A Conversation with Jenny Scheinman – HuffPost 5.9.14
Mike Ragogna: Jenny, The Littlest Prisoner. How did this album begin?
Jenny Scheinman: I just started writing songs. Usually there’s a song that forms the center of an album. There might have been two on this one. There was “Just a Child” which came out complete; I dreamt it, then I woke up and wrote it all down. It felt like a real breakthrough into the core of an album. Also “The Littlest Prisoner” title track is a character that I love. It started when I was 8 months pregnant and had a fever. I had a delirious fantasy of cooking my child, and the “prisoner” in my body, and that turned into fantasizing about pregnant inmates within another prison. And all of this led to a character that I really love. It’s not me, and it’s always liberating to get a song to the point where it’s not about me, but somebody else. This album was culled from a lot of material. The earliest song on there which might be “Run Run Run” was written before I did most of my touring and release for my last vocal album, which was five years ago. So there’s some older songs and more recent ones, and in between there were probably twenty other songs that I chose from. Luckily, I had a bunch of material to choose from, so I chose the ones that felt important to me, or that I wanted to hear over and over and wanted to sing. So everything on there is sort of core.
MR: Nice. It must be interesting to carry both a career as an Americana artist, which is how you came off on this album, and being a jazz violinist. How do you balance the two?
JS: Mischief & Mayhem was my last release. Before that was a double release of a record of songs that I sang, and also this big, lush instrumental with great jazz players on it. It’s not entirely new, and the most confusing moment is exactly this, when the press is trying to figure out how to describe me. It seems there’s very little room for facets and complexity, i.e. normal humans, in the press. I guess it’s hard to write about somebody that has multiple interests, and we all do. Most artists are listening to all sorts of different music and even playing lots of types of music. Especially now, modern and younger musicians are exposed to so many different types of music. The feeling I have when I’m doing it is that it’s just music. For example when I’m recording or performing a song with words, when I transition from singing to playing, I feel like I’m just continuing the lyric. Hearing words is very different from hearing a solo, but my experience of it is that I’m taking the narrative and the focus of people’s ears, and I’m taking them on a trip somewhere. I think you could say that about going between my instrumental records and my singing records. Of course they’re very different processes. When I’m honing words, I’m thinking about words, and when I’m writing a song with words it usually comes out as a song with words from the get-go. Occasionally, I have melodies that I’ll put words to. I have a few of those right now I’m working on. There are differences in the process, but I don’t suddenly feel like a different person when I’m doing one thing or another.
MR: So it’s a couple different ways that you express yourself. You have merged the style at least when you do albums with vocals.
JS: I think it’s the vocals that are so strikingly different. Think how different it is to experience a word than a sound. When you’re hearing a singer, you’re controlled by the words, because you understand the language, you know what they’re talking about, and you’re forced to think about what they’re talking about. But when you’re hearing that same thing without a word, you’re free to wander. If I took all these songs I just released, took out the words and just played the melodies, they’d be very similar to my other albums. It’s not particularly different music. I always play songs that are very based in folk music. Maybe this stuff is slightly simpler, but not really.
MR: Do you find, once you get to the studio with new material, that you’re in constant renovation mode? Do things evolve in some ways because they’re in the studio?
JS: The song itself, the writing, is barely affected at all. I’ve always gone into the studio with a very clear understanding of a song; of the words, or if it’s an instrumental piece, of the melodies, and that never changes. I get to know stuff really well before I go into the studio. I’m always surprised at what people do, and I pick people that will surprise me and take it to a new place musically. I’ve been lucky; my recording experiences of my own records have been a joy. I think my least favorite was Mischief & Mayhem; it’s one of my favorite albums, it didn’t affect the results, but the experience in the studio was, for some reason, frustrating. I think that had to do with coming out of playing for a whole week at The Village Vanguard and being in the live jam of it all, and then going into an “Antiseptic” studio situation. So that had its own sort of jinx. But this one was a total joy, and if you talk to Bill Frisell, Brian Blade and Tucker Martine, it was just a dream. Things just flowed. We did it very quickly, like you’d do a thoughtful jazz album. We did it in three days, one day of those mostly being setup. And jazz artists are notorious for doing albums in three hours. Paul Motian would go in and do the album in forty-four minutes and then release a forty-four-minute album. But songwriters, and albums like the one I’ve made, are often made in a month or a year of fussing and overdubbing and laying down tracks and then adding stuff, and we didn’t do any of that; we just went in and played it, and some songs we had to dig around in to find the right groove, but not long.
MR: When you look back at this record, perhaps compared to other albums that you recorded, do you feel that this is the most personal album you’ve ever come up with?
JS: Absolutely. I commit to things. I say things. Instrumental music can be about anything. It’s about a mood, and I usually title my instrumental songs long after they’re written. Sometimes I figure out the titles when I’m doing the CD package, and that’s very common for a lot of people who write instrumental music. These songs really are stories, and they’re definitely more personal. I hope it doesn’t sound like it’s all about me. I feel like that would be a bit of a failure. I don’t think I’m a particularly interesting person. I’m just somebody who wakes up, writes songs and goes out on tour, and comes home and does the normal things anybody does. I hope this speaks to people’s personal lives. It’s a very emotional album, and it’s about very vulnerable situations like childhood, divorce, obsession, frustration; all these sorts of things. “The Littlest Prisoner” is about pregnancy and confinement and the kind of desire to keep in touch within the cycle of life. “Will my child ever remember me, and do I remember my mother?” It’s this long view of generations. So it’s about personal stuff. It’s not a political album.
