“Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn has been creating incorruptible independent pop music since the late 1990’s. She has released over a dozen solo and collaborative recordings on K Records, Kill Rock Stars and various domestic and foreign independent labels.  Defined by her graceful songwriting and adventuresome recordings, Pitchfork has praised her “incredible voice—a versatile coo that can flit from low, sultry tones to high, airy falsetto in one breath.”

Mirah has always sought the creative company of unique collaborators, from multi-media artists and orchestral composers to dj’s, Baltic music enthusiasts, and entomologists. A partial list of some of her collaborators includes Phil Elverum (The Microphones/Mount Eerie), Merrill Garbus (tUnE-yArDs), Tara Jane O’Neil, Khaela Maricich (The Blow), Melanie Valera (Tender Forever), Jherek Bischoff, Lori Goldston, Britta Johnson and Ginger Brooks Takahashi.”

mirahmusic.com

“But there is an especially gratifying feeling for me when the universality that my song taps into is one of concern for others, for the fate of the world around us, the natural world, the social and political worlds.”

February 2, 2018
interview by Maia MacDonald for Women in Sound #5
illustration by Maggie Negrete
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You’re supposed to start mixing your record this week, right?
That is true! What’s also true is I’m trying to finish up two of the songs real fast.

I heard some of those Headlands demos a while back, maybe a year ago. I haven’t heard the songs since then. Have they changed a lot?
Yes! That one we were listening to the other day—we keep adding more things. I still forget sometimes that when you’re working on a record and you’ve been adding little things here and there and you’ve heard it a million times, there can be a moment all of a sudden when you’re like, “Oh my god, no one has heard this yet!” So it’s exciting! I feel excited for people to hear them. They’ll be surprised. You’ve heard a lot of them at different points but you’ll be surprised, too!

A thing I like about your songs is that they can exist on their own as recordings that don’t have to be reproduced 100% faithfully live.
It would be so hard to actually do that because I never make recordings with the intention of: “And then I’m going to recreate this perfectly for the stage!”’ I don’t think that way. Recording is too much fun in and of itself. I feel that I would end up limiting myself in the studio if I was at the same time trying to figure out what the live version was going to be and how I was going to find enough people and pay them all to make all these cool sounds at once.

It’s been cool to play in your band with very different lineups. The string quartet stuff this year was really fun. What was it like hearing your songs reimagined with those arrangements?
With the strings? Super satisfying. It’s funny because when Jherek [Bischoff] and I first talked about doing that project, I sent him a bunch of stuff which included a number of the newer demos from Headlands, but he gravitated towards the ones that we ended up doing. He ended up going through my back catalog and picked a couple that I hadn’t thought of, which was cool. Part of what is fun for me about collaborating with people in that way is allowing someone else to make at least a couple of the decisions. In a lot of ways, recording music is this intensely thick collection of decisions. There are so many choices you have to make, and the, if you’re an independent musician, on top of all of the musical decisions you’re making with every single recording, you’re also deciding which songs go on the album, when the album’s gonna come out, every single thing. One of the thrills for me with collaboration is like, “Well, what would YOU choose right now?” Sometimes it’s a surprise. I loved that we got to do “The World Is Falling Apart” again. Even though I really love the original recording I did with Phil [Elverum] on (a)spera, I feel like that recording captures the energy of the song; there are just some technical aspects of it that I feel like maybe don’t come across on all sound systems and for all people, with the kind of sounds they’re used to hearing. I’m really proud of that song, lyrically. It feels like an important song to bring back now and give a bit more of a lush bed, but still have the same intensity.

Speaking of collaborations, can you tell people about any folks you have worked with on the new album?
I worked a lot with Greg Saunier from Deerhoof. He’s really fun for me to work with. We have somewhat of a similar way of engaging, which is following intuition and not doing too many takes. Some of my favorite people to work with are people that have a wild, untamed streak that goes all the way through or spikes that come out. That was something that was fun about working with Phil when we used to do more recording together. I also have been working with Eli Crews. He’s been helping co-produce and engineer this stuff. The truth is I am kind of a sloppy engineer and I kind of am that way on purpose. I can be a perfectionist in some areas. I think I let that take the lead more when I’m working on lyrics and working on the song itself—lyrics and melody and structure. I have a tendency to be precise. So [recording] is the area that I can be like, “No, not gonna be precise!” which can be frustrating if then I bring my demos to Eli and I’m like, “Can we make this sound just a little better so I don’t mess up people’s speakers?” I think I’m more of an interesting producer than I am a good engineer.

