FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: Max Lester
Part Thirty-One: Aldous Harding
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I am very eager to include…
PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Colls for Interview Magazine
Aldous Harding in this part of Modern Heroines, as she is an artist who is going to be a legend and icon of the future. Born Hannah Sian Topp, she is a New Zealand Folk singer-songwriter, based in Cardiff, Wales. I have been following Aldous Harding music since she released her eponymous debut in 2014. She then followed that with 2017’s Party. I think those first two albums are remarkable, but she really hit a high on Party. It was one of the best albums of that year; critics remarking how her mannered delivery and remarkable voice was striking. Others talked about the shifting moods and how there is this blend of raw and the more tender. That is pretty much true of her latest album: 2019’s amazing Designer. I am not sure whether Harding has plans this year for a fourth album, though there is a definite demand for her amazing music. I am going to end with a playlist of the best tracks from her three studio albums at the very end, though I want to concentrate on Designer. It is an album that is impossible to forget and ignore. If you have not heard it yet, then go and pick up a copy. I am going to draw a couple of reviews in for that album but, first, some interviews that were conducted in 2019. We learn more about the Designer album and Harding as an artist.
I want to borrow a lot from an interesting interview Under the Radar published:
“Growing up with musician parents, Harding, an animal lover, toyed with the idea of studying veterinary sciences. In her 20s, when she did decide to make music her career, she quickly revealed herself a prodigious talent with her 2014, self-titled, goth-folk debut. By the time Party, her sophomore effort was ready for release; she was signed to tastemaker label 4AD. Party received international acclaim and made several of 2017's Best Of lists and the following year won her New Zealand's prestigious Taite Music Prize. She is now in it for the long haul.
Harding is talking about starting her new tour and being nervous—New York is cold and she fears she might fall ill. "I mean if I have to sing 'Zoo Eyes' with a cold, it's not going to be so good," she says with lightness. During her last tour, she became obsessed with how the show must look. She appeared possessed by the different vocal characters her songs called out and wore impossibly pristine white ensembles throughout. "I'm a little unsure what to expect this time," she says. "I have a plan but we'll just have to see. I'm as curious as everyone else I think." As it turns out, she needn't have worried too much. She's the toast of the town when she performs in New York, and later in Washington D.C. where NPR's Bob Boilen is all praise for her.
Harding wrote most of Designer's songs on her last tour, going straight into the studio last summer and reuniting with producer John Parish after her 100-date tour. In playing Party, it became clear to her what kind of songs might be missing from her repertoire so she willed them into being with her pen. "Damn" was the last song to be written; she knew that the album needed a "lull before the lull" (just past mid-point on the album, before a set of four heavier-themed songs) and she wanted a self-portrait of herself as an artist.
"I was pretty terrible about that song," she explains. "John was asking me every day, 'Did you manage to write a song last night? You know you did say you would have it today.' I had to keep my head down, put my hand up and say, 'John, I hear you.' And he would say, 'I know I trust you but we're two days away, now would be the time.'... I had to just sit with it and figure it out."
When she finally gave the song to Parish it was almost nine minutes long. "I knew that wasn't going to fly but I presented it to him in that way, and then we sort of made a unanimous call on which verses to remove," she says. "I can tell I was lazy, instead of saying what I was trying to say I was kind of over indulgent."
The finished song, however, is perfectly formed. A sparse piano ballad that channels Vashti Bunyan, with a lolling rhythm as if in a rowboat, on a lake with only the gentle breeze for company; it brings an enormous sense of wellbeing. It's vaunted by her poetic lyricism, as she astutely employs the image of a tambourine as a metaphor of her as music-maker. "Damn a shammy, I'd thought I'd made a tambourine," for when she presumably got it wrong and didn't have a song.
Knowing the effort she now places on her songwriting and sometimes at the expense of others she apologizes: "Sorry I was late and you didn't get your weekend." Yet she ends with a playful revelation: other times songs can come to her without any agonizing, without even trying—"Damn it, Hanny/When you jump up and down/Your chains almost sound/Like a tambourine." Harding might be guarded and at times come across as dour but Designer is warm and full of humor.
There's a general levity that pervades the whole album, pointing to an artist, growing into their craft and personal life, yet comfortable with their difficult choices. The first two songs "Fixture Picture" and title track "Designer" both reconcile choosing art over matters of the heart—"better to live with melody and have an honest time," she sings on "Fixture Picture." There is a cheekiness to "Treasure," and you wonder if she's found a new love when she purrs: "I've got my eye on you now treasure."
