FEATURE: Spotlight: Tirzah — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Lillie Eiger

Tirzah

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AS there are so many…

interesting and different artists around, it gives me opportunity to feature them in my Spotlight feature. One artist I have been following for a little while is Tirzah. Based in Greater London, she is releasing her new album, Colourgrade, on 1st October. It is a release that I would encourage people to pre-order:

“Colourgrade follows on from 2018’s immediate cult classic LP, Devotion. It forms a subconscious snapshot from across a year when Tirzah was playing live regularly for the first time, in the depths of promoting Devotion and recorded soon after the birth of her first child and shortly before her second child was born. The album explores recovery, gratitude and new beginnings, presenting a singer having discovered the type of love that is shared between a mother and a child for the first time, whilst simultaneously working as an artist”.

I am keen to explore and uncover a few interviews from this year. We get a better impression of who Tirzah is and what we can expect from Colourgrade. There have been quite a few interviews this year with Tirzah. She is turning heads and capturing a lot of attention ahead of the release of Colourgrade. It is about time that I get to some interviews, as Tirzah is someone that you will want to know more about.

Earlier in the year, Loud and Quiet spent time with Tirzah. We get to learn more about her personality, in addition to her long-time collaboration with producer Micachu:

“The first line of the bio sent over by her record label reads, ‘Tirzah the artist is an idea that’s hard to hold on to.’ It’s a sentence that comes back to me as I listen to her debut album, ‘Devotion’ – a moody, melancholy collection of love songs with a distinctly British RnB flavour. There’s an ethereal, other-worldly energy to it; the musical equivalent of smoke. Thick and dreamy, a beautiful texture that’s not quite solid, drifting into nothing once it’s done. ‘I’ll be thinking of you when you’re gone,’ she sings over a soft electronic instrumental. ‘But what’s keeping me from holding on…’

Tirzah the human is hard to hold on to too. She speaks quietly, in drifting, smoky sentences. It’s difficult to tell whether she’s unassuming or distracted, or maybe just tired. Her daughter was born in November (“I’m knee deep in nappies!”) and Tirzah’s juggling the first months of motherhood with the release of this record, which follows in the wake of gradual recognition due to the success of 2013’s ‘No Dancing’, her 2014 EP ‘No Romance’, and sporadic Internet releases over the past few years. She hasn’t made any music since the baby was born, and she’s not quite sure how she’s going to adjust her working pattern to this seismic life change. “It’s going to challenge me to be more organised,” she laughs, “which is not something I’m really good at.”

Tirzah doesn’t laugh that often over the course of our conversation, which isn’t to say she’s rude. But there’s a hesitancy there. “I’m not the most social person,” she tells me. She’s speaking about her song writing process, really, which mostly takes place over regular catch-ups with her collaborator and childhood friend, the producer Micachu. They meet at one another’s houses and communicate mostly through music. It’s with Mica, Tirzah says, where she feels most able to express herself.

“I sort of feel like it’s more of a band or duo than a collaboration in a way. As in we hang out together as friends, and make music together – it was all one thing. So that became our relationship. So it’s kind of… It feels like a dual project in that sense as well. I’ve done the odd collaboration with other people but hardly any, and it’s a nice thing to do, but I feel most comfortable when I’m working with Mica. And I think that’s what I’m in it for – that’s what I find most enjoyable about it.”

The pair met at The Purcell, a school for young musicians near Watford on the outskirts of London, at the start of the Millennium. It was an environment seeped in music. “Everyone was playing music all around you,” remembers Tirzah. “Very much, that’s what’s going on. It was a very small school. Like, you’re in a class with, probably, 12 kids. And obviously everyone’s got that interest.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Charlotte Patmore for Loud and Quiet

Tirzah joined Purcell at thirteen, after a music teacher suggested to her mother that it might be a good idea. Although she originally began her musical career as a harpist, the friendship with Mica, which started as “messing about on guitar” in class, writing “goofy songs”, developed when the school built a music tech room. “So she started working in there and we did songs over the music we’d made.

And now, sixteen years later, they’re releasing an album.

It’s almost a retro-move, to go from dropping experimental pop and stripped-back music videos online to creating an old-fashioned romance record. Eleven love songs. “I think it was just, we toyed with the idea of doing EPs, and it felt like something more creatively challenging to do an album and exciting therefore,” she shrugs. “And I always listen to music in albums. I don’t really flick through singles, so it didn’t feel like… it felt natural. Like I would want to do that, I would want to sit and be in someone else’s head for a while. So the process then was not really too dissimilar from the EPs but way harder to pick tracks, because we had so many singles over the years”.

I did not know that motherhood and family was a big influence on the album. As we find out in an interview with FADER, she started recording Colourgrade in 2019, shortly after the birth of her first child. That said, Tirzah does not consider the record to be overly-personal:

“In filmmaking, color grading is the process of adding extra body, depth, and emotion to visuals. A camera can’t always capture the true colors the photographer saw; color grading is about adjusting the tones and shifting exposures to get back to the colors that were really seen. For Tirzah, naming the new record Colourgrade was about seeing the work through the framework of color.

“I suppose the way I like to link the songs together is textures and colors,” Tirzah says. “I know in the previous record, we had the sounds Meeks had done labelled as colors — green, purple — and I really loved that. It made sense to me, maybe because everyone learns things in different ways but I really respond to color and pattern and texture. And you can apply colour to loads of things. It doesn’t have to be literally color, you know, it can be moods and emotions. I really like how that could all tie together.”

