Emerging from the Texan underground in the late 1990s, Heather Leigh came to prominence in Ash Castles On The Ghost Coast, Charalambides and Scorces, her duo with Christina Carter. Since relocating to Glasgow in 2004, where she co-ran the underground record store and mail order Volcanic Tongue, she has released several solo albums and collaborated with Jandek, Peter Brötzmann, Chris Corsano (as Jailbreak), Stefan Jaworyzn (as Annihilating Light), and Robbie Yeats of The Dead C, to name but a few. During the past few years she has stepped up her solo activities, from the fearsome solo guitar of Me-Ba and the raw electric blues ritual of Nightingale to her first studio album proper, 2015’s I Abused Animal, a song cycle which foregrounds the glassy beauty of her voice and her intensely focussed pedal steel playing. Throne followed in 2018, an album of sensuous gothic pop, dark psychedelia and ragged Americana. Last month saw the surprise release of Glory Days, an album recorded in her Glasgow flat during lockdown.
Glory Days is part of Boomkat's Documenting Sound series. To what extent did lockdown shape the process and the mood of the album?
It shaped it completely. When Boomkat invited me to be a part of the series at the end of March, while I was already physically in lockdown - really only venturing out for essentials or short walks - I was still in the throws of frantically rescheduling cancelled concerts, checking on family/friends and coming to grips with our new reality. While I’m ultimately accepting of the situation, initially it was devastating to watch all of my work for the year disappear, I had a lot of exciting concerts/new collaborations in the works! My situation being nothing special of course, we’re all facing great uncertainty in every respect at the moment. Of course you could argue that’s life in general but these feel like overwhelming times. I had planned to have a quiet year anyway as far as traveling goes. I’ve spent the last six years touring near constantly and needed a break and the time/space to work on new music but it’s one thing to make a decision to calm it down and quite another to be FORCED to. So, to put it bluntly, I wasn’t really in the headspace to record and initially in lockdown I found myself writing and painting more than making music, but then came Boomkat’s invitation. I took their remit seriously in terms of my process which was essentially to record something quickly without thinking about it too much, a document of the moment, whatever that meant to me.
Did recording at home influence your choice of instrumentation/tone? I guess you couldn't crank things up too much, so it's less noisy, more atmospheric/electronic? Or maybe that's where you were going anyway?
I immediately found the limitations I’d have to face appealing: did I even still have the equipment to make this happen? I’ve primarily worked in studios for years now and have never really used music software - in the past I recorded to cassette or digital 8 track. When it comes to tech and me, the less the better. I want to capture the sound and my transmission of it as simply as possible without having to think about it. If my brain is involved when I’m making music then it blocks the channel. So while I had a million other worries in life as a result of lockdown, I didn’t worry about the recording of the album all that much. To have to focus on this project was exactly what I needed to somehow transmute all of the lockdown feelings into the work. I let the instrument and recording device present itself naturally, I tried not to consciously choose. I have a Zoom recorder, iPhone and laptop with Logic (that I had to teach myself very quickly) at hand, so as songs arose, I captured them as simply as possible with whatever device felt right. It was a given that I’d sing and play pedal steel guitar - my primary loves - but the synth/voice pieces were unexpected and I haven’t played cuatro in at least ten years. I recorded some psaltery songs as well though they didn’t make the cut. I was recording with the window open and I live in a one bed tenement flat - I’m sure I drive my neighbours crazy enough already - so I was aware that I couldn’t push the volume too much. I played the steel through the tiniest Blackstar amp you’ve ever seen, I really like the tone a lot. If a song would have required loud volume I would have found a way. Though listening back to the finished album, cranking it would have betrayed the mood.
In certain respects, Glory Days might seem like a return to your earlier, more improvisatory releases, yet there's a concision and focus that reflects the songwriting of I Abused Animal and Throne. Is that a fair assessment? Does it feel like a continuation or a new departure? Can you see yourself working like this in the future, or at least incorporating aspects into your studio work?