I’ve heard you talk a little bit about Dub Narcotic and what the recording days were like there. It seemed like it was a magical place at a magical time.
It really was. We had keys to this giant room that was mostly empty. It was only mostly empty because it was so giant. There were tons of instruments and some of them worked and some didn’t and there was no isolation booth and no acoustic engineering of panels here and there —nothing. It was a giant warehouse room with those huge warehouse windows that tilt at the middle, so every sound that was happening outside might make its way into the recordings. It was also just a special time. I was in my 20s and exuberant and not totally devastated yet. [Laughter] I feel like the world wasn’t as terrible. It was like sleepover parties in the big room if we were working too late, and then getting up and recording more. Maybe some of us had jobs, but mostly we were all making things. My rent was $150. I ran a secret cafe out of my apartment one night a week with my housemate. That’s how we paid our rent.

At least until recently, you were so heavily associated with the Pacific Northwest. Do you feel like New York Mirah yet?
I don’t feel like New York Mirah. I don’t know who that is. I also don’t feel like Pacific Northwest Mirah anymore. That really feels like a long time ago. Not that I don’t feel connected to a lot of people and my own history there. All the people who make things that are publicly consumable in the world—music, art, writing, movies, whatever—who people think they know in a way because they know that person’s work—there’s a real person in there! An everyday person, brushing their teeth, living where they live. I did grow up in Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia. So is there a Philadelphia Mirah? I’m not really sure who that is either. I feel like some weird onion of all these layers of places where I’ve spent time and people I’ve gotten close to there and people who I’ve worked with or had relationships with. I will say that New York is still kind of a mystery to me. I don’t even know if I want the identity of a place.

“I feel like some weird onion of all these layers of places where I’ve spent time and people I’ve gotten close to there and people who I’ve worked with or had relationships with.”

You’ve been building your new studio for this past year or so. Are you feeling like that’s a space where you can be creative yet?
I’m not so sure if It’s my writing spot, but I definitely feel excited about recording there. I’ve been having a lot of ideas, which are sort of related to how I feel about living in New York. If I have that space, that can be not just the private place that I get access to but I can invite people over. There could just be this general invitation for all my music people: “Yup, Monday nights, whoever wants to come over!” Then if we ever wanted to record something, everything’s all set up and we just start recording. What’s interesting is it’s this small soundproof room at my house, so it seems very insular, like this little cocoon that I would go and lock myself inside of, but I have this place that I can invite people to and maybe have some sleepovers. [Laughter] It’s really cool. I feel very lucky. I wouldn’t have been able to do it myself, certainly not financially but also all the design stuff. You know how not-a-gearhead I am.

Speaking of gear talk, are you thinking of expanding your pedalboard beyond a tuner and a Big Muff this year?
Uh oh. [Laughter] I did experiment with using your delay pedal a little bit. It was useful for a couple of songs. Especially for playing shows, I really like a streamlined setup. Essentially I am a singer. All the other stuff...I just sort of picked up those skills so I could accompany myself.

You have this guitar. Is it the Gibson? Isn’t it true that you’ve played that at every single show since you got it?
Pretty much, yes. Even after I got my Martin acoustic-electric a couple years ago. Since then, there may have been a few shows that I’ve only played that one, but I just really love my Gibson. It does have its single coil pickup, so I’ve had problems on tour for years where it’s gonna be a noisy night or I have to turn around and face the back of the stage. [Laughter] Sorry, everybody! But I really do love that guitar.

