Soundcheck: Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond

Five minutes before the doors opened for the My Brightest Diamond/Decemeberists show at the Orpheum last Friday, Shara Worden's (My Brightest Diamond) guitar is acting up. The cord seems to be acting up, and the guitar is cutting in and out. Two minutes before the doors open, she's still fine-tuning with her band. But everything seems to work out, and as she comes off stage, she seems happy to meet me.

As we climb the backstage stairs, we talk about the oddness of the back areas of the Orpheum. "It's like something out of another time," she says. And indeed, behind the big blast door that leads backstage, the Orpheum is a cross between a fortress and a haunted house - long, narrow stairwells leading to sinister closed doors and narrow hallways. We also figure out how to pronounce DeVotchKa (it isn't like you'd pronounce it in Russian). She has a history with Madison, playing shows at the Catacombs before making a splash opening for DeVotchKa last summer. In fact, she tells me, she wrote a long letter to the board of the Catacombs, while they were in a tussle with the two men who were running it - the board wanted to move away from the whole foods and indie shows appeal of the small venue, and turn towards proselytizing. Finally, at the top of the third or fourth floor, we find her dressing room. It's a tiny room looking out onto the parking ramp, with paint peeling in the corners.

Steve: So anyway, this is the first time I've interviewed a big rock star, and I was worried about building rapport...

Shara: [laughs]

Steve: ...and I was trying to figure out what we might have in common, and I thought, "aha - we both ride the bus to work."

Shara: Ah! [laughs]

Steve: How is the tour going for you?

Shara: It's awesome.

Steve: I kind of imagine the bus having some heavy conversation where you all talk in quatrains and drink lots of coffee...

Shara: We do drink lots of coffee. But we drive in a van - we're not at the bus level yet. It's good though, because you get different... in a van, it's harder on your body, but you have more conversations, in a way, 'cause you're forced to be together more. In a bus, you can retreat to your bunk and get more alone time, so maybe it's better [in a van] in the long run.

Steve: Brings the band together...

Shara: Yeah.

Steve: So what's the most Wisconsin thing you've done?

Shara: Well, I just got a massage today, so that's not very Wisconsin. And I found a little mouse. I found a mouse outside [in the alley], but I didn't have any cheese - I figured a Wisconsin mouse would eat cheese. The other thing we did that was real Wisconsin-y was, James, our tour manager, his grandfather owned a house on the lake, and we drove by that house.

Steve: You know, it's one of the biggest lakes in Wisconsin. There's Lake Winnebago, which is artificial... But anyway, you come from this crazy musical family, you advertised for your band of course by saying they should like P.J. Harvey as much as Pierre Boulez, and you talk about listening to rap music growing up outside of Detroit. How do you synthesize all those elements to come up with the sound that you have come up with? How does that all fit together?

Shara: It's, I don't know, it's sometimes I feel like I'm doing things well, sometimes I feel like something's not for me... I think that, in a way, I sort of stopped looking at them as a... in a way I sort of stopped feeling like I had to force soul music in - 'cause I have a huge history in R&B and soul and pop. But at a certain point, I feel like I had to allow that to develop, and I felt like I had to focus more, basically, on groove. So that's the way I see it coming in, in songs like "Workhorse." It's not necessarily hip-hop, but the groove is still there. So I think that's were it works out as soulful at this point.

Steve: You've got two albums coming up, a remix album, and then a strings-based album. Is that a little bit of cognitive dissonance putting those together at the same time, or is it just fun because you get to explore other sides?

Shara: Yeah, it's - the remix didn't take much effort on my part. It's just all in organizing people and giving a little bit of guidance, you know, but for the most part, I just let the DJs do their thing. And I picked people that would serve some kind of... that would fit together in some way, or would serve the tune in a way I thought would be interesting. But the classical stuff, I've been working on that alongside "Bring Me the Workhorse," - the songs on both those records go from the present [back] to 2001, so it's been like, a way for me to organize my own head, is limiting the instrumentation. "Bring Me the Workhorse" had strings, drums, bass, me playing guitar, keys, and then vibraphone. That was the main component of that record. For the strings, I'm really trying to limit my use of guitar, and my use of drum kit. So, I think in terms of that, this helps me to really use those kind of restrictions...

Steve: To focus on one thing...

Shara: ...Yeah. And not feel like you have to get all your ideas out in one record. It's like, just, well, maximize this one idea that you had and do the best you can and make that work.

Steve: So you're on Asthmatic Kitty records, you've got a song about rabbits dying, you've got a song about, if I read it right, bringing an old workhorse to the glue factory...

Shara: Saving him!

