This Must be the Place

Ad Hoc: Did you all specifically take influence from New England-centric psych-folk when you started your band?

Shane: I think we take a lot of influences from all over the place. There are definitely some bands that I really was inspired by, and it was funny to later hear that they lived in New England. Like Six Organs of Admittance. You start to wonder whether you were inspired directly by these particular artist’s sounds, or whether similar external/internal circumstances influenced [everyone] . I am inspired by what is here, along with a lot of other things. In Boston there are all of these spooky, old brown brick buildings. It’s some of the most inspiring architecture I’ve seen. There’s also this clash in Boston and a lot of New England between new architecture and old architecture, and I think all of us are psyched on that.

Ad Hoc: And what about Boston? You’ve all lived in different places— Boston, New York, and New Jersey— but do you feel your music has been most informed by your experiences here?

Anna: Maybe it’s informed by Boston, but on a subtle level. We’ve met a lot of interesting artists in the area who have inspired us; it’s an important part of our history. We all love New England and the trees and the general vibe up here. It feels very cozy up here. It’s funny: everybody says we sound like these West Coast bands, but people also always say we sound New England-y. Maybe [music from those places is] more similar than people want to admit.

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Ad Hoc: Anna also was reading that book while we were on tour, on “sacred geometry,” which makes sense because you are all visually-minded, and I know your music is informed by a lot of visual art. What attracted you to that book specifically?

Anna: I’ve been really interested in exploring those ideas with my drawing and painting. I’m really influenced by the infrastructure that you find on highways— power lines, bridges, and things. I think it’s beautiful, all of the lines created against the landscape on highways— again the sky, open spaces. It’s interesting, you have these beautiful images and landscapes, [and then] power lines and things like that to create symmetric and asymmetric forms… Symmetry has always been a big thing for me.

New York, Chicago, L.A., these are concrete cities, vast expanses of freezing, cracking, bubbling, seething concrete, so much more unyielding than the smaller concrete-and-grass cities. Where you burrow into the redolent grass of the smaller cities you may have found a peace, may have made a home for yourself in the world. And that’s really presumably all that any of us could ever ask for. But the bigger cities are impenetrable - you can only commune with them by becoming, yourself, concrete. Then, alien as the soft green world may be, as alien as the concrete, even, will always remain - it won’t matter anymore. You will be home to everything. The world will try and fail and try and fail again and maybe eventually even succeed in making its home in you.

(from an interview Larry Livermore did with John K. Samson of early 2000’s folk-influenced emo-ish indie rock band the Weakerthans. check their lyrics, they’re amazing.)

Q. Through all of your songs there’s this sense of place, that seems to set down roots in the Manitoba landscape - not just the physical landscape, but the landscape of the mind as well. How important is that to you? How do you approach the identification of time and place in your writing?

A. It’s very important to me to have a sense of location in my writing. I’ve lived here for 27 years - all my life. I leave a lot, but I always return. This is the place I understand, it’s the landscape I understand. I think the landscape has some profound effect on people, the place they’re from. I don’t know how to describe what that is, but you recognize it when you go other places. Winnipeg is a place that thinks life is elsewhere. The idea you get from the community here is that everything is happening somewhere else, and that nobody can actually do something here. But there are lots of people struggling against that here, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed. That perhaps makes me “regional” in some people’s eyes - a “regional” writer.

Though she now spends much of her time in New York, she keeps coming back to Iceland, where she lives for several months of the year. The relative simplicity of the place is reassuring to her. Once, she translated a local news headline for my benefit: TIRE TRACKS IN FOOTBALL FIELD. A look of pleasure crossed her face as she studied photographic evidence of the catastrophe. “This is so Iceland,” she said.

[The Master and Margarita] has a very Nordic feeling to it, even though it is Russian. It ridicule bureaucracy, it has black magic and Arctic magic realism. You could say it is Alice in Wonderland for the Arctic grown-up.