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Poor Girl's Blues
By Adam D. Miller

While Jolie Holland is a name not many will recognize yet, it’s one that has found an audience all over the world.  The 29 year old singer/songwriter, originally from Houston, Texas, hadn’t left her native North America before 2003, but as of press time is in the midst of her fifth European tour this year, and will go on to close off the year with her first tour of Australia and New Zealand.  All this on top of just two albums, one of which hadn’t even been intended for proper release.

When the buzz about Jolie Holland caught up with me in the spring of 2004, it was leading up to her studio debut on Anti-, Escondida.  Holland’s name had already appeared in the music news with the proper release of her homemade recording Catalpa, which gained attention from musicians, the press, and music listeners all over the world.  After hearing “Old Fashioned Morphine” off of Escondida on the Internet, I took a trip to a reliable Toronto record shop to seek out the album.  My excitement caught up with me as I realized I hadn’t the faintest clue where in the store to look.  Sure, “Old Fashioned Morphine” hinted at folk-blues with a New Orleans-style horn section, but was this a rock artist?  A country artist?  A folk artist?  I was ultimately directed to the Folk section, which is where I found and purchased Escondida.  Like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, or Tom Waits, genre is entirely artificial when it comes to Holland’s music.  One cannot simply label her as a ‘Rock’ artist, even if that is where – although apparently said shop disagrees - you are supposed to find her music.  After all, as Holland told me, “Everything’s in the rock section.”

When I first started Being There in mid-July, I read that Jolie Holland was planning a Toronto date in the fall at a small venue called The Drake Hotel, which was incidentally the basement of a trendy west-end hotel.  I really hoped to have the opportunity to interview this fascinating figure that had found a place in the new music scene.  About a day before Holland’s show, I was told that I would have the opportunity to have some time with Holland prior to her performance.  I put down on paper the many questions I had compiled in my head since first hearing Escondida earlier in the year and geared up for our meeting.

Twenty-four hours later, I was sitting with Jolie Holland on a very comfortable couch in the basement of the Drake Hotel, as her guitarist Brian Miller and drummer Dave Mihaly set up their instruments on the stage she would later dominate in front of a sold out crowd.  Holland was shy and guarded but friendly and down to earth, answering my questions insightfully without diminishing the mystique that makes her music so appealing.

Despite an early exposure to music and being born into a musical family, Jolie Holland feels her childhood has little to do with her music today.  “I just feel the need to completely extricate my influences from my youth, cause they don’t have anything to do with each other.  I listened to, like, German shit when I was a kid.”

Taking up piano at a young age, Holland also played viola and violin in high school.  While the music she plays is no longer classical in nature, Holland continues to incorporate piano and violin into her music, even if her instrument of choice is the guitar.  “I think the violin led me into it.  I played in a lot of rock bands when I was a kid, with the violin.”

Soon after high school, Holland began to travel.  She settled in several major American cities, most notably Austin, New Orleans, and San Francisco.  How much did these places influence her music?  “I would say not very much, because it’s really rare that you find music that comes from a place that’s still in that place.  You know, I’ve never really spent any real time in Appalachia, but I know some of those songs came from England anyway.”

Eventually, Holland ended up in Vancouver, Canada, where she co-founded the Be Good Tanyas.  I asked her how someone from Texas ends up in western Canada.  “I was living in San Francisco, and my girlfriend was teaching self-defense with her Aikido group.  I just went up with her to Washington and ended up meeting all these puppeteers up there.  I had some money saved and didn’t have a job, so it was just time to bounce around.  And they said ‘Well, you can stay with us if you come up.’ I was really close, so I just took the forty-five minute ride up to Canada.”

Her time with the Tanyas was brief.  Soon after contributing to the first Be Good Tanyas album, Blue Horse, Holland left the group and returned to San Francisco, where she continues to live. 

Holland discovered the music that inspires her today like most of us: through friends and the people she surrounded herself with growing up.  “I was just always hanging out with really eclectic people.  I was always in orchestras, and the kids would listen to classical music but at the same time, you know, rock and everything else.  And I was just hanging out with this pretty diverse cool crowd of kids, and they were a little bit older than me.  My first boyfriend was really into Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, but also like… punk rock.  And um, yeah, so we’d go to punk rock shows, but he’d listen to Leadbelly.”

That kind of mentality remains clear throughout my conversation with Holland.  The subject of genre consistently comes up in the conversation, and she attempts to dispel the theory many critics have that her two albums are representative of her whole musical aura.  Holland told me, “I was reading some article where someone was saying, you know, on this record she sounded really folky, and on this record she sounded really jazzy, but whatever, it’s one song.  And they’re rude about it. ‘Well, on the next record we’ll figure out what she really sounds like.” 