Steve: Aha! Saving him! Well, I was going to ask, "why do you hate animals so much?" But...

Shara: [laughs] The problem is that I love them!

Steve: Right. [laughs] Do they serve as metaphors for you, or... I sense a real kind of Romanticism - a big "R" Romanticism, if I can be back in college for a moment: the kind of focus on nature, and getting out, as opposed to being artificial and in the cities - you want to avoid "sneaky societies"...

Shara: Yeah!

Steve: Where does that come from? Are you influenced by other literature, or things like that?

Shara: It's more, um, it has to do more with my childhood. We lived in - both my mother's father, and grandfather for that matter, were farmers. So we lived in Oklahoma for a certain amount of time in elementary school, and so we had acres of property all around us, and so we were playing outside all the time, and we would go to the farm for the summers and hang out. So that is a huge part of my childhood, being on a farm and being outside. And my dad is a birdwatcher and a hunter and a fisherman, and he's a real nature dude. So that's also a big thing from my family, having that connection to the farm. And I think it's also easy for me to think in metaphors with animals. But mostly those animal stories are all true.

Steve: Really?

Shara: Yeah, and then I just expounded upon - say there was an incident with an animal, like the rabbit dying, and then for whatever reason I'm still processing that. And the robin - that really did happen - it's not like I was just sitting in my room, like, "What would that be like?"

Steve: Do you feel more at home in the city? Maybe you're dreaming of Paris - how does it work?

Shara: I love Paris - there's a romance. I love New York, mainly because there's an energy there that I love, there's so many creative people, and so many different kinds of people - the diversity drives me to that city. But it's not particularly beautiful. It's very utilitarian, like, money base at the bottom of New York that I find particularly disturbing. And so, yeah, it's easy for me to romanticize the art in Paris, you know, the music, the architecture, and the beauty there. But that's part of my romanticization of it.

Steve: You play a lot of covers in your shows as well - do you just enjoy playing covers, or where does that come from? You do really well with them - a friend of mine at the DeVotchKa show really loved your cover of "Tainted Love." So where does that fit in - where did you get the idea to start doing covers in shows?

Shara: Well, I've always - it serves several different purposes, but especially as an opening band, because I've opened up for Sufjan, for DeVotchKa, for, now, the Decemberists. For people who don't know your stuff, it's a good way to access something. Because they just heard you do thirty minutes of stuff, and it's a way to actually give the brain a break from that kind of level of attention. And it also serves to inform people of where you're coming from, it gives them context - like, if I'm doing a Prince song, or a Nina Simone song, or Led Zeppelin song, or whatever, it's giving them a context to understand the music. Like, "Where is this girl coming from? What's the source?" And so I feel like it's informative and also it's incredibly useful to me as a way of just understanding other people's structures. Because I've only got one record out, it helps keep an aliveness - to learn a new tune, to not just be doing my own material.

Steve: With so many influences, people toss out a lot of comparisons for you. What's the favorite comparison you've gotten, and what's the least favorite?

Shara: Um, jeez [pauses] ...I don't know! I don't really care, in a way...

Steve: Do you even pay attention to it?

Shara: Well I used to, and then I just realized that that's the way that we understand music: the human brain organizes material together, right? So people are going to bring their own... what they heard in their life, and associate that with what they know. And so that's okay - it's natural for that to happen. And one of the main things I've learned in my life is learning to sort of remove... finding my value or just basically removing the ego. And the ego is about defining itself from external means rather than internal ones. So whether or not the applause is a certain way, or whether or not sales are a certain way, or people understand you in the way you want to be understood, you have to really let go of all that, because you can waste a lot of energy...

Steve: You're so eclectic, and you want to do so many things, it seems worthless to pay attention to one comparison for one album.

Shara: Yeah! Because in a way I'm like, "That's cool, that's the way you're understanding this. That's fine, you know? Whether people are going to be interested in the strings - they might be like, "Well, what happened to the rock? We don't like it!" And I'm trying to prepare for that. Maybe I'll make a rap album next!

Steve: Who would win in a fight, Colin Meloy or Sufjan?

Shara: [laughs] Trick question! ...I don't know, Colin's got a whale behind him - you can't underestimate the power of the tail!

Steve: Well, one more question - a friend of mine wanted to know how you do your hair.

Shara: [laughs] Spray it! Bobby pins and hair spray!

As we walk back down the narrow concrete staircase, we get horribly lost for a moment, ending up in the basement at a door that prohibits entry in the strictest, boldest letters. We finally make our way out, barely navigating the narrow passageways back to the blast door that leads to the stage.

"We had our own 'Spinal Tap' moment," says Shara.

Steve S also keeps a blog at Letters in Bottles.