I’m headed for L.A. soon to make my next record. I’m going to work with Chris Cohen, one of the artists on Captured Tracks. When I saw him live, I cried. I hadn’t heard anything that good in so long. I’m so excited to be working with him. I left New York without really telling anybody.

We became allergic to church. We’d get there and just pass the fuck out.

The opportunity presented itself to go to Georgia and I just left. New York is dying a sad death and that was depressing to me. I was living back in Rockaway Beach, the best place I’d ever lived in New York. But then, I like the South and I’d never lived this deep in it. It’s good for me to change scenes

The opportunity presented itself to go to Georgia and I just left. New York is dying a sad death and that was depressing to me. I was living back in Rockaway Beach, the best place I’d ever lived in New York. But then, I like the South and I’d never lived this deep in it. It’s good for me to change scenes

Where do you feel at home then?

In California, where I was born. That is one place that has stayed the same, despite my parents moving a lot. We moved from California to Pennsylvania in 1999. It was such a strange change. I was a beach kid… actually, maybe that’s why I took to Rockaway so much. When we moved, my parents hated the Jersey Shore, Billy Joel. They clashed with the culture and we didn’t integrate well at first. I think they thought Pennsylvania was more backward than it was. The first few years were really strange. We went to this creepy church in the middle of nowhere. Eventually we had ‘home church,’ which was basically our dad reading the Bible to me and my brother, and we’d both instantly fall asleep. We became allergic to church. We’d get there and just pass the fuck out. A year ago, there was a Bible study at a family gathering and, guess what, my brother and I fell fast asleep. He’s 31 and I’m 27! It’s the same with preachers and televangelists from the Bible Belt. My mother would play those tapes to get us to fall asleep at night.

I wanted to be an actress, a comedian, a marine biologist – I love the ocean, I love feminism.

Do you feel like Cardamom Times is in a way related to the places where the EP was made, Rockaway and Greenpoint?

I don’t really think so. I mean, of course there will be environmental factors, Rockaway being the most influential. In the winter it was desolate, I took some freezing cold walks on the beach. I remember in the spring they were rebuilding the boardwalk that had been destroyed by Hurricane Sandy and I watched trucks offload these vast amounts of sand on the site. It seemed so unnatural to bring in so much fake land that was going to be eaten away again. You find out about the history of that place and you realise it’s been destroyed a couple of times by storms and a fire. Living there had a feeling of impermanence and transience. You’re on a delicate, tiny peninsula; you can really feel it, especially near the swamps of Jamaica Bay.

You know how when you’re little, you’re told you can be whatever you want to be? What does that feel like when you decide to be an artist?

I wrote my first song when I was about four while riding my tiny bike around the kitchen island, round and round in circles. My mother wrote songs so I decided I could too. As I got older, Kurt Cobain was my idol. We weren’t allowed to watch MTV, but we’d turn it on when my parents were out. I had Nirvana Unplugged on cassette tape and thought it was really crazy. My parents were Christian but they were Born Again so they had arty friends. One of them was a couple who lived on the Lower East Side back in the ’60s and the woman, Diana, was obsessed with Tim Buckley. Apparently, one day she was drawing a picture of Tim Buckley and Andy Warhol walked past, took the picture, signed it and said it was a Warhol. I learned that when I was an adult. But when I was a kid I remember them having a Sex Pistols poster and being very excited and shocked. Back then I dyed my hair with food colouring, dressed up my guitar and took polaroids of it. Those may have been my first ventures into conceptual art.

Have you ever had moments where you thought you should be doing something else?

Definitely. I feel like a jack of all trades, master of none. The music thing just turned out to be an obsession so I did that, but I’d heard my calling in other places too. I wanted to be an actress, a comedian, a marine biologist – I love the ocean, I love feminism. I wish I was more intellectual, my family isn’t really; it was never in our house.

You’ve been to many places and explored many art forms. What brings you satisfaction?

These days, it’s finishing recordings because I put myself through such an arduous process of being very particular about how I want things to sound, learning how to use my voice in a different way. I’m married to music so my greatest satisfaction comes from seeing where and how far I can take my work. Aside from that, touching people with my music, having them feel more meaning. I don’t like to get too deep into that territory, though, because I don’t know how I feel about giving myself credit for that.

Be close to nature, understand your connection to a larger system.

And disappointment?

I’m disappointed by hubris, in my personal microcosm, but also on a larger scale. Hubris with the planet and our attitude of being able to do whatever we want with it and believing it will be replenished. There are some people in power who refuse to admit how fragile we are. It’s really obvious and really sad. Same goes for mental illnesses and addiction. Even in these modern times, we don’t understand them. We refuse to associate with the animal kingdom and so, we’re flailing, thinking that we’re better than other creatures. I don’t think we are. There’s a whole culture of TV and movies that feeds into the culture of us believing we’re these perfect archetypes of human beings. You don’t get the full human in them. It makes the imbalance even more destabilising. And that’s when you get these beautiful people staring in the mirror saying, ‘Oh God, I’m disgusting.’ Everyone gets this idea of who they should be, how much they should get done, how they should reply to emails, post pictures… We get caught up in an imaginary race that is really making us like monkeys.

What do you do to get more clarity and perspective?

Sometimes I notice that I’m taking myself too seriously with an unrealistic set of goals and I have to take a step back and remember that I probably won’t write six perfect songs in one day and by doing that I’ll inevitably disappoint myself. Even though in my mind I should be a super human.
I also believe that we as humans need to be touched and loved. We need to socialise, it sends good chemicals through our bodies. Isolating yourself from people, feeling unloved, living your life vicariously through others on the internet, will make you suffer chemically. Be close to nature, understand your connection to a larger system.

We’ve been paying close attention to Weyes Blood’s Instagram. We’re staying tuned for new notes in the near future.