Lula Wiles on Modern Ballads “Wide River” : An Interview with Isa Burke and Video Premiere
A few months back we highlighted a special project curated by GennaRose Nethercott (the full album that actually releases today!) the idea of which was that as a poet, she had a handle on crafting words and prose in beautiful fashion, but alas she was not as much of a singer as some of her friends around the area. And when looking for musicians and beautiful voices, Somerville/Cambridge sure as heck isn’t a bad place to be.
Fast forward and the project nears completion and one of our favorite groups just so happens to be involved in the whole thing, Lula Wiles.
We caught up with Isa Burke to talk about their involvement in “Modern Ballads”, working with GennaRose and of course premiere a live video of the song that they were assigned to develop in collaboration with her. Check it all out below.
RLR: Tell us a little bit about this project and what it meant for the band to be involved in it.
Isa: We were so excited when our friend GennaRose came to us with this project. She’s a wonderful poet, folklorist, and generally creative person, so we knew she’d come up with some amazing material, and of course she delivered. She also assembled a crazily good cast of musicians who would never have ended up on the same album together if not for her! The album is a really interesting commentary on the folk ballad tradition with its murder and heartbreak and fairytale-esque twists, but it’s also just a collection of really good songs. This video was recorded about six months after the album was recorded, so we had fun re-learning and re-creating the arrangement from the album for this video, which was expertly filmed and recorded by our pal Greg Liszt.
RLR: The video itself, seems like you girls recorded live and very close, something you are obviously used to for folks who have seen you perform live. How important do you find that ability to be in today’s musical landscape where you can overdub for days or bring your Macbook on a stage and do some beep-boops for 5 minutes and have people dance? From where I stand, I think tradition in terms of folk music and story sharing is doing very well, but do you have a similar view as touring artists?
Isa: I think that for the kind of music we make, playing together around one mic in the same room is often the best way to capture the specific type of energy and organic-ness that we aim for. But there are certainly other times, like in the studio, where we have different creative goals that are better achieved through processes like overdubbing or using artificial sounds. All approaches can be equally good and equally valid depending on the artist, the song, the setting, and a million other factors. I think in general, the music world is all the better for the diversity of methods we have today, and I don’t think the magic of human beings playing instruments in a room together will ever die.
RLR: How did the project work? Were you assigned a song that GennaRose felt would be the best fit and you kind of adapted it to your musical aesthetic or was there a lot of collaborative effort involved in terms of arrangements?
Isa: Genna wrote all the lyrics as poems with the plan that they would eventually become songs, and then she assigned them to each band based on what she thought would be a good fit. Each band then set her lyrics to music and came up with the arrangement on their own. Ellie did the bulk of the work writing the melody and chord progression for “Wide River,” and we arranged it as a band. When writing the melody we did consult with Genna a bit about the rhythm of the lyrics, but for the most part the lyrics were all her and the music was all us. It was a very cool way to collaborate because we got what was essentially a finished product and then added a whole other dimension to it based on what those lyrics evoked in our musical brains. I imagine it was really fun for Genna to see how each band interpreted her lyrics.
RLR: You all have taken songs from other folks and really molded them into something that is truly “a Lula Wiles take” on the tune (‘I’m Over You” always slays me in the best way). What was it like to not just take a song and make it yours, but to take someone else’s words, try and digest them and put them to music? Was that something new for you all?
Isa: It was something new for us, and it was really fun! We’ve interpreted and re-arranged others’ songs, and of course we’ve written our own songs, but we’ve never written completely new music to someone else’s finished lyrics before. We’d love to collaborate with Genna again in the future.
RLR:. So what else is coming up for the band that is not necessarily about this project?
Isa: All I will say for now is that we’ve got some more new videos coming very soon and some even bigger announcements coming… somewhat soon. Also, keep an eye on our tour dates! We’ll be announcing a bunch more summer and fall shows in lots of exotic locales (i.e. various parts of the the United States of America).
