For such a young artist, Jesy Fortino exhibits uncanny patience. With Hands Across the Void, the 2007 Sub Pop debut from her musical nom de guerre Tiny Vipers, the Seattle songwriter established herself as a singular artist whose songs seemed to escape reluctantly from her lips as her guitar issued trance-like circles of sound. The follow-up, Life on Earth, due out tomorrow from Sub Pop, finds Fortino banking on her strengths, exhibiting an even stronger grip on the temporal with her methodically plucked guitar and haunting baritone. Here, though, is pushing further into experimentation that takes her music from almost-pretty light melodic fare, such as “Time Takes” and the title track, to dark reverb-laden psychedelia, as found on “Young God” and “Twilight Property.” The result is breathtaking. Sound spoke with Fortino about the almost accidental creation of the album, her understanding label and how that patience has helped her to make art without going mad.
SEATTLE SOUND: Tell me about when you started this project, you recorded some demos in your bedroom, when you started it, what were your goals for the album and what did you think it was going to be?
JESY FORTINO: When I started it, it was kind of chaotic. I hadn’t re-signed to Sub Pop and I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. So I just decided I was gonna start recording and I was going to make the best record I could, basically. I thought, I’m just going to do it exactly how I want, after I sit down and listen to it I’ll figure out what to do.
I recorded all the tracks at home, but they were so sparse that I was using digital equipment, at least for the reverb stuff, at my house. I thought that they sounded good just by themselves, recorded in a room, but then I went down to sing on my friends’ record, Balmorhea, and the studio that they used in Texas had chamber reverb, which is like real reverb. You’re singing and playing into a room, like a chamber—it looks like a tank kind of in the back—and then mics pick up the sound of it echoing in the room. I liked that reverb, how organic it sounded, and so I went down and re-recorded the more sparse tracks, I re-recorded them using that room with the engineer down there, Andrew Hernandez. I dunno, it just kind of pieced itself together, I didn’t really plan it, I just had the attitude of, “I want to make this sound exactly how I want it to sound. And I’ll worry about the label stuff, I’ll worry about how it gets released later, but for right now, that’s all I care about.” I really zoned in on it.
SS: When you found that reverb chamber, was that a great “Aha!” moment?
JF: Yeah! It just clicked. It clicked really clearly, ’cause up till then, I was like, “I don’t know if I really want to record in a studio; I don’t know if I want to record it myself,” you know, ’cause I love recording myself but I don’t have expensive equipment. I just don’t have the money to invest in a full analog studio. I have a four-track and a couple pedals and a guitar, which is cool, but in my mind I just wanted it to be as rich and I just really wanted to capture all the tones. And when I went down there, I kind of just agreed, like, “Yeah, I’ll do it!” Like, I didn’t think, “Oh, I’m gonna scout out a studio while I’m down there.” I didn’t even know what they were recording, I just wanted to help sing on their record. So when I went in there, the way that Andrew works, he’s really into experimenting, too—we both just have the same approach to recording, to do whatever it is by any means necessary to get the right take, to get it to be as organic as possible. It’s like we were old friends, as soon as we met.
SS: Do you think that you’ll work with him in the future?
JF: Yeah, for sure. He’s just great, and he has it set up so it’s all analog. We did everything on tape, reel-to-reel tape, and he just has a really intuitive approach that I can relate to.
SS: What about the two tracks, “Young God” and “Twilight Property”? They both sound very different? Were they recorded in the same way.
JF: Well, they were recorded in my room, but we ran the finished product through the reverb chamber to give it that big sound, that echoey sound. We just took my four-track and hooked it up through the studio and played that through the reverb chamber and recorded that.
SS: You get to those parts of the record—those two eerie, beautiful tracks—and it is a very different sound and you feel like you just fell off of a cliff during a hike, sort of. Were those songs that you recorded once and you could not re-create?
JF: Yeah. They’re special.
SS: Is that how you go about creating your instrumentation, is that you sort of play around with the record button on and hope that something like that happens?
JF: You know, I spend a lot of my time just noodling around in my apartment, and every now and again there’s something that happens that can’t ever happen again, and if I’m lucky enough to get it recorded, then it’s awesome, for me at least. That’s kind of the approach I’ve been taking with new recording. Like the stuff I’ve been doing lately—the stuff that you heard on the record’s about a year old now—and so the stuff I’ve been working on at home now is a similar approach, where it’s more about getting a cool recording. Not necessarily taking a song and playing it the best you can play it with no mistakes and then that’s the recording, that’s the record. Instead it’s like getting something special, and being lucky enough to record something special, and then it is what it is, it’s not about re-creation.
SS: So that must have been tough going into the studio and re-creating these other songs.
JF: No, not really. It’s weird, I went down there and I booked two weeks of studio time, just so I’d feel comfortable, like, “Oh, I don’t have to rush.” And we literally almost recorded the entire record on the first day. Just one after another. Like, “Oh, this is our mic placement; let’s just mic the room, the area; it sounds good; let’s just play the songs.” And on tape, that’s kind of how you do it. With ProTools, you do a million takes, you can cut and paste the best parts of all the takes and make a song out of it, but with tape, you just get a take and it’s good or it’s not good. So if you’re in the right mood you can just play a set, almost and have it be just right. That’s kind of what happened, it was cool.
SS: When you were going into creating this album, before you discovered Andrew, were there things with the last album that you weren’t happy with, lessons that you feel like you learned, that you applied to this record?