Devotion comprised songs from a ten-year period of writing with Mica, who is perhaps now best known for their Oscar-nominated work scoring films like Pablo Larraín’s Jackie. Tirzah describes that album as “a collage” of love songs from the era — about her own relationships past and present, but also relationships she had observed around her. There was a striking rawness to the record, lines like “I need all your attention, sometimes I think that’s all I need / But most of all I want your comfort for me” and “I come to you with an open heart, ’cause the last thing I want to do is be apart from you” as clear and fragile as cellophane. But Tirzah balks at the suggestion that her debut was especially personal, laughing and covering her face with her hands when I mention a Guardian review that called the record “frighteningly intimate, lived-in as an unmade bed”.

“To me it doesn’t seem that personal, which I suppose is quite weird,” she says, laughing. “I suppose everyone has that whole palette of feelings and emotions. Sometimes I think we are all the same, with all the same emotions — which, now that I’ve said it, makes me think of that Sesame Street book I read to the bubbas: We’re Different, We’re The Same. I feel like I’ve been listening to love songs for time, really, and it’s all kind of the same to me. And also because it’s me putting myself in other people’s shoes, thinking about other people’s relationships, [Devotion was] not an unnervingly personal thing to me”.

Colourgrade was recorded in 2019, after the birth of Tirzah’s firstborn, with the “human deadline,” as Tirzah calls it, of knowing another baby was on the way. It’s an altogether more visceral record than Devotion, with a scuzzy, caustic dissonance occasionally cutting through. (Incidentally, Tirzah mentions that Kwake and Dean were recording in the studio around the same time, and says they unintentionally started “sharing” ideas and sounds.)

Unlike Devotion, these are all new songs, and Tirzah revels at the freshness of it. “Devotion was pulling together ten years of work, whereas Colourgrade was kind of more actively written,” she says. “In some senses making Devotion was more a process of editing and curating, and we had so much material we drew a line under. So coming into this we were writing completely new stuff, and there was no pressure of matching anything because this is completely new. There was that excitement in starting again. And we’re different people from ten years ago, so it’s gonna be different.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Udoma Janssen for FADER

There are songs here about figuring out your role as a parent, about labor, even a soothing post-lullaby, where Tirzah mumbles: “My baby, ooh she’s sleeping tonight.” The track was recorded at night, Tirzah explains, back when she lived across the road from the studio, and could slip there to meet Mica after J had finally fallen asleep. In general, the album was created around the busy schedules of the trio — not least with Tirzah having a newborn child. “All of these things come into it,” says Mica, “The moods, the environment, the weather, all of that stuff has an impact [on how it sounds], especially when you’re leaving all that sort of thing in.”

Despite being initially cagey when I ask if Colourgrade speaks directly to her experiences of motherhood, Tirzah eventually concedes that, in some ways, it does. The artwork is a close-up of her torso, hands poring through what appears to be a colourful picture book. “One of the things I wanted to get across was the comedic value of new motherhood,” she says. “That whole spiritual side to becoming a parent is so huge, but there’s also such comedy and mundanity in what your life becomes — it’s literally just laundry and bums. And that all comes with the joy of it, because it’s so funny and nuts, but you know you’ll look back and think of those endless days of washing clothes and bottles.”

Family is threaded into Colourgrade in the way that romantic love was on Devotion. “I’ve got these new loves in my life that are in my thoughts all the time,” she says. Still, she’s resolute about not wanting to go too deep on the intimacies and intricacies of love for a child vs love for a partner. “I feel like I would have to write a book about that,” she eventually deflects with a laugh, replying via voice note after thinking about it for the day. “I think my answer is constantly evolving. And it’s almost too personal to answer I think. I feel like I’ve put it in the words, in the music, so I don’t want to talk about it”.

I am going to wrap up in a minute. There is another interview that I want to quote a short snippet from. Contrary to Tirzah’s feeling her music is not necessarily personal, this Stereogum interview highlights an intimacy and warmth in her music and speaking voice:

“In a Guardian piece around the release of Devotion, Damien Morris called Tirzah’s work “frighteningly intimate, lived-in as an unmade bed.” She contested that notion in a recent Fader feature, arguing, “It doesn’t feel more personal than anything else.” But I continue to argue for Morris’ description of her music. It has always felt strikingly intimate, especially compared to the usual contextual anonymity of electronic music and techno. The discrepancy, I think, is that it feels intimate but not necessarily personal. She whispers, her voice trails off, she clears her throat, she hums, she murmurs off-mic. Her lyrics capture the diaristic poems she’s transposed into melodies, things she’s too shy to share even with Levi, her best friend and close collaborator. Even when her lyrics aren’t revealing, her voice feels like a cry of relief, always on the verge of cracking.

In the extended music video for “Hive Mind,” out today, this tendency expands beyond Tirzah herself. As the 10-minute film opens, Tirzah enters the room with a bouquet for a celebration; it looks like it’s someone’s birthday, and they are partying after-hours at a gallery. Tirzah hands the viewer a flower, moving slowly but not quite deliberately, taking her time, fumbling with the bouquet, and always laughing. Scenes of a house party are juxtaposed with a butterfly terrarium, with long walks through a park, swings on a playground, running around a studio, driving electric scooters through quiet London streets, images of young children; everyone is trying to make the baby laugh. It’s a loose juxtaposition between humans and insects, the animal world and her own, scurrying around and bumping into one another. Colourgrade is a meditation on where you end and someone else begins, on friendship, on love, and the profound experience of motherhood, bringing a baby into the world and watching them grow. How do you make a representation closer to life?”.

If you have not heard of Tirzah and her music, go and listen to what is online. Colourgrade is going to be a fantastic album that you will want to listen to. I think that she is going to go quite far. Her work gets stronger by the year, and what she is producing now is her very best. Colourgrade will be…