All Part Of The Process: Margaret Glaspy On 'Emotions and Math'
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
Written by Huw Baines
Photo: Ebru Yildiz
Margaret Glaspy is getting used to the scenery changing again.
For a while, her world revolved around the same four walls on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A native of Red Bluff, California, Glaspy initially landed on the east coast for a semester at Berklee College of Music in Boston. When her grant money ran out, she hopped from job to job while continuing to use her lapsed student ID to attend classes at her old school. All the while, she wrote. Soon, as it has done for so many songwriters, New York called.
In her apartment, Glaspy sowed the seeds of ‘Emotions and Math’, her new record. iPad demos later became home-recorded songs, with an intervention from ATO Records eventually leading to a full-band do-over at Sear Sound, home at one time or another to pretty much any legendary figure you might pick out of a hat.
Glaspy treats writing like it’s a job, and that graft is apparent across ‘Emotions and Math’. The record seamlessly splices her arresting vocals with intricate guitar lines and turns of phrase that pin the listener to the wall. There are moments where Glaspy sounds like Hop Along’s Frances Quinlan fronting Speedy Ortiz, but in the loping gait of the title track and No Matter Who’s west coast strut there is also evidence of a pop classicist at work.
“Early on it [songwriting] was a little more incidental,” Glaspy says. “It still is, in its own way. It’s something I’m really passionate about and it’s a really creative process, but there is a point where it turned into a really process-driven endeavour for me. When I was making the record I worked at songwriting every day and laboured over it quite a bit, which was really fun for me. I miss that a little bit right now.”
Right now means touring. Now that you can pick up ‘Emotions and Math’ from a record shop or see Glaspy wring spiky truths from a beat-up Telecaster on stage, she feels a line has been drawn under her ownership of the songs. Her efforts are now ours to decode and enjoy on our own time. That attitude extends to the record’s lyrics.
Glaspy is not in the business of discussing her words forensically and that leaves us with reams of lines - many of them cutting, emotive, funny - with which to bandage elements of our own lives. The songs here are sharp-tongued and forthright, whether Glaspy is apparently discussing the dynamics of desire and insecurities, on You Don’t Want Me, breezily chatting shit about a fizzled relationship on You and I ("Tonight I’m a little too turned on to talk about us. Tomorrow I’ll be too turned off and won’t give a fuck.")or, on Situation, skewering some dude who’s just desperate to tell her what to do. “Don't you dare pity me,” she sings. “Because you don't know my situation. We've had, at most, one conversation.”
“It’s not mine anymore. I really feel that way,” she says. “It’s out of my hands and now it creates space to make new stuff, which I’m very excited to do. Right now I’m in heaven because it’s out and it belongs to everyone else. It's so fun to hear people talk about what they got out of it. I don’t have an interest in talking about the meanings of the songs because it doesn’t really matter.
“You’re just coming up with funny little ideas: ‘That’s interesting, that popped into my head.’ You start working with it and for me there’s a whole process around it. By the end of it you have this song you made. It’s often just a piece of music [at first]. After I play it a few times, I realise it’s totally wrapped up in all these different elements of my life, other people’s lives and things that I’ve witnessed. It’s such an interesting teacher, songwriting. It teaches you a lot about yourself and how you look at things.”
Glaspy’s writing is also about the pursuit of balance. Her guitar playing is prickly and her voice raw in its emotion, but those competing elements must exist in harmony with her songs’ rich melodic cores. ‘Emotions and Math’ isn’t about compromise, though. It’s a collection of songs happy to exist briefly at extremes, whether that’s melding the off-kilter riff of Situation with a quietly effective vocal hook or fully indulging Anthony’s worn-in lament. Fashion or ease of use aren’t pressing concerns, leaving Glaspy’s compositional flair apparent as these poles are stitched into something instantly satisfying.
“Often it’s as simple as saying: the guitar part is really busy so it lends to a more simple vocal line,” she says. “It’s pretty intuitive. I think one of the things I love so much about songwriting and performing, being a singer and a songwriter, is that there’s so many things to try and get good at. It’s not just one job. You’re trying to do all of them the best you can. I find that to be a constant challenge, to try and show up as a singer, show up as a songwriter and a guitar player. That’s something I’m always striving for and always falling short of. It’s fun to always have something to strive for, you know?
“I listen to a lot of pop music. It’s part of my repertoire, I guess. It’s totally where I’m coming from in one way and totally not where I’m coming from in another way. I listen to top 40 music all the time and also pop music through the years. I’m a big Beatles fan, big Ray Charles fan, Michael Jackson, David Bowie. In terms of song arrangements, I nerd out over that stuff quite a bit. I love how the structures of songs slowly evolve and a mainstream format is created. I like that a lot.”
Glaspy’s touring merry-go-round will drop her off in the UK later this summer, with a headline London show at the Moth Club set to accompany an appearance at Green Man in the Brecon Beacons. Following that, she will return in November for a headline tour, including a stop in Ireland at Dublin's Grand Social. “I had an urge to play the songs live and to be able to play them with a band,” Glaspy says. “I’d always been recording songs in my room and couldn’t play live without other musicians. That was the biggest urge for me.”
Margaret Glaspy Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Tue August 23 2016 - LONDON Moth Club
Sat November 05 2016 - NOTTINGHAM Bodega Social Club
Mon November 07 2016 - GLASGOW Hug and Pint
Fri November 11 2016 - BIRMINGHAM Sunflower Lounge
Sat November 12 2016 - BRISTOL Louisiana
Wed November 30 2016 - DUBLIN Grand Social
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