JF: Yeah, for sure. On the last record, we recorded that track “Forest on Fire,” and the way we did that track was different than every other track. We had the attitude of, “The record’s done, we have enough for the record, so this track is purely extra material, it’ll just make the record longer, no big deal.” So there was no pressure on it at all, and it left freedom. The song wasn’t totally written, either, so I just kind of messed with it in the studio, and he let me mic the room, rather than micing up really close like the rest of that album was miced in a way that I wasn’t totally used to. I like the sound of just the room being miced, that’s just the way I am. So that song was recorded that way, and then I improvised a lot on it. It’s one of those things where you capture something cool and you’re like, “Whoah!” It just kind of changed my attitude toward recording. Recording doesn’t have to be about practicing something and getting it perfect, it can be about doing something in a way that’s so specific and unique for that moment that it makes the recording special. That’s kind of where that philosophy came from, like, this is how I want to record from now on and I totally learned a lot from that.
SS: You didn’t learn what not to do, but what to do.
JF: Yeah, I like improvising more; the pressure of not making mistakes, messing up, I can’t stand it. It’s not enjoyable, and I think the end product’s too sterile. I think the slight deviances in time, and the sound of your hand on the guitar, those kind of things, they make things sound more organic. I don’t think they’re mistakes.
SS: Do you consider yourself as more of a natural live performer than a studio performer?
JF: I would say that what I do live and what I do in the studio are almost two different things, sometimes. The tracks on the new record, I feel like those songs are really captured well. I can play those live and the recording sounds like they are live. But the more psychedelic or the more instrumental stuff is definitely … it’s just a different sound, and when I recorded “Young God” and “Twilight Property” it’s almost a totally different thing. I really enjoy doing it, but it’s not something I do live ever. It’s just two different aspects of how I do music I guess.
SS: At what point in the creation of the new record did you approach Sub Pop and start talking to them again, and how did you approach that?
JF: Well, we’d been talking throughout the couple years since I did Hands Across the Void. They’re like, “So, what do you think about doing another record?” and I was kind of sitting on it a little bit. It was just a lot of work, doing that Hands Across the Void record was … it took me to a lot of weird emotional places and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it again. It’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of pressure, kind of, to be on a label that size. A lot of people pay attention and there’s just a lot of pressure that comes with that. So I kind of just waited until I understood what I was doing and made sure I liked what I was doing, and found an approach to music where I could keep doing music without going crazy. And once I’d found that, I talked to my A&R guy, and I was like, “Okay, I can do it,” and they were like, “Well, we can do it, let’s do it,” you know? They’re really understanding there, they let me take my time, and we just sat down and talked about goals. They were like, “An easy way to figure out what you want to do with music and what to do is to just think about what your end goal would be in the future and perhaps that will help.” So I thought about that, and then when I figured that out a little bit more, then I was like, “Okay, this was a good idea, maybe.” I was just worried for a while there that the music was too weird. I was like, “Is this going to be too weird for them?” But they liked it, so it was cool.
SS: What are your goals?
JF: I just kind of decided that I want to be able to travel, and I want to be able to make music with people I like. As long as I’m having a good time and I can choose what I do. I had enough good experiences toward the end, right before I re-signed, that I was like, this is what I want. I don’t want to play big festivals, I don’t want to do things I don’t like, I don’t want to be in a world I don’t understand. But I kind of found a little niche where you can exist and not be totally surrounded by weird commercial stuff, and that made me go, “Okay, this is what I want to do, and this is how a label can help me get that.” I guess my end goal was to be able to play music and enjoy my surroundings, be with people I like and not a bunch of strangers. It had a lot to do with just having a good time and being around friends.
SS: So I want to talk a little bit about the subject matter within this record. It’s not necessarily a painful record, but there’s definitely some darkness on it. Is that informed by what you were going through at the time, or is that where your mind generally goes when it’s writing lyrics?
JF: I just have feelings; I’m a pretty emotional person I guess and they go all over the place. I mean, really happy things are accompanied by really intense fears of losing those things that make me happy, and things that make me sad and depressed and full of grief are accompanied by finding ways out of that, and finding hope. I feel like that’s present in a lot of the songs, just ’cause that’s how I am and how I experience life. I don’t ever plan on what the songs are about. There’s no concept behind anything. I just go completely with my gut, it’s just intuitive, kind of dreamlike writing. I don’t sit down and go, “Okay, this will be a concept album about this, and this will be a song that expresses this.” It’s kind of a mystery to me, even. The songs have metaphors I understand, and things from my life, but it’s almost like interpreting a dream for me.
SS: Do you ever write lyrics first, or is it always an accompaniment to the instrumentation?
JF: It’s always accompaniment. The guitar, the melodies come first, for sure.
SS: Are you working on different material right now?
JF: Yeah.
SS: And you’re gonna start touring on this, right?
JF: Yeah, I start touring on the 14th, I leave.
SS: Are you going to be playing any new material at all?
JF: I think I’m just going to play the songs from this record, ’cause I still really enjoy playing them. And a lot of the newer stuff isn’t done enough to be played live, anyways, so it will be a while. The record’s gonna be released on double LP a little bit after the initial release, and so there’s gonna be some bonus material, 10 minutes’ worth of bonus material on that, and I just finished those tracks. They’re more abstract stuff like “Young God” and “Twilight Property.”
SS: Where was the photo for the album cover taken?
JF: That was taken up by Aberdeen; my boyfriend picked the location. It’s on the Indian reservation up there; I don’t remember specifically. It was really windy. It was so stormy and windy, we couldn’t believe we actually got a fire started.
Photo of Jesy Fortino and album cover by David Belisle