Bathing in the Light: Julia Holter on Her New Album, Have You in My Wilderness
Holter says the character building process for her gorgeous new album, Have You in My Wilderness, was a gradual, organic one, not as overthought or deliberate as her previously lofty subject matter might have led you to believe. She’ll find a timbre that fits an empty space in a song, and only then decide whose mouth might have made it. The low Gauloises-smoking frequency she hits on “Night Song” makes you picture her a cabaret singer (a hat she wore with great panache on Loud City Song). Filling a sudden silence in “How Long?” she’s a soloist in the church choir. The album’s titles find a woman named Lucette stranded on an island, and another, named Betsy, taking refuge on a roof. Hiding out in Mexico or musing with the Pacific Ocean, these characters aren’t definitionally removed from Holter’s own time, space, or setting. They could at least be some other young Los Angeleno, if not the one writing the songs.
She’s described the album as being based on real life, a close read of the power dynamics in personal relationships rather than an extrapolation of some classic text. That doesn’t mean she’s describing her own. “I never write music that’s just about my life. It’s just not that fun for me,” she says. “What’s really fun is making something that isn’t overtly about you at first, and then subconsciously what comes out is you, inevitably. To me that’s much more interesting than making a song, specifically about something.”
Lyrically, she seems eager for change. Again and again, the people in these songs are running: from the sun, away from the horizon, to a good thing, away from each other. The actual tempo is leisurely throughout, but in a change from previous records, the ballads are sun-kissed more often than moonlit. But even the characters she inhabits are hiding from view. “It’s impossible to see who I’m waiting for in my raincoat,” goes the quizzical chorus to lead single “Feel You.” “Show me how you make your second face,” she repeats in “Night Song,” perhaps demanding deeper insight into a loved one, or maybe just eager for new tricks to better conceal herself, a highbrow Arya Stark interning at the House of Black and White for college credit instead of blood revenge. Holding her lyrics up to psychoanalysis will only get you so far.
“There are songs that you write for therapy,” Holter says. “Those songs tend to not be songs that I want to listen to again.” She says she just started going to an actual therapist, one to talk to, not sing at. But she doesn’t expect it to suddenly render her songs an emotional open book. “Or I hope not,” she says. “That would be weird.”
What these songs do provide is further evidence of Holter’s ever-increasing skill as a composer, writer, and performer. Her precise phrasing lets the most unwieldy words fall like raindrops of split-up syllables. “Lu-ci-di-ty.” “My-tho-log-i-cal.” The collision of classical or avant-garde elements in her songs was an early talking point, but this batch owes more to Burt Bacharach’s time in the Brill Building than avant-gardists locked away at the academy. A few included songs, like the lush, Brian-Wilson-in-exile shanty “Sea Calls Me Home,” are refurbished old songs with rougher existing versions, that now gleam with perfectionist polish yet somehow avoid sounding slick. “It’s hard to take raw songs that you love as raw songs and to try to develop them,” Holter says. “When you try to do that, usually the initial recording in the studio will sound too mechanical or not have the raw performance. It really took a lot of time to record performances that were interesting again.”
She credits producer and longtime collaborator Cole M. Greif-Neill for his contribution to the album’s crystal clarity. “When I work alone, it’s a big mess,” she says. “I’m a messy person and everything’s a mess. I’m obsessed with layers upon layers, to the point that you get all this noise and distortion. That’s why Ekstasis sounds like that. That’s very different than working with someone else who’s not a mess, and who’s a good engineer and a good producer and has a good sense of how to bring things out in a really elegant, beautiful way.” The impeccably mic-ed drum strikes in a song like “Everytime Boots” give it a three-dimensional joy that provides a real, if subtle, pop thrill. Even “Vasquez”, the album’s most far-out free-jazz-flecked track, provides oddly pleasing points of entry.
Holter’s early albums produced images of tangled wires jacked into laptops in a cramped bedroom, even as they described antiquity. In comparison, Wilderness sounds analog and tangible—like wood, nylon, and ivory. Or, to use the album title’s phrase, these songs never actually suggest a teeming internal wilderness so much as a manicured Spanish garden. She’s gentle and considered, even when things get heavy. If, as she suggests, she isn’t currently as put-together as she seems on record, then it’s another lovely bit of deception.