“Everything happens for a reason” is an adage that Margaret Glaspy has lived by in recent years. The California-born, New York-based musician really ought to be a bigger star, but sometimes the small matter of a global pandemic lays waste to the best-laid plans.
Coming off the back of her superb debut, Emotions and Math, from 2016, Glaspy’s second album, Devotion, released in March 2020, should have augmented her glittering reputation as a songwriter of quirky, thoughtfully crafted indie-pop songs with a side of virtuosic guitar playing. Instead, without the thrust of a tour and a traditional promotional cycle behind it, the record undeservedly fell between the cracks when it came to many end-of-year lists. Thinking in such terms, she says with a bittersweet smile, can lead only to sadness.
“I’m sure [Devotion] will find its own way,” she says with a wistful nod, on a Zoom call from her Brooklyn home. “But, yes, it was kind of a bizarre process in not being able to give it a full campaign, for sure. But everyone was going through it, so I wasn’t special, in that case. Sure, I had my moments of huffing and puffing at the time, but really, in the grand scheme of things, it was pretty universal at that point. So it is what it is.”
With all touring and in-person promotional commitments pulled, Glaspy, like everyone else, spent a lot of time at home that year. She taught songwriting, wrote a little and came to peace with the fact that she was never going to tour Devotion. There were some happy times, too: she married her partner, the guitarist and composer Julian Lage, who has coproduced her new album, Echo the Diamond. It is life experience and not the pandemic that has informed the album, which takes its title from a conversation that she had with Lage; the phrase, she says, “is a way of saying ‘shine bright’, ‘be brilliant’”. She agrees that both her songwriting and her perspective on life have undergone a shift in recent years.
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“There was grief, a lot of joy . . . It was everything under the sun, as life is,” she says with a shrug. “I think it did put some things into perspective for me – mainly that life is short. My process of songwriting became a lot quicker, I would say. Songs happened a lot more easily and a lot more fluidly; I wasn’t second-guessing myself, going ‘Is this good or not?’ I was just going, ‘Cool, I wrote a song. Next!’ And that felt like such a gift, amid all the kind of chaos and unknowns. That was a really beautiful thing that happened in the last couple of years: it became very apparent how important writing is for me, what close friends we are. It was there for me in a really pointed way.”
The album certainly has a rawness, both lyrically and production-wise, which stems from the fact that several of the songs on the record were first takes. Working with just two other musicians, the drummer Dave King and the bassist Chris Morrissey, created a certain kind of magic that recalled her high-school years, playing the fiddle or as part of the marching band.
“I think the record was meant to be a tightrope,” she explains of its back-to-basics approach. “It’s not hiding anything – which I think right now, I feel like that’s the flag I’d like to fly. Really putting musicians at the forefront, in terms of saying, ‘This is the way that music has gotten made for a long time – without a click [track], or any kind of quantisation [a digital technique to adjust the rhythm of a recording] or security blanket.’ Trust me, I listen to plenty of music that has those things, and I absolutely love it – but I think my real passion and heart lies with music that has a lot of risk involved. I kind of like to watch things almost fall apart. That moment of seeing something land or come together before your eyes is really exciting to me.”
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Echo the Diamond runs the gamut of emotions, from its spiky lead single, Act Natural – about the first flush of infatuation – to tracks exploring loss and grief, such as Memories. Although Glaspy doesn’t go into detail, she confirms that that song was about a recent loss in her life. The track was recorded in just one take because, as she phrased it on a recent Instagram post, “What you hear is the only take that that I could fully get through. Grief is a b***h.”
I just want to make great music and see where it leads. That’s kind of my mission
“It’s a very sad song for me to play and sing but also feels kind of a special thing, as a writer, for me to have done,” she says. “It’s probably one of my more vulnerable states on record, ever – so that one felt like it struck with me. It’s totally a song born out of grief, for sure.”
The album includes some pointed humour – one of its highlights, Female Brain, illustrates Glaspy’s experience in a male-dominated industry with lines such as “Your life’s in all-inclusive crews, while I’m out here getting stiffed and screwed”.
“That song just comes from being alive and having ovaries, I’d say,” she says, laughing. “The general experience of being in the world as a woman, and playing music. And even if I didn’t play music there’s plenty of experiences I’ve had that weren’t related to music in particular. So because I’m alive and have a pulse, I know that is the story for many women and many people who identify as female. I think it’s unfortunately a popular tale.” She grimaces. “That said, I can only speak from my own experience of being on the road and getting s**t from men all the time.”
The album’s sonic influence saw her returning to the music of her youth. There is an undoubted grunge and 1990s-rock twang to songs such as Act Natural and I Didn’t Think So. “I was listening to Sonic Youth at the time, and Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder,” she explains. “And watching live performances of them – that got me really inspired. My brother and sister both listened to that music so much, and I was the youngest of three, so they kind of showed that music to me by just blasting it out of the speakers in their room all the time when we were kids.”
Alanis Morissette was another major reference point – “diving into her records and also watching a lot of live footage of her, particularly as a young person performing at the beginning of her career,” Glaspy says. “She’s a super-inspiring performer, singer and writer. And Björk is always there for me; Vespertine is kind of a benchmark and touchstone for me at all times. I was watching some Jim Jarmusch movies, which was really inspiring to me, and also [the work of] Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen. For some reason they really inspire me musically and have really touched every one of my records, I think, on some level.”
The best thing someone could say about Echo the Diamond, Glaspy says, is that it is a companion in the best possible way.
“I think a lot of this music was written from a point of view that is really trying to figure out this whole human thing of being alive,” she says, pausing. “And recognising that things happen in ways that you can’t explain and can’t predict, and you have to just kind of get on board and meet life on life’s terms. That’s a big theme on this record. I crave to hear music that captures that myself and that makes me feel less alone. I’ve always gotten that from musicians like Elliott Smith or Aretha Franklin; just her voice alone gave me hope and made me feel less alone. But, in particular, writers that make me feel like they’re not sugar-coating the difficult stuff in life. That makes me feel, like, ‘Right! Somebody else is going through something, too. It’s not all a fairy tale all the time’,” she adds, chuckling. “So that’s the point of this record: to make it feel okay that things might be going in a way you don’t understand or predict.”
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Touring as the support act for bands such as Wilco and Spoon in recent years has not necessarily given her a sense of single-minded ambition to follow in their footsteps, however. The past few years have demonstrated that wherever Echo the Diamond leads her, she is where she needs to be in her journey.
“It gets tricky to think I’m supposed to be somewhere else,” she says, smiling. “There’s a fundamental displeasure, no matter where you are, if you want to be somewhere else all the time. So I try and stay where I am. I just want to make great music and see where it leads. That’s kind of my mission.”
Echo the Diamond is on ATO Records
