Foto-© Leanna Kaiser
Kate Bollinger kommt aus Virgina, lebt in Los Angeles und spielt ihre Songs in aller Welt. Inspiriert von Pop-, Rock- und Folksongs der 1960er Jahre, klingen Bollinger und ihre Band eklektisch und melodisch, ihre Lyrics sind intim und geprägt von einer scharfen Beobachtungsgabe. Am 27. September erschien das Debütalbum Songs From A Thousand Frames Of Mind via Ghostly International.
Wir konnten im September mit Bollinger via Zoom über ihr Debüt sprechen. Wir erfahren, dass das Album an vielen Orten gleichzeitig und dann doch an fünf Tagen in New York entstanden ist. Bollinger erklärt, warum es einen Aha-Moment brauchte, um zu verstehen, dass sie nicht nur das Gefühl von Vertrautheit, sondern auch eine Prise Punk in ihren Popsongs braucht, damit sie sich richtig anfühlen. Wir sprechen darüber, wie sie es geschafft hat, ein Album mit unterschiedlichsten Einflüssen in ein zusammengehörendes Mixtape zu gießen und warum es bei Livekonzerten manchmal schwierig, auf sich selbst zurückzuschauen.
Congratulations on your debut album, Songs from a Thousand Frames of Mind. The title is very descriptive. What was your overall goal for the record, and how did it turn out?
I am really happy with how it turned out. I thought of the title before I had written any of the songs, and it felt like it represented where I was in my life. I had lived my whole life in Virginia, where I’m from, and I decided to move to California. I was moving back and forth a lot and I was just kind of all over the place in a lot of ways – geographically, emotionally, and other things. That’s where the title came from. It was kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy with the songs, I wanted to make an album that felt like a mixtape or a bunch of songs from different places inspired by different genres and eras. I wanted a lot of different sounds on the record. I think that happened.
Let’s stay with the sound. You can hear the different influences, but the album is still a cohesive work of art. It does not feel like a mix tape in the sense of big cuts. It still belongs together. Was that a challenge? How did you approach having all these differences and bringing them together into one?
For a while I was trying to figure out where I wanted to record it and who I wanted to produce it. There was a period where I considered breaking it up and doing it in different places and with different people because there were a lot of people I wanted to get involved. I’m glad I didn’t do that because I don’t think there would be the same kind of through-line that there is. I think that came from doing the whole thing in five days. It was four of us and we recorded all the live tracks. We basically put a band together for a week in upstate New York at Sam Evians’ studio. We spent a lot of time rehearsing the songs like you would with a band and getting comfortable playing them. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years trying to record with producers and players that I didn’t really know and it always lacked that sense of comfort. I feel like you can tell when you’re listening to players who have been playing together for a long time. A lot of the music I like sounds like old friends who have played together a lot. Not that it was that, but I think getting together in one place and spending the week really learning the songs, recording them all live and not with click tracks, gave the songs all the same feel. They’re all very different, but they’re all through the same lens.
You recorded in New York, you wrote between Virginia and Los Angeles. How did the different places affect your writing? Is it through the things you see? Do you think people have different personalities in different places? How do you think that translates into the music?
One time a friend of mine said to another friend that I’m like a plant that keeps blossoming new little flowers. And then the old ones die. And our other friend is this flower that takes longer to grow. But when it does blossom, it’s a giant flower. I think that’s really true for me. I sprout a lot of things and then I’m over them really quickly. Traveling a lot and being in all these different places and meeting all these different people has led to different kinds of songs. I feel like I get obsessed with something and then I move on to the next thing really quickly. Maybe that’s part of why the album is the way it is. It’s a longer form of project than my EPs and singles. It represents a longer period of my life. And you can see that. I’m changing quickly in the process of making it.
So, Songs from a Thousand Frames of Mind is not the typical debut album where you take all the best songs you have written so far. And you said that in the end you were very careful about who you were going to work with. What were the criteria? There must be so many considerations. On the one hand there are the artistic factors, but as you said there is also an emotional side. How did you end up with the people you ended up with?