Jolie Holland recorded her first solo album, Catalpa, in a very do-it-yourself fashion.  The album consists primarily of original material that draws from American roots music but managed to not sound derivative.  It also includes a cover of “Black Hand Blues” by 1920s blueswoman Hattie Hudson.  One of the most fascinating highlights of the album is “The Littlest Birds,” on which Holland gives co-songwriting credits to Be Good Tanya Samantha Parton and Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett.  The song was not co-written with Barrett, but builds upon elements of his song “Jugband Blues.”  Most of Holland’s clear influences seem to be rooted in early American music, so how does the British psychedelic legend fit in?  Holland told me, “Well, good music is good music, you know?  Cause I feel like Syd Barrett taught me how to play guitar.  Syd Barrett and Mississippi John Hurt taught me a lot about guitar.”

And yet, despite the album’s brilliance and gradual success, Jolie Holland never really had any high expectations regarding Catalpa.  As early as 2001, it was being sold at shows and off the Internet.  As the buzz surrounding it increased, so did Holland’s aspirations.  “I quit waitressing to sell it for a whole year.  It supported me for a whole year.”  Did she ever push for a proper release?  “Oh, hell no.  It was kind of obvious when it happened.  It was in the Top 10 on two of the biggest independent radio stations in America, one on the West coast and one on the East coast, even before I was signed.” 

In 2003, Tom Waits nominated Catalpa for the Shortlist prize.  The musical legend heard the album while it was being considered by his label, Anti-.  As Holland describes it, “The most normal, boring way possible.”  Whether or not he was responsible for Anti-‘s signing of Jolie Holland is unclear, but he and wife Kathleen Brennan definitely liked what they heard.  She was signed by Anti-, and Catalpa received a proper release in November 2003.

Despite her success prior to the album receiving a proper release, this allowed the album to truly take off around the world.  She reflects, “It got - especially in Europe - it really took off.  You know?  One girl going down to the corner café and seeing which addresses I have to send them off to today is totally different from major press.”  She recalls finding a Russian review:  “My boyfriend reads Russian and he was translating one of my Russian reviews.  The really liked it, they said super cool things about it.  They called me a bard.”

With a label behind her, Jolie Holland recorded a follow-up, Escondida, in 2004.  While retaining much of the earthy qualities of Catalpa, Escondida allowed Holland more room to work with.  How much did having a record label change the planning and ultimately the recording of the album?  “It made about $20,000 difference.  It’s also a totally gut-wrenching experience.  It’s really scary, cause like, you know, I’m not used to throwing around other people’s money.”

Yet despite the budget and environment, the album was still recorded in an intimate, live fashion, with Holland producing the album herself.  “There’s really no overdubbing on there.  It’s pretty much all live, pretty much all first take, there’s one unrehearsed first take on there… an unrehearsed, unplanned first take, which is “Mad Tom,” but it all happened in a nice studio.  It all happened in this place called In The Pocket, which is where Waits recorded Alice and Blood Money.”

As far as material is concerned, Holland told me that there was a lot of overlap on the two albums.  “Actually, Escondida has the oldest and the newest songs on it.  And then Catalpa’s more of a middle period.  Catalpa describes more of a general piece of time… it’s like a two year time frame.”  The Escondida track “Darlin’ Ukulele” was even recorded at the Catalpa sessions.  “So that’s really neat when you listen to the record, cause it does sound really different.  It was recorded in Lemon DeGeorge’s backyard studio.  ‘Wanderin’ Angus’, ‘I Wanna Die’, and ‘Darlin’ Ukulele’ all come from the same session.”

While most of the songs on the album were written since the completion of Catalpa, the album also includes much older songs.  “There’s one song on there from 1995 (‘Poor Girl Blues’).  I started writing ‘Sascha’ in ’98 and finished it in 2001.  The intro to ‘Lil’ Missy’ is called ‘Tiny Idyll’, and I wrote that when I was six.”

Jolie Holland told me that the key was to make everything sound natural.  She was excited when I told her that while thousands of songs entitled “Poor Boy Blues” exist, the title “Poor Girl’s Blues” appears nowhere outside of Escondida.  She recognizes the importance of singing from a woman’s perspective.  “You kind of have to imagine your way around it.  I mean it’s obviously something that you’ll never have to do, really, unless you’re trying to do women’s material somehow, but it’s kind of a challenge.  But I’ve always been thinking about it actually.  I mean back when I was a teenager and I was into The Pogues, there’s that song “Let me go boys, let me go boys, let me go down into the mud where the rivers all run dry.”  And I was like, “God, that sounds so cool!”  But it’d be so weird for me to sing that.”