MR: It’s pretty interesting that, speaking of generational, your bloodline includes the likes of robotics pioneer Victor Scheinman, and you’re the granddaughter of Telford Taylor, the Chief Prosecutor during Nuremberg. Perhaps there are elements of a person who likes to succeed, or is focused, or creative. Not an over-achiever, but just somebody who likes to achieve.
JS: Yeah. What’s interesting about those two people in my life. I know my uncle Victor very very well, and Telford I knew pretty well; I used to visit and stay with him in New York. He lived to a ripe old age. They were very focused. They wanted to see something through to a satisfying end, they wanted to follow the thought all the way through. And I may have inherited that. I would say I’m probably pretty tenacious and hardworking. Victor didn’t do well in school. Telford couldn’t “kiss babies” and be politically cool, otherwise he would have been in politics. So they weren’t exactly ambitious in that way, but they did a lot, and they do have an effect on my family. My mother, uncle and aunt on Telford’s side all in their own way ran away from that. He was a very famous person and they were living in Manhattan. Their mother was also quite a stud–if you can call a mother a stud–she was a pretty righteous lawyer working for poor people in New York and was very well respected. As parents, what you really inherit is how your parents express their love for you, and how they parented you. And they were pretty absentee parents; when my grandfather went off to Nuremberg he dropped my mother and my aunt off at a boarding school when they were two and four years old, and basically said, “Bye, see you in a couple years.” And that’s the kind of stuff that we inherit, and that my mother and uncle sort of ran away from. That being said, it’s magnificent what my grandfather did, and we all inherit that as a role model for empowering us to have an effect on the world.
MR: Do you think of yourself as someone who makes music that doesn’t have set parameters? Is this something that happened naturally or that you aimed at doing?
JS: It was not a goal. There’s a certain haphazard quality of the life of a musician, what you end up doing and what you end up knowing something about. It’s a matter of saying “Yes” for many years and then ending up in someplace, having crammed a bunch of information into your head because of what opportunities came up. It’s hard to carve out a specific image; for me, I didn’t try to control the whole thing, and thus far a lot of it’s that I’m curious about a lot of things. I like playing music with people. The type of music matters somewhat but not a lot. What more matters is whether the music lifts off, and I feel like that can happen in a klezmer wedding band, or with Bill Frisell at Carnegie Hall. They’re different, but it’s that experience of sharing music, making something together, and that dialog is really exciting. Also, my Achilles heel is that I tend to get spread out in a lot of different ways, and part of moving to the west coast was really trying to focus on my own writing, band leading, and my own stuff. I’m quite happy playing with other people. Going from Lou Reed to Lucinda Williams or whatever, that’s a joy to be able to dig in.
MR: What is your advice for new artists?
JS: If it isn’t fun, it’s not worth doing. There’s no money in it! It’s following your passion. You’re an artist because you have to do it, you can’t do anything else. Being an amateur musician is the best; to stay home, make money as a doctor and play string quartet music with your friends, that’s a joy. But if you’re being a professional artist, it means you’re extremely passionate about it, so you have to keep the joy of creating as the focus. That’s sort of a personal answer to the question. In terms of people’s careers, say “Yes” to everything you can do, and that opens you up to different possibilities and places you can grow and things you can learn about, and all of that will filter into making you a more expressive and dynamic artist. As Tina Fey said in her book, “‘Yes’ is the doorway into everything.”
MR: Beautiful. So what’s up for the future?
JS: I’m about to go out on a tour with Wilfred Bell, we’re doing the music of John Lennon, mostly on the west coast and southeast. I have a CD release concert in New York on June 30th with the band. And then I have some touring, a lot of solo act stuff for audiences bigger than I’d ever play on my own. Like I opened for Ani DiFranco on a tour recently. I’ve opened for Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris and Bruce Cockburn. It’s thrilling to play solo. That’s really exposed. I don’t play guitar so I don’t come out and do a singer-songwriter thing that people can really understand; I come out and I play fiddle and I pluck and I sing and I just have to be present enough to connect with people. It’s super fun. So that’s my touring stuff. I’m looking for a booking agent, in fact. Without a booking agent I have a handful of really nice tours. I’m playing at the Kennedy Center with a trio. Some really nice stuff. I just got a couple of grants to finish a project that I started a while ago, which is writing music for a live performance focused around the documentary footage taken in the late Depression like in the North Carolina area. I’m working with the film director and I’m writing the music for that. A lot of that is fiddle-based. In fact, a few of the songs on this album came out of thinking of that project. And I’ve started another album, so I’m working on that.
MR: You’re very prolific.
JS: It really doesn’t seem like that. I wonder if anybody feels prolific. But you’re right, I’ve got eight albums, that’s a lot.
Transcribed by Emily Fotis