Sounding Softly with Jennifer Coleman
Plus some exciting news and upcoming performances
In This Edition
✸ Conversation with Jennifer Coleman
✸ OPIA Compilation
✸ Upcoming Performances
It’s been a roller coaster week. My grandmother, and last remaining grandparent, long deteriorating from dementia, is very close to the end. It’s been a long journey as we watched her spark slowly, painstakingly, die out. Caregiving for someone suffering from this relentless disease is thankless work, and my mother shouldered all of it. It was hard to watch my grandmother become a shell of a person. It was even harder to watch my mother carry that burden.
Meanwhile, I’ve recently received incredible musical news. I will be a featured artist on the first compilation album on Ólafur Arnald’s new record label and musical community — OPIA. Read below for some thoughts on what that means to this tender-hearted musician. tl;dr: it means the world to me.
But isn’t this always the way? We go through seasons, for sure, but are we ever not in the season of overlap?
It’s been a joy to get to know Jennifer Coleman (Architrave, Haley Moley) a bit more recently. Jennifer is a prolific musician and painter from the 518 area. We discussed her synesthesia, how it took her a few decades to fully realize the vision she had for her music, and more.
In Conversation with Jennifer Coleman
With a really good song, you can’t imagine that song not having existed before. It's almost like time travel. It's spooky. You've conjured matter that shouldn't be possible.
It seems like some of your earliest music-making was DJing. Was that the first musical thing you did when you were younger?
No, I was in choirs and choruses all through school. I also had some classical vocal training in high school. I started writing songs in high school and attempted to do the coffee shop singer-songwriter thing. I had an arsenal of songs that I wrote but I was just terrible at playing acoustic guitar. And to be honest, I had already developed so much of an interest in electronic music and new wave and dance music that it was mostly just frustrating for me. I couldn't get the songs to come out the way I envisioned them. I had this whole deep synth new wave sound in my head built around these songs and all I had was this guitar and boy, it just didn't come out like I wanted.
Once I moved to this area, I met a bunch of people who had turntables. I started DJing and found I had a real knack for it. So I threw myself into that while I was in grad school for visual art and those two interests grew together.
I went reasonably far for a local DJ. I developed a reputation for being a DJ's DJ because I wanted to orchestrate things in a musical way beyond just selecting records and mixing them together haphazardly. I tried to make things be in key with each other, the rhythms make sense together, and the flow be at a certain pace. I wanted it to be a composition. So that was my MO as a DJ, and it still is. I still somewhat have that reputation, but I just don't do it as much.
So I put aside the singer-songwriter stuff for a while. It turned into decades. I did my art and didn't do a lot of music other than DJing. When I met Paul [Coleman] in 2010, we started talking about music. He was in rock bands and he had different projects, some of which were electronic based, so we started trading tracks. Then we started writing tracks together and sharing ideas about electronic tracks that we were building. And all of a sudden, I started to see possibilities about how I could make music that I wanted to make, because he had an understanding of the tools.
It started to dawn on me that I could go back and do this. I could make the songs that I write sound how I want them to. And all of a sudden, we started making music that I actually heard in my head, and it was an absolute catharsis.
That’s so wonderful that you had that kind of catharsis!
We started a project called Haley Moly, which was a play on DJ Jennifer Haley, which is my DJ name. Haley's my middle name. He had an electronic project called Mount Mole, so I thought it would be funny to have a combined name.
All my projects have puns and stupid jokes in the titles of things. We hype ourselves as dark wave, but I really want there to be humor in almost everything that I do and write.
That's great because I feel like it's too easy to start taking things way too seriously as an artist. We need to have a little bit of levity in what we're doing.
We have three other members in that band now, which is awesome. I love that band, and it is what it is, but it's not my pure vision. I'm a real control freak when it comes to music. So as much as I love that project and will always want to have it, I did need someplace to put out my particular ideas after saving them up for all these years. So we started Architrave in 2019 as a way to get back to that rudimentary vision. He lets me steer the ship.
So you write, you paint, you make music, and I was reading about your synesthesia. With this newest album, it all feels very related, right? All of these art forms that you're doing are so interrelated, and I'm particularly curious about how your synesthesia impacts the music creating process for you.
I experience music as a physical thing and a lot of the lyrics in my songs are about experiencing music that way. One of the first songs we wrote was called “Come Through”, and the lyrics are describing what it feels like to channel inspiration. One of the images in that song is rhythm falls like stones around me. If I close my eyes, I feel beats, like individual beats of a rhythm, as actual objects falling. Like I see them.
