Stillness can be hard to find for a touring musician when your existence is all about moving: from the bus to the hotel to the soundcheck to the gig, and back on the bus to the next town, or a night in a hotel if you’re lucky.
For bassist and vocalist Melanie Radford, the perpetual motion of touring with her bands Built To Spill and Blood Lemon created a desire for stillness. She found it in the contemplative periods between movement, when she made field recordings that helped form the songs of her debut album “For The Sake of Stillness,” out June 26.
“It is probably the most personal record I’ve ever released,” says Radford from Los Angeles, where she’s just gone to see Rush at the Kia Forum with Built To Spill’s drummer. “And it’s also the first time I feel like I’m finding my voice. I don’t think I’ve felt confident enough to do something like this until probably three years ago when I started getting more into writing as a solo artist. I’ve done similar things like this before, like 10 years ago, but I just wasn’t confident enough to pursue it.”
She adds: “I’ve always been a really collaborative musician working in other projects. So this does feel like an extremely personal album, but it does also feel like a good declaration of who I am as an artist.”
The field recordings were made from Philadelphia to Brazil.
“I went in with the concept of trying to build songs off of the recordings initially. And I recorded [the field recordings], and I recorded the songs, in a bunch of different places while I was on tour and while I was traveling in hotels and Airbnbs, so it kind of has a homemade feeling to it, and that’s what I wanted. I wanted something kind of like a quiet, very comfortable, homemade, lo-fi record.”
On the song “Seagull,” she tracked her bass and the sounds of the ocean simultaneously in a beach town in Brazil with assistance from her partner Lê Almeida.
“I was sitting next to an open patio door in an Airbnb that looked out onto a beach and was watching a seagull hover in the wind, above water,” Radford says. “Lê and I had multiple mics set up to get the sounds happening outside. So almost everything you hear — the ocean sounds, people chatting, the bass meandering through a melody — was all improvised and recorded live in that moment.”
Radford, based in Seattle, is releasing “For The Sake of Stillness” via the Portland, Ore., label Jealous Butcher Records.
In addition to Almeida on drums and guitar, the album features former Built To Spill guitarist Jim Roth on synth, pedal steel and vocals; Cacá Amaral on additional drums, and Lori Goldston, who was Nirvana’s touring cellist — you’ve seen her in the MTV Unplugged performance — with cello arrangements. (“She’s a legend in Seattle, and she very graciously came on to the record,” Radford says.
Radford will play an album release show on Friday at Good Shepherd Chapel in Seattle, an opening set for Califone at Substation, also in Seattle, on July 18, and serve as artist in residence at the Doe Bay Resort & Retreat on Orcas Island, Wash., Aug. 12-18.
She’ll also do double duty on a run of Northeast dates with Built To Spill, performing an opening set, including at Music Hall of Williamsburg (Oct. 22 and 23) and ending at Ardmore Music Hall outside of Philly (Oct. 30 and 31).
As Radford continues to find and share her own musical identity, she takes inspiration from bassists like Rush’s Geddy Lee (“a really huge influence on me growing up, maybe not as much now with the kind of material I write now, but he’s very much a part of my DNA”) and Jaco Pastorius, citing him as fueling the expressive nature of her playing: “I feel like I get to do this more on my solo album. I get to be more expressive and let my bass sing I the same kind of way Jaco and others in his genre have done.”
She mentions the chamber jazz group Vegas Trails, calling Milo Fitzpatrick “a clever bassist who uses space and plays sparsely. Taking cues from a band like that was really helpful for me to contextualize my own projects.”
When it comes to singing and writing, Radford says Erika Wennerstrom (Heartless Bastards) “was huge for me when I was young, because she had a really great way of writing emotional but simple songs that kind of captivate you. And she also has a low alto voice, so she made me feel more secure in my voice as well.
“More recently I take a lot of inspiration from a lot of ambient songwriters. So Grouper was huge for me. Gia Margaret, a more contemporary artist right now, she’s fantastic. She uses field recordings and they’ve really entered into her songwriting, and she’s able to create a really great atmosphere with it.
“A lot of slowcore bands, like Low, in terms of atmosphere again and their creativity to do unexpected things like bursts of sound, bursts of magic in their songs, really helped me gain the confidence to do similar things in my music. Even bands like Mazzy Star, right? Bands that really have a great way of harnessing minimalism and harnessing simplicity and really relying on the songwriting to carry you through.”
Photo by Travis Gillett
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