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‘drop it like it’s hot’.
With ‘drop’ meaning ‘buy’, ‘like’ meaning ‘while’ and ‘hot’ meaning ‘on sale’.
I’ve been listening to lots of Shilpa Ray this past week. I bet she’s killer live. Jeff Lewis drew this:
Win.
I sold out of the last 30 maps I did so I made another batch on Tuesday. Get your orders in. They look like this:
They are size A2 and £5. BUY BUY BUY. If you want one send me an email. My email is this: anikainlondon@gmail.com. Yesir.
What a lovely evening. The rain and cold was doing its best to make me not want to go out. But, it was worth it! This show was at The Luminaire to celebrate the launch of the self titled album by Broadcast 2000.
I have so many good things to say about Joe Steer, the man behind Broadcast 2000. He’s been nothing but supportive of all the weird little drawings and things I do. He was even wearing an Allotment t-shirt that night. It was an honor to be asked to draw the lyrics booklet for the album. It was the first time I saw it in print when I picked up a copy that night. It’s on SHINY PAPER! I feel like I’ve moved up in the world. It was so wonderful to see and made me all warm and fuzzy inside. Here is a photo of it:
Pretty exciting! Buy a copy! Amazon have them.
I was on merch duties selling CDs by all the bands and I brought along some copies of my map of the world (I sold 5! YEAH MAN!). Joe is a bit of a wonder. I’ve never got so many plugs from the stage for doing merch. He introduced each band and told everyone to come say hello to me in the merch hatch. People did, one person asked if there was an ‘in joke’ because they didn’t think that I really existed and another person called me ‘mystical Anika’. I like that. MYSTICAL! It was pretty sweet and funny and really great to sell the band’s CDs. I did fistpumps whenever we sold stuff.
Because I was in the hatch I could only watch the bands on the telly. But I could hear great, the soundman did a great job. I love Luminaire. It’s such a lovely place to hang out. There was a really lovely atmosphere and the show was completely sold out.
Stars of Sunday League played first. It was nice to see Euan and Sarah again, they are both super lovely. Their music is here. Dry the River were next. Of all the bands playing they were the ones I knew least well. I had seen all the other acts several times but this was just the second time I saw them. The singer has a nice voice and they really went down a treat with the crowd. Their music is here. Then Alessi’s Ark was next. I used to see her play all the time but I haven’t seen her in nearly like three months or so. So that was nice. Her music is here.
Then it was Broadcast 2000. They are brilliant. They had a string section in tow and it sounded magnificent. I love some string section fun. The atmosphere really was wonderful and it was a great set from Joe and his brilliant band. The percussion/glockenspiel parts are fantastic.
It was a lovely evening and I can’t say enough good things about Joe. Listen to his music here.
So happy for my blog to return to Wildbirds-centricity. I love them loads. Here is what they say:
CHOIR TOUR IN MAY!!
Hiiii you!!
Were so happy to announce a tour we will do in May!
Its called Wildbirds & Peacedrums with Voices and we will tour with a choir!
We have just been to Iceland for a week and recorded two new EPs,
five songs with a choir and five with steeldrum, and the tour is to present this new material for you. WERE SO EXCITED! This is us, but with a somewhat new direction. We love our new material. We feel strong. And very proud. Hope you will like it too. The shows will be really really special, with special stagesetting, light, sound and offcourse atmosphere and ten new songs, so dont miss it.
And the first EP will come out in time for the tour on limited 12″ vinyl only.
(Below is the official pressrelease for you who would like to read that as well.)
take care for now!!
_:,-.;:_love:;-.;_:,
m and a
Hildur Guðnadóttir does choral arrangements! YES! That lady is great. I saw her supporting Fever Ray and she was brilliant.
Yeah man. Wildbirds & Peacedrums were the original dominators of my blog, when something like 8/10 posts would be about them. Why? Because they are INCREDIBLE. WOOOOO YEAH. I saw them 9 times last year and I love them so much.
LOST WITHOUT YOUR RHYTHHHHHHM! YES!
Oh yeah this is the date: May 15th at Bishopsgate Institute
Wildbirds have saved an otherwise rubbish day. They’ve brought me so much joy ever since I first saw them. In fact, it’s the one year anniversary of when I first heard them play My Heart live, next week. March 1st. That can be Wildbirds & Peacedrums day. Hurrah!
I can’t remember if I blogged about this or not. I’ve been hooked on this song for the past week. Look, you can download it for free from Last.fm, how nice:
Parenthetical Girls- Evelyn McHale
It’s an amazing song. Parenthetical Girls are always so wonderfully dark. Incase you don’t know, Evelyn McHale was this lady:
She jumped from the Empire State Building in 1947 and fell onto that car, and photographer Robert Wiles took that eerie but strangely beautiful and unsettling photograph right after. It’s super sad. She looks so serene and peaceful. Pretty creepy. She was 23 and wrote a note (and then crossed it out), which read ‘…I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody’.