When I came to LA, I obviously didn’t have any of the people I worked with in Virginia. I spent a couple of years doing trials, meeting producers and players and recording. I’m glad I did that because I think some cool stuff came out of it. But I always left a little disappointed, not knowing why or what was missing. At some point I realized what I wanted. I wanted it to sound less sterile and more familiar, so I decided that I wanted to involve at least one of the people that were in my original band in Virginia. So Jacob Grissom, who’s my friend from high school and the original drummer in my band, played drums on the album. And then there is Sam Evian, who recorded the album. About four years ago at this point, when I was still living in Virginia, I had gone up to upstate New York to do one of those producer trial things. He and I immediately connected and recorded. I got there and we talked a little bit. At that point he hadn’t built the studio that he has now. It was just the living room. He set me up in the living room and we tracked Running live and then added overdubs and built the song around that live track. We ended up keeping that recording from four years ago on the record. That’s the only one that wasn’t recorded that week. This is always how it is with me. I’ll try on a million outfits and I’ll just end up wearing the first one I put on. It was that kind of situation. He brought his close friend, which I think was nice. It was two sets of close friends and we all just got along really well. Then my other really close friend, Matthew White, came up from Virginia. He and I had started writing songs together when I lived there during the pandemic. Some of those songs are on the record. I had him come up and play the piano parts that he wrote on the album. Sam’s partner, Hannah Cohen, sang some of the vocal harmonies. It was a good mix. They are all musicians that I admire.
Sometimes I left the sessions with a song, and I felt like there was my voice and it was my writing, but there was just some essence that was completely missing, which was really weird. A few months before we recorded the album, my friend Matt and I had this conversation about why I was unhappy with some of the recordings. He said, “I feel like you’re secretly trying to make a punk album, but nobody knows it, obviously, because your music isn’t punk music. It seems like what you’re unhappy with is that you go into these sessions and you have such a clear and soft voice that the producer thinks you want the music to match that quality”. That was a crazy realization that I had and it definitely influenced the way we made the record. Not that it is a punk record at all, but in the sense that The Velvet Underground is pop music, but it has that punk spirit in the songs. That’s something I look for. Even if the recordings are really polished, I want there to be that homemade feeling in what I do. In the last few years I’ve put out things that I don’t feel that way about and I didn’t know why I wasn’t totally happy with something. It’s missing that homemade, carefully crafted thing that just feels like the person who made it.
Do you ever worry about translating that live, or do you feel that it’s harder to translate the live spirit to a record?
It was really natural with this record to translate that live spirit. I’m a little nervous about the live show. Just because I love all the sounds that Sam has. He’s a really great engineer and producer, so I just know it’s not going to sound that way live. But I think it’s going to be something different, which will be fun to see. It’s hard to know until you do it.
Do the songs change as they travel with you? Recording is so isolated, you are in your little bubble, you do it and then people listen to it. But then when you are face to face with them in such different settings on different continents, what does that do to you and your relationship to your own music?
Sometimes I’ll listen to the very first voice memo I made of a song when I was writing it and I’m always surprised at how crazy different it sounds from what I’ve played live or with my band. They definitely change. It feels like the same thing people say about a memory. Every time you think about a memory, it changes in some way. Every time I play it, there’s some little micro thing that changes and then influences the next time I play it. I’m really excited to play this album because it still feels very recent to me. I still feel very connected to the songs and what I’m singing about. It’ll be really nice to sing something that’s still in my heart. With the older songs, sometimes I have to figure out how to connect to them in a new way. A lot of the older songs, my band and I will change the arrangement just to make them exciting and new to us in some way. Music is like an expression, so it can feel weird to sing old songs that you don’t connect to as much. It can feel confusing. But then it’s obviously more than that because it’s a show for other people.
Songs from a Thousand Frames of Mind is your first LP. It’s a big deal for the people around you, everyone is waiting for the release date. Does the day itself mean anything to you? Or is all the emotion already gone by the time you finish the album?
The emotion is not gone. But it’s a weird thing releasing music now because it can be hard to know. You post about it and then it’s like what? I released one of the songs when I was dog sitting for my brother and he lives in this really rural remote part of Maine. I remember posting about the song that came out that day and then I went outside and there’s nothing around. You go outside and you’re in the middle of the woods and nothing happened. It’s a weird thing, but I’m really excited. I think I’ll feel the release the most when I’m on tour playing the songs and I’m really excited about that.
Thank you for the interview!
Kate Bollinger Tour:
01.06.25 Berlin, Frannz Club
02.06.25 Köln, Gebäude 9
