Hip Mama #30 – The Lineage Issue 2004

Interview by Claudia Zuluaga

 When Anny Celsi’s innovative new album Little Black Dress & other Stories was released in May 2003 on the Ragazza label, reviewers compared the L.A. artist’s poignant and complex talents to those of Aimee Mann.

 The initial inspiration for this album came when Anny – along with Suzanne Vega, Bruce Springsteen and Mann – was invited to contribute to a benefit compilation album, Songs Inspired by Literature.  The resulting single, “Twas Her Hunger Brought Me Down,” was just the beginning of Anny’s thematic tour de force.

 On Little Black Dress, her first major release as a self-titled artist, Celsi takes folk rock and jazzy pop and combines them with dark snippets (in the form of the albums’ liner notes) of noir-ish short stories.  Her fusion of music and literature results in a haunting dialogue between catchy, melodic songwriting, and the rich, evocative imagery of the classic Gothic-American short story.

Claudia:  You not only have a preteen son, but there were times during the recording of this album when you had two day jobs.  How on earth did you do it all?

Anny:  Actually, I think at one point I had four jobs!  I was waitressing, working at a grocery store, writing radio programs for an airline, doing data entry…in between all that, I was recording when I had a free day or evening.  That’s one reason the CD took almost three years to make.  My son is with his father for half of every week, and I would try to schedule working/recording when he wasn’t’ with me.  Sometimes, of course, he would have to come to the studio with me for a few hours.  As an artist and mother, I hoped he would find it fascinating to watch a record being put together, and would count himself extremely luck to be in the company of talented musicians, something he would look back on later in life with fondness and gratitude.  There were times like that, which made it a lot of fun.  He plays piano, and he even put down a keyboard part on one of the songs (“Day After Tomorrow”).  A mother’s dream come true!   But for the most part he was bored.  For times like those, there’s Gameboy, TV and Harry Potter books.

Do you think its’ possible for a mom to devote herself to motherhood and art without feeling as though one is getting the short shrift?

Well, devotion means undivided commitment, right?  So, not really.  It depends of course on what form your art takes.  I think many mothers have solved that problem by doing things like teaching art to children, recording children’s songs, or costuming the school play (and remember those clouds Meryl Streep painted on her son’s walls in Kramer vs. Kramer)?  Those things can be very fulfilling, but they may not have anything to do with your own artistic vision.

When my son was small, any time taken for myself (whether writing, recording, performing or traveling) felt like time taken away from him, and it didn’t feel good.  Now that he’s older and has his own interests, it’s much easier to find that time. 

As a side note, very few mothers I know of any artistic bent seem to have full support from their children’s’ fathers (whether separate or together), in terms of getting the time they need for creating – it seems to be an assumption that their first priority is to take care of the child’s needs.  It’s usually the mother who puts her trip on hold for the children, I rarely see male musicians doing it.

Your son has gone on tour with you…I remember, as a child, it was impossible for me to see my mother and father outside of their parental roles.  Do you think it’s a challenge for him to see you as not only his mother, but also as an artist?

He enjoys coming to shows with me when he can, and its fun to have him there.  He’s actually a lot of help with selling CDs (although I admit he has a financial incentive).  One of these days I hope he’ll want to play in my band.  He’s almost ready!  The last time we toured together was a couple of years ago, and it was wonderful.  It was fairly easy at that time, because it was the southwest, and I have a lot of family in New Mexico, so he was able to take some downtime.  He didn’t have to be at every show, but the ones he went to, he really had a good time.  He likes staying in motels, eating in diners and riding in the van listening to music.  Of course, it’s absolutely crucial when touring with children to make time for stopping to get out, wander around, look at Indian ruins, do the corn maze, get some strawberries or whatever’s going on at the side of the road.  You can’t just rush from gig to gig like you would with the other grownups.

I have to say that one of my ‘parenthood dreams’ was to have a little pal to travel with.  Often our expectations about parenthood don’t really come true, but that one has.  I remember driving through the Arizona desert at 2:00 a.m., my son asleep beside me, watching lightning flash in the sky ahead of me, listening to some Native American music on the radio, and thinking, “this is exactly where I should be.  Everything is perfect.”

Of course, next time may be completely different.  He’s a little older now, very into doing well at school, and it would be stressful to him to miss a week.  I’m the opposite; I’m all about the flexibility, the adventure, the “life experience.”  It’s a personality difference between us that I have to allow for and respect, rather than just pulling him willy-nilly around the country because it sounds like fun to me.  Next time a touring opportunity comes up, we’ll talk about it, and if he chooses he can stay home with his father.

How have the struggles of motherhood, paying the bills, trying to carve out time to work on your career shaped your music?

It seems like, for one reason or another, paying the bills has always been an uphill battle.  Maybe the last time I remember being on easy street was in my twenties, living in Portland in a houseful of struggling actors, paying $100 a month rent and living on a CETA grant job that paid $750 a month.  Since then it’s been downhill!

