Song Exploder - Sara Watkins - Without a Word

Episode Date: February 17, 2017

Sara Watkins began her music career when she was only 8 years old, as one of the founding members of the Grammy-award winning band Nickel Creek. In 2016, she released her third solo album, Young in all the Wrong Ways. In this episode, Sara breaks down her song "Without a Word." This interview was recorded in front of a live audience at the Chicago Podcast Festival. songexploder.net/sara-watkins

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi K. Hirwe. Sarah Watkins began her music career when she was only eight years old, as one of the founding members of the Grammy Award-winning band, Nickel Creek. In 2016, she released her third solo album, Young in All the Wrong Ways. In this episode, Sarah breaks down her song without a word. The interview for this episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the Chicago Podcast Festival.

This song started when I was on tour with my bandmates. We were driving in England, and I just remember sort of leaning against the passenger door and singing the basic melody. And I leaned over in my phone and just recorded. The lyrics started with this image. Trying to find it to where we are, where we are. The lyrics started with this image of someone coming through the front door and just wreaking all kinds of havoc in the living room, twirling around like a Tasmanian devil, and then out through the bedroom window and just running out of the driveway and down the street and feeling the emotional equivalent of all that.

That feeling of just what happened. Everything was fine, and now there's a disaster. By the end of the tour, I had the first two verses. I played it for my friend Gabe Witcher, who produced the record. I asked him to help me finish it. I've known Gabe since I was eight. We grew up going to Bluegrass Festivals in Southern California. We lost touch with each other in the teenage years,

but reconnected and just sent him a text out of the blue, hey, do you want to produce my record? And he said, yes, we have a similar. appreciation for really just caring about the band performance. You get the right people together in a room, there's nothing like it. So we made this record by performing in the studio live. For this album, I had a core band on all the songs, and part of the fun was bringing these songs to life with this group of people for the first time.

Jay Bellrose, he is a drummer who I feel like he somehow hitches a ride on my lungs, and plays to the vocal. Jay is really good at playing with acoustic instruments, and this track is almost exclusively acoustic. This beautiful dance between the keys and the guitar as they're sort of trading just sort of developed, and it became this beautiful theme in the song. It's kind of a lovely dance of what's happening lyrically,

these two characters. It's an instrumental treatment of what the lyrics trying to sort through. the instincts of all these musicians where we're pretty right on. Ben Montaigne-Worlitzer and Chris Eldridge playing acoustic guitar. In addition to that band, there's a string section. I play fiddle, but there's not a lot of fiddle on this record. Because it's a really strong character, but strings,

they can be supportive and they can add to the harmonic complexity in a way that's not distracting stylistically. Gabe played all these beautiful violin parts, Worthy arrangements for the bridge, which I think really helps it lift. My friend Ifa O'Donovan is singing the harmony on the bridge, and she was with me in the car when I was first starting to write this. The words came out really quickly. First a knock and then a crash and a staggering conviction that I might not catch up.

And she has this incredible ability to blend and go into these very strange melodies effort. Leslie. Like all the truth. One of the things I loved about making this record is singing with the band. When I got in the studio with the other players helping me move the song along, it let me relax my singing. And then also having headphones in the studio, being able to hear when I sing quieter, I could hear myself.

That brought it into this whole other kind of intimate moment. the last verse talks about wanting to just write somebody out of your story but despite everything that they put you through you still just want a little bit of inkling of their presence around your life I thought I could write you right out of my story I still want you to show up yeah I hope you'll just roll through

After all these years without a word. A lot of times writing songs is therapeutic because it gives you the time and the space on the page to actually consider a lot of things that you're going through and try and organize them in a way that makes sense. Some people talk about a song just appearing to them, and that's never happened to me. And it takes me a while to figure out what I'm trying to say.

But it's the first time that I've had the feeling that a song sort of uncovered itself to me without me being aware of it. And I found myself returning to this original image of the Tasmanian devil spinning around in the living room and creating a mess of everything, that person in my life who just can't figure out what they want and you are tangled up.

And now here's Without a Word by Sarah Watkins in its entirety. Visit songexploader.net for a link to buy this song and to learn more about Sarah Watkins. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Kesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations

about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. and this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April,

and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live.

That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder is produced by me, along with Christian Coons, and is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary cutting-edge podcasts, made possible by the Knight Foundation and by Milchimp. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. Next time on Song Exploder, the song Break Apart by Bonobo,

featuring Rye. You can find Song Exploder on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, at Song Exploder. And you can find all the past and future episodes of the show at songexploader.net, or wherever you download podcasts. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.