Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Aly Spaltro, aka Lady Lamb, is one of the most gripping live performers around. Forget about stadium bands and noise rock amps and guitar smashing. She has left every one of our writers with their jaws on the floor, especially when she takes the stage. So it should come as no surprise that the record release show for her sophomore studio album After sold out quickly.
Lady Lamb’s music has a raw ripeness to it that’s akin to the flush of air hitting your skin immediately after you pull a Band-Aid off. It’s quick and sharp, pairing witty lyrics with undeniably emotive music. While most of her songs play with song structure and time signature, Spaltro has returned on the new LP to rope more pop into her sound. From lead single “Billions of Eyes” to “Spat Out Spit”, she tangles listeners up in a bright new vision just in time for spring (should this snow ever melt).
Last time we spoke with Spaltro, she talked about her move to Brooklyn and why it’s okay to discover music late in the game. She was kind enough to chat with us before this Saturday’s show at The Sinclair about pop songwriting, making collage art, and the ever-present theme of death on the new album. We shouldn’t have to remind you, but you should grab a copy if you haven’t yet. (Really really). You can do that right here.
Allston Pudding: “Rooftop” was your first traditional pop song in a structural sense and you said you wanted to try writing a pop song since you never do. However, After is noticeably poppier than your past work. Was this your take on exploring pop more?
Lady Lamb: Yeah. For me, it’s really easy to write a long song that goes through the motions and goes through many movements. It isn’t editing itself in terms of lyrics and length. It’s much harder for me to write a concise song. For that reason, I wanted to challenge myself to be a little more direct with a few of these new songs. It wasn’t a conscious decision to try to write poppier music, but it was a conscious effort to say what I wanted to say in a shorter amount of time. I’m not one for writing choruses. Because of that, I wanted to explore writing them since it’s not second nature for me to.
AP: So did you turn to other people’s work to find good ways to compress your material down to fit that format?
LL: Not consciously I don’t think. I wasn’t emulating anyone. It’s always a solo process. I tend to not–and I’ve only noticed this recently–listen to a lot of music when I’m in the writing process or the recording process. I listen to new music when I’m on the other end of it, when the record’s done and it’s time to tour.
AP: The way you maintain consistency, regardless of the structure of the song, is in your lyrics. You tend to have strong imagery and well-throughout lyrics. when you were writing them on this record, did you sit down and shoot for strong images that you wanted people to associate with the song?
LL: It’s usually the other way around, actually. I mostly find it impossible to sit down with music and write lyrics on top of the music. I generally and inspired to write at odd times like right before I fall asleep or while I’m driving in the car. A lot of my work is a collection of phrases that I’ve found a common thread between and stitched together or phrases that in reading back have led to other ideas or memories. I think my work is generally a collage lyrically of different times and moments. Then I sit down and figure out how to make them work several months later.
AP: Do you have any favorite lines off this record?
LL: Off the top of my head, one of my favorites is from “Billions of Eyes”: “This feels like eating the meat of the mountain / It’s all grit and gristle / I can’t chew and swallow / I’m gnawing my way back home.” That I wrote on tour. I was on a tour I was not enjoying very much and was really homesick out in the middle of the mountains, very far from home. I thought it was an interesting visual for the feeling that you have when you’re driving in the opposite direction of the direction you want to go in. You know what I mean? I was up in the mountains, just going further and further away. I felt like eating the meat of the mountain, gnawing my way through the road to get home.
AP: The lyrics feel more personal on After which is interesting because that’s always been the case. For some reason, they feel even moreso this time. Do you think this record shares a little more of your personality than the past albums?
LL: Yeah, I do. I definitely think so. Looking back on my last one, I felt that though it was a very vulnerable album, it had very little to do with me. So on this record I wanted to be vulnerable in a new sense, to talk about my childhood, my family, friends, things I’m afraid of, things I think about. I definitely think that while this is more concise and direct, it’s definitely more about me.
AP: Was that hard at all? Do you have a moment where you worry you’re getting too personal?
LL: That can happen sometimes. You never know how people will relate to what you’re singing. You know, when I was much younger I was driven to things that the artists I loved were saying. I felt I knew them. That’s a wonderful thing, but as an artist, it can get a little overwhelming if you’re like me and very introverted and shy in your personal life. I didn’t worry too much about it. I didn’t feel like I was over-sharing. At the end of the day, I definitely noticed that this was more about my life and my experiences. It’s at a point, though, where I prefer to share that with people than continue to harp on the themes that were rampant in the last album.
AP: Are there specific moments from your life addressed here or are the lyrics referring to an accumulation of things that didn’t get attention in Ripely Pine?