In the last few years, I have made what some might call Uncomfortable choices: to end a marriage, to leave a well-paying corporate job for an ultra-flexible job at a grocery store, to drive a pretty old car with no CD player, etc.  It seemed over the years I had fallen into a lifestyle that was not allowing me to say Yes to the artist; I was saying No because of my job, because of my husband’s needs, because I felt crushed by the weight of life that just didn’t fit me.  Now, yes, it’s a struggle to make it through every bill cycle, but most people are struggling, no matter what level their income, whether it’s to keep their children in private school or to make payments on a car they can’t afford.  My choice was to put my time and energy into getting this record made, and now that it’s done, to make sure people hear it.  What keeps me going is the undeniable fact that if I don’t do it, no one will, and that for me, there is no other way to live.  I pull my little train up this hill because I truly believe that somehow, some way, I will find a place where the ground is level, and the train can just hum along.

The CD took a long time to make, mainly for financial reasons, and during that time I was impatient, wished it were finished, wished I was farther along, wished I had the resources I needed.  But looking back it’s obvious that if it had been finished a year earlier, it wouldn’t have been the same record, and it wouldn’t have been nearly as good or felt complete the way it does now.  I wouldn’t have had some of the songs that ended up on it, some of the incredible players that participated, and the concept of the “other stories” might not have occurred to me.  So I have to trust that the things I’m impatient for now will come in their own good time, just as the record did.

I read that “Twas Her Hunger Brought Me Down” was inspired by a Theodore Dreiser novel.  I once heard someone say that all art was a response to other art.   What is your take on that idea?

I don’t think that’s entirely true, but I do think that other art is a very rich resource for inspiration.  Once you’ve run down all your relationships from high school up to now, what else are you going to write about?  I’ve written songs based on books, based on paintings, based on a scene from a movie, even on something I saw spray painted on a wall. Most of the songwriters I know of are voracious readers, and that certainly can’t hurt when it comes to putting sentences together.  Picasso copied one painting by Velasquez dozens of times.  But every time he copied it, it was a Picasso.

Can you talk about your songs and their relationship to the stories that accompany them – which is the stimulus, and which is the response?

The songs were all written and recorded before I started writing the stories.  At that time, I wasn’t working due to a job injury.  The recording was all done, and I was waiting to get it mastered.  For whatever reason, I hadn’t written any songs in months.  It was hard even to pick up a guitar and I couldn’t really sing either.  The cover of the CD was finished, and I already had the concept of making it look like a book.  I started to write something for the back cover, just a little teaser based on “Little Black Dress,” like the ones they have on paperback books.  I kind of gave myself an assignment to write a story for each song.  Some were easier than others.  They’re all related to the songs in some way, but I wouldn’t say they describe the song so much as just put you in a world with those characters.  A song is basically two-dimensional – there are the lyrics and the melody, and they have a specific beginning, middle and end.  But beyond that is the world within the song that we don’t see: the glass on the table, the lipstick in the girl’s purse, the curtains in the hotel room, the person who might be watching from across the street.  All of those thing exist in a dimension that really only belongs to the listener.  It’s like when Alice went through the looking glass – what she found on the other side was so much more than just a reflection of the room she was in.  When I wrote the stories, I just tried to put myself in the room, look around and see what was happening.  This is all completely separate from what originally inspired the song and what it might really be about, which becomes completely irrelevant once someone else hears it anyway.  The resolution of the story is up to the reader as well.

Looking at all of the aspects of this CD – from the texts, to the songs, to the Pulp Fiction album cover, etc…the CD is such an enveloping experience – far beyond the experience of simply listening to some songs.  With that in mind, does an audience expect something extra from a live Anny Celsi performance?

I’m very lucky to have awesome players in my band, and when we do a show, it’s just kick-ass rock n’ roll.  I like to dress up, be a bit bigger than life, know my material and deliver it – that’s a performer’s job – nobody comes to watch you drag yourself onstage in pajamas and complain about the traffic.  I take the same approach if I’m doing an acoustic show, except I don’t try to kick your ass so hard.

With this new record, a couple of times we’ve done a kind of cabaret performance with a wonderful actor, Arye Grosse, who reads the stories aloud as an introduction to each song.  He brings to life that “Joe Typewriter” voice in the stories.

This is the Lineage issue of Hip Mama.  Can you talk for a moment about lineage – musical, otherwise?

Most of my family is not especially musical, but they are incredibly literate.  My grandmother, mother, aunt, sister and brother are all writers and/or artists.  I’m not really much of a musician myself; I’m a writer whose format is pop music.  But I’m not sure if it’s nature or nurture that gives my family that bent.  People often comment on my son’s musical talent, and say that he must have gotten it from his parents, and while his father is a very talented musician, I can’t take any credit for giving him “musical” genes, other than the fact that he’s been listening to music since he was a baby.  His knowledge and understanding of the mechanics of music are already way beyond mine.  Children naturally gravitate to what’s important to their parents, whether it’s fixing cars, fishing or writing songs.  I think any child has the potential for that talent, and will develop it if encouraged; but if your parents are musicians, you’re given the keys early on and told, “Take the car, kid, just don’t hurt yourself!”

Reprinted from Hip Mama Magazine www.hipmama.com