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sinceileftyoublog · 2 months ago

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Susanna Interview: The Heart is a Muscle

Photo by Ida Fiskaa

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Susanna Wallumrød dives deep. When I last caught up with her in 2020, she had released Baudelaire & Piano, sung interpretations of poems from Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil over piano arrangements. She told me at the time that the Baudelaire project "will be my main thing for a while," which turned out to be a severe understatement. 2022's Elevation added a couple more collaborators and instruments to the arsenal of Baudelaire adaptations, and last year saw the unveiling of Baudelaire and Orchestra, a collaboration with The Norwegian Radio Orchestra to bring Baudelaire's words to a full-on ensemble. While her fascination with Baudelaire and its subsequent manifestations have ballooned, Wallumrød's been focusing on something more simple, yet infinitely more complex at the same time: love. In August, via her SusannaSonata label, Wallumrød shared Meditations on Love, a project written over five years that concerns anything and everything about how and why we feel deep affection.

Unlike the Baudelaire trilogy or 2019's Hieronymus Bosch-inspired Garden of Earthly Delights, Meditations on Love has no concrete source material, Wallumrød taking inspiration from her own stories and that of family and friends. That said, she still treated her exploration of such a broad-reaching theme with her usual scrutiny, and the songs as growing, shifting entities in need of the right caretakers. She chose to work with someone new, Finnish-Norwegian composer Juhani Silvola, as her co-producer; together in the studio, they augmented Wallumrød's arrangements, ditching her usual minimalism for something more rhythmic, and encouraged the session musicians to add in instrumental flourishes. As a result, various aspects of the songs sound like they're in conversation with one another. On album opener "Everyone Knows", the narrator confronts a cheating lover. They're heartbroken and angry but terrified at the prospect of life without their partner. Harald Lassen's alto sax flutters, Dag Erik Knedal Andersen's hand drums pan, and Wallumrød's vocals descend into wordless melisma, mirroring the narrator's mental back-and-forth. On "Battles", Wallumrød posits that relationships can feel like war. Her vocals, the pulsating percussion, and the horns sound like they're chirping at one another.

The best quality of Meditations on Love is its embrace of the intangible and the surreal. That is, even if Wallumrød's groundwork making the album was intense, her conclusions are unconcerned with traditional logic. Her lyrics delve into dreams, colors, and nature rather than interpersonal drama. On closer, “I Was Never Here”, she's so forlorn that she begins to doubt her own existence and dissociate. "Black Heart", whose pulsating bass tones and sharp and wincing guitars and synths act as an initially unintentional but eventually doubled down homage to Angelo Badalamenti's Twin Peaks theme, explores, "What's hidden in the light / Beyond the blue sky." On "Elephant Song", her ultimate declaration is, "We don't know what will happen in the end," words that are presented alongside swelling strings and percussion, like the grand reveal in an epic film. Wallumrød's meditations are not peaceful. Instead, they're sonic tornadoes that lay bare their inconclusive paths.

Next month, Wallumrød will start to play Meditations live, yet another infinite-seeming puzzle to conquer. She'll be part of a five-piece band, which will include Silvola and Morten Barrikmo, the clarinetist who played on the album, as well as drummer Jan Martin Gismervik and multi-instrumentalist Marthe Lea. (Espen Høydalsvik will provide sound design.) Because Wallumrød--and any artist who doesn't sell out arenas--can't really afford to fully tour such an ambitious project, especially internationally, it's hard to predict how much the Meditations songs will continue to morph as they're performed in front of an audience. She's thankful that the album has physical distribution not only in Norway but throughout Europe and in the U.S., making it easier for folks throughout the world to get physical copies, listen, and perhaps decide what its main, all-encompassing theme means to them.

A couple months ago, I spoke with Wallumrød over Zoom about the construction of Meditations on Love, the relationship between music and imagery, and nature. If you happen to live in Norway, you can catch her a few times next month. The album's record release show is November 2nd in Oslo at Parkteatret Scene. She's performing with just vocals and Silvola on guitar at the Nesodden Jazzklubb in Akershus on November 20th. Finally, the five-piece band returns November 29th at USF Verftet in Bergen. Whether or not you live in Norway, read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

SILY: With the Baudelaire material occupying so much of your time, you knew you wanted to do something different going into your next record. Was there something specific that made you want to focus on the theme of love?

Susanna Wallumrød: Yeah, I guess from the start of the writing, I started to go in that direction, of the matters and condition of the heart. I was curious to see if I could attack the heart from different angles, because I got curious about the ability to love. I feel like it's almost a muscle that needs to be trained.

SILY: Did you cull from personal experience, the experience of friends and family, or from other art when trying to get at matters of the heart and love?

SW: It was a mix of all of that: my own experiences, and devastating things that happened in my family that opened it up some more than what I already knew about. It's been a research project.

SILY: I wouldn't expect anything less from you, the same approach and level of diligence you put into musical interpretations of classic works of art and poetry, you put in for music inspired by a more abstract theme. Did you find that your research-like approach was similar to when you were writing songs based on Baudelaire and Bosch?

SW: I think so! Of course, I had been doing interpretations for a while, but I keep on learning from those different processes. There are a lot of things to bring onto the next project.

SILY: Do you feel like you had to adjust your vocal approach for these songs, that are so much more rhythmic and expansive than what you had done recently?

SW: Yeah, I guess there's some different approaches to that. I made all of these songs on the piano. The next step in the process of the recording of it [was] to see how we could expand the songs with the arrangements and production. The vocal approach [fell] into that. [For some] songs, like "I Took Care of Myself" and "Big Dreams" and "Elephant Song", [it was] quite late in the process when I had already started to play with how they could be presented.