Anyway, I love the song. I love Parenthetical Girls. The song is from Privilege, Pt. I, an EP worth picking up. I love that Zac references ’safe as houses’ in the song. The song reminds me alot of The Weight She Fell Under, my favourite song from Safe As Houses. Love Parenthetical Girls lots.
Holly is BACK! Ready to make you swoon.
April 28th at Westminster Reference Library
Yip! Jump! Hurrah! She is probably my tied favourite live act I’ve seen all year; she completely wow’ed me at the Barfly, and The Magician’s Private Library is an incredible album and I love it lots and lots. Listen here.
Man, this Joanna Newsom song really is lovely. In last week’s fun frenzy practically everyone in London who likes music tried to snap up a seat at Royal Festival Hall for her first show here supporting her new record Have One On Me. I have a pretty good seat on the 11th.
You can pre-order her new record from Drag City for just $25. Pretty reasonable for a triple LP. Also, you should just hit up the drag city site anyway because I love its design.
Have a listen to ‘81 here. Joanna Newsom is so ridiculously talented. What a beautiful song. Have One On Me is going to dominate alot of year end lists….
Photograph by Annabel Mehran.
Interview originally published on The Line of Best Fit. The one posted there is not the full thing (I guess the full version is a wee bit long) and it’s all edited and chopped up. Here is the full, unedited interview, where we talk about comics, The Antlers, New York, Scary Mansion, collaboration and lots more.
Interview: Holly Miranda
I met Holly on a sunny Saturday in Camden before her set at the Barfly. We took a walk up to the Roundhouse and had a chat over a drink. She was a pleasure to talk to and thoroughly lovely. I can’t recommend her music enough, listen here.
I really really love your album.
H: Thank you.
Absolutely brilliant! I love it.
H: Thank you!
Did it turn out how you wanted it to sound?
H: Yeah. Well, I didn’t have that much of an idea of how I wanted it to sound really, Y’know, kind if just…. going along. But I love it.
Who did you work with making the album?
H: Dave Sitek, from TV on The Radio produced it.
How did you end up working with him?
H: He’s been an old friend of mine for a long time. It was just something that we talked about, trying to get our schedules to overlap so we both, y’know… had a month off together. Then we ended up working from like December 19th to January 19th, not this year, but… over Christmas. When no one was doing anything.
Do you have a favourite track on the album?
H: Errrm, I think it changes alot. Right now I think my favourite might be ‘Sweet Dreams’ because we haven’t really been playing it live (laughs).
Do you enjoy playing songs live? Do you change them around a bit?
H: Yeah, we change it alot. We just did a show in New York where we had a seven piece band. At one point we had thirteen people on stage, that’s not something I can do on a tour. I can’t bring that many people, I can’t afford to bring that many people out. So now we’re touring as a four piece. Y’know, we kind of lose horns and strings but then you kind of try to make it up, everyone’s playing and singing and doing as much as they can at one time.
Do you enjoy touring?
H: Yeah, I mean… ‘enjoy’. I do like it, it’s really fucking hard. It’s definately not a vacation, but it can be fun.
You went on that giant tour with The Antlers?
H: Yeah, we did an East Coast thing. We’re talking about coming back to Europe together too. We want to tour together again, we’re like ‘what haven’t we done?’…
I’d LOVE to see you tour together. One of my favourite bits on their album is the bits that Sharon Van Etten sings, would you ever do the bits she does, live?
H: Yeah.
Have you done that?
H: Mmhmm.
I would actually…
H: [starts singing The Antlers' song 'Thirteen' (I do a big swoon)]
I would DIE to hear you do those bits.
H: (laughs).
I think that album is just so incredible. But…. that’s The Antlers.
H: (laughs)
How did you end up signing with XL?
H: I don’t really know. I was in negotiations with a couple of different labels, and it was taking really fucking long. It was getting really draining, and then XL came out of nowhere. I mean, Sitek, y’know, TV on the Radio is on Beggars, and I have alot of friends with Beggars. But I didn’t really know XL, except for like Elvis Perkins. But they kind of swooped in with the perfect equation and it just made sense.
Had you been to London before you came last year? Because you played that show at the Boogaloo club.
H: Yeah, I did something at Boogaloo in May, then I was back here on the 4th of July for an XL showcase. And then, I toured with the XX and played a show at The Social, just me and Timmy. So this is my 4th time to London, but no, I hadn’t been here before.
How do you like London?
H: I like it alot.
How does it compare to New York?
H: I mean, I haven’t had a ton of time to really explore the city on my own. I have friends here that take me around, to the whatever….
Would you ever consider living in another city besides New York?