For three years, Harding who now resides in the UK, was part of one of Lyttelton, New Zealand's most famous pairings—inextricably tied to its folk scene's resident heartthrob Marlon Williams. He recently had a cameo in A Star Is Born, as the Roy Orbison upstart. Williams, who now resides in LA, had a hand in producing Harding's debut and has talked openly about their relationship, claiming they will "always be tied together." She sang on his last album, the duet "Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore," though when first approached, she told him to "go find someone else." In the end she did capitulate. They appear to have a loving respect for each other, but an even higher regard for their métier. The song is about their breakup”.
Designer was featured in many end-of-year lists in 2019; it has won incredible plaudits and praise. It is no surprise when you listen to it! There is something very natural and seamless when you listen to Harding, though her songs and delivery have all these different contours and layers. It is a fascinating brew! When she spoke with The Line of Best Fit, we learned more about her songwriting process and the sense of expectation that built after 2017’s Party:
“Harding’s stories are in her songs; they are weaved through their lyrics and sung through all of the voices inside of her. Not to say she literally has lots of voices inside of her, that is. Just that each song has its own and each of them is what comes out along with the words. Many of the songs on Designer, she started writing while on the road with Party. One of these, "Pilot", she added into setlists, including her show at Islington Assembly Hall in London at the tail end of 2017.
Its lyrics strongly paint the picture of time on the road, of certain ill habits Harding found herself falling into on the road to battle thoughts, which she would then get angry with herself for. Whether for having them or realizing them is left up to "Pilot", Designer’s closing track; ellipses before the next chapter. The song has references to sadness and Albert Camus; an existential, absurdist philosopher who claims that ‘he who despairs of the human condition is a coward.’
"Pilot" took 15 minutes to write. “I was having a strange series of conversations with myself,” says Harding. “I realised I was a creature of habit. ‘Pilot’ was me laying it all out and going, 'This is what I think is going on.'" Moods. Fears, anxieties, sadnesses… addictions? "I don't know if I was writing out of emotion or necessity, because I was living it. I can't be the person doing and the person watching at the same time.” It was a confession, she adds, to everyone. “This is just what it is, it’s how I am sometimes,” she further confesses. “A lot of the time”.
Since Party’s release in 2017, it’s the world who has been watching. Despite this, Harding refuses to write for anyone but herself. “My obsession at the moment is producing things that make other people feel in an interesting, listenable way." She rightfully classes this as good work. "I like the feeling of if I write something that seems interesting and John will go, 'That's a good track,' and I'll go 'Right?' Not like, 'Yeah, I'm great', but like it makes sense. Like, he sees it, right? He felt that, right? I like that feeling because everybody deserves to feel good at something."
Anyone who has seen Harding perform live has felt it, too. They’ve seen it. She inspires feelings of disarmament, catharsis, otherworldliness. “I'm an incredibly sensitive person, I think that's clear,” she says, her lips forming more words before they surface. “I'm also very strong, but as for the sensitive side, you couldn't pick a stranger thing for a shy, paranoid person to do.”
Harding lives in the moment, for the now. She has to; her world has rapidly expanded fairly quickly and expects people will continue wanting to know it all. The key is to try to not think about it so much. “You can think yourself into a corner. You can think yourself around the world,” she says knowingly. “In the end, it doesn't matter. If it matters⸺you know, people matter, love matters⸺it can't matter that much, because it wouldn't arrive and disappear the way it does and it wouldn't let us lay with it in the interim.”
Every morning after waking, Aldous Harding slips on a pair of headphones and meditates to prepare for the day ahead. Unapologetically, she allows her art to apply as much pressure as it receives; sharing, but by design”.
I am going to end up with some reviews, as I said, but there are a lot of fascinating interviews available that I could not leave alone. I genuinely believe Aldous Harding is going to be around for many years - and she is already inspiring artists. In terms of her songwriting, there are few as consistent and spellbinding as her.
Whilst her music is definitely awe-inspiring, as she explained in an interview with The Guardian, her intention was never to make music that made this huge artistic statement:
“Her recent album, Designer, also has a foot twisting gently in the realm of pop, although its catchy songs still have wrigglier, murkier lyrical roots. Take the sweet guitar-pop of The Barrel, full of puzzling phrases such as “show the ferret to the egg” and more emotional ones, such as “when you have a child, so begins the braiding/ And in that braid you stay”. Her ever-changing voice also leads the mood of the songs: gently heavenly on Weight of the Planets, sadly stern on Heaven Is Empty. On the title track, Harding sings the lyric “give up your beauty” with relish.
She has never tried to make art that’s arresting, she says. “All I ever wanted to do was to do something interesting.” But she will admit that she’s “trying to work out what’s missing in music. I’m trying to hold your focus as an unremarkable person trying to do something remarkable.”
And she’s doing this while there’s an aversion in her generation to admitting that you’re even trying, she says. Why does she think this? “Because there is so much to lose. It’s like when people go to acting school and someone will say, ‘Now, I want you to scream at the top of your lungs’ and they don’t want to. They don’t want to watch themselves fail.” Fail at what? Harding’s look lingers in my head long after I leave. “Fail at what is basically being human”.
