From Biggie to Bach
the eye interviews emily wells
PrintEmily Wells is a 20-something singer-songwriter who has no eye for labels and no desire to fit into the neatly defined boxes so many musicians subscribe to. Finding no proper home with existing record labels, Wells started her own and has been slowly but surely carving out a space for herself in the music world. Described by many as, improbably, a classical violinist dropped into a world of hip-hop, Wells boasts a comfort in almost any genre and easily incorporates folk, rap, rock, and as her latest album indicates, full blown symphonies. The Eye sits down with Emily Wells to map out her journey across the genres and discover how she went from a violinist trained in the Suzuki Method to an artist who claims that “absence of genre makes the art grow fonder.”
To start with, if you had to name a couple of your biggest influences that come out in your music, who would they be?
Well, I have my big three that haven’t changed since I was little, and that’s Nina Simone, Biggie Smalls, and Bob Dylan.
That speaks pretty well to your music! I mean, one of the reasons your work is so unique and wonderful is the fact that it is sort of that square peg that doesn’t fit into any genre’s round hole. How do you take so many seemingly contradictory styles and fuse them without missing a beat?
I definitely have so many influences. Like I am so open to so many different kinds of music, especially jazz, not that it necessarily comes out, but I know it’s a huge influence for me. But I also love a lot of the new stuff that’s coming out now, like Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes and the such, you know? As far as how I get it all to work together—well, I love collecting little strange toy instruments just because I’m so interested in sound as an idea and being able to capture that and capture melodies and making them come through in ways that are maybe unconventional. It’s not that I set out to be weird or quirky—I set out with an open mind and open to intepretation.
With such an obviously open mind as to how you want your music to sound, how do you go about recording a track?
For the most part, I recorded all the phonic stuff live because even though they are looped-based parts and incredibly repetitive, I wanted to actually play out all of those parts. So I went in and literally played out something like 21 violin parts to have enough tracks to do it right. Then Joey, who plays bass, and Sam, who plays drums, they’ll come in and they’ll play their part. Then you know, I’ll keep adding, adding, adding: production, synth, and even little glockenspiel or bell parts. Sam and I do a lot of post-production too, where we run things through reverb, delays—all analog-style production that’s all after the fact. I mean, besides the drums and bass and this one time my friend came to do the cello, it’s all me.
That’s a lot of tracks going into a single song. How can you possibly do this live during your tours?
Well, we want it to be different than the album because it's like, why go to a show if you can just sit at home and listen to the record? But the way that we get that whole ensemble thing is through live looping. I do a ton of live sampling on stage; it’s sort of oriented towards a hip-hop production where you can bring in and out different elements. You can record limitless layers, it’s just a matter of organizing it and doing it fast enough to make sure the audience doesn’t get bored. I actually just started sampling off of vinyls during shows thinking, “Oh, maybe I can challenge myself a little bit more!” Anything that can be played can be sampled, and we really push that on stage.
So by live looping, you mean you loop what you actually play on stage? That sounds incredibly challenging…
Yeah, definitely, and it’s something I’ve been working on for a couple of years, perfecting. I had a loop pedal for a number of years that I would mess around with but it wasn’t until I approached it as a new instrument entirely, instead of something I could just screw with. So I really set my mind to learning it because you have to be really on point with your timing and everything like that for it to work out at all.
You seem to play, and very well I might add, an incredible number of instruments. I know your first musical training was in violin. When did that start for you?
I was really young—I was 4 years old. I went through the Suzuki Method which is entirely ear-oriented. The philosophy is that you can learn how speak before you learn how to read or write. So you learn music as a language as opposed to a written or read discipline; so you build your background through that, then eventually you learn the theory. So it’s really a part of me, it’s all sound-oriented, which I know I wouldn’t have done any other way, but it makes it so I don’t approach music from a traditional way, I really approach it just based on what it sounds like and figure out what the fuck I’m doing later.
So when did everything else come in? Where did all these other influences come from?
Well, I became this teenage girl who was like, “Fuck playing Bach!” I wanted to play the guitar and learn how to write my own songs! There was definitely a period of trying to play other instruments, then I got really into recording and taught myself based on sponging information out of any studio experience that I had. And then just starting with a four-track. I got a four-track when I was 16 and became completely obsessed with the idea of being able to record more than one thing and add parts. That was all really, really, exciting for me. Then over the years, I set up a studio, grew at different instruments, getting more and more gear and being super geeky about it! Also, trying to learn how to play anything I could because I’m just so curious. I hear sounds in my head, and I think, “How can I make that happen?”
When you go into the studio, do you ever have a set plan? Or do you just know where you’re going to start, sort of feel it, and go from there?
That’s an interesting question because the last records have been really based on that live-looping. We were doing all the songs live before we ever started recording, so a lot of the parts were really present already—we knew which parts we were going to play when we went in. So I definitely had a nice tree trunk to start with, then it was a lot of just filling it in through messing around in the studio and getting sounds. But the new record that I’m working on now hasn't been taken to the studio at all, and I think I might try to approach it a little bit different and have more of a plan so that maybe the string parts are recorded with several string players playing all together and definitely trying to capture that live aspect. The studio is incredible, but it can be a little sterile without that live thing.
17 September 2009
vol. 7, issue 1
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