This Sunday, musician Mirah will play a solo acoustic show at Castaways. Mirah’s charming, delicate pop-folk songs are often infused with a sense of childlike reverie, but she also has a knack for canny observations and timeless narratives. In the past decade, Mirah has become a prolific and unique voice in the indie rock sphere, contributing to a number of Phil Elvrum records (of The Microphones, Mount Eerie), collaborating with visual artist Britta Johnson, and releasing six albums on the iconic Olympia, WA-based label, K Records.
In recent years, Mirah has made a subtle shift towards a more traditional pop paradigm, and the results are lovely. 2004’s C’Mon Miracle, her last full-length record, was a sweetly-spun, thoughtful pop record that still utilized her ear for lo-fi rattles and hums. After stints living in Olympia and her hometown of Philadelphia, Mirah moved to Portland, OR, where she currently resides. We recently spoke with Mirah about the pleasures of playing solo, living on the West Coast, and her forthcoming album, set for release in March of 2009.
Popcorn Youth: Is this tour in support of a specific release?
Mirah: Well, the last release I did was back in May or June, a rarities-type of album [The Old Days Feeling], unreleased or older recordings from an old 4 track, songs that can only be found on an obscure 7” release in Japan, you know? (Laughs) With the encouragement of friends I realized that I should be putting out that material digitally, and it ended up being a full-length. The whole thing took literally three years or more to put together. Then I did my remix project and the insect project and just finished a new album. The tour is not intended to be connected to any of that. For this tour, I felt that I wanted to tour solo again because it’s been years since I’ve done that. And while I enjoy playing in a band with various arrangements of people, it’s so different to be alone on the stage rather than as a member of a band.
Popcorn Youth: And you’ll be on tour with No Kids.
Mirah: Right. We’ll travel together, partly for practical reasons. There’s no sense using twice as much gas. And that’s a huge compromise that I make, traveling. In Portland, I ride my bike everywhere. But I seem to be the worst commuter of them all — I fly all the time, I have to get in cars to get from venue to venue. I’m very conscious of it. But this is the least that we can do.
Popcorn Youth: Do you prefer playing solo over playing with a backing band?
Mirah: They’re such different experiences. Before I had any experience playing with a backing band live I think that I idealized it a lot. Like, that playing solo was somehow ‘easier’ or at least not all the pressure would be on me to be the sole entertainer. I play the guitar and I sing, but I certainly have my limitations. (Laughs) But the really nice thing about playing solo is the way that I’m able to concentrate on stage. I can be easily distracted by other people. Like, ‘How are they doing? Are they okay?’ (Laughs) So I have these issues and I try to work on them in my life. Solo shows are focused and personal time for me.
Popcorn Youth: Well it seems as though even without a backing band the essence of your songs would remain perfectly intact.
Mirah: Solo, I play with a hollow body Gibson that is both electric/acoustic. Obviously without drums, keyboard, cello or whatever my music can have a pretty different impact sonically, but what I play changes very little. The nice thing about playing solo is that I can hear everything — there’s less to hear, so to speak, so it’s easier to hear what little is going on. (Laughs) There are a lot of compromises that can happen live, sound-wise. It’s hard to get a perfect mix. You try as hard as you can, but with every night being a different space, there’s a lot of compromise, in my experience. With a band, in terms of being able to hear everything and how I can perform to my utmost abilities, I just try to push on through, instead of really being able to listen to everything that is going on, and respond to all of it in a perfect way, musically.
Popcorn Youth: So sound quality is really important to you.
Mirah: (Laughs) Well, I wish I was an audiophile or a gear head, but I can’t really pick them out of the air like that. I’m not like, “Hey guys, I feel like I’m in a tunnel and I’m wearing too big of a scarf, can we fix the frequency?” I’m very sensitive to my environment. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: Were most of your songs written with just a solo setup in mind?
Mirah: Most of my songs were written just on a guitar by myself. Then I bring them to a studio to my collaborators and the songs turn into more orchestrated versions of themselves. So I never have the problem of having my very first association with a song being a full-blown number, unlike people who listen to my songs and go, ‘This is the song. This is what it sounds like.’ So they may hear my songs stripped down and say, ‘Wow,’ but for me, this is what it is and always was. All those other bells and whistles, they came later.
Popcorn Youth: Do you ever listen to your older material and cringe a little?
Mirah: Sure. With some of the really old songs, I’m like, ‘Ooh… I don’t quite sing like that anymore.’ Or, ‘Oh, now I wouldn’t have let that slide. I would have rerecorded that second vocal track.’ But at the time, I was just doing it for fun, and I never thought it would be released. I didn’t have a sense of how many people might listen to it… forever. (Laughs) Especially now with digital formats and the Internet — you can’t sneeze without it ending up on YouTube.
