Tag: Ann Arbor

Dani Darling Premieres Wizard of Oz-Inspired Video from Psychedelic New EP The Future

Photo Credit: Doug Coombe

In the summer of 2020, Dani Darling headed to Lake Michigan with her best friend. On the drive there, they listened to Pink Floyd’s 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon, an album that Darling had previously heard in part, but had never listened to in its entirety. Listening to that classic album for the first time in the midst of a summer marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd had a profound impact on the Ann Arbor-based singer. Darling had a revelation. She wanted to make a psychedelic album. 

When Darling won an Amplify Fellowship, an initiative from Grove Studios and Leon Speakers for Black artists in Washtenaw County, Michigan, she was able to make that idea a reality. “Usually, I’m more of a lo-fi, bedroom pop artist because of the financial aspect of it,” says Darling, who was previously featured in Audiofemme last fall for the release of her EP Mage. She says that it’s been easier to learn how to record and mix her own music than to bring a whole band into a studio. The fellowship, though, allowed her to do just that. “It was really the last little ingredient that I needed to put the whole project together.”

The resulting EP, The Future, is set for release on June 25. Like all of her music, she says, it began to take shape in her living room, where she jams, plays with her pedals, makes “little soundscapes” of ideas and starts devising lyrics. The first proper session, though, convened on December 21, 2020, the date of Winter Solstice as well as the Great Conjunctions between Jupiter and Saturn. Darling brought a folder with her that contained her ideas for the new material, but those quickly began to evolve as the group started to play. 

“Everyone was talking about the Age of Aquarius,” she says. That led to the recording of “The Age” featured on the EP. “I just kept singing ‘the Age of Aquarius’ and it was totally different from the lyrics that I had down and it just stayed that way because of the vibe,” she says. They liked the results and decided to book another session, an hours-long New Year’s Eve session that Darling describes as “wildly ambitious.” 

The hard part wasn’t spending the last night of 2020 in the studio, it was figuring out how to work with all the material that came out of the session. “We sat down and we had all these hours of music and I was like, how am I going to pull an album out of all this psychedelic craziness?” Darling recalls.

It was “hours and hours” of music recorded onto very large files. Darling sifted through it to figure out where the songs were. She estimates that there are probably another 20 songs that could be pulled out of that session, but she was looking for the ones that made the most sense with the vibe that she had been developing – a retro 1960s to 1970s sound that reflected her eclectic tastes; she’s into James Brown, loves Diana Ross and name-checks Jimi Hendrix’s album, Are You Experienced as one of her favorites. 

The cohesiveness of the EP began to take shape when Darling brought in flautist James Russell to play on “The Down,” which is the lead single for The Future. “When I thought of the ‘60s, one of the things that I really love about the ‘60s is the flute sound that you hear,” Darling explains. “That’s very vintage to me.” After working on “The Down,” she asked Russell if he heard anything he could play on the other tracks and the flautist ended up playing on much much of the release. “If the whole album is a trip, then the narrator is the flute,” says Darling. “It’s like we’re taking people through these different doors and different realms, but you constantly hear that flute sound.”

For “The Down,” which is already getting radio play in Detroit, Darling thought about The Wizard of Oz and how she remembered hearing in college that The Dark Side of the Moon synced up with the movie. 

“I also felt like, with the pandemic, a lot of the color had been drained out of life and out of me. I felt like life was very black and white, it was very static,” she says. “So when it came to the video for ‘The Down,’ I thought let’s try a Wizard of Oz in reverse. Let’s throw her in a black and white, pandemic world and have her trying to reach inside and find the color and find her tribe, the band.”

There’s a message in the video too. Says Darling, “When the color goes out in your world, you really have to look within and be mindful and try to find the light inside and bring that out and bring the color back into your world, through your own spirit.”

Follow Dani Darling on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Lily Talmers Chooses Her Words Carefully on Remember Me As Holy EP

Coming of age: we all do it. But a very select few of us do it with as much grace, self-awareness and poetry as Lily Talmers. The Birmingham, Michigan native and recent University of Michigan grad combines her stunning mastery of the English language with her unorthodox classical music training to create a viscerally raw and beautiful debut record, Remember Me as Holy.  

