The Places

A conversation with Amy Annelle

(October 2006)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

“Where have you been all these years?” Amy Annelle asks on “Worse & Wise,” the closing track on the latest batch of comforting/disturbing material from The Places.  Listeners who have been away all those years will want to hurry into catch-up mode after hearing the evocative folk and emotional purity featured on Songs for Creeps.  Winding her way through the Appalachians, Annelle reaches out to discuss the new record—which, true to its title, isn’t afraid of lifting up the rock and peering underneath.  Accordingly, Annelle opens herself up for uncompromising questions about van stereos, found sounds, and giant metal butterflies.

You started The Places when you began working with more of an ensemble.  As there is less of an emphasis on the ensemble on Songs for Creeps, what made you decide to keep it a Places album instead of a return to the solo album?  Is there a clear division between the two?

The Places is really the home planet for my music.  It’s a handle, like how a trucker has a handle.  The Places started out as a more conventional band, but has become something more fluid.  I don’t intend to record any other albums solo under my name.

Who do you have out on the road, then?

It’s a duo right now.  It’s myself and Adam Kriney, a percussionist.  He has more of an improv, free jazz, psych kind of background, so we’re finding new ways to explore the songs.

People who know the record might be surprised?

Well, not necessarily.  I’m doing the more conventional stuff solo.  A few of the other ones that are out there already we’ll take out even further, exploring in an improvisational way every night.  Paul Brainard, who’s the multi-instrumentalist on the record, will be joining us, too.

You know, I don’t see Lompoc on a tour schedule very often.

Yeah, there’s a great bunch of musicians in Lompoc that I met through my friend Kyle Field, who does Little Wings.  We like playing together and seeing each other, so I make a point of going back.

Is there a democracy with the van stereo?

Um, it’s the driver’s choice.

What have you been playing, then?

I just listened to the Plastic Ono Band and Gather in the Mushrooms, which is a comp of ’60s, super underground folk stuff.

The bio makes it sound like the 11 songs for Songs for Creeps came pretty easily, spread out between two fruitful sessions with some home recordings thrown in.  Were there songs that were harder to pull out?  Were there songs that got left by the wayside?

(noise in background)  We’ve got a Firebird and a Corvette drag racing in front of us.  (laughs)  Songs that were left by the wayside—definitely.  There is a whole album of material that is even darker and more raw than these songs, and those will certainly find their way into the studio eventually.  There was something about these songs that seemed like they were natural together, like they told a difficult story.

Yeah, and I think it takes a start-to-finish listen for that story to really crystallize for the listener.  Did that theme emerge later, after you stepped back and said “Okay, these songs fit together,” or was that something you were exploring from the outset?

I was so deeply inside these songs and the circumstances that brought the songs about… I mean, these are as personal as they can get.  They shed light into some very dark things—which, in retrospect, seem easier to understand.  It’s hard to explain, but it’s like taking accidental pictures when you’re falling down a mine shaft.  Your camera is snapping along the way as you’re falling, even if at the time you aren’t aware of what’s around you.

Are there any songs that are complete fictions or fabrications?

No.  Even the song that’s based on a chapter of Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection…which changed my life, really.  It’s a really powerful book about a transformation. But even that—the reason those words and that chapter struck me so powerfully was that it made me relate to individuals in my own life.

The recording was done in marathon bursts.  How about the writing?

The writing happens at the expense of pretty much everything else.  It usually does come in a burst, it will evolve from a dream or something that shakes you to the core.  If I know I’ve got something, it stays with me and is constantly running through me.  By the time I get into the studio, I have a pretty intuitive sense of what’s going on.  But the actual details work themselves out in the studio.  Working with Brian [Beattie, producer] was just ideal in that sense, because he’s extremely intuitive and detail-oriented.  He was able to jibe with me in more abstract, metaphorical terms.

You met him when working with Okkervil River?

Yeah, yeah, and we just hit off.  I knew right away that he was someone I was destined to work with.

I wanted to ask about background sound, particularly on “My Weary Eye,” which has that layer of almost found sound.  What’s the origin there?

That’s one of my home recordings; I did that on a four-track cassette recorder.  There are deliberate sounds on there and super accidental found sounds in the form of shitty wiring in an unheated attic in an old mansion in Portland.  The wiring was picking up radio stations, so you can actually hear a cheesy, smoking guitar lick in the beginning.

