Amélie: You're touring for the 25th anniversary of 69 Love Songs, which is kind of crazy, 25 years of that album. You're going to like Denmark, Spain, and Austria, and you're doing a residency here in New York. I just want to know what that's like going from not touring as much to globe-trotting.
Stephin: We actually have been touring a great deal ever since it became possible again. We were not touring at all for two years and some of the band had basically no income for two years. We have been touring as much as we possibly could for the last two years. We see it as just–we rehearsed a lot with a new set of music, partly a new set of music, and off we go back on tour. We have been on tour for a few months a year, for two years. And now, again, we're going to be on tour for a few months this year. Although the subject matter has changed, the airports have not.
Shannon: An aspect of 69 Love Songs I really enjoy is the instrumentation and the use of a mix of different analog and low-budget instruments. I was wondering what inspired you to use unconventional instruments and if there's any one of those instruments in particular you feel the most drawn to or find the most interesting.
Stephin: Well, the album before 69 Love Songs had one song that I played on ukulele–and it wasn’t even my ukulele, it was Claudia’s ukulele–and I fell in love with it. So I started using it on lots of 69 Love Songs and it grew and grew. Probably a third of the tracks on 69 Love Songs feature ukulele in some way–even if you can’t hear it as ukulele…which I didn’t realize at the time was going to cause every journalist in Germany to believe that it was an album featuring badly recorded guitar because they have no idea what a ukulele is in Germany. I featured the ukulele in a way that made the record sound different. I didn't really think of that at the time. That wasn't the point. But, I unintentionally prefigured the ukulele revival. I don't know that I had any effect on the ukulele revival, but it was a big part of my life…well, before the release of the sheet music “Metallica for Ukulele,” which happened about 12 years ago.
Amélie: Well, yeah, that's another thing too. When I was learning the ukulele. It would go like Riptide and then Magnetic Fields–
Stephin: I think that's great. Thank you for saying that I have not heard that before… When Eddie Vedder put out an album of ukulele songs, the New York Times called me and Amanda Palmer—we were the ukulele experts! We hadn't heard the album yet, but we know what Eddie Vedder sounds like. I realized that he had this twin fetish of ukulele and typewriters, and that there was an equivalence that he was making with obsolete technologies having their own charm. But now the ukulele is not at all an obsolete technology, it's at least as contemporary as guitar, maybe more, because people no longer think of it as sounding like the 1930s, which it did 25 years ago when I put it all over 69 Love Songs.
Amélie: 69 Love Songs, is a collection of love songs, and then Fifty Song Memoir, your memoir, and then Quickies is all short. Does having these concepts help you write, or is it just something that kind of comes naturally?
Stephin: I think it works both ways. I have certain songs sitting around. I notice that they have something in common that suggests maybe that it would be a good idea to write more in that type or in that vein. In between those records, we also did Distortion and Realism and those don't have lyrical themes, they have production themes. Realism is instruments that you would find on a folk album but with no amplification. The rule was you couldn’t turn on an amp for the two months while recording the album. On Distortion, everything went through an amplifier except the vocals and the drums because we were using the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psycho Candy album as a template– which in my opinion is the last time anything major happened in music production. So, even when I don't have a lyrical theme, I like to have a central conceit of an album. That said, a perceptive Swedish journalist informed me when he was interviewing me about Realism, that it was a concept album about solitude and I absolutely had not thought of that. All of the songs are about Solitude. I mean, clearly that's what I was going through on some level. But not really. I had a boyfriend at the time. I was in the middle of moving to L.A. It was a strange time to have released a concept album about solitude. The moral of this is that, whatever I do, it's a concept album, even if I don't intend it to be. And I think that would be true of most artists. If you listen to Roxy Music, they sound like Roxy Music for their entire career. What that sounds like begins very clunky and ends up so elegant that on Avalon, it can't be improved on, so they had to break up. It's like they reduced themselves to the essence of what they were getting at, and that was the end of the manifesto.
Shannon: I was watching your documentary the other day and there was a quote that you had that I really loved: “not being in the film world is sort of like being mute or not involved in the conversation.” How does cinema influence your writing and the music you make, and are there any films in particular that have influenced you?
Stephin: I would say that the album Charm of the Highway Strip is essentially one long response to Carnival of Souls. I don't usually have an entire album having to do with one movie, but Carnival of Souls was so massively inspiring to me at that time that I could just churn out responses to it. And I didn't think of it as that at all. But once I listened back to it and I realized what I had done with the album cover… I guess I thought I was writing more about roadside America and J. B. Jackson and John Stilgoe and the built environment, which is what I had been studying at that point, when in fact I was writing about Carnival of Souls. The weird thing about Carnival of the Souls for me is that when I first saw it, I thought it was the stupidest thing. I thought it was a low-budget movie that had no art to it at all and was depressing and bleak and pointless and had nothing to say. Then I lived a little more and I realized that it's a profound statement on the nature of human existence. It went completely over my head when I first saw it at the age of 16. I don't know that any movie has ever had that much effect on my life compared to Carnival of Souls. But there's a lot of movies that I've seen a lot more. I was a Rocky Horror person in the 80s and late 70s. I went to Rocky Horror every Friday night like everyone did. But I don't know that that directly influenced my life in a long term way. There's some songs in it that aren't especially great songs…but there's plenty of songs in it that are actually really funny and really engaging and very unique. Where else are you going to find Sweet Transvestite? And I can still do the time warp…
Shannon: The whole dance, everything?