As far as the great musical touches on the album, such as the horn section on “Old Fashioned Morphine” and swing drumming on “Mad Tom Of Bedlam”, both recall very amusing stories.  Holland first reflected on how the horn section on “Old Fashioned Morphine” came about: 

“That was a really beautiful occurrence.  It was really natural.  Actually, the horns made me record the song.  To me, people like it, but I probably would have never performed it at all if it hadn’t been for this one instance, where there was this really great party over at my friend Sean’s house, and it was like four o’clock in the morning, everybody was drunk, and most everybody was gone, and it was like this great big sprawling house on the fourth floor, on the top floor, and you know, there was like… a big wooden marimba set up in the living room, and a drum kit, maybe two drum kits, and it was like the jazz kids party or whatever.  It was so much fun, and Paul Scriver, the saxophonist was there, Ara Anderson was there with trumpet, and Enzo Garcia was there with saw, and he’s also a great banjo player.  And I was just playing the song in the smoking lounge, you know?  And out of nowhere Enzo, Ara, and Paul kind of just showed up and started doing New Orleans style cacophony.  And I was like “Who are you people?  What’s going on?  This is so cool!”  And they made it a song for me.  And it was just a completely natural arrangement.  And then Enzo couldn’t make it, he had the flu.  He couldn’t make it to the recording session, it was just the other boys.”

As for “Mad Tom Of Bedlam"’s almost Gene Krupa-esque drumbeat:

“Actually I was waitressing when I came up with that.  Cause it’s a pretty straight-ahead beat in the English song, but it’s got a very odd measure.  It’s got a measure with an extra beat in it, so it’s not what you’d call a square tune.  And David Mihaly, the drummer, he’s one of the most respected jazz drummers on the west coast, he’s a total freak.  And you’ll see… he’s super-sophisticated, and I dunno, I was waitressing, and it just occurred to me, ‘wow, you could have that kind of beat with that song and it would work.’  I was like singing it in my head, and was like ‘oh yeah!’”

I asked Jolie Holland how “Mad Tom Of Bedlam,” an old British folk song and “Faded Coat Of Blue,” an American song from the civil war era ended up on the album.  “Street kids taught ‘em to me.  These really cool girls taught me ‘Mad Tom Of Bedlam’, and we were at this massive camping event in the woods, this all female camping event in the middle of Arkansas.  It was so fun.  It was like a skills sharing thing.  And then my friend Stefan taught me that (‘Faded Coat Of Blue’).  Stefan used to be in the Dickle Brothers, and they’re like really great, really seriously drunk, totally honest, old time band.  And Stefan plays the banjo and has a group now called The Rank Strangers, and he’s like me, he can hear old songs immediately.  He can hear all the words, even when a lot of people can’t.  And we end up sharing material a lot.”

While Holland appreciates the critical acclaim she receives, she resents the narrow-mindedness of some journalists, who try to pin her down to a specific genre.  “I do so much more than is even on the records.  I mean, I’ve been in classical ensemble groups, and hip hop groups, and I’m in his (Brian Miller’s) band, and he’s got this beautiful pop group called The Speakers, and I’ve played in jazz bands with Dave Mihaly, and I played in my trumpet player’s (Ara Anderson) band, I’ve played in my friends bands, and there’s so much going on.”

Genre is entirely artificial as far as Jolie Holland is concerned.  “It’s just about marketing.  It’s not real.”  She added, “I came out of a punk rock scene and I was used to supposedly surprising people being really into that stuff.  You know Submission Hold?  They’re a Canadian hardcore band.  I played - one of the main guys Andy (Healey) - I played for his birthday.  And I played another birthday party in San Francisco for the biggest goth-metal drummer in town.”

Of course, if goth-metal drummers and hardcore punk bassists dig the whole Americana thing, her public audience must also be mixed.  In the crowd at the show later in the evening, I saw everything from young cowgirls to old bikers.  While the American roots music would typically draw an older crowd, her age and lyrics attract a younger generation of music listeners who are looking for something new.  “There’s still a lot of young people.  I like that about my audience.  There’s a lot of older people and young people.”

As is evident from successful tours abroad, Holland’s music is clearly appealing in other parts of the world.  “People told me in Russia.  They’re like, ‘We don’t know what people think of your music in America, but we love you here!’ So like, I dunno, people like it.”

So why the American roots music?  “Cause it seems to have a lot of pathos to me, and it’s not quite overdone so that’s what attracted me to it.  It seems like a way to say something fresh.”  Fresh indeed.  This woman has a bright future ahead of her.

For more on Jolie Holland, check out Adam D. Miller’s concert review here.

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