For someone who never really set out to be a songwriter to begin with, Talmers’ poetic lyrics and intrinsic sense of melody make her a very, very good one. “It’s kind of a weak thing to do,” Talmers says of songwriting. “At least in my mind, I think I wanted to be an engineer or a doctor, something so hard and objective… objective is the best word to describe what I wanted to be.”

Sure, performing open-heart surgery or aiding in developing the COVID-19 vaccine can be seen as more “objectively” utilitarian than writing a song. But, as we all know, music has a unique healing ability that can’t be found in any medication or surgery – especially, at this moment in time, songs which pull on the tender strings of a desperate nation teetering between change and stagnancy.

In “Miss America,” Talmers meets us at a moment of reckoning and rebuilding, begging her country to see through the smokescreen it’s been looking at for years. “I’ve been staring at you darling/Sitting back and wonderin’, what the hell you’re gonna do,” Talmers sings to the millions of undecided voters. “‘Cause it all comes back to you who eat your dinner with the T.V. on/And who smile thinking everybody else is wrong/Yes, you who drink your coffee with the curtains drawn/Yes, still it’s you that we’re all counting on.” It’s a simple and poignant way to describe the MAGA masses that stayed loyal to 45 throughout his hack job of a presidency without dismissing them completely. And she does all this in a voice as soothing as the ocean – even when she’s talking about a nation’s proverbial nose-dive. 

Though Talmers is a multi-instrumentalist (piano, guitar, banjo and cello), she explains that the most important part about songwriting, to her, is the language she uses. “My compulsion and obsession with songwriting is definitely lyricism, and the spirit of a song, what it’s trying to say,” says Talmers. This focus on words is befitting for the musician who studied literature and English, although that wasn’t always the initial plan. For her first few years at university, Talmers was a neuroscience major with the goal of eventually becoming a doctor. Even with the rigorous coursework, she was still moonlighting as a musician. “I was finishing my homework so I could feed my obsession with writing songs,” Talmers remembers.

An awakening came when Talmers was in Copenhagen for a neuroscience internship in the summer of 2018 that made her question the path she was on. But the artist found solace in her songwriting. “[The internship] was so bad and tortuous that that was what compelled me to go to my first open-mic in Portugal,” Talmers remembers; she was gracious enough to share a Facebook video of the performance.

The song she played there ended up being an important one for her for the validation it would provide. “I wrote it in a fit the night before and and then the next day I found this open mic in a random bar in the middle of Lisbon,” she says, crediting the bar “full of old men” (and other encouraging voices) for the inspiration she needed her to pursue music – even though the vulnerability of it makes her uneasy at times. “Even to this day it feels sort of vulnerable to perform – I never feel good,” Talmers says. “It’s not like I’m bad or anything. I just think it’s not that glamorous if your soul is on the line.” 

Talmers’ summer in Europe also held another musically formative moment; sitting in a hostel in Copenhagen, she heard Adrianne Lenker’s voice for the first time. “I heard ‘Masterpiece’ playing ambiently,” Talmers says. “And then I became obsessed.” She describes how Lenker’s songwriting style, both solo and with Big Thief, inspired her to take a more experimental approach with songwriting and trust that the listener will catch on. “She just digresses so much from normal songwriting rhetoric,” says Talmers. “The way that she writes is so sonic, the words that she chooses, I feel like she has really given me permission to express myself in an incoherent way almost, trusting that it makes sense.” 

In addition to Lenker’s palpable influence, Talmers cites other folk legends like Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Simon & Garfunkel as shepherds of her path. In fact, she says hearing “Scarborough Fair” opened her up to listening to pop music, which she didn’t have much time or patience for at the time. As a student of the piano from a young age, Talmers revered classical music and wasn’t interested in much else. “I had this old Russian piano teacher named Yuri who was also my dad’s piano teacher growing up,” Talmers explains. “He forced me to do scales the first two or three years and nothing else… then suddenly instead of giving me, like, ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,’ he just started giving me like insane classical pieces and expecting me to memorize them.”

