Photo by Bernd Preiml
Most artists on Asthmatic Kitty live up to the adorable, fractured creature the record label’s name etches. Under the moniker My Brightest Diamond, Shara Worden is no exception — which really just means she’s overly exceptional.
The experimental pop singer-songwriter grew up in the small town of Ypsilanti, Michigan, studying opera and classical arrangements in a community filled with a love for the arts. Over the years, she’s churned out several albums, starred alongside The Decemberists and Sufjan Stevens, and put out a free ‘Best Of’ album, Until Now. Now, on this year’s This Is My Hand, Worden is using her soulful singing tone to not only mirror Nina Simone and Antony and the Johnsons, but she’s roping in the rhythms of high school marching bands, too — and Boston lucky enough to see one onstage at her show (shoutout to Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band).
Yet for all her pleasantries, Worden still catches us off guard when she answers the phone for our interview with the most cheerful hello. After a hometown show in Detroit filled with friends and a relaxed “beach day” in Toronto, she’s staring at a green landscape at a service area 30 miles outside of Albany, eager to get to Boston but still friendly and enigmatic as ever.
Allston Pudding: Five years ago, you moved back to Detroit for, of all things, intense gardening and the desire to lead a sustainable life as an artist. How’s it working out?
My Brightest Diamond: I have since moved into a loft space, but my son is there. I’m no longer with my partner, so I’m not gardening anymore which has been sad for me. I’m still able to go to the house and weed the garden whenever I’m hanging out with my kid, though. Urban gardening in Detroit is really, really exploding. There’s so much happening there agriculturally. It’s really fascinating and exciting.
AP: Your new album, This Is My Hand, is almost stripping itself back to the basics like that, too. That’s not meant in the sense of it being acoustic or anything, but more in the sense that the themes it delves into are all foundational, like love, sadness, friendship, and so on. The two seem to parallel themselves well.
MBD: After the last record and with all the changes in the music industry, I had to adjust. How is it that we value music at all if we’re no longer really buying things? You’re exactly spot on. I was reading Daniel Levitin’s The World in Six Songs and he lists religion, love, friendship, sadness, war, and information songs, like the ABCs. These themes were the backbone of what I wanted to start with and then, through various means, I was really thinking about the marching band. If we’re all gathered around a fire, what does it mean to make music together in this way? The marching band became the symbol to me of this place in our culture where we’re still making music collectively. It’s pretty ubiquitous in high school that anyone can be in the marching band if they want to be. Then I made a list of ways in which people can gather—like what ways could we participate together, whether that’s clapping together, singing, call-and-response. In my imagination, everybody would bring their dusty, old saxophone out of the closet and we would all play a song together. I think it’s maybe not going to happen right now. In my imagination, I was like, “Oh yeah, everyone can just bring an instrument! They can bring a kazoo!” I made a running list of things like line dances or vogue-ing, where everybody takes a dance solo. So the Daniel Levitin themes, group participation, and the marching band were the three themes to become factors in this.
I thought, “What if we were playing at a festival and this marching band appears from the mountainside from behind the audience? They come down and surround the audience and we have this 3D listening experience.” I wrote some instrumental music as well for that kind of moment and did several shows in Detroit with a marching band there to try out some of that stuff. In the end, I decided the album should be more like a pop record than something with 10 minute-long instrumentals.
AP: Did you store the instrumental versions you made?
MBD: I have the scores, but they’re more of an experience than something to record. I really have only done it twice. Initially I did want to record them, though. The whole point is for the audience to be enveloped in the sound. Recording isn’t even ultimately what the goal of that would have been anyways.
AP: Do you think part of that is from your background in music? Unfortunately, not everyone gets the chance to learn how to play an instrument or listen to music and be able to see notes or images. You’ve studied opera and arrangement; you were one of Sufjan Stevens’ Illinoisemakers; you call experimental musicians like Laurie Anderson close friends. How do you keep all of these interests tame? Or is that the key — you let them run wild?
MBD: I definitely came from a family that’s musical, too. Everybody studied classical music—my uncle, my mother, my father—but also did gospel and jazz music, too. It had to do with growing up in a family of all classical musicians. They were trained and that was the culture. It’s really important, especially now that I do focus myself since I am so interested in so many things. Last year I wrote a baroque opera that’s going to be, I’m excited to say, at the BAM Next Wave Festival in 2015. I’m as proud as a peacock that I get to do that! I do think it’s very important now that I really focus and make concentrated decisions. The records have always been that. The first album was strings and a rock band. The second followed parameters I set up, and the same thing for this one. I can be all over the place. I try to limit the toys. I see it like this: you could have an infinite number of toys to play with, but for this album I’ll only try to play with four toys. Maybe I’ll bend the rules a little bit and play with five, but the scope of the album should only be with these four. The last album could be me playing with watercolors. You know? For me, it’s very important to set up a framework otherwise it could go all over the place.
AP: Because your family was so musical, I imagine music gives you a sense of home-y comfort.
