There’s a lot going on in Karen Schoemer’s new album August, which blends her wide-ranging approach to writing lyrics with musical contributions from the likes of Mike Watt and Amy Rigby. We spoke with Schoemer about the making of this album, her work with Bernadette Mayer, and how August differs from her earlier musical and literary ventures. And we’re also happy to premiere Schoemer’s video for the song “August 24.”
August is built around a pretty significant formal structure. Is this the first time you’ve created music built around — for lack of a better phrase — a formal constraint?
It is definitely the first time I’ve worked this way. August began as an idea for a poetry collection. I wanted to create a group of poems not so much on a theme – I didn’t want to write poems about the month of August – as poems that occurred in the month of August, informed by and infused with that time of year along with whatever happened to be going on in my mind and life. In an ambitious frenzy I decided I also wanted it to be an album, but I wanted it to be poems first. I’m sensitive about the difference between poetry and songwriting. When you add music to words, it’s like adding sugar to a recipe. Music is transporting and emotionally vivid and deeply pleasurable. Poetry can be those things as well, but it really feels like adding music is cheating. Music gets you to an emotional space instantly, whereas a poem can take years or even decades to unlock. People say, “Bob Dylan is a poet” and I roll my eyes. Emily Dickinson didn’t wear shades and have the Band backing her.
I generally feel like what I’m doing is a hybrid between poetry and songwriting. It’s both and neither. That is a satisfying way for me to understand it. But I wanted the August poems to exist as poems that could be experienced as poems. Having said that, I really feel like the album is the most wonderful way to experience the poems because the music is so marvelous throughout.
You’ve worked with a lot of notable artists over the years, from Mike Watt to Bernadette Mayer. Is there anyone in particular who has influenced you in a way you didn’t expect?
Everyone has influenced me in ways I didn’t expect. Mike Watt, when we began collaborating, pushed me to learn how to record myself at home, use audio software, launch a bandcamp page, create a website, and even make videos using my phone. I never aspired to any of those things, but each little benchmark expended my sense of who I was and what I’m capable of. Bernadette got me out of what was essentially lyric nature poetry into experimenting with language and forms. The New Yorker published a profile of her in 2016, when I was in her summer workshop. She talked about trying to nudge her summer students away from meaning: “I’ve been trying to get people to become less involved with it.” That was a radical idea to me. Bernadette made radical ideas fun. I haven’t chucked meaning totally out the window, but I strive all the time to follow her suggestion.
How would you describe the video for “August 24″?
This is the third video Jeff Economy made for one of my projects – he also made two videos for Sky Furrows. Every one is totally different. “36 Ways of Looking at a Memory” uses vintage clips, “Shopping Bags” uses AI and this video is cinematic and Lynchian, with slow motion and long dissolves. The big, sad, empty parking lots remind me of Gregory Crewdson. People drift across the screen, cars glide by, and you have the feeling that no one is aware of anything but themselves. I think Jeff sat at the edge of a parking lot for hours and no one even noticed him. We’re all so caught up in our own mental dramas. But his eye on the scene provides a kind of loving intimacy with these lonely people. Also I notice that he picked up on colors mentioned in the poem: walnut skin green, salmon orange, poet laureate purple. All those colors have a rich presence in the video.
Was your idea from the outset to release a book of poems along with the album?
Yes, the idea of a book or booklet was really important to me. I published a nonfiction book, Great Pretenders, in 2006, and it was a long journey creating another book. I call August a “chapzine” because it uses cut-and-paste visual elements inspired by pre-digital zine-making.
You’ve written a book about your enthusiasm for 1950s pop music. Do you see any traces of that style in the music you yourself have made?
Honestly, I would say not at all! What interested me about ‘50s/early ‘60s pop music, both the fuddy-duddy adult stuff like Perry Como and Patti Page and the schlocky teen stuff like Connie Francis and Frankie Avalon, was the way it lied to audiences. I was interested in the manufactured mythology of romance and marriage which was a rigid backbone of American culture, and the way pop music subtly or not-subtly brainwashed those values into listeners, or reinforced them. Find a husband or wife, get married, be heterosexual, have children, live happily behind your picket fence, open the garage door, get in the car. I was interested in the candy-colored surfaces, the aquamarine taffeta gowns, the ruby lipstick, the magnificent artifice. I don’t know what the parallel is now – Taylor Swift? It’s definitely not me in my Philmont, NY hallway with a microphone and a laptop trying to get a clean take before the cat walks through meowing or the furnace kicks on.
We’re all culturally literate now. Culture today tries to provoke and challenge assumptions, whereas that music tried to cap and suppress them. But I don’t feel as if I’m working in the cultural landscape, I’m way out on the fringe where people make weird shit to get it out of their brains. There may be some kind of backhanded emotional agenda in August and it may have to do with loneliness and finding richness of experience in isolation.
How would you say the music you’ve made under your own name differs from, say, your music made as part of Sky Furrows?
One thing I love about my bandmates in Sky Furrows, and people in the Albany-Western Mass psych scene in general, is that everyone does lots of projects. Eric Hardiman, who plays bass in Sky Furrows and co-produced August, has Spiral Wave Nomads, Rambutan and Century Plants. Mike Griffin does noise recordings and performances as Parashi. Mike Watt is another person who does dozens of projects and tries to discover something new through each one. I thought, hey, I can do my own thing, too. Sky Furrows is super loud onstage and I love that volume – I love being in the center of it and I do a lot of shouting and raging in those performances. The August show on November 21 at Avalon will be totally different, a first-of-its-kind experience. Musicians who contributed independently to the album are coming together as a band. We’re not rehearsing or practicing, they’re going to improvise new settings for the poems in the moment. The poems are elastic enough that I think they’ll do fine.
I remember back in the ‘80s when Neil Young made a string of different albums in different genres. He made a country album, a rockabilly album, an electronic album, and with each album he changed his look, his persona. His fans were pissed off. He was getting terrible reviews in the rock press. I interviewed him in the early ‘90s when Harvest Moon came out and asked him about it. He said those excursions had to do with the fact that he had two children with cerebral palsy and couldn’t communicate with them. He himself became indecipherable, at least by his fans’ standards. I was really moved by that and I think it’s a natural way to work. You have to give yourself up, in a way, fracture your comfortable identity, to do anything worthwhile. You can’t go around in the same old sock and shoe. Our circle is very, very small by comparison, but people in our scene respect that. They come to a show hoping to have their mind ripped open. They don’t want to hear what they’ve heard a million times. Thank god there are a few people around like that!
Photo: Michael Rogers