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hair is covering their face or they don’t even look at the audience – that’s a style of music that’s so one. It’s about watching this per- son that may not even acknowledge you.”
“The one reminds me of Stanislavski,” thinks Elizabeth. “You’re doing your task and you become so absorbed in the task that it becomes this really natural and engrossing thing to watch from the outside.”
“Because working with traditional music means moving the song or the piece from a certain context to another – which has already happened when it’s been moved from the home to the archive. But then from the home to the archive to the stage is this other move, and I guess we never feel like the way that that move is done should be settled, or an assumed thing. Like, what’s another way we could make that move?”
“Kind of to help people notice that it’s moved,” Anna pinpoints. “To see what parts of the folk process people can be made aware of.”
At one point during the performance Elizabeth holds up a MacBook out of which can be heard a crackly recording of Mas- sachusetts ballad singer Margaret Shipman from 1943. As Margaret’s hesitantly sung Jeano And Jeanette emerges from the tiny speaker, Anna accompanies on guitar before singing it herself. The now silent lap- top is held as reverently as if it were a manuscript. The song moving from one con- text to another, and another.
“I think part of this project is wanting to have old music and these particular songs and these particular ballads and our ideas about them be a part of a conversation that’s happening amongst modern people. We talk a lot about wanting to be a part of a conver - sation that other artists are having. And I feel like we’re looking towards other art medi- ums as a way to inject the ballad question into different conversations about music.”
ne night in Sidmouth in 2016 a huge storm hit the shore. The waves surged and raged in blacks and greys. A painter’s storm. A storm never to return from. Looking out at the water, Anna explained a piece they’d created to follow Elizabeth singing a song from the family collection of Carrie Grover from Maine, called Adieu To Aran. “But we can’t ever perform it,” sighed Anna, “because it’s so extreme.” The following day at a Sidmouth FolkWeek concert, they performed it anyway: a starkly minimal yet deeply affecting meditation on emi- gration and loss.
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“I feel like that piece is such a good example of how our brains have grown in the last six months,” marvels Anna, “because it’s a piece where I play one note, and variations of one note for four minutes and Elizabeth just cranks this crankie that’s an unchanging painting of the sea. And for us it’s almost been this shedding of our own expectations because for five years we’ve been relying on narrative and relying on that question, ‘Audience, are you with us?’ And being obsessed with that relationship, at least for me. Now we have this growing awareness that if we hold the space and if we’re in that moment then people will come with us.”
You may be asking yourself how any of this can be presented on an album. At the time of the interview Anna and Elizabeth were asking themselves that too.
“One terrifying thing is we have no idea what our record’s gonna sound like,” says Anna. “Kind of like how we didn’t know how to make linoleum block prints, I don’t know how to make a modern album. But we have all these ideas. On a basic level we’re making a record that’s different from us performing these songs live. I think it’s partly because we’ve thought about these
songs so deeply and there’s so much chaos in our brains about how we feel about these songs. Like any one song has so many layers of thought connected to it, and I think we want to show some part of that layered chaos in the recording. Having that be a part of the recording instead of a com- pleted arrangement.”
“It’s the same thing we’re doing with
the show,” says Elizabeth. “I think a lot of this record is gonna have that same sense of discovery. It feels risky.”
As well as the album there are those aforementioned films on the way (“We’ve been referring to them as dance films.”) with an accompanying book, talk of a play, and ideas on ideas on ideas. With so many open doors to explore can life as a touring musician still be satisfying, if it ever was?
“It’s a great question,” Elizabeth muses.
“There’s a quote from Martha Graham in a letter she wrote in reply to Agnes De Mille. They’re discussing some show she’d just done and all she could see were the things that had gone wrong. And Martha Graham speaks very eloquently about how that’s just the nature of making art and that there’s something that can only come through you and it’s not for you to judge whether it’s good or bad, just know that blocking it would be a sin and everything that you feel has to be secondary to just keeping your channel open. And Agnes De Mille has asked, ‘Is there to be no satisfaction at all?’ And Martha replies: ‘There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction.’”
“In some ways it’s no different from any other way of living,” ponders Anna. “But like someone who is a preacher or anyone whose job is trying to get people to listen and to see the beauty of the world, it’s a job that’s never done. You never finish it.”
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