Popcorn Youth: What are your thoughts on that phenomenon? With regards to the Internet and increased accessibility?
Mirah: I have mixed feelings about that. I do take advantage of the Internet, like I don’t own an encyclopedia, so I’ll look things up on Wikipedia. I’ll research kora players on Youtube to get ideas. I’ll watch the end of a marathon from the Olympics online. That kind of thing. You can find any piece of information anywhere — lyrics, sheet music for show tunes or old pop songs. I’ve even looked up my own lyrics to remember how things go. (Laughs) If I can’t remember them and I don’t have a copy of the album with a lyrics sheet, I’ll look it up on the computer. So, thank you to whoever did that. (Laughs)
But anyway, I was going to say that I kind of have a critique of the ease of the flow of information and the form of communication that comes with this age of information. I feel like it has affected people’s social conduct in ways that I don’t love. I think that talking to someone really is better. And I feel a change within myself towards social interaction. A resistance to it, maybe. I’m actually a very social person but because there is an option to function and still get a lot of stuff done without even having any physical, social, verbal, or eye-to-eye contact with other people. And I feel that it has changed me.
And, yes, maybe I’m lazy in that I’m not such an activist that I refuse to use email or have a cell phone. I do take advantage of those things, and they can be amazing — for example, I would have never set up my own tours without email. When I was first starting out and setting up my own tours, it was in a post-Internet and post-email world for everybody who was in the field. And I never could have done that just over the phone. I can’t see myself ever having done that. So, I might not even have had a music career simply for that fact! You know, I’m not some sort of hardliner, like, ‘We need to ban this, and it’s all bad.’ Because it can be amazing.
But I do feel that a lot of things have been devalued, in terms of music in particular. The ‘thing’ part of it has been devalued to some sort of sound in the ether. There’s nothing to hold onto or flip through. If people do purchase or rip something in a digital format, they never get to hold that record, they never get to feel how special it is to put on a record. And it has to do with a larger shift in people’s consumption; the very fact that there is so much stuff in this country. In the story and in the supermarket — everything is bigger and bigger and larger and larger quantity. It’s hard to feel like it’s really worth it. Everything gets cheaper and cheaper but crappier and somehow also bigger. It’s like, ‘What is it worth to you?’ So I kind of see the digital downloading of music as that. If you download five albums at once you forget that they’re even on your iPod. And then, two years later your iPod is on shuffle and it comes on and you’re like, ‘When did I buy this?’ But I’m certainly not on some high horse opposing all of it. I’m certainly conflicted about it. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: Do you take advantage of digital technology with your newer recordings?
Mirah: For the new album, we used a little bit of everything, both digital and analog. The new album is coming out in March, and for it I did some recording on two inch tape with a 16 track and a little bit also on a 24 track. We would record analog and then dump the stuff from the tape onto a computer, and add some more things. All of the versions of those formats are represented on my new record.
On the one hand, it’s amazing how simple it can be to record [digitally]. You just blink and do it again. But there’s also something about it that I find distressing — the ease with which you can fix or redo a mistake. It takes the necessary skill out of the picture, because you end up with something ‘perfect’ even when you don’t know how to do it. I do believe that it’s really important for every individual to have their own process of creating something and making their own aesthetic decisions. It’s affordable, it’s DIY, it’s awesome.
On the other hand, there’s so much crap now. (Laughs) You have to wade through it all, and it’s like, how do you find anything that shines when there’s a cast of dimness over it all? It’s hard for things to stand out or for anything to feel really special anymore. It’s less special to be making music, it seems.
Popcorn Youth: Do you get a sense that there will be a moment when the paradigm shifts radically and we’ll start to move away from that?
Mirah: Not necessarily. I just see it expanding and expanding. There are no trends to it. There are a few examples of people who resist that trajectory, in various ways like through their lifestyle choices, but generally it’s so strange to me, this. I don’t know when things will stop expanding. I don’t see a mass movement of people purposefully reigning in this trend, if we’re talking about that. Something like MySpace certainly isn’t destructive, but the same concept gets applied to consumerism, environmental destruction, more more more. I don’t see a massive trend of people choosing to reverse that. I see individuals and small groups of people who are seeking out to work against that trend because they see the inevitability of its collapse.
Popcorn Youth: Well, you first started out with that 4 track and got labeled ‘lo fi,’ for better or for worse.
