{"id":15565,"date":"2018-11-26T05:30:00","date_gmt":"2018-11-26T10:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=15565"},"modified":"2018-11-12T13:12:25","modified_gmt":"2018-11-12T18:12:25","slug":"hlly-golightly-the-country-punk-blues-one-take-wonder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2018\/11\/26\/hlly-golightly-the-country-punk-blues-one-take-wonder\/","title":{"rendered":"Holly Golightly: The Country-punk-blues One-take wonder"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"British-born Holly Golightly was an important part of the UK garage-punk scene of the 1990s. Today her music effectively combines that foundation with a sound that draws equally from classic American country and western music. Her latest album, Clippety Clop<\/i>, was created in her well-established way: working with life-and-music partner Lawyer Dave, Golightly recorded the thematically unified set of tunes in the couple\u2019s garden shed on their property in rural Georgia, not far outside Athens. They made the album in spare moments between caring for the horses on their rescue farm.<\/p>\n

Bill Kopp: How important is it to you to get a particular production vibe? <\/b><\/p>\n

Holly Golightly: On a long player, I really like to try to adapt each track so that you don\u2019t have two things that sound similar back to back. If you were to listen to one track in isolation it wouldn\u2019t be that noticeable, but when you notice the atmosphere change on every single track then it\u2019s kind of noticeable. I suppose it\u2019s like a trademark, really, and it\u2019s what I\u2019ve done ever since I\u2019ve begun making records.<\/p>\n

\u201cPinto Pony\u201d and \u201cBlack Horse Blues,\u201d just to name two, almost fall apart; I mean that in a good way. Those songs made me think of what it might sound like if Alex Chilton or Johnny Thunders went country-blues. Do you just roll tape and go with the first take, or do you agonize over getting it right?<\/b><\/p>\n

Well, Dave has a very different approach to recording than I do; he\u2019s much more thorough than I would be. So it\u2019s a compromise really, especially when it comes to vocals. Not so much with the backing tracks, but when it comes to vocals I don\u2019t think that doing something over and over again necessarily makes it a better take. I think it makes it a different<\/i> take, but I don\u2019t think it makes it better. What you should try to do is sort of familiarize yourself with how you\u2019re going to do it ahead of time. So quite often I\u2019ll just be singing along in the car to backing tracks for a few weeks before I even go in there to do a take. And then when I do, I\u2019ve got my vocal acrobatics all figured out. Usually I am a one-take wonder\u2014that is the truth, where I\u2019m concerned\u2014because I don\u2019t think you\u2019re trying to make something that\u2019s necessarily perfect, because nothing is. What I think you\u2019re trying to do is catalog a moment in time.<\/p>\n

In what ways do you think that living in rural Georgia informs your music?<\/b><\/p>\n

In no way at all.<\/p>\n

Really?!<\/b><\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t matter where I am. I lived on a boat on the Medway Delta in Kent for 12 years and I didn\u2019t sound that different. The music I really like is the music I really like, and that isn\u2019t a variable. So what I draw influence from is everything I love and everything I don\u2019t love. You\u2019re influenced by everything, aren\u2019t you really?<\/p>\n

Not to belabor the point, but do you think that your being British colors the Americana influences in your music at all?<\/b><\/p>\n

I grew up listening to radio in England, and all the \u201860s beat groups were doing Arthur Alexander covers for their first albums. So it\u2019s not alien to me, actually; it\u2019s much more familiar to me than say something that was a little bit more contemporary and British I don\u2019t know anything about. I only know about American music of a specific era and of a specific genre; I\u2019m very narrow-minded when it comes to music, actually. I\u2019m the worst person to speak to about it, because I don\u2019t actually like most of it! So I think being British means that I don\u2019t have a reverence for it that perhaps others have. I think I come at it like, \u201cOh, I\u2019ll have a go at that; I\u2019m game.\u201d I do it and then people say, \u201cWow, that\u2019s really great what you\u2019ve done with that,\u201d and I\u2019d say, \u201cWell, I didn\u2019t really think about it that hard. I opened my mouth and that\u2019s what came out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Do you road-test the material before going in the studio?<\/b><\/p>\n

Usually the way it works is we record something, and then we learn it to take it on tour. And then by the end of the tour it sounds absolutely nothing like it did on the record! Which is fine; we\u2019re not trying to replicate it. It\u2019s like, \u201cthis is a song that we did and it goes like this,\u201d and as long as we stick with the bare bones of the song it can really develop after playing it every night for six weeks. We drop the bits we don\u2019t like, and we flourish the bits we do like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

British-born Holly Golightly was an important part of the UK garage-punk scene of the 1990s. Today her music effectively combines that foundation with a sound that draws equally from classic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15559,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,20,21,41,49,59],"tags":[1002],"class_list":["post-15565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blues","category-country","category-cowpunk","category-interview","category-new-release","category-punk","tag-holly-golightly","cat-9-id","cat-20-id","cat-21-id","cat-41-id","cat-49-id","cat-59-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15565"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15592,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15565\/revisions\/15592"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}