right now. Can you talk a little more about that? Yes. It seems so trivial sometimes, when the world is in such turmoil…And like, “Here’s a pop album!” (Laughs) “Buy it!” It seems so silly and not fair and not right. I realize that you just can’t think about it in those terms, because everybody is working within their strengths to dismantle what’s in front of them. Everybody is doing their best with what they have and if you can honor all those spaces and use your strengths for positive messaging to further understanding, then you are doing good. And, maybe even be a little subversive! Tell me a little about your songwriting process. Do you create lyrics first or hear and create the music as in the beginning? That’s a good question. This EP was very song oriented. I
didn’t really have a skeleton in mind and just picked some of my favorite upbeat songs that I’d been working on. I would say the majority of what I write, it’s almost like stream-of- consciousness. What will happen is that and I have to be at an instrument, I don’t really write lyrics first because the music really tells me what it wants to say. I sit at the piano and I’ll start coming up with a [chord] progression as I hum along coming up with phrases. It’s really kind of gibberish to start, stuff doesn’t make sense at first. It’s kind of silly and cliché at first, sometimes it’s stupid, but then I’ll build on it. How can I make this more articulate and what is it that I want to say and how can I say something that has a strong message? As I was listening to the album, one of the things that struck me, is that the songs are almost like meditations on a topic. Each song has its own impetus and its own reason for existing. Like ‘Know Your Name” was a song that I worked on with Tobias Karlsson, he really wrote all the music and I sort of just hopped right into it. My natural place, where my soul gravitates toward and where I feel most at home writing, is probably more in the vein of “Do Anything” and “Lay Your Head Down,” the first two tracks on the album. If I’m going to make something more in the pop vein,
I’m going to collaborate, because that’s not exactly where my soul lives. There are parts of me I can access and use to collaborate and create that sound, it was very fun to have that mix of those kind of things. “Hang Out With You” I wrote with my girlfriend [Michelle Chamuel] who is a very talented woman. She’s all over the album, she did the remix of “Know Your Name” and was the mix engineer for that song, as well. I wanted to make sure that things really came from my world and were things that I love, done with collaborators that I wanted to work with. The album does have a great range, there’s a wonderful pop sensibility, yet it’s filled with the seriousness only Mary Lambert can do. I’m interested in how you manage to stay in such a place of vulnerability… Is that something that comes naturally, or have you had to develop that? More transparency is my natural state, I think. (Laughs) It’s
MAY 2017
MAY 2017 | | RAGE monthly
monthly
39
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