Q&A: Maia Friedman & the Magic of Love and Family on ‘Goodbye Long Winter Shadow’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY LENA FINE ☆
Photo by Alex Munro
MAIA FRIEDMAN HAS RETURNED — with her transcendent and transformative record, Goodbye Long Winter Shadow. Friedman, previously of Dirty Projectors and Coco fame, stuns with intimate and introspective writing, brought to life alongside understanding collaborators and producers Philip Weinrobe and Oliver Hill, of Adrienne Lenker, Florist, and Magdalena Bay credits respectively. The result is a sonic chamber of intensely delicate explorations of love, family, and age.
Goodbye Long Winter Shadow pairs best with days that stretch into the evening amid tall grass and generous sunshine, and late nights ripe with the desire to reflect. The sweeping orchestral arrangements and striking lyrics make for enchanting and enrapturing listening – it is clear that Friedman is coming into her own with a focused clarity granted by the space of her solo project. We caught up with Friedman to learn more about the magic behind Goodbye Long Winter Shadow.
LUNA: You explore themes of love, childhood, and age in Goodbye Long Winter Shadow. Can you talk about the marriage between love and family and how they inform each other in your writing?
FRIEDMAN: In my personal experience, songs spring from dynamic emotion, and what is more dynamic than love and family? The love I have felt for the people in my life is what continues to inspire thought, poetry, song, happiness, worry, sadness, heartbreak, hope and creativity. Thinking through the songs on GLWS, I can tell you that “Russian Blue” is written for my childhood cat, “Shape Is Your Own” for myself as an adolescent while simultaneously being for my child in the future. “Witness” for my parents as they grow closer to the end of their lives. “Vessel” for someone I loved and lost. The evolution of our relationships is so much of what gives life its richness.
LUNA: What was the arranging and production process for “Long Straight Path?” It’s such an exciting and unique way of synthesizing the voice and wonder of childhood.
FRIEDMAN: Thank you! The voice you hear is the daughter of a friend of mine, Simone. We were sitting together one morning when she was maybe three years old painting and playing guitar and she was talking, talking, saying the funniest things. I recorded her while I was practicing something on guitar and wanted to stitch it all together into a kind of abstract sonic collage. It was made almost entirely “in-the-box” as they say [in ProTools]. I really love that I captured this moment in time, because Simone is much bigger now, with a different voice and a different sense of herself. We used the original recording and added saxophone (Daniel Pencer) and piano (Oliver Hill) to follow along and outline the melody of Simone’s voice. We had to listen through and record phrase-by-phrase to find the closest melodic and harmonic translation. I must mention my friend Charles Spearin’s The Happiness Project, as “Long Straight Path” is certainly in dialogue with his piece of music.
LUNA: You began writing the record by going through your parents’ book collection. Did you go to their collection in pursuit of the record or was it something organically born from the experience and what you discovered in it?
FRIEDMAN: I knew I wanted to pay particular attention to lyrics when I started writing again after my first record. I had studied poetry a little in college, but wanted to expand my poetic experience with more reading. I grew up in a house filled with books, floor to ceiling, and many of them were poetry books. So I sat down and started reading! Jim Harrison’s book of zen poetry, After Ikkyu, resonated with me immediately. He has a special sense of humor, and each poem says a lot with few words. Here is one I love, that relates to a common theme within GLWS:
Time eats us alive.
On my birthday yesterday
I was only one day older
though I began 10 million eons ago
as a single cell in the old mud homestead
Photo by Felix Walworth
LUNA: Goodbye Long Winter Shadow is equal parts lyric and sonic poetry. Do the lyrics and instrumentation come in tandem or was this project led by one and bolstered by the other?
FRIEDMAN: Each song from the record began on the guitar. I would play around with chords, and then progressions, and then mouth sounds would emerge. From there I would distill meaning, find clarity in what I wanted to communicate. I spent a long time on the words, doing my best to write freely and without self-censorship. After I collected many pages for each song, I edited the words down to what you hear now on the album, while simultaneously playing with form. The arrangements came after, when I asked Oliver Hill to translate what I had written into an orchestration for strings and winds. [Philip Weinrobe, Oliver and I] were in dialogue throughout the process and would send notes to alter here, clarify there, reharmonize this repeated line, etc. Oliver did such a beautiful job.
LUNA: There is both such hope and retrospection on the record, especially in “Vessel” – what place were you in whilst creating the record that allowed such clarity amidst such potential unknown?
FRIEDMAN: The songs on the record were written over the course of a few years, through much change, loss, and uncertainty. With each song, I really tried to whittle it down to the core essence of what I was trying to say, what story I was trying to tell. “Vessel” was written after immense heartbreak, following the end of a long-term relationship. It can take years to feel at peace with the outcomes of our choices, and this song helped me find the peace I was looking for. I’m just trying to dig deeper, to see what new nuggets of enlightenment or wisdom I can find. Even if it’s aspirational.
LUNA: The record is intersected by these beautiful interludes, namely “lapetus crater,” “A Heavenly Body,” “Soft Pall Soft Hue,” and “Suppersup.” What was behind the album sequencing?
FRIEDMAN: Growing up in the ‘90s, I listened to a lot of albums that included interludes in the tracklist. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was a big one. I would sit next to a boombox listening to her album on repeat for hours devouring the lyrics, the music and Lauryn’s voice. Now that I think of it, maybe part of what drew me in to that album was the presence of children’s voices in the interludes, being a child myself at the time. And thus, Interludes have always been something I’ve loved; a little amuse-bouche between songs, if you will. While writing Goodbye Long Winter Shadow, there were a few songs that I just couldn’t set the right words to. After a while I realized I had enough “songs” and came to think of the extras as instrumentals. In two of them, “Suppersup” and “A Long Straight Path” I created as sonic collages, and then “Foggy” we mixed from the original demo stems. I love the scene changes sprinkled throughout Goodbye Long Winter Shadow. Thank you for posing such beautiful and thoughtful questions!
