Kris Delmhorst on folky New Wave covers and coming back to songwriting with a whole new perspective
Kris Delmhorst has the best of two worlds. Born and raised in Brooklyn, she’s a bona fide city girl, but she also has a nature-loving side. When we talk on the phone, she’s busy putting in a “pretty extensive” garden in Western Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband, singer-songwriter Jeffrey Foucault, and their 6-year-old daughter.
“In a way,” she says, “this is a perfect existence because I get to have both. We tour and we go soak up all of our favorite cities, then we come back here. It’s a really restful place to come back to.”
In a way, she’s brought the same mix of rootsy earnestness and urban cool to her music. A favorite of folk fans, Delmhorst raised a few eyebrows among purists with her 2011 album Cars, a tribute to the music of the slick New Wave band of the same name. For Delmhorst, making the album was a chance to “inhabit the joy of just playing,” and take a peek at the inner workings of the Cars songs she has known and loved for decades.
“They’re built like these amazing, intricate machines,” she says, “with all these interlocking parts and so many memorable riffs packaged into each song. I’ve always been fascinated by the construction of those songs.”
Delmhorst also wanted to see what the songs sounded like stripped down and played with acoustic instruments.
“They were so rooted in their moment, production-wise,” she says. “I wanted to hear those songs wearing different clothes—less ’80s outfits.”
On her latest album, Blood Test, which is her first of original material since 2008’s Shotgun Singer, Delmhorst took a different approach. Where Cars is a fun romp down memory lane, Blood Test is a deep journey into the mind of a woman who is now focused on the big picture.
“Becoming a mom zooms your perspective out,” she says. “It makes you see yourself as one piece of the fabric of the continuity of your family, and the whole human family.”
After not doing much songwriting for the first few years of motherhood—something she attributes to sleep deprivation and not having the luxury of applying any brain power to the process—Delmhorst re-emerged with a different take on life.
“One theme of this record,” she says, “is cutting through all the noise and all the fundamentally irrelevant stuff that is everywhere in our culture right now; trying to stay connected to the real stuff.”
To record Blood Test, Delmhorst teamed up with songwriter/producer Anders Parker. The two worked well together as Parker’s calm demeanor balanced out what Delmhorst describes as her tendency to get “wound up” in the studio about having a finite amount of time to finish a project. From the start, the two wanted to keep the sound and instrumentation of Blood Test stripped-down.
“I was interested in having this one be a lot more spare,” Delmhorst says. “I wanted to have the structure [of the songs] define it and not clutter it up too much with other stuff.”
During the recording process, Delmhorst made notes on the places she wanted to do overdubs or edits. In the end, they chose to keep the songs as organic and close-to-live as possible, and not start down the road of tinkering with what they had recorded.
The result is a thoughtful, introspective album that finds the humanness in the universal. One of the standout tracks is “Bees,” in which she sings “And the sky looks down on me and says / What are you doing with your one little chance to be free? / And I look up at the sky and say / What am I doing with my one little chance to be alive?”
The lyrics came to her on a long flight where she says she gets “a little distance” on her life and the world. When she takes a big-picture perspective, Delmhorst finds a place of gratitude.
“I’ve had this lucky road through life,” she says. “I haven’t done any work but this work for 20 years. There’s a lot of bullshit involved with being a performing musician, but there’s also this central fact that I’m getting paid to think about life … and express it.”
Info: 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, May 13 at Don Quixote’s, 6275 Hwy. 9, Felton. $15. 603-2294.