While I dove into recording as soon as I agreed to do this release, I had no idea what shape it would take, I wasn’t even sure there would be songs or how long it would be. It became apparent quickly that not only were these songs but this wasn’t just a document of my lockdown moment, this was my next album, it felt fully realised. I imagine inevitably an umbilical cord runs through all my work - recurring themes, echoes that still reveal themselves to me sometimes years after I’ve recorded an album, though it’s impossible for me to be objective, sometimes it all feels like one big work. Everything is connected in this world so you can argue everything is a continuation, but I try not to think about all of that too much and just keeping making new music. I do see myself working like this for the foreseeable future. I fell in love with recording myself again during this process, especially the immediacy and capturing a mood in the moment. I even like working in Logic. Studios are always a bit weird and I liked returning to a more raw quality that was perhaps more of a feature of older albums like Pot Baby and Devil If You Can Hear Me that I recorded myself. After finishing the album I sort of have a fuck studios for a while attitude and want to see how much more I can accomplish with my new setup. The learning curve and challenge has been fun, it’s certainly keeping me busy.
When we spoke around the time of I Abused Animal, you said you had gotten into more of a daytime routine, after years of recording at night. Has that changed with lockdown?
I recorded Glory Days at all hours though the daytime recordings are fairly obvious by the amount of outside activity bleeding through. Most of the synth/vocal songs were recorded at night. Time has such a bizarre quality during lockdown, I never quite know what day or time it is, every moment bleeds into the next. Especially during the recording of Glory Days I was in a strange kind of hallucinated haze, the music took over everything, I was often recording much of the day and night over a concentrated period, in a way it’s hard to remember how it all happened and came together.
I'm struck by the detail that it was recorded at home with the window open. Did that make a difference? Were you consciously responding to environmental conditions and sounds, or trying to shut them out? I'm particularly thinking about ‘Death Switch’ and ‘The Peace Of Wild Things’, which make more prominent use of environmental sound/fielding recordings. The former has a pastoral feel, as if it's recorded in the garden, with the wind and buzzing bees, while the latter has dogs barking.
For much of the time the recording was made I barely left the house, so I had to let the outside in as much as possible. Thankfully Glasgow was gloriously sunny and dry for much of the Spring so I rarely closed the windows at all. The birdsong this year felt more pronounced, even friends told me they felt the same or we were all more in tune with their song considering the circumstances? So having the window open for the recording wasn’t a deliberate choice or affectation, they were open anyway and to close them for the music would have felt wrong. I didn’t consciously respond to the outside sounds, in the case of the dog in ‘The Peace Of Wild Things’ or the car door syncing with my voice in ‘Aretha’, this happened by chance. I didn’t overdub over any field recordings, that approach doesn’t interest or capture me, any outside sounds were seeping into the music while I was recording inside. ‘Molly’ and ‘Island’ were the two songs where I was perhaps more focused on the outside sounds, eyes closed, the guitar soundtracking the life of my street.
Is the garden somewhere you often work on music, or do you see it as a space to get away from that? Obviously gardening is a creative act in itself, but how does it affect your other work?
My usual rule for the garden is I turn up and just move through the day without much thought or conscious choice. It’s a place of inspiration so sometimes to create within that space is to interrupt the inspiration, I like to keep the work space and the garden space separate in that sense. Sometimes I’ll listen back to music I’m working on while there, sharpen lyrics, record little melodies that pop up if I’m singing while working but outside of photography, reading or staring into space, when I’m in the garden, I work. In retrospect, my more song based studio albums beginning with I Abused Animal coincided with becoming more seriously involved in gardening and more specifically getting my current plot. Prior to having this allotment I had a hut in Carbeth, still the most idyllic of Scottish hutting communities to me and so deeply connected to working class culture here. The garden hardens you, you learn to accept change and death in new ways since you’re faced with it everyday in nature. There are no guarantees. You become less attached to everything and learn to accept the cycles of life much more lucidly. In winter, everything seems so dead and grey, you can’t imagine seeing colour again then all of the sudden the season changes and there’s new life everywhere around you. It’s satisfying to work hard, mindlessly, it is a type of meditation. When my mind is most still, hours can pass in a breath and the fruits of your labor are immediate, it gives you a kind of work ethic that extends to my creative life.
Do you listen to music while gardening?
In general, no, I don’t listen to music in the garden. I like to hear the sounds of the trees in the wind, the traffic, my neighbours’ conversations, the birds (especially the bullfinch, long-tailed tit, song thrush and more recently seven resident parakeets), planes and with some luck, rare moments of near silence.
Glory Days is out now on Boomkat.