MBD: Yeah, I guess so. Writing music is my happy place, for sure.
AP: Did the fact that they were so tied to religion have any influence on your writing? A mother who plays organ at a Pentecostal church and a father who’s a musical evangelist isn’t the usual mom and pop story.
MDB: Music is vibration. It’s unseen. It’s in the air and we can’t touch it or hold it. It’s ephemeral. It disappears as soon as it happens. The very nature of music in and of itself—the fact that it’s something that passes through time and then is gone—is connecting us to the unseen. When it came to write the religion song, I was like, “Oh man, what am I gonna do? How do I do that without prescribing to me what religious music is?” All of music is sacred. All of life is sacred. There’s no separation between the emotion and mind and spirit. When you’re speaking about classical music versus folk music or punk music, people will say classical music isn’t about feeling since you’re reading notes. That’s not true. We are human beings and the feeling comes through us. Everything is sacred, from the grass to sex. I didn’t grow up thinking that way, but that’s what I think now.
The song “Shape” was about that, this thing manifesting in each individual. It’s something we can’t put our finger on and touch, but it’s that mysterious thing that comes through each person and communicates to each person in a very individual way. The lyric “everybody take a shape” is how I’m going to express a sacred thing differently than you. It’s all important. We’re not trying to be cookie cutter copies of each other and compare ourselves. The beauty of humanity is the fact that we are all different and we are all unique, but we have these things that connect us. Diversity of existence is the most beautiful thing. The more I accept my own individualization, the more secure I become.
AP: When you’re performing live, or at least in the past, everything is so theatrical and bright that it encourages people to let loose, and not necessarily in a way that’s over the top, but more in a comforting, indirect way. Do you sit down to prepare these songs so that they come across the way you envision it?
MBD: Yes, yes, yes. The live show is about creating an environment where people can feel and dance and cry and laugh. The best show, to me, is when I allow myself to experience all of those things and hopefully I’m facilitating that for other people, too. Whether that means a puppet is employed or a mask or a silly joke, it’s all in service of saying, “Hey, it’s okay. We can let our guard down. That’s what this moment is about.” That’s what I want to experience in an evening.
AP: Is it hard to perform some songs live because of that? Inadvertently reliving those emotions? The Take Away Show you did a few years ago for “I Have Never Loved Someone” comes to mind because there you are, singing in an empty hotel bar in Berlin, and you start crying thinking about your son… and then one of the cameramen does, too. It’s a very beautiful, personal moment. Inevitably at your shows and at home people go through that as well. Is it hard to put these songs out if they feel too personal?
MBD: There are some songs I don’t do, but if somebody asks me to sing “Gone Away,” I’ll do it. That song makes me so, so sad, even still. They’re these little time capsules. A friend actually had to remind me of that last night because I was like, “Why am I feeling so sad?” and she said, “Well, that’s because you’re going back into this time capsule.” I sang “I Have Never Loved Someone” last night and I really almost couldn’t get through it at a certain point because I had to think about my son. He’s four years old.
At the end of the day, you know who I love? Judi Dench. She, as an actress, is always experiencing the emotion. The audience is then allowed to have their feelings rather than being concerned for her. At the end of the day, I’m there to facilitate other people in the same way that an actor would. There’s this moment in The Shipping News where it’s all under the surface and then I, as an audience member, am allowed to cry myself because she didn’t let herself go over that edge. You want to access your own emotion, but, at the end of the day, I am in a performance. Sometimes you go over the edge and you’re like, “Well, I found my edge.” It’s something that’s very astute of you to be thinking of.
AP: On the bright side, your shows are so uplifting that it’s hard to leave uninspired come the end. What’s the best way to keep your imagination fresh over time, especially as you grow up?
MBD: Remain curious!
AP: That’s so much easier said than done, though!
MBD: Well, if we’re ever bored, it’s because we’re not digging in. We’re taking for granted that we think we know something. You’re taking for granted that the world is so fascinating that then it’s about finding a subject that you’re interested in and want to learn about actively, with discipline and joy, following those things you have little bubbles and sparkles about. But the world is never boring. It’s only us who can’t see that.
AP: What’s something you were left inquiring more about recently?
MBD: My friend gave me The Leonard Bernstein Letters recently which I’m reading on tour, and a journalist gave me a book he wrote about Miles Davis’ life. There’s also this whole relationship between Detroit and Berlin that I’m excited to research. In the early ‘90s and ‘80s when electronic music was happening in Detroit, Kraftwerk started hearing the Detroit stuff and I want to get deeper into that music.
Also, I only know surface-level stuff about Duke Ellington. It’s funny; I really want to buy all of the Nine Inch Nails records and everything I can of Duke Ellington [laughs]. Duke’s career spanned a really, really long time and I also, for whatever reason, have had a lot of blocks towards Nine Inch Nails and now all of those blocks have left. I want to dive into those records because Trent is really, really deep in electronic music. I’m gonna do that soon.