LL: A little of both. I wrote all the new material on this album in between tours when I was back at home with two or three weeks off or something. I don’t know why, but the record is pretty existential. A lot of it has to do with mortality and thinking about what it is to be human. I don’t really know why. I think part of the themes came from traveling so much and seeing different things and flying a lot, which is my biggest fear. Like, the song on the record isn’t a joke. I’m terrified of flying so I wrote a song about it. But yeah, the influences are from a vast pool of moments and experiences and memories. I think the nostalgia on this record is a happy nostalgia. It’s not bitter. If I’m looking back, it’s with content.
AP: That’s funny you brought up death because I wanted to talk about “Sunday Shoes”. It’s very sad, but a beautifully written song about how we envision life after death.
LL: Thank you.
AP: That’s an older song, right?
LL: Yeah.
AP: So how did you approach that song to put it on this record? Were there a lot of changes? And how to you talk about death like that without getting too dark?
LL: Well, at the risk of doing that thing where I explain exactly what the song is about, but I will in this case, I wrote “Sunday Shoes” a very long time ago. It’s very specific. Sometimes I’ll write songs that are dealing with one situation and they come out entirely different lyrically. “Sunday Shoes” was the first song I ever wrote that was totally fictional. It was inspired by when I was 20 years old and my dad was remarried and I found out he and his new wife were going to have a baby. This was my way of dealing with the fact that I was going to have a half-sister at 20-years-old, you know? What that meant and how weird that was. As bizarre as it sounds, that being what the song is about and the lyrical content, that’s where it came from. I’ve never connected with the song in that it’s dark and heavy and sad more than me trying to accept that I was going to have this new baby sister. It’s weird like that. As a way to cope with that, I wrote a character who’s being mauled by wolves trying to save their baby sister from that same fate. It’s something I made up, but it really did help me cope with that.
AP: That’s good to hear.
LL: I don’t know why the themes are of death when the real scenario was of birth. I guess stuff can happen.
AP: Well the end part of the song lends itself to imply that death is very much a new way of living, so it makes sense, I think.
LL: It’s pretty gentle even though there’s some violence. It’s pretty gentle.
AP: Contrasting that is “Violet Clementine”. It’s really aggressive in that it changes sound and tempo and instruments frequently. For that one, did you go in looking to make a song that comes naturally to you that’s longer and toys with format?
LL: That’s actually one of the other songs on this album, one of the few, much fewer than on Ripely Pine, that had been written previously. I co-wrote that with my friend TJ who plays bass in my touring band. We wrote that in 2008. I came to him with the melody and banjo and lyrics and we sat down to rearrange the bass-y part that runs throughout it plus the back-and-forth vocals. We performed it a few times in Maine in the early years of Lady Lamb and then it went to bed for a couple years. I always felt connected to that song and it felt like a crime to not give it its time. With his blessing, I went in and arranged all the new stuff you hear: organ, trumpet, horns. I wanted to make it full and defined, once and for all. IT hearkens back to my early process of having lots of movements within a song and tempo changes. I had a really good time this year collaborating on it to build it up.
AP: I didn’t realize that was an older track, actually. How did you decide which old songs you wanted to put on After?
LL: Well, I felt like there were a few songs–“Penny Licks”, “Violet Clementine”, “Sunday Shoes”–that didn’t quite fully get their moment. They came out as demos or were only performed live, like “Sunday Shoes”. It naturally felt like the time for these songs to have their moment, for more people to hear them and appreciate them. A couple of the songs were sketches of melody ideas I had sitting around for a while. Most everything else is pretty new that I built up between touring.
AP: Is After in reference to moving on to this new sound then?
LL: Yeah. For me, it means a little bit of everything. I wanted a one-word titled that was really open-ended. Ripely Pine was the first title I thought of for that album. No matter how many lists I made of other titles, I kept going back to Ripely Pine. It’s the same with this one. This is the first word I ever wrote down. Didn’t quite know why I did at the time, but I liked that it was open to interpretation and I felt it was fitting since it’s after I’m over the stuff I was singing about in Ripely Pine and also after like afterlife for the themes of mortality.
AP: That works with the collage-based art, too.
LL: Yeah, exactly. It helps that my work is very collage-based. The visuals definitely tie into that idea. I don’t really have a pure reason for using them in music videos and my art. I’ve just liked them a lot since I was a kid. I’m interested in making my own album art, so I felt like using the collage again, as I did with Ripely Pine, was a nice common thread between the two.
Lady Lamb plays The Sinclair this Saturday, March 7 at 8 PM. More info can be found here.