Mirah: My dad gave me a cassette four track as a graduation present, and that was still back in the day when tapes weren’t so… archaic. (Laughs) And the [K Records] studio that I used was my introduction to recording, more or less, and they have great equipment and old DAT recorder, and not a computer in sight. So it was mostly circumstantial than an aesthetic choice. But I am an old fashioned gal in a lot of ways — I make and can applesauce, we mow our lawn with a bush mower, and I ride bicycles everywhere. So it’s not necessarily an ill-fitting label, I suppose. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: Well it seems like thanks to people like Phil Elvrum, the term ‘lo fi’ as it applies to indie pop from the Pacific Northwest seems as if it’s here to stay…
Mirah: It’s funny, when I was making my first album, I wasn’t trying to make it ‘sound’ like anything. I didn’t listen to indie rock; I didn’t even know about it. But I listened to my record a few years ago and I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is, like, that lo-fi indie rock aesthetic!’ I was so shocked and almost a little bit embarrassed. (Laughs) But at the same time, I still liked it. I was definitely surprised that it sounded like so specifically a genre that I wasn’t even aware of at the time that I was making it. I think that it was accidental.
And in terms of having a lo fi aesthetic or choosing to record on tape, I think that’s great and I support it, but I just started out that way, it wasn’t on purpose. I didn’t have some concept in mind — it was purely circumstantial. I just happened to like it, and I made what I liked. And I listen now, and I still like it.
Popcorn Youth: And you live in Portland now?
Mirah: Yes. I moved to Olympia for college in 1992, and left around 2001. I moved back to Philly, and I was doing a lot of traveling and touring at the time. And during that year and a half after leaving Olympia and not really settling anywhere, I met my girlfriend, who I am still with. And even though she’s from Massachusetts, she moved to Portland in ’93 or ’94, and she still lives there too. We were together for a long time before I moved to Portland, so it wasn’t a hard decision to move back to the Northwest. And Olympia is only a little over two hours from Portland. By bicycle, it’s 12 hours if you stop every 10 miles. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: Portland has emerged in the last five years as one of the most exciting American cities for underground music scenes. What’s it like living there for you?
Mirah: Interestingly, it took me a number of years before I started feeling like I was meeting people who were involved in the Portland music scene in any way. I was traveling a lot and staying at home when I wasn’t. I’m kind of a homebody. But through recording I had great experiences meeting people, and the world started seeming cozier and cozier. Some meetings were more planned than others, like recording records or running into someone at a potluck.
Popcorn Youth: Do you try to go out and see other local bands play?
Mirah: I probably go out less than I should. I really am a homebody. I’ll make it out to some of the bigger shows, like Antony & the Johnsons just did a show with the Oregon Symphony, and I was like, ‘I can’t miss that.’ And it was so amazing. I haven’t gone to see a orchestra play in a really long time, since I was kid. Maybe since the Bjork ‘Vespertine’ tour. It was beautiful to see all of those people — 50 or however many people all get together in an orchestra — playing music at the same time.
I also volunteer at this rock ‘n’ roll camp for girls here in Portland. It’s for girls ages 8-18 and they have one week to meet other musicians and write songs and at the end of the week they perform a song. It’s so cool. I’ve had these experiences of being with 14 year old girls and trying to figure out, ‘How do you play music together?’ Like, ‘This person has good rhythm, this person, not so much.’ (Laughs) You can really hear that they can’t hear each other, and then comparing that to an orchestra — it’s a world of difference, of course. It was so beautiful. I don’t go to as many shows as I could or should but I do have a lot of friends in town who play music that I love to see. It’s a similar vibe to Olympia, I suppose. Portland feels bigger, and in a certain way I feel a little bit more at home in Olympia.
Popcorn Youth: And you’ve had a great relationship with K Records over the years?
Mirah: Yes. They’re so great there. It feels very supportive and very familial. I have good personal relationships there and that makes a big difference to me, because my career — which is a ridiculous word applied to myself anyway (laughs) — was pretty accidental, or unplanned. I mean, when I was in 5th grade we had to write a half page in the yearbook saying what we wanted to be, and I wrote that I wanted to be a singer and a writer. There has always been a part of me that wanted to do that. But when I went to college I wanted to study environmental or political science, maybe travel to somewhere like the Himalayas. I could have done anything, but because I chose Evergreen [College] in Olympia and there was such a great music scene… it was very happenstance. Or rather, fate. I did study some music through a performing arts program that had a music component. But once I got there, after my first year I tuned into the music scene and thought to myself, ‘this seems so neat. I would somehow like to be involved.’ But I certainly didn’t have a plan.
Popcorn Youth: You’re originally from the suburbs of Philadelphia. What was your exposure like to music growing up there?
Mirah: I owe a lot to my Dad for introducing me to a lot of music. We would see Sun Ra, Duran Duran, the Philly Film Festival. There wasn’t a ‘cool music scene’ that the youth was doing… or maybe it existed and I wasn’t cool enough to know about it. (Laughs) Which is very likely because I’m not very cool. But I know a little bit more about the Philly scene now because my sister lives there and she plays music too.