H: Yeah. I think about it all the time. I mean, I’ve been in NY for 12 years now. But I’m kind of ready for a change, but I don’t know where. It’s hard, it’s hard to live somewhere else after being in NY for so long. But definately it would have to be a city. But I like the ocean alot.
Where did you live before you lived in NY?
H: Detroit. And I was in Nashville. I grew up between Detroit and Nashville. I moved to New York when I was 16.
Why did you move to NY?
H: My old sister lived there at the time. And I’d gone to visit her over the summer when I was 15, going on 16. I played an open mic night at this bar in the East Village. I just knew that it was what I wanted to do…
Do you have any favourite New York bands… besides The Antlers?
H: (laughs)
I’m a really giant fan of alot of Brooklyn bands. I love Scary Mansion, She Keeps Bees…
H: I don’t know them…. TV on the Radio. Y’know, my friends’ bands. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Grizzly Bear, Scott Matthew, Kevin Devine, Abandoned Lighthouse… Pink Noise.
I’m actually a Scott Matthew fan as well. That’s how I came across some of your music… like a year ago, I saw your cover of Between The Bars together.
H: I toured in Europe with Scotty. We didn’t go to London, but Germany….
I saw him play when he came here. Have you been asked to sing on many albums, besides your own?
H: I sing on Scott’s. Both of his albums actually. Yeah. I can’t remember right now though… Kevin Devine. A band called Murder Baby. Like a stoner death metal band, I did some screeching. I don’t know, I used to sing on alot of records all the time, but maybe I haven’t been in one place for very long. So I haven’t done stuff recently, I’m having a hard time remembering what I did. I sing back up for alot of people, like Dirty on Purpose, TV on the Radio, live.
If you could sing with anyone, who would it be?
H: Leonard Cohen
Really? I want to see him.
H: I saw him at Coachella last year.
How was it?
H: Unbelievable! I cried the entire time. Like a life changing experience.
So, you’ve been getting alot of, very well deserved, attention lately. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve had happen to you since all this started?
H: What started it all, what’s the weirdest thing to me, was the Kanye blog. I don’t know him, and I don’t really knew his music. A friend of mine wrote me and was like ‘How’d you do it?!’ and I hadn’t even seen it yet, I was like ‘What are you talking about? Did you meet him?’ and he was like angry at me that I hadn’t told him, this huge Kanye fan. I was like ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about’, he’s like ‘you’re on Kanye’s blog. This is gonna be huge’. I was like ‘Ok. That’s weird’. Since then, every interview is like ‘how’d you meet Kanye?’.
Have you met him since?
H: No. He was at a TV on the Radio show I went to, but Dave was like, ‘Nah, I don’t think you want to meet him’. He didn’t want to introduce me, it was like, alright, whatever. I don’t really care…
I really like your Black Cab Session. How was that?
H: That was really really fun.
Would you like to do more stuff like that?
H: Yeah! We’ve done quite a bit. We just did something for Fader TV, we did a take away show with Vincent Moon. Something with a San Francisco blog, called Yours Truly. We’re doing some stuff while we’re here, some stuff in Paris… Canal Plus in Paris. With a full band. Trying to do stuff with a full band now, cos we’ve done alot of the duo/solo, y’know.
Do you get nervous before you play?
H: Erm… the only reason I get nervous before I play is if I’m not feeling great, y’know what I mean? If I’m feeling sick and I’m like ‘ohhh, I’m not gonna be able to sing’. But, I don’t really get nervous anymore. I don’t know… no (laughs). I did. I used to get horrible… when I started in New York, I used to get horrible stage fright. Like if I broke a sting, I was just like ‘ahhhhhhhhh’ (laughs), what’ do you do? Y’know.
How did the crowd react to that?
H: I don’t know… I mean, it’s always different. I’ve played some really really really bad shows. But I think you have to do that if you’re gonna be a performer. I’ve been talked over, played to like two people in a room in… Boston. Yeah….
I really like the ‘Forest Green’ 7″. I like the artwork on it, I think it’s really beautiful… who did that?
H: This artist, a really good friend of mine in New York, David Hochbaum. Who I actually stole this tattoo from, he has a little tiny black heart (shows a tattoo on her neck of a black heart). He’s one of my really good friends, and I stared at his little black heart forever… his is much smaller. I was like ‘can I steal that?’, so I stole it. And now whenever he comes to my shows he’s really self conscious about people thinking that he took it from me. And we’ve actually been talking about getting little temporary tattoos to give out at shows (laughs)… which I’m sure he would love. But he’s actually doing the artwork on the record too. He and I worked on a painting. You should look at his website, it’s davidhochbaum.com. He does like, alot of stuff, he did a series for a while… he takes photographs of girls, mostly topless or naked (I wasn’t), and he puts the photograph onto the canvas, he transfers it onto the canvas, and he paints a really magical, y’know, sometimes the girls are riding dolphins or, crazy oceans, y’know. Just really trippy. So, he took a photograph of me holding this cathedral he built, and I’m wearing this long dress, it’s really stoic, and we put it into a canvas. And he painted me in this gold leaf forrest where I’m taller than all the trees. So that’s originally what I thought might be the cover of the record, but I instead made it so that there’ll be a fold out poster of the artwork. And we also used his other artwork for the cover.