She would watch Yuri play phrases and use her melodic sensibility to repeat them back. Eventually, she memorized entire classical pieces like Chopin’s “Waltz in C# minor” this way. Though she didn’t realize it at first, this intense ear training undoubtedly plays a role in her complex and clever songwriting style.

That’s how a lot of Talmers’ songwriting feels: effortless, accidental, and primal. Remember Me as Holy serves as a roadmap of Talmers’ deepest thoughts, feelings and desires. It echoes the cries of a nation and the cries of a regular old broken heart. At the bottom of her Bandcamp, Talmers writes, “I do forgive you, after all,” a message to anyone who can see themselves in one of her lyrics. “I wrote that in recognition that it’s all good. I don’t believe that you write songs about people, I think you write about tons of different relationships in your life,” explains Talmers. I think the record could be perceived as like a burn and it’s simply not that – it’s sort of like self-reconciliation.”

Follow Lily Talmers on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

PLAYING DETROIT: Fred Thomas “Voiceover”

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Fred Thomas has a lot of feelings (and he really wants to talk about them). He may fear transformation in the same way he might fear another perturbed thought of how he could have prevented a previous love affair from going to pieces. He may relish in the scratching of the many surfaces that camouflage and protect his tender, gooey existential crisis-inflamed interiors. But what is made clear by Fred Thomas’ latest beautifully neurotic mind-mapping narration “Voiceover” (the first taste from his forthcoming record Changer due out later next month)  is that he doesn’t quite have it all figured out and if he did, well, he might not know what to do.

“Voiceover” is a sleepless, chorus-deprived and worrisome dashboard “check engine” light. Self-deprecatingly confrontational, this pared back rock jam feels like a tightly woven string of doubts that overcame by means of emotional overload. The video is a life on loop. Repetitive thoughts are mirrored with commonly overlooked/performed imagery. From lipstick application (and lipstick removal) to uncorking wine, and to book to bookshelf placement to the subtle beauty of gently falling hemlines against the back of kneecaps, what is captured visually here is the same crisp mundanity expressed in Thomas’ artfully composed run-on sentences.

View Fred Thomas’ latest GIF-like emotional exploit below:

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PLAYING DETROIT: Mayer Hawthorne “Cosmic Love”

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Detroit-adopted Ann Arborite and premier Motown revivalist, Mayer Hawthorne, returned this week with another funk infused groove, “Cosmic Love” from his fourth solo studio LP (his first in three years) due out this spring. If you’re unfamiliar, you might think Hawthorne is just another white boy relying on soulful affectation. What you should know is that Hawthorne has built his reputation on authentically modernizing funk, soul and Detroit’s signature Motown sound in a way that has always felt fresh and fun but with a soothing melancholy that speaks to what Hawthorne does best: croon and groove.

This time around, however, I feel as though Hawthorne missed an opportunity. “Cosmic Love”, for me, is borderline comical. It could fit into a shaky Shaft-esque 1970’s amateur porn or a montage scene from an Anchorman movie with equal fluidity. It’s satirical in its literal interpretation using galactic twinkling synths, Hawthorne’s spacey echoed vocals, and the breathy female background chorus, all of which makes “Cosmic Love” feel more like a store-bought Halloween costume than a reinvention of your parent’s vintage wardrobe.

Am I a jerk for longing for heartbroken, lovelorn Hawthorne circa 2009’s A Strange Arrangement? Or story driven, assertively dreamy Hawthorne from 2013’s Where Does This Door Go? Considering Hawthorne is an artist who begs us to turn the clocks back, isn’t it natural for me to want to do the same? It should be said that I like “Cosmic Love.” I do. I can appreciate its playful, candied kitsch. The single opens with the lyrics “If I had a dollar/For every dream of you and me/I’d buy myself a rocket/And shoot into your galaxy” and by the end all I can think is that I wished he would have shot a little further.

Listen to “Cosmic Love” for yourself below:

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