I would urge everyone to listen to of Aldous Harding’s music, although Designer is a pretty good starting place. It is an album that still impacts me some two years or so after it came out. Unsurprisingly, critics were keen to heap praise on a remarkable album. This is what AllMusic observed:
“The New Zealand singer/songwriter's third studio effort, and her second time working with producer and frequent PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish, Designer eschews the post-last call darkness of 2017's Party for something a bit sunnier, though no less peculiar. Aldous Harding remains an enigma; she's an elusive but captivating presence who can invoke both a nervous giggle and a slack-jawed tear via her careful pairing of abstract lyrics and subtle hooks. Her off-kilter songs have something in common with the knotty confections of Welsh pop innovator Cate Le Bon, but Harding's willingness to wrap her sibylline words in such agreeable melodies gives her a bit of an advantage. Take the opening stanza of the easy-on-the-ears "Zoo Eyes," which wonders "Why? What am I doing in Dubai?/In the prime of my life/Do you love me?," or the closing verse of the spare and heartbreaking "Heaven Is Empty": "If a big cold bird tried to bring me a baby/I feel I would get on its back/kissing his neck/breathing the down/kissing the down/and whisper softly/I don't want entry/that place is empty." Both songs exude a sort of existential malaise, but also a propensity towards transference. Harding has stated in interviews that her ideas are, simply put, just ideas, and more often than not it's her inclination to simply run with them rather than search for deeper meaning. Still, there are sharp observations to be found throughout the LP's nine tracks -- "When you jump up and down your chains almost sound like a tambourine" -- and incisive examples of pop acumen -- "The Barrel" is a warm '70s pop gem that just happens to contain impenetrable lyrics and feature a mesmerizing video of a dancing Harding dressed in what looks like a nun's habit with a tube of toothpaste for a hat that eventually disappears and is replaced by a garish blue monster mask. A singular talent, Harding seems to have hit her stride on album number three, and while the darkness of previous efforts is still pervasive, Designer feels like a summer record, though it's probably best suited for dusk”.
I am going to wrap up soon but, just before I do, I want to bring in a glowing review from The Guardian:
“For anyone braced for a further explosion of oddness, the strangest thing about Designer might be how disarmingly pretty it is. The staginess of Harding’s vocals has been slightly toned down, although she is still wont to sing with a curious enunciation, as if she’s invented her own accent. The tunes are sweetly charming. The music, meanwhile, is drawn in soft, warm tones: piano, Mellotron, fingerpicked nylon-strung acoustic guitar, subtle shadings of woodwind and brass, gently pattering congas. It occasionally sounds like a lost Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter album from the immediately post-psychedelic era – there’s a faintly lysergic shimmer to the tempo shifts and pregnant pauses of the title track – and occasionally like the work of Leslie Feist. The emotional temperature seems to drop midway through, with Damn’s hushed six and a half minutes ushering in a shadowy, twilit mood that lingers to the album’s conclusion, but even then the songs are draped with graceful, inviting melodies: driven by the muffled tick-tock of an ancient-sounding drum machine playing a vaguely Latin pattern, Weight of the Planets is particularly lovely.
“The lyrics are cryptic almost to the point of impenetrability and are clearly going to keep Harding’s army of online interpreters busy for some time: relatable everyday incidents are swallowed up by bizarre imagery. If it’s hard to say what Treasure or Zoo Eyes are actually about – “I made it again to the Amazon, I’ve got to erase the same as the others” opens the former, while the latter concludes with repeated demands to know “what am I doing in Dubai?” – a distinct sense of disquiet and darkness seeps through the splintered imagery, scraping unsettlingly against the music.
She alludes to something grim and bloody in the lyrics of Treasure, completely at odds with its breezy musical setting; the honeyed vocals and beautiful harmonies of opener Fixture Picture conceal a bleak worldview: “You can’t be pure and in love.” Even if you don’t feel like spending hours trying to unpick what she’s on about, there’s something oddly compelling about the contrasts.
Making an album that’s both captivating and indecipherable is no mean feat. What seems like the work of an unbiddable artist, operating according to her own baffling internal logic, turns out to be something rather more finely wrought: the fractured and confusing weighed out against the straightforwardly appealing, the darkness balanced by airy light. It’s a strange world that Harding has created, but it’s also an inviting one”.
I am looking forward to seeing what comes next for Aldous Harding and in what direction her music travels. Although many are keen for another album from her, perhaps lockdown and these current times have not been conducive to the sort of music Harding wants to make. She is this remarkable all-round artist who has a stunning voice and can write music that captivates all the senses. In my opinion, her songs are…
AMONG the most beautiful of modern times.