My Brightest Diamond

Shara Worden reflects on a prosperous 2007 and looks ahead to a strings-laden 2008

By Daphne Carr
Published: November 16th, 2007 | 2:06am

Born 150 years earlier, Shara Worden might have been Clara Shumann, a brilliant but underappreciated musician-composer who wrote art songs with romantic tendencies in the backdrop of small salons. Instead she’s a classically trained opera-singing, jazz-loving, electronic-adoring multi-instrumentalist composer writing art songs as My Brightest Diamond for a growing audience of mostly popular-music listeners willing to cross the classical divide. And this is why it’s great to be here now.

Things are going so well for Worden that 2007 seems a blur: a new album (Tear It Down), work with Sufjan Stevens, and constant touring. This winter My Brightest Diamond headlined dates with Brooklyn rapper-producer Tim Fite, a chance she relished. “To hear his music for a couple weeks, and watch him in varying performance situations is a thrill for me,” she says.

Worden has become an integral part of Stevens’ band and this fall appeared as part of his BQE suite at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM commissioned Stevens to compose music and film to celebrate New York City’s controversial urban planning monument known as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway). She joined the second half of the performance and rocked orchestral versions of Sufjan’s favorite tunes. Some of the most beautiful moments of the evening came from her harmonies with him, vocals that sounded like duets from the golden age of country.

“I have always thought vocals with him as this challenge to blend as much as possible. It’s connected with the attitude I had as a waitress trying to bring water to a table without making a noise, or placing a spoon down before someone asked for it. I once spilled red wine on a guy, and that's about how I felt when I accidentally played a really loud D chord on guitar over a quiet woodwind verse in Sufjan's ‘Chicago,’” Worden says.

As an Ypsilanti, Michigan, preteen Worden listened exclusively to Motown, soul, and R&B, calling herself “a late rock bloomer.” For her, string sections served the vocal as they did for Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, or the Temptations. As she hits her stride with songwriting, her string writing has moved further away from her early inspirations to a more art music approach. “In the beginning I wanted the strings to take over the rhythm of my guitar, more like Björk's Homogenic song ‘Hunter,’ where the strings are providing all of the rhythmic foundation. But over time I moved away from using the strings in that way and now use them more to extend or develop the harmonies.”

Her Web site features a video of Worden and friends rehearsing and recording A Thousand Shark’s Teeth, her album of small orchestral arrangements due out in summer 2008 on Asthmatic Kitty. Shark’s Teeth is a blend of Bring Me The Workhorse–era outtakes and four new songs arranged to sound coherent. A taste of things to come can be heard on her string arrangement for an older track, “Freak Out,” where a grizzled percussive mid-tempo violin riff anchors the song. In it, Worden croons the blues as she leads into a chorus of “freak out” shrieks met with siren swooping strings. Worden admits that the metered gate and vibrant pang of lyrics are an odd juxtaposition. “I think rock is about having independent thought,” she says. “It is less about instrumentation or electricity for me.”