Do you do much of your own painting and stuff like that?
H: Yeah. I draw. I’m working on a graphic novel…
Oh! Really?
H: Yeah.
I love that stuff!
H: Me too. I’m obsessed with Jeffrey Brown… and I found this new one recently called ‘Three Storey Man’, have you read that one?
No…
H: I can’t remember who wrote it but it’s about this guy that grows to be three storeys tall. And it’s told in a few different chapters, it’s told from the viewpoint of his mother, his wife and his daughter. It’s like 3 different stories. It’s really really sad… but it’s really beautiful. So check it out.
The sad things always the most beautiful.
H: Y’know. I can’t really get into the super heroes, that’s why I love the real life stories.
My favourite is Leah Hayes, who’s the singer from Scary Mansion…
H: Leah Hayes? Oh I know her…
Yeah. I’m a massive fan…
H: Oh cool. I don’t know Scary Mansion. I just know her through Kyp Malone, I actually only know her artwork….
Her music is amazing.
H: Yeah?
I love it. I promote shows as well… she’s playing at our next show. I’m so excited.
H: That’s awesome!
I’m such a giant fan, that I went to Paris to see them because they didn’t play in London. I love her artwork too, her stories are so sad… if you’ve read her book….
H: Yeah, I did. Actually, that’s weird! Somehow I knew her name and then I was hanging out with Kyp Malone and he gave me a flyer for a show that she had coming up, and I couldn’t make it. But I went to the Brooklyn public library a few weeks later and ended up checking out one of her books, but I didn’t realise it was her until I got home. I was looking at the ‘thank yous’ and it said ‘Kyp Malone’ and I was like, wait, Leah Hayes… I like, put everything together. And then I went on her website, and was looking through quickly… but yeah, I’ll have to check out Scary Mansion. It’s strange when, y’know, the stars align and you’re meant to know about somebody, you do. Whether you’re pro-active or not.
Do you read your own reviews or do you stay away?
H: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of inevitable. You just learn to not… to not let it affect what I do after that (laughs). Y’know what I mean? Cos…
Yeah, it’s just somebody’s opinion.
H: Yeah. And alot of people just have shit in their ears. (laughs). People just want to compare you to anyone… that has a vagina. Basically. Like, I’ve been compared from everything from, Joni Mitchell, to Juliana Hatfield. Y’know. I get the Feist and Cat Power thing all the time…. that’s the part of the reviews thing, like, somebody refereed to me as ‘the Ellie Goulding from Williamsburg’
That makes NO sense to me.
H: No! I’m just like, y’know what, it’s laughable. You just have to laugh at it now.
There’s so much of that just cos they’re girls, just being compared…
H: Always. C’mon… it’s like ‘I don’t need another…. chick’, how many rock reviews all look identical? Y’know…
Have you got many new songs ready?
H: I do, I have quite a few new songs. I haven’t had alot of time to teach them to the band, or to figure out full band arrangements. We’ve worked about 2 into our set, I don’t know if we’ll play them today. But I’m trying to find the time right now, to work out and stuff. I just kind of got a little portable… I actually plan on doing that today, I’m just gonna go back to the hotel, work on a little XX cover. I got a little portable studio, like the M-Box minis, have you seen those?
No.
H: You can plug a microphone into a computer… yeah, I love recording.
What instruments do you play besides guitar?
H: Piano, piano was my first instrument. The guitar. I can play some trumpet… y’know, anything piano related.
I literally just remembered, when I first found your music, I found… I’ve forgotten the name. There used to be that video website, that recorded stuff in Amsterdam….
H: Mhhmm.
I’ve forgotten what it’s called.
H: Yeah… it closed down.
Yeah, that’s the one.
H: That’s from the tour with Scott Matthew.
You played ‘Hallelujah’…
H: No, I played…
Well, that’s what it was labelled as…
H: Yeah, it’s not THE ‘Hallelujah’…
No, no, your own original song.
H: Yeah, yeah!
Your voice is absolutely incredible on that song.
H: Oh, thank you!
Absolutely amazing. Your voice just blew me away, that’s one of the first things of yours that I heard.
H: I forgot about that song.
I love it. It’s amazing.
H: I should try to record that (laughs). Maybe I’ll try to record it, and then I’ll send it to you. And you could post it with this…
That would be amazing. Special. That’s it! What are your plans for the coming year?
H: Lots of touring I hope. Maybe a new record at the end.
That’s all my questions. Thank you so much!
H: No, thank you!