Amy Whitehouse
Juana Molina decided that she wasn’t meant to be a drummer, but that didn’t stop her from beating the hell out of rhythm
By Erik Adams
Published: October 8th, 2008 | 3:04pm
Juana Molina has always wanted to be a drummer, but time and appendages are holding her back. “I’ve never taken the time to really learn how to play drums. I just can’t coordinate all my four extremities,” the Argentinean singer-songwriter said in a phone interview. “I just can’t.”
Molina does do some drumming on her new LP, Un Día (Domino), though none on a drum kit. She gets a high, tight snare sound by tapping the body of her acoustic guitar, while she pulls some deep booms out of the traditional Argentinean bass drum known as the bombo legüero. The low end was the subject of much focus and experimentation during the recording of Un Día, and as a result, the record is highly rhythm-driven. Molina suggested that her percussion fantasy was the first step in this direction. “Maybe because I was messing around with rhythms and everything, I just wanted to pretend I finally became a drummer, but I recorded everything separately,” she said.
Save for some snippets of guitar played by Gareth Dickson (best known for his work with Vashti Bunyan), Un Día was recorded entirely by Molina, piece by piece and part by part. The ideas for her songs don’t start flowing until she’s entered the recording studio — she said that if she does begin with something in mind it “absolutely does not work.” But what doesn’t work might open a door to something that does.
“Maybe for very good composers and real musicians, they have an idea, and they are able to put it down to paper or to sound well after they thought about it, like Beethoven or Bach or Schubert, maybe those people could,” she added with a self-deprecating laugh. “I start working, and then I play, and play, and play, and play. When something triggers some kind of emotion, then I record it after working with that.”
Un Día is the sound of Molina chasing those triggers. There aren’t any choruses, verses, or bridges confining the record’s ethereal tunes, they’re dictated by the groove alone. This leaves Molina free to follow the whims she uncovers through all that playing, playing, playing, playing. At the two-minute mark of the title track, a jaunty synth saxophone emerges from between the chattering percussive, liquid bass line and Molina’s hypnotic vocals. Soon, it’s joined by another sax figure, blaring at quarter-note intervals. The two charge through the song, gaining momentum and volume, pushing all the way to the front of the mix. A few measures after they hijack the melody, the saxes disappear as quickly as they arrived.
But we’ve not seen the last of them. Soon every instrument but the saxophones has dropped out, and these saxes perform a breakdown duet. It’s a brief spotlight moment, and their duet is assimilated into the rest of the song. So who’s in control here, the song or the songwriter? “Sometimes I choose a sound, and the sound kind of tells me what to do with it. So, I just follow the sound and obey its orders. It happens a lot,” Molina said. “I wonder if the songs I really couldn’t ever play live … maybe they were controlling me in a way that I couldn’t respond to, because there are a few songs that I was never able to play live. I guess those are the ones that control me. All the rest — the ones I do play live — I am the boss.”
In Molina’s opinion, the recorded version of a song is only of the states that song exists in. To that effect, when she plays live (solo, aided by a staggering amount of looping equipment), she keeps her ears open for tweaks in texture, structure, and melody. When fans began asking why she was making these changes, she didn’t know what to tell them.
“But now I have this very simple answer,” she said. “‘Well, just play the record, because that version is only alive there. Everywhere else it’s either non-existent or dead.”
Her lyrics are the subject of great scrutiny, as well. As with previous Molina releases, the words on Un Día in Spanish, if they’re words at all— the songs are peppered with scatting and nonsense syllables. Molina chose to release Un Día without a lyric sheet, a gambit which might pay off, given a recent encounter at a show in Scotland.
“A girl came to me and said, ‘When I listen to your songs, I just make up my own lyrics,’” Molina said. “I was in awe — ‘Ah! That’s amazing, because that’s exactly what I would like people to do when they don’t understand the lyrics!’ So by the phonetic of the words, you understand a couple of words, then you make up the rest.
“I think I’m going more and more into the music and less and less into the lyrics, and this may be a record that’s in the transition of both.”
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Juana Molina’s Web site: http://www.juanamolina.com
Juana Molina’s MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/juanamolina
Issue #24
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