SILY: Are you the only one singing on the record? I know your vocals are layered, so I was wondering if when I was hearing different voices, it was just your voice, pitch-shifted.

SW: Yeah, it's only me.

SILY: It's effective on "Big Dreams" when you sing, "I have big dreams for you." The voice becomes an instrument as much as a communicator of words and ideas.

SW: Absolutely.

SILY: I love that the video for "I Took Care of Myself" takes place in a hockey arena because the organ on that song reminded you of the organ played at hockey games.

SW: When we were in the studio and working on the organ theme, we started to get these images of being at a hockey game. It was super fun to actually be able to realize these images for that song.

SILY: When I read that, and listened to the song again, I thought to myself that it sounded like a more sped up, weirder version of what I might hear at a hockey arena in the U.S.

SW: [laughs] Sure.

SILY: When making "Black Heart", were you trying to make a direct homage to the Twin Peaks theme music?

SW: I wasn't, but it turned into that more and more when we were working on it. It started out quite different. When we had the guitar sound layered out, the ground core of the song, it was easy to move in that direction. [laughs]

SILY: Does that happen to you a lot, where you're subconsciously inspired by something and discover you unintentionally paid tribute to it, so you lean into it and just accept it?

SW: I think so! It's a fun way to work. I like so many things about Twin Peaks, so it was obvious when it happened even though I didn't know it would happen.

SILY: A lot of the instrumentation on this album does sound filmic. At the end of "Elephant Song", when you sing, "We don't know what will happen at the end," the swell of strings and percussion is very orchestral. Do you ever look at your music as something that inspired images?

SW: I think it does. I think of my music in images a lot of the time. This time, Juhani Silvola, the producer, talked a lot about using a lot of different instruments and to "paint" different sound worlds and soundscapes and universes for the songs. You can compare that to short movies.

SILY: You do have a lot of lines on the album referring to colors: "blue heart, blue night" on "Black Heart", and on "Where Has the Love Gone", lines about how when you're in nature, the colors of various elements, like trees, give you certain feelings. Do you feel like you experience your life in colors every day?

SW: It's getting more and more the way I experience things. I have a special focus on that for this album. The lyrics or the meditative themes on this album are linked to nature. I've had really good experiences of being outside in the forest.

SILY: Do you tend to spend a lot of time in the forest in Norway?

SW: I try to when I have time. It started during the pandemic, when we were stuck in the city center of Oslo and everything shut down, it was really sad and boring. [laughs] We got all this hiking equipment so we could go outside. My husband and I started during the pandemic, which was a huge help during that period. When I don't travel that much or I have the time, for sure, I'm a lot more outside.

SILY: Do you see a lot of wildlife?

SW: A little bit. The forest is quite a big part of the Oslo area. It doesn't take that long to get out there. So, lots of birds, some snakes, elk. The big scary animals don't live here. [laughs]

SILY: Can you tell me about the album art?

SW: The main cover is an illustration by an artist called Ingrid Torvund. I came across her not that long ago when I was working on these songs and the album. I really like her pictures, illustrations, sculptures, and video art. She makes films from the forest with weird animals and creatures, with sci-fi vibes to it. They are really gorgeous. I thought I could use some of her stuff, and I had been working with other artists before, and some are really reluctant to make something new on commission. I was thinking I could use some of her already existing work if she didn't want to make something for the album. I just asked her, and we hadn't really figured out exactly how to do it, but she had made the main cover illustration, and sent it to me, and I really loved it. I found it so fitting and soothing for the album and songs. It felt like a really good match.

SILY: Have you played these songs live?

SW: I haven't! We just started to rehearse with a couple of musicians, and we're being joined by a couple more in a month. We'll be a five-piece band to try to do this live. It will be fun, but it's a process to find out what elements we want to keep for the live editions. I really don't want to do tricks. I really want it to be played, so we have to find out how to work the chorus of songs and sounds.

SILY: What else is next for you?

SW: The Baudelaire orchestra project has become massive. I made a full orchestra concert last year, and then we altered those arrangements for a smaller soloist ensemble, with one person per instrument with really good musicians. That project, the Baudelaire trilogy, and the orchestra, has been so massive alongside this Meditations album.

I haven't really recorded anything [new], which feels a bit weird, actually. I usually have a lot of things going on at the same time, but now, I'm more in the writing process for a couple of other projects. I'm making some music in relation to Hildegard of Bingen, an 11th century nun who made Gregorian music and wrote several books about ecological gardening, the mystics and religion, and also early feminist thoughts. That's super interesting to explore.

SILY: Even if it feels weird to not be recording, does it feel good to be in the early thought process, creation, and writing phase?

SW: Yeah, I love that. I have several writing projects. I'm looking forward to keeping on working with that.

SILY: Is there anything you've been listening to, watching, or reading that's caught your attention or inspired you?

SW: I stumble across things all the time. There are a lot of things going on in the Norwegian music scene these days, a lot of young people doing really interesting hybrid genre projects. I was recently in Gothenburg and saw Anna von Hausswolff. She just played at the Opera House there with some dancers from a Dutch company. It was really interesting to see.

SILY: Are you planning on coming to the States?

SW: You never know. [laughs] I have been trying or planning to several times, but things have certainly gotten so much more difficult, travelling and playing. I was hoping to come next year, but we'll see if it's possible to realize.

SILY: I know you've played Big Ears in Knoxville before. Is that usually the catalyst, where a festival invites you over and then you book a tour around it?

SW: Yeah, absolutely. It makes more sense. That is exactly what we need. [laughs]

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