Canadian Musician - September/October 2020 | Page 35

began working on a new set of songs, the musical stars aligned. On
For Evelyn, Georgas began writing primarily on piano in contrast
with her previous records, which were written mainly on guitar. She
maintained that approach on All That Emotion.
“I was demoing at home with a little synth that I use,” she
shares. “I like using this synth because it kind of steers me away
from the way I normally go or the things that I gravitate to, to go
about writing a song. Sometimes I would just start playing a beat
and then that would inspire a melody and then from there, chords
would come in and things like that. I tried different ways to be
creative in the demoing process, but I still think piano is my main
instrument and what I’m most comfortable with.”
Georgas and Dessner – who more recently produced Taylor
Swift’s massively-successful 2020 effort Folklore – found a rhythm
that allowed them to work quickly on arrangements while still making
sure each song centred around the key components: Georgas’
understated piano parts and lilting vocal melodies.
“We would track me on piano and singing the song and then
from there we would build a foundation on top of that,” says Georgas.
“We would create drum loops. Really early on in the process
we brought this fellow named Jason Treuting into the studio to play
drums, who plays for this really awesome drum quartet named Sō
Percussion and he is just, like, one of the most fascinating drummers
I’ve ever heard and seen.
“From there, we would spend basically a day where we’d open
up, like, two songs at a time, and we would just start painting and adding
overdubs to each song, and then take a break and move on to the
next song and then come back, take a break, on to the next song...
And then at the end of seven
days, we had opened up,
like, 11 songs.”
Simple and lush is an apt description of All That Emotion. On the
album, songs are often propelled by static drum loops. Gauzy keyboards
alternately move the melody forward and provide the stirring
atmosphere while sparse single-note guitar lines echo around
the stereo spectrum. Where For Evelyn had danceable beats and
thrumming synthesizers, All That Emotion dials it back down, leaving
the songs to speak for themselves. The soundtrack for the quiet
evening of reflection rather than a big night out.
Which is fitting, since as we speak, few people are able or wanting
to hit the clubs. There is a downbeat aura to All That Emotion that
speaks perfectly to the COVID-19 era. The song of the summer might
be Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP,” but club bangers seem
somehow offensive when there are no clubs to bang.
Georgas’ latest fits more into some of the other critical darlingesque
releases that garnered glowing New Yorker writeups this
summer: Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters or Phoebe Bridgers’
Punisher. Death tolls and the battering of the daily news cycle
aside, the summer of 2020 is by and large a time for, if not outright
depression, at least quiet contemplation. All That Emotion might not
call out humanity’s sins and hubris by name, but the vibe is quietly
reflective nonetheless. In terms of scoring the reckoning we’re all
going through, we could do a lot worse.
Of course, the songs were written way before terms like “social
distancing” entered the popular lexicon. But Georgas says the lyrics
address issues specific to her – namely, self-doubt and a tendency
to overanalyze – so the larger themes couldn’t be more timely.
“I definitely wrote everything in a concentrated period of time
in 2018. And I feel like a lot of it, all of the songs that I wrote, have
to do with resilience and kind of finding hope and a way out on the
other side of tough situations; with self-reflection and getting up
every day when things aren’t so easy. There’s a lot about heartbreak
and just a lot of self-reflection about who I am and why I act the way
I do and the habits I have.”
There’s a universality to this type of self-flagellation. Who can’t
identify with a lyric like: “Say everything you need to say / Hey, I can
be your punching bag”? Everyone has a toxic relationship with a significant
other, or a parent or a sibling or a friend somewhere in their
past. While Georgas says she had very specific incidents in mind
while writing, there was a conscious effort to generalize the feelings
behind those moments.
“I do write with the intent of wanting people to draw their own
experience from [the lyrics] – like I don’t want to give too much away,
I guess. But I feel like as a music listener, I find my own experiences
in songs that I love and it may not be the same as what that writer
was intending to say, or what exactly they were going through, but
they spoke to me somehow and that’s how I try to kind of get things
out with my process.”
Still, hints of Georgas’ own past peek through. On “Same
Mistakes,” she muses about her childhood, crooning about how she
“grew up in a family of wolves.”
“I come from a very big family. I have a lot of siblings and I just
feel like a lot of the time I was trying to defend myself,” she says,
chuckling. “There’s a lot of disfunction in my family at times, which
I’m sure everybody has experienced. That’s where that was coming
from. I felt like it was harder to be at home growing up than it was to
be outside of my home and be in school. It’s hard to process when
you’re a teen or a kid; it’s not easy.”
CANADIAN MUSICIAN 35