Christy & Emily

LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC
I caught up with folk duo Christy & Emily during their show at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn this past Saturday. It was more sparsely attended than it should have been because their set was awesome, and, hey, they play fun games that involved passing a mini disco ball around the audience until the music stops, when the person touching it answers a question with a subjectively right answer decided upon by Christy and Emily. They asked, “You live in a three story house. Where are you more afraid to go, the attic or the basement?” The correct answer was the basement, inexplicably. Also, the girls mentor six underserved high school women in music and song creation, all of whom performed as the opening act. Below, Christy & Emily discuss the girls in the viBe SongMakers program, keyboards in Germany, and the Vietnam War.

JM.com: So, do you guys do projected visuals with every show?

Emily: Brock Monroe does them and he came and did our record release at The Stone, also. He had all this water he was using and made this giant mess all over the floor. I think that was the first time.

Christy: Well, we’ve done stuff at Secret Project Robot, and he does stuff there. That’s really how we got started because Secret Project Robot has their Mighty Robot Visual squad and they have a lot of people who are our friends and they do that stuff really all over.

JM.com: So, I wanted to ask you guys about viBe SongMakers. How did you get started with them?

Emily: That was through my friend Katie Eastburn. Now she performs just as Katie E. She was part of that band, Young People. And she’s just a great singer, a really great musician and also a really great dancer. She knew Dana Edell who ran this after school theatre program, and Dana asked Katie to help with dancing and singing in the program. So then the girls in the program really started writing these one woman shows where they were writing these whole scenes with just themselves acting all these different characters, and they were writing these little songs. Katie thought they were such amazing songs, and when she met me through some mutual friends she asked me if I wanted to come help record them and just flesh them out. And she asked Busy who’s the drummer in Telepathy and Allie Alvarado to play bass.

Christy: And I played guitar.

Emily: And it was just us at first, and we kind of backed up the girls. What’s so great about working with Katie is that she’s one of these people that when you have an idea and you say it to her she makes it happen. So viBe has developed into this very fleshed out educational program where they have piano lessons with me for a month and then they have guitar lessons with Christy and then learn beats and go to vocal coaching. So they just have all this amazing stuff now.

JM.com: So it really started as a theatre program for high school girls and then it sort of morphed into a music thing. How did they choose the girls who participate?

Emily: They have to be in the theatre program first usually, and they audition. It changes every year, but we usually have room for six girls to be in the program. It’s a special program that’s funded aside from the theatre program.

JM.com: And it’s need-based or…?

Emily: You know, it’s kind of a mix.

Christy: And the ones that have been in the year before kind of get priority because I think they want the girls to develop too, you know? And it’s also those girls that really show that they want to do it and have some inclination towards music.

JM.com: They’re putting out a record right?

Emily: Yes we have a recording session with them and then we do a record release.

JM.com: So who puts out their record? Is it a self-release?

Emily: It’s a self-release, yeah.

JM.com: What was it like working with the girls?

Christy: [Emily] does a lot of one-on-one with them and then I’ll do little workshops with them on guitar and stuff. So you kind of get to know all of them as people.

Emily: It’s different every year and there’s always a new dynamic. And some years you feel closer to them than others and this just feels like a really special year.

Christy: I just feel like I get really close with them by the end of it, and then it’s over!

Emily: Definitely. And I feel really close with this group this year because we’ve had them for so many years. You know, the girls can keep doing the program every year. Plus, a lot of them really took to the piano, which isn’t always the case. That’s why they were all accompanying themselves.

Christy: And there were some who already played guitar, too.

Emily: They really came in with a lot of skills

Christy: This is probably the most instrumental group we’ve had

JM.com: Do you have any interesting stories from the experience? Working on songs?

Emily: There’s actually a documentary that’s going to be made; there’s all this footage of them. There have been some really powerful things that have happened. What really gets me is there were several years in a row where they were writing these dead-beat dad songs. And it was like, wow, every year are we going to have a dead-beat dad story?

Christy: They have some pretty intense stories.

Emily: Yeah, they have a lot going on in their lives and viBe SongMakers is this really powerful outlet to just take all of that energy and just look at it, and write a song about it, and if you’re feeling angry or frustrated just write music from it. It was just really getting to me last year. There was this one song I couldn’t play with them without crying. It was kind of intense, actually. And it is for the girls too, you know, it would make the rest of the band cry, and during the performance of that song there was this audience member who just had such a different way of looking at the song. It was like, “You’re not supposed to feel sad about this. This girl is singing about it and she’s getting over it in this way.”

Christy: She just yelled out “You’re beautiful!”

John Colpitts (Kid Millions): Oh, hey, I picked up one of these (holds up the new Superstition Album).

Emily: Oh yea, sorry it took us so long to get you one! This is John, Kid Millions, he worked with us on the new album, the song “Tigers.”

JM.com: It’s nice to meet you. So what did you guys all do for the collaboration?

Emily: We spent a lot of time at the Acropolis…

Christy: Ah, the Acropolis.