Stephin: It's just a jump to the left!
Amélie: I know you probably get a lot of questions about the Book of Love, but I still find its legacy pretty fascinating. A show called One Day recently used it over the end credits.
Stephin: Like, a TV Show?
Amélie: Yeah, on Netflix. It was number one on the website for a while. What is it like having this popular song that’s still relatively unknown, I guess, to specifically Generation Z. We're still kind of discovering the hits of yesteryear…
Stephin: For me, The Book of Love is the very definition of a slow burner. No one considered it making a single. It's never been a single in the U.S. Peter Gabriel covered it. And from that, it got movie placements, notably in a JLo movie. Thank you, JLo, for my house. No, really…When my father, who is a singer-songwriter, was very young, he wrote a musical called Soon which was up for, I believe, two days before it closed. It was a rock musical about how horrible the music industry is. You can imagine that the music industry was not interested in supporting it. The cast of Soon included Vicki Sue Robinson and also Richard Gere. Richard Gere was singing and dancing in my father's musical for the rehearsals plus the two days of performances. So there's Richard Gere in my father's musical. And, 50 years later, there's Richard Gere dancing with JLo to The Book of Love in a big major motion picture. So, both I and my father have written songs to which Richard Gere danced in public. That's part of the Book of Love backstory that I don't usually tell. I could write a book about the Book of Love, in fact.
Amélie: It probably wouldn't be long and boring!
Stephin: It would definitely be long and boring! At least, to me. I've played it at weddings and I've played it at one funeral and I will never do that again. It was the funeral of a friend, it was a very bad idea, but they asked me to do it. I didn't realize how bad an idea it was, so I didn't refuse. But now I would refuse. I couldn't get through it without crying, so I was really trying to hit the notes but not always succeeding. The friend in question was Maggie Estep, who was my downstairs neighbor in the East Village when I was recording 69 Love Songs. She was de facto the first listener to 69 Love Songs, I guess including The Book of Love…
Amélie: One of your other projects was the soundtrack for the movie Pieces of April. I was wondering, A: Is that something you think you'll do again? B: How was going about that different from what you normally make?
Stephin: I like doing soundtracks. I've done a few since then, actually. I like constraints. I like working with structures where I can just sort of describe the structure and that's halfway to writing the music. I like writing for other people who are telling me what to do on some level. I haven't made any soundtrack music for a few years. But actually, I did make a 10 minute tone poem during COVID lockdown, which was essentially a soundtrack because it describes a walk around Washington Square Park at night. It’s so similar to making a soundtrack that I can easily imagine someone just doing an animated movie in which someone is walking around Washington Square and the things that happen in the music are happening to them on screen. I think that that might be a thing that I would like to do again– make the score before the image happens. There's definitely no money in it, but I do a lot of things that there's no money in.
Shannon: Do you ever see yourself being on sort of the other side and being the filmmaker or making a movie?
Stephin: I went to film school. So for years, I thought that I was gonna make that my life. But, I don't think that's where my talents lie. I don't think I think in terms of visual movement. I certainly think in terms of movement, but it's conceptual and it's sonic. I just think my brain doesn't work that way, in a way that would prevent me from being a talented filmmaker. I also wish that I had realized that a little earlier rather than majoring in it in college. I'm still very much a cinephile. I went to a big chunk of the Japanese Horror Festival at Film Forum earlier this month. I like to consume movies at festivals. I think for me it's a good way of learning—comparing movies to each other that are alike in some ways and unalike in others. At a Japanese horror festival, the horror is usually not something that we would call horror now in the U.S. or Hollywood. We would call it ‘psychological thrillers’ or ‘supernatural thrillers.’ There's zero jump scares. You know, it's not something that you would play in a 42nd Street theater in Times Square at midnight and have people screaming. They're slow and moody and dark and disturbing. It's great! I love it. I'm pretty slow and moody and dark and disturbing myself, so I fit right in.
Shannon: Did you have a favorite of any of the films you saw at the Japanese Horror Festival?
Stephin: Oh, for me the great revelation was The Face of Another, which is about burn victims and people who have no face. A guy has been in an industrial accident at his factory and a plastic surgeon makes him a new face that he can put on and take off. They have a series of monologues, philosophical monologues—take that, Hollywood—about anonymity and what it would do to society if people could just change their faces all the time. What they end up describing, I thought, while I was watching the movie, was the internet. Where anonymity allows people to get away with anything they want and there are prices to pay for it, and the power that people get is usually limited to a particular site or something. But because people are anonymous, they behave very differently from how they would if they were in an ordinary, recognizable situation. They behave as though there were no consequences for their actions. They also lose sincerity because they don't have any reputational tie to being trustworthy. So why mean what you say if it doesn't matter?