I carry a tape recorder with me all the time.  KTNN is the AM station for the Navajo reservation, and it’s a very powerful station.  I was coming back from a tour of the Southwest, taking some time to have a ramble, and I was picking it up everywhere—Utah, Nevada, all over the place.  It’s a very strong signal.  So a lot of that stuff is just off the Navajo station.  Some of it is really dry, just announcers talking about the softball scores or whatever, but there was something about the quality of the voices that I found very musical and monotonous.  There’s other stuff, too, like the neighbor kids yelling—it sounded like a custody sort of situation.  There’s a siren outside, a really old drum machine that we have on tour with us.  We’re using a different selection of those field recordings when we play those songs live.

I read an interview with you where you were talking about recording in abandoned homes, an abandoned performance hall, at the beach, et cetera.  When it comes time to go into the studio, how do you keep the various studios from feeling kind of sterile by comparison?

I’ve always worked with people who I trust a great deal, and feel a great connection behind the curtain, so to speak.  If I was in the studio with someone who didn’t give a shit about me, I wouldn’t be able to do anything.  I really rely on people to share in my vision and help expand on it and illustrate it with me.

I interviewed [Hush Records founder] Chad Crouch last year, and he was talking about the difficulty of balancing his creative side with the side responsible for his label.  I know High Plains Sigh is still in its infancy, but have you felt that push and pull already?

Well, I think with all due respect to Hush, I needed to leave there in order for the songs to be heard on their own terms.  I think that starting your own label is just a way to remove that extra layer…it can be static in a way, because there are perceptions attached to someone’s vision with the label, and it may or may not reflect your own.  In this case, I think we had a really different aesthetic from the start, but we always had a mutual respect and appreciation for what we did.  But I felt that this was a very important and very right thing to do with this record, to have it speak for itself and be heard on its own.

To answer your question, it is a lot of work, and it’s kind of terrifying in a way because there’s nobody there to fall back on.  But I think that the people who are already familiar with my music are going to be very receptive to this record.  My path has always been the difficult one; I haven’t really had any desire to jump on a bandwagon—or really any grounds to do so.  I feel like I’ve been following my own drummer.

If you’re in the Appalachians and you come across this band that blows your mind, does the thought cross your mind now, “Hey, I have a home for this.  Let’s put this out?”

I don’t have any fucking money!  (laughs)  I don’t have a trust fund, I don’t have an inheritance.  I just spent nine months in a pretty horrible set of circumstances, working my ass off to get enough money to put out this record and get the band on the road.  It’s completely worth it.  It’s the only thing that kept me going through it.  I wish my music was generating more money.  I’m trying to find more avenues for that, like licensing things for a soundtrack or something.  I’d be very glad to do that, so I wouldn’t have to be hauling remnants of people’s ruined lives out to dumpsters—which is what I was doing.  Hopefully I’ll be in a better place a year from now.

If there’s justice in the world.  When did you start writing songs?  What fed that interest?

I was a late bloomer, frankly.  I didn’t start playing guitar until I was 21.  I didn’t really have any examples around me.  I was a huge music fan from the very start, and was always collecting records and going to tons of shows.  I knew that nothing turned me on more than music.  But I had horrible self-esteem.  Why would I possibly ever be able to do this?  What the hell do I have to say?  Who do I think I am to actually think that someone would want to hear what I have to say?  Finally, I had to wrestle those demons and say, “Get out of the way, there is something in here.”

So it started—I had a four-track, and I got recruited into my best friend’s brother’s band.  I had only written a handful of songs, but they didn’t have a guitar player and they didn’t have a songwriter.  And I never stopped. I realized what a powerful thing it is to be the songwriter, because you’re creating the basis for a band, you know?  I’ve been in more collaborative situations since then, but I think I am a pretty classic songwriter in a certain sense.  I’m bringing constructions that are open to varying degrees of interpretation—sometimes a lot, sometimes not much—but they come to the table fully formed.

The album art is pretty arresting again.  How closely did you work with E*Rock on that?

The concept came from heavy collaboration.  I have a special interest in baby birds and what they represent as far as survival goes.  I think they represent these human needs that we have inside of us.  A lot of what the album is exploring very deeply and darkly is these unmet needs and the way that they mutate and come out as addiction and self-destruction and loneliness and alienation.  It’s about not really knowing the language, about blowing it all the time, you know?  A moth is another natural creature that goes through these evolutions and stages, and the photo inside is me holding a moth that I found in a gas station in Delaware. 

You know, speaking of these creatures, I was checking out the photographs of the giant metal butterflies on your website and thinking, you know, there’s a pretty nice coffee table book in that.

Oh, yeah!  I’d have to go back out.  I know where they are.  I almost approach them like an entomologist, because they do have a certain habitat.