Emily: It’s John’s recording studio… such a nice room. Yea, we actually just recorded a single with John, for his record label Brah Records. It’s going to be on a compilation or something.

John: Yeah, not sure (laughs).

(John eventually wanders back into the show to see Pterodactyl.)

Emily: Yea, we’ve known Kid for a really long time.

Christy: We’ve never had like a band band, but we always have people that we play with, and he’s just one of those drummers who can do it all.

Emily: We can’t take him on tour, though.

JM.com: So he played the drums on “Tigers?”

Emily: Yea.

JM.com: And you just had your new record, Superstition, come out in December? What did you try to do with your sophomore album?

Christy: The second album is sort of the opposite of our first record because our first record we tracked basically in a weekend. It took us a little longer to do the vocals, but the music was all finished within a weekend. And with Superstition we just had as much time as we wanted. We recorded it in Emily’s basement studio apartment, and we just worked on it on the weekends for months.

Emily: I still hear the album in those little groups of songs. We would do two songs in weekend, and I still hear them. It just feels more spread out.

Christy: We were able to bring in everything that we wanted to, too, like bass and viola. We were able to layer where as on the first one we had ideas for that, but there was no time for it. And it wasn’t our priority the first time. We were just like, “let’s get in the studio and get a recording and let it be what it is.” And it’s a great record, but for the second one, for me at least, it was really important to say, “If we want vibes on this song, lets get some vibes in there! Ok, now lets get Kit on the drums…” It’s just nice to have that time.

Emily: And then we actually have a third record that’s coming out in Germany in February.

JM.com: You guys are heading over to Germany soon aren’t you? For a tour?

Emily: Yea, and we had a studio in southern Germany. How long were we there, ten days?

Christy: I think like a week. And it was nice because they had a cooking service that cooked for us the whole time. It’s great.

Emily: And they had like a whole keyboard museum/library-like thing. One day I was taken by the hand and they just pointed to an old keyboard and said, “Ok, you’re going to try this one today.”

JM.com: How did this all come about?

Christy: Well, our friend goes to play at this tiny festival there.

Emily: And then we played it too. Klangbad is the festival and Klangbad is the name of the label that we worked with as well. They’re putting out the record in Germany that we are going out in February to support. I think it will be released here in the States in April.

Christy: So Superstition is done. We’re on to the next thing!

Emily: And this third record is more like the stuff we’ve been doing recently, like playing with the band. I mean, we didn’t bring the band to Germany, but we play the drums on the album and it has that orchestrated, fuller feeling.

Christy: It has that, but it really was produced by Hans Irmler of Klangbad. He really had a lot of input in it. Not the song writing, but sonically how things came out, and that’s really different from what we’re used to. We’ve always just produced ourselves, so it was really the first time someone was like, “I want to make your voice sound like this, and this is going to sound like this.”

JM.com: Did you like that part of it?

Emily: Some of the time. It got hard to negotiate that. In general, we loved his ideas, so it worked out. You know, when you’re in agreement with someone and they’re helping you get a certain sound it’s more like a collaboration.

Christy: I think that when people hear the third record it will sort of fall in the middle of our other two. It’s sort of like Gueen’s Head in that it is very vocally driven and yet it’s a little bit like Superstition with the eclectic sounds going on.

JM.com: Speaking of eclectic sounds, I read, Emily, that you have studied John Cage and the post-modern and contemporary musicians. Do you think that those artists have an influence on the sound of Christy & Emily?

Emily: I think it constantly has, yeah. Before I started playing with Christy those were the sorts of things I played, but I’m really trying to play more pop-y things now – less weird and more melodic. Yeah, just easier, really. I want to start concentrating more on other parts of making music instead of playing these really complicated chords.

JM.com: I also heard that your new song “105 & Rising” was inspired by the Vietnam War. That’s interesting; can you talk a bit about that?

Christy: It was sort of an investigation into my family history. My mother is from Taiwan. I was just talking with my family about my father’s experience during the war and how he met my mother. It was kind of just a love song, but then I started doing all this research and it became this kind of metaphor for them and my family history and it framed the war as this fucked up relationship between America and Asia. America and Vietnam became this macrocosm of a bad break up. That’s why, all of a sudden, I felt like this song became really long, as an interpretation of the war.

JM.com: So your parents met during the war?

Christy: Yeah, he was in Vietnam and Taiwan and he met my mother on those tours because he was a meteorologist in the Navy. He was doing weather reconnaissance. It’s kind of really personal stuff. “105 & Rising” just kind of grew out of that investigation about their relationship and that time, and the video really came out of my research on the computer. I would just pull these Quicktime videos off the Internet and animate them. I do video work too, so that just became the music video.

JM.com: Do you think your work in video is part of the reason you guys play with visuals?

Christy: Definitely.

Emily: And with venues like The Stone or here, at Issue Project Room, they’re white, like a blank canvas. There’s something about that that is a little awkward and a little intense.

Christy: Almost gallery-ish.

Emily: Yeah, and they’re seated venues with white walls. I love how they work and I love the people who organize for them. If we had a choice between here and playing at a bar, I would choose a place like this.

interview by Tricia Patterson