By BRUCE DENNILL
In Woolf, the third single from the new Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys album Pale Bloom, Lucy Kruger conjures a haunting journey across time, memory, and voice. The track begins with a tentative, halting voice stepping into a river, gradually swelling into a polyphonic chorus that seems to absorb echoes of voices from the past. It crescendos into a soaring, prophetic refrain – Heaven is twisting / fraying / heaven is bending / ageing…- hovering like a lens flare over the song’s lush, unpredictable textures.
What are the aspects of music that most appeal to or thrill you as a listener, from lyrics to arrangements to instruments used to production techniques?
Mostly, I just want to believe what’s happening — and I want what is happening to come from a sort of inside or beneath place. The heart and the guts. I think that can come through in a number of ways: through sound, noise, a lot of space, surprising lyrics, or very mundane lyrics sung in a surprising way.
Are those the same things you try to recreate in your writing or performance?
Yes, I think so. I have become less afraid of trying to communicate something slightly more primal — though I’m still a bit afraid. I grew up believing that sentimental artwork was something to watch out for. Now I feel like I might have been tricked — but I’m still trying to figure that one out.
Which aspect of creating music comes most easily to you, and which requires the most discipline and practice?
Because the music I make is so based on feeling — inside out, as opposed to outside in (where form might come first) — the initial stages feel the clearest. If I believe in it at that first stage, I can move with it for a while and it sort of guides me. I tend to get stuck in the crafting stage. When I come to it and try to look at it from the outside, I often get lost. I have no idea whether something is “good” or not — only whether the translation does something to me. I also get attached to the initial experiment and become anxious about losing the sentiment. Attached to the seed — which can prevent growth.
Outside of the actual music, what is, for you, the most important part of a great new release (single, album, etc)?
I’ve been really lucky to work with wonderful visual artists and illustrators, and I love watching how they interpret the music. I always feel proud and excited to share their work.
Live performance: which artist has most impressed you in terms of what they deliver on stage?
Watching Inge Beckmann from Lark perform undid me. She didn’t seem human to me — so unafraid to step into the songs. A brilliant kind of vessel for this otherworldly voice and music. The first time I saw Patti Smith, I cried after she said “hello”. There was something so powerful and soft and connecting in the way she was there with us. I felt extremely moved and stripped of my guard. I have always loved the drama and force of Nick Cave and his band — a kind of deranged storytelling that is very exciting to witness. The Lost Boys’ guitarist, Liu, has a solo project called Alienbaby Collective, and I love watching her perform. She seems to have found a language and voice with the guitar that feels so embodied, and so distinctly herself. It is moving to witness.
What role does music play in your life on a day-to-day basis — listening to it, writing it, practising it, buying and selling it, performing it, etc?
Oh gosh. A big question, with a possibly uninteresting answer. I’m trying to fall in love with music again at the moment — to meet it as human. To remember the experience of listening for hours in my bedroom as a teenager. It struggles to find that much space in my life these days. It is such an affecting force, and I don’t feel up for being so derailed all the time anymore. So as a listener: less and less, sadly — though it’s something I’d like to change. We’re lucky to have access to a lot of live music in Berlin, so I get a fair amount of that. I try to keep up a practice of writing and playing regularly. The more I do it, the less confronting it is, of course — but because of an inconsistent routine, it isn’t always possible or easy. The admin involved in being a musician — and perhaps just a human — is quite endless. I do not wish to contemplate the hours spent. Still, perhaps most of my day-to-day life revolves around music, on some level.
What is the story behind Woolf — the genesis of the song, the people involved, the muse behind its creation?
I’m a relatively recent reader of Virginia Woolf, and I was surprised by what I found. It’s quite wild, somehow. I love it. One day I suddenly remembered how she died — by filling her pockets with stones and walking into the river — and I felt very sad. Or perhaps something different to sad. That such a mind, so brimming with life, might choose to leave. At the same time, I was thinking about my own creative life. Something felt stunted and blocked, and I found myself taunting my muse in the form of a threat to my old mentors — whom I perhaps subconsciously blamed for some of it. It’s teasing, in a dark way — trying to provoke that childlike spirit into revealing itself. I think. Something like that.