And then also, because of the recession, they were like, "Wait, she can also clean up the audio. She can also score the film. She can also edit the video. This person is three people in one." So I was getting those gigs and was getting pretty good. That was my day job all the way up until the pandemic. . . . That is because of the fact that I have a degree in MP&E, most likely. The skills came in handy. And yeah, I worked on this documentary and it won an Emmy, and so they also sent me a plaque. You've worked with so many incredible artists over the years. How do you go about choosing the right people for a project? I think there's a level of trust and love that needs to be expressed as part of the project. The level of playing [also] has to be at a certain place. I view my collaborators not as the instrument player. . . . I view them kind of like these musicians who have tran- scended their instrument and have a really strong personality of their own in the instrument. So, that's just not a harp player—that's Maeve Gilchrist [BM ’07]. Or that's Joel Ross. You can hear somebody who has really worked on their craft and has transcended the instrument and made it an extension of themselves. Grief and joy sit right next to each other in your music. Vulture Prince felt like a meditation on loss [Aftab lost her brother in 2018], and Love in Exile spends a lot of time in this doomy, ambient space. But with Night Reign , it’s not that you’ve left those textures behind—it’s more like you’re asking what else they can hold. There’s a playfulness, a mystery, and even a kind of joy. How you think about that relationship between darkness and light in your work—between grief and joy? They definitely go hand in hand. It's been a personal journey of mine to experience the loss of that magni- tude—where you're like, "Oh my God, something like that could never happen to me," and then it happens, and you're like, "This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me in my life. What am I supposed to do now?" You start to molecularly rearrange yourself. So many things are tied to who you are, and one of the most important things that's tied to who you are in the moment is music, as a musician. So for me, I had really no way out. I had to channel it into music or lose music to it. This sound that I was creating was also simultane- ously happening, and I had spent so much time trying to put it together with the right musicians, teaching and training them to play this new sound. And then grief and loss started to channel into it as well. Then, [with] Night Reign, I started to feel . . . that I want to absorb this loss as a real thing, as a life event, and I also want to celebrate this person's life, and my story is going to keep going. I want to be happy again, and I want to be joyous again. I think that that is the natural way that things are supposed to go. Celebrate the life that already was there,
and then continue to bring joy into your own, and . . . keep the music really close to how your heart is feeling. Let it be natural. I really like what you said: It's not like we departed from the textures that I cre- ated in Vulture Prince. It's just that I evolved them. Over the past few years, so many new audiences have gotten excited about what you're doing. What has that experience felt like for you? It's like: finally guys! I've been trying to show you this thing, and I've been saying like, "Come on, look. It's really cool." Finally it feels like everybody's down, and they get it. And I'm having to explain it less and less. I had gotten to a point in my career before Vulture Prince where I was like, I'm just gonna be making this really intricate, beautiful music and no one's gonna care. Then I was proven very wrong, and it restored my faith in listenership. We're told over and over again by capitalist music industry: They're not gonna wanna listen. The songs have to be three minutes long. We're talking about listeners as if they're absolute idiots. And that's always felt a little strange to me. I think we can grow an audience that likes different things. You don't have to appeal to a lowest common denom- inator in order for people to get into your music. Yeah. Or that they would be intimidated by it, or that they would feel alienated if it's in a language they don't understand. None of that has been true. My audience keeps growing, and everybody keeps loving it. It's being seen as just a really great contemporary style of music that is familiar, but also new and refreshing. That's exactly what I've wanted. And it's people from all ranges. It's really young people. It's the old jazz heads. It's Brown people, Black people, White people. Everybody is digging it and coming together in these rooms. And that's also so awesome to see. Sometimes people are very formal and they're sitting really qui- etly. Sometimes we're all screaming and jumping and shouting. There's so many forms that the music ends up taking. Your musical tastes seem completely omnivorous. Where are you finding inspiration these days, and do you have a sense of what's next for you musically? I keep going in between, like, really hard-hitting con- temporary flamenco stuff—not for what I want to do, but what makes me feel excited. The algorithm is just feeding it to me, and I don't mind at all, because I had no idea that there was this whole subgenre. But Rosalía's probably the reason why all of that's happening now. And then I also feel like returning to my teenage self, where I'm again loving really soft acoustic guitar songs. I don't think either of those are a good idea for my next album, but we'll see. One of my processes when I'm writing is to try to not listen to too much music, so that my unicorn horn can grow all the way out, and then it can tell me what we're doing.
15
Powered by FlippingBook