So when I'm DJing, I feel like I'm physically moving boulders with each kick drum. It's really strange. I have this very physical feeling about making music. And that's also connected to this idea that I have, that if you write a good song, it's weird to think of a time before that song existed. With a really good song, you can’t imagine that song not having existed before. It's almost like time travel. It's spooky. You've conjured matter that shouldn't be possible. That's physics. When you make a song, you have brought something into the world that takes up a certain amount of space that wasn't there before. And to me, that is fascinating. And I think it ties into that whole feeling of a song being this physical object. I have intense synesthesia in a lot of different ways, but I think that's a big one – I see things when I hear music. I feel it as a thing that's taking up space.
Are you chasing that feeling when you’re writing a song? Does it drive your music making in a certain way so that you're having that effect? Or, to put it a different way, if something isn't quite working when you're writing a song, is it because you're not having that kind of intense feeling attached to it?
I think that when a song is coming together, it's almost like a sculpture. You're chiseling away to find it in stone. It's in there. There's a fully formed thing that you're trying to find, and you just have to find your way to it. I have to chisel away and dig and throw things at it, then see how many bounce off. It's in there as a thing that exists, and I just have to find it. And if it's wrong, it's very upsetting. I have to find it the way it actually wants to be.
I do not have synesthesia, but the way that you describe the music as being very physical is something that I've thought about for a long time as well. For me, there’s this idea that because music is a physical event that's happening in a room with other people, that we have a responsibility as the artist to take care of what we’re doing and take care of a listener in that moment.
I like that you use the word responsibility. It does feel like a responsibility when you're delivering it, because you're right – it's something that happens in time that's an experience as well as a thing. I was talking about it in terms of a thing that you can go take off a shelf and experience and then put back. You're talking about it as a performance, and I think that's another angle, that it's also a physical responsibility.
How do you feel like the music scene has changed over time? I'm curious if there are any broad strokes.
Well, I feel like it's much more open now, thank goodness. I wasn’t connected to the rock music scene until the past decade. But I get this sense that the new generation of listeners is more open. They listen to everything. It's wonderfully open in a way that maybe it wasn't when I was a kid in the 80s. Back then, music was either cool or it wasn’t. And we rejected our parents’ music. Now, your parents’ music is cool. And I, as a 53 year-old woman, am booked to play colleges. What is happening? It’s weird. I'm so grateful that even though I'm coming to this late, there's an audience of all ages that is open and receptive and just incredibly kind about it. I'm very encouraged because my daughter is 15 and I see it in her generation too. They're not gatekeep-y, they're not too cool for school. It's fantastic.
Have there been any roadblocks, anything you've come up against that has been difficult in your journey?
Trying to get my music heard. I think that's everyone's struggle right now. There's just so much. I mean, this is also a positive thing. Everyone can make music and put it out and have it accessible to people. But oh my god, there's so much. So to get yourself heard without feeling like you're stepping on someone else or shouting over people can be overwhelming. It's like an ocean.
Anything else you want to share?
My daughter is a virtuoso saxophone player. Her parents are rock musicians and she’s obsessed with wind ensemble compositions. It feels like her own way of rebelling. We'll listen in the car and she’ll tell me that I’ve got to hear this arrangement of something. I'm very supportive and so happy she's into it. I don’t know anything about this music but I'm amazed by it. It's extremely complicated and academic, and I'm impressed that she can do it. It's just so funny to me how these things flip back and forth each generation.
OPIA Compilation
I’ve been holding this news in for a while, but I can now freely announce that I am a featured artist on the first compilation album on the OPIA record label, founded by Ólafur Arnalds. Stay tuned for the release date in early 2024!
If you know anything about me, you might know that Ólafur has been one of my favorite musicians and biggest sources of inspiration for years now. Truthfully, it’s been hard these last few years, trying to find my place in the musical world. I’ve been told by classical spaces that my music isn’t right for their listeners. And I’ve been rejected by countless producers/presenters/labels in non-classical spaces too. Finding venues and musical communities has proved elusive for me. And yet, my album In Our Softening continues to sell on Bandcamp and is even listened on their “all-time best selling solo piano” page.
We had a listening party for the OPIA compilation album yesterday, and it was one of those rare times that I thought, “I belong here”. This community has an openness, a generosity of spirit, and a voracious appetite for beauty and the highest-quality sound - things that I crave in my musical spaces and which can be hard to find. There is stylistic variety from track to track, and yet, I felt wholly aligned with the vision of each artist. It was an incredible, affirming feeling: one I will carry with me. I truly can’t wait for you to hear this album.
Upcoming Shows
Dec. 10: Cambridge, NY
1 PM
Music and brunch!
The Depot at Argyle Brewing Company
6 Broad St, Cambridge, NY
Dec. 16: Brattleboro, VT
8 PM
Tickets
Solo piano, with John Davis of The Folk Implosion opening
Epsilon Spires
190 Main St, Brattleboro, VT
Jan. 24: Troy, NY
6 PM
The Lift Series (stay tuned for the full season announcement and tickets!)
Solo piano
Troy Savings Bank Music Hall
30 2nd St, Troy, NY