Have You In My Wilderness is a surprisingly outwards-looking work. There’s no central theme, although literary characters do crop up – one from Colette’s Chance Acquaintances, and Sally Bowles from Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories. Instead what holds it together is a new element in her sound. Her early work experimented with twisting up traditional stringed instruments, before adding jazzy instrumentation on Loud City Song. She’s still working with that core, but in a much more rhythmic way. The humble drums are essential to her new songs, making them feel lively where older songs were stately. Even when drums are absent, other instruments take up the slack to propel them ever forwards.
“A lot of these songs really require a band, I think,” Holter says. Although she started out performing entirely solo, these days she plays with a drummer, bass player and violinist/backing vocalist. “At this point I’ve been playing with other people for three years now. I do solo shows though, and I like them a lot, but it’s just different.”
Holter is comfortable no matter which format she performs in. She always has been, in fact, which is surprising given her music started out as a very personal bedroom project.
“Performing for me has always been natural,” she says. “It kind of weirds me out – I don’t know why it is, because I’m not seriously introverted but I am more of an introvert, not super social or whatever – but I love performing for some reason.”
Part of it is perhaps that Holter’s songs aren’t really about her. Even when they’re not based on existing fiction, the songs are built around stories and role-play. “I would say I play a character,” she says. “I think that’s what most people do, even if they aren’t aware of it. I feel like even if you’re singing a song about your life, it’s not like talking to somebody. If you go up on a stage and perform, for me, unless it’s for a political cause it’s not a form of communication. It’s usually a sentiment that’s being expressed and it’s not addressed to a particular person.”
It’s an unusual idea, but one that’s matched by her music, which takes characters and stories and boils them down to moods. There are no morals imparted at the conclusion of Holter’s songs, just feelings. “Usually you’re performing for a group of people and there’s this thing being exchanged, but it’s not exactly communication,” she says. “I think in the same way, you’re not your own person, you’re something else – just like the audience themselves are not like separate people that are receiving information from you. They’re this mass of listeners that are having all their own experiences.”
To fuel her songs, sometimes Holter will go looking through books, but not in a methodical way. “Sometimes when I’m writing lyrics I flip through random anything, just looking at words and looking at sentences, just going from one page to another. [It] kind of gets the creativity moving a little bit. The thesaurus is also useful.”
Most recently, Holter has been working on the score for the boxing film Bleed For This – directed by Ben Younger and executive produced by Martin Scorsese. She’s still expressing a sentiment, but this time purely instrumental. “It’s very simple music. I’d say a kind of dark, bluesy piano and then there’s some string pads.”
To get an idea of what the next song Holter writes might sound like, it’s worth inquiring into what she’s reading. At the moment it’s The Palace Of The White Skunks by Reinaldo Arenas, which she describes as “really intense and difficult to read.” If it serves as inspiration for any of her future songs, they’ll be sad as hell.
“It’s really depressing and hits you over the head with depressing and bleak situations in a surreal way. It’s interesting suffering through it, because it’s painful to read. Sometimes that’s OK – I think things are just painful and miserable and that’s the way some art is, and it should be that way.”
BY JODY MACGREGOR
