Blood on the tracks

Erin McKeown’s fourth studio album We Will Become Like Birds marks a fairly dramatic change of style for the Virginia-born singer-songwriter. While her last record (2003’s Grand) came steeped in influences from the American songbook and classic Broadway musicals, the follow-up is a more cohesive collection with an emphasis on contemporary electric textures. This change of approach is, she says, intentional.
“I tended to be all over the place musically in the past, and wanted to try everything,” she explains. “This time around, things in my life became more focused. I’d just come through the break up of a relationship - you know, when you’re in the middle of it, there’s nothing you can think about. I just couldn’t write about anything else.’
Does this mean McKeown has abandoned her former incarnation as a purveyor of catchy quirky numbers like ‘Born To Hum’ and ‘How To Be A Lady’, both of which garnered her wide airplay on this side of the Atlantic?
“I’ve a great love of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley”, she confirms, “and there are a lot of people who’d be really happy if I continued to write in that vein. But those things are superficial and hollow for me right now. The problem with that kind of approach is the emotional content tends to be glossed over, and it becomes a kitsch reproduction of the form. I needed to work with a different kind of music, so I’ve retired a bunch of songs of that vintage.”
We Will Become Like Birds is undoubtedly in the tradition of classic break-up albums like Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks, Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call and Ryan Adams’ Heartbreaker. Certainly, songs like ‘Beautiful (I Guess)’ and ‘You Were Right About Everything’ pack an emotional directness (“I was too scared and delicate/ You kept trying, I’m the one that quit”). So does she feel that the kind of upheaval that accompanies a relationship breakdown is conducive to the songwriting process?
“I don’t know if it’s true or not,” she says. “But it lends a certain quality to what you do. The thing that was important to me was to offer hope to the genre. There’s always got to be some doorway out of that state of mind. And there are other things you can do at times like that, like go and see a lot of art and theatre and read lots of books, all of which I did.”
What about music? Did she find solace in the songs of others?
“Actually I wasn’t listening to a lot of music when I wrote these songs,” McKeown explains. “I tended to get much more enjoyment out of going to live gigs. I don’t want to spend time at home listening to Bob Dylan re-issues.”
The album was recorded in New Orleans with producer, engineer and composer Tucker Martine who has worked previously with Jim White, Modest Mouse, Bill Frisell and Laura Veirs. Joining McKeown in the studio were Matt Chamberlain (Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, David Bowie), Sebastian Steinberg (Beth Orton, Soul Coughing), and Steve Moore (Laura Veirs) on drums, bass and keyboards respectively, while Peter Mulvey added vocals.
“It was all done in a week,” she says. “I handed them the demos from my four- track where I’d played everything and let them do what they had to. I just became the guitar player in the band.”
“For me it was all about what’s going on with the drums. I care about lyrics too, but they’re not always the first thing for me. The importance of drums is about not having to think too much.”