There any many through-lines in your music. One I want to ask about specifically is activism. You released “Sundial” this year and “No Guns No Guns” last year, and both are addressing very pressing issues from different angles. I’m curious how you see your music and your activism taking form as we go into another terrifying year.
As a younger person I was definitely an activist. I was involved with anti-nuclear activism from the time I was pretty young, like 11, and was going on marches and writing letters and protests from the time I was in middle school and high school. At a certain point, maybe by college, I just fell off of going on peace marches and writing letters and being really active in social justice movements and groups and meetings. I had more of that as a vocal expression as a younger person. College was also when I started making music. I have lots of friends and family members who really put it all on the line to work for positive change. It’s their every day, or it’s their job. I know that I’m not doing what those people are doing, but it’s really important to me to be working for a better, more just and sustainable world in all these different ways. I still have that expression inside of me and since the main thing I do is music, that’s where it comes out. The songs that I've felt the most proud of are the ones which I think would be categorized as “political” songs—“Monument,” “The World is Falling Apart,” “Generosity,” “Sundial.” Of course, I feel good about how strongly people connect with the love songs and heartbreak songs, too. Other people's songs have certainly helped me to feel through my life and so I feel grateful for any way that I have been able to tap into those sorts of universal experiences and connect with people. But there is an especially gratifying feeling for me when the universality that my song taps into is one of concern for others, for the fate of the world around us, the natural world, the social and political worlds.

You got to see Pauline Oliveros play pretty soon before she died.
Only a few weeks before she died.

Can you give us a glimpse into that moment?
I do feel so lucky about that. I had seen her play one time before, when Ginger [Brooks Takahashi] and I were living at that house, Black Mountain, making the Black Mountain Music Project album. We went to an event at the college and she was playing it. I actually wasn’t familiar with her before that time. Then she sort of came back into my consciousness after I met my partner, Todd. He was a student of hers. For his 40th birthday, I got a bunch of people to send video messages and she was one of the people. She called in live to his birthday party and I think she played a harmonica solo. That’s just a little background. When I saw she was playing at National Sawdust, we were like, “We are definitely going to that.” Todd hadn’t seen her in a bunch of years. I just feel so thankful for the work. By work, I mean she has made a lot of important work as an artist, but also being a woman in the world requires a certain kind of work, especially if you are doing something that, for her, at the age that she was, was breaking a lot of boundaries and challenging a lot of expectations and stereotypes. I just feel so much gratitude for all of those different kinds of work that she did. There’s no one else like her. She had a special relationship with sound and music and sharing that with people. She became a teacher and really wanted to share her perspectives on sound. It was amazing to be at the performance and appreciating her so deeply, and when she died a few weeks later, I was really grateful that we had gotten that opportunity to witness and experience her.

Can we talk about that songwriting workshop we did at Willie Mae? What were your takeaways from that?
At the Portland Rock Camp I had done songwriting workshops with kids before. I do think when we did ours together I had lost track of which activities worked for which age kids. I’m not a teacher; I haven’t practiced teaching and I don’t spend tons of time around kids. In a setting like that where we’re doing this thing three times in a row and each time we have completely different kinds of humans coming in. Six- to eight-year-old humans are very different from 14- to 16-year-old humans and the kinds of things that work in terms of engaging them. I need to spend time with kids of different ages in order to get my creative mind activated to match the appropriate activities for the different aged kids. You were awesome that day. There was a section where the kids were basically freestyling and you just had a guitar and you were supposed to back them up.

You included a packet of seeds with the Sundial release. What are your tips for growing a successful sunflower?
One of the reasons why I chose sunflowers as the seeds I was including with the album is because their faces follow the sun and it’s so cool to watch when you grow them. They also grow easily in any kind of soil. I’m great at anthropomorphizing plants and animals. Sometimes that’s useful because it’s a form of empathy, but sometimes it’s not useful because it’s a form of projection. [Laughter] It builds empathy because you’re like, “I’m like a sunflower too!”
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Since this interview, Mirah released her album Understanding, toured the United States, gave birth to her first child and signed to Double Double Whammy Records.
Mirah’s extensive discography is available for purchase here.
www.mirahmusic.com