Musician Jarboe on capturing ideas as soon as they happen

You’ve released nearly 40 solo albums. To what do you attribute your impressive productivity?

I think it’s more like 30, but I guess it depends on what you would call an album. When I started in ‘83, ‘84, before I joined Swans, I was doing tape projects because I was part of the mail art culture and tape project culture. These were independently made and artistically packaged, and they were shipped all over the place. There wasn’t money involved. It was just shipping your ideas back and forth. It was really cool. I might call some of those albums.

I actually feel like I could have a whole lot more stuff out now, but last year I broke my wrist and my right hand, which is my dominant hand, and I was in a cast and then I had physical therapy and then had to have surgery. All of that took a year, which is why I feel like I haven’t been as productive as I normally would be.

Since then, I’ve started about 60 things, and I will develop some of those depending on how it goes because I just get ideas and immediately do sketchbooks, just recording rough ideas on my phone. It’s kind of a spontaneous thing that happens. It’s not like I sit down and deliberately try to create something. It just sort of happens and then you capture it. And sometimes an entire piece is written spontaneously.

I have a song called “Dear 666,” which came about many years ago from reading a book about people who stay in abusive situations. This book is primarily geared towards women, and it’s essentially Stockholm Syndrome. In doing that research, I saw a film that’s about a situation that gets so extreme that the woman’s legs get chopped off. I was thinking about all this when I was making toast one morning and the lyrics and the melody just flew out in 10 seconds. So, it’s a catch-it-when-you-can situation.

You’ve also done deliberate experiments with this, haven’t you?

Dreams was a self-released project I did where I kept a pad and pen by my bed, and I was deliberately forcing myself to wake up in the middle of the night to write down what I could remember from my dreams. It was fragments, mostly. But when you train yourself to do that, it’s amazing what the brain will do. Every song on that project was a result of fragments of actual dreams that I had. Some of them are rather cathartic and painful, but some of them were just trying to interpret what I had seen.

It sounds like your creative process isn’t consistent. You do different things at different times, depending on what you’re working on.

Yeah. And definitely an event in your life, whether it’s personal or some kind of event globally—those make impressions on pretty much everybody. You can treat that as something to explore, or you can treat it as something passing through you. And that’s kind of my philosophy, which I’ve had for many years with my studies in Buddhism, is that this stuff is like a chemical thing that’s happening: it comes in, and then it’s in there, and then it goes out. You don’t have to be afraid of the emotions, whether it’s sadness or rage or whatever. They’re just there. And they’re going to leave. That’s kind of the way you can get through life, the brutality of everything.

You mentioned Buddhism. How has your spirituality played out in your work?

Every single album that I’ve done has had something to do with that, going as far back as Thirteen Masks (1991). I was studying Buddhism when I was in college and meditating and all that. The turning point for me, the major change in my views and my interests, came during what they called the Year of Tibet in New York [in 1991]. They had all these events for weeks. The monks were there; the Dalai Lama was there. I went to every single one of them, and the biggest one I guess would be when we got up when it was still dark and walked from Avenue B and East 6th St to Madison Square Garden. That was the Kalachakra initiation.

It culminated with all of us receiving a blessing. The ceremony itself, which took place over days, was very powerful. I found myself weeping. I couldn’t stop the tears. It was purging something from me. After that, I felt a sense of euphoria. This is when I shifted from just meditating and started moving into something a little deeper and trying really to understand it and not just use Buddhism as psychotherapy, which is what a lot of Westerners do.

But I’ve just left little hints and messages in my music, because I don’t want to preach. So, I’ve done songs about how you are not your emotions. That’s the biggest thing for me. It’s possibly the biggest thing that I personally have embraced. Facing my emotions was something I had to do. And it doesn’t mean becoming numb. It just means that you don’t define yourself by that.

Over the years, you’ve been a big proponent of DIY, of handling every aspect of your material—the composing, the writing, recording, design, the release—yourself. That’s a ton of work, but I imagine that it’s served you well in the long run. How did you find yourself on that path, and what do you see as the rewards of doing things that way?

Well, the initial thing was the mail art and the cassette projects. That was a network of people that were global, but there was very much a community aspect to it. But I think the big one was [my 1998 album] Anhedoniac. That was extremely personal and, in my opinion, a really powerful work. And it’s hardcore—I mean, it’s not for everybody. It was so personal and so private that I wanted to self-manufacture it, self-release it, which I did on compact disc. But then no one would publish it because it was deemed obscene. The photos were done by Richard Kern, who was rather well-known, but people didn’t understand the photos. There was nothing pornographic about them. The images are rather fierce, and that was the whole point.

Finally, I found a publishing company run by women. They weren’t concerned about the photos, but they didn’t like the words. They said the words were blasphemous. So, finally, the person who wound up publishing it—meaning the artwork, the booklet—was a pornographer. Today, there is stuff so much more extreme than what I did back then. But in those days, there was so much censorship, and I just met wall after wall. And then, when it was more “commercially” released by Atavistic years later, the tracks were edited down, the stores would not take the photos, and most of them were removed. After an experience like that, you want to do everything on your own.

Many musicians find their lane, be it rock or jazz or whatever, and stick to it. You’ve consistently experimented with many different forms of music. Why is that important to you?

I like the word “exploratory” rather than “experimental,” because I feel “experimental” has become overused, kind of like “alternative.” If I self-release my work to streaming platforms, there is no category. It just says “alternative.” What does that mean? So, yeah, that’s kind of frustrating. But it probably comes from my background—my father taught me all these songs from the 1940s, but my brothers were older than me and they went through music happening later on with rock and so forth. I think I just heard things differently. I didn’t want to sing Gilbert and Sullivan. I didn’t want to do the church stuff all the time, the stuff my father wanted me to do.

There was a dividing line when I broke out on my own and I wanted to stop the singing lessons and all this. I wanted to learn how to sing improperly, incorrectly with breath. The teacher was horrified and said, “That’s not singing!” So, I had to unlearn my approach because I was inspired by Pink Floyd and I was inspired by what I was hearing. That’s when the turning point came of just reaching for other things. I started doing covers, but I wanted to explore beyond the well-known versions of things like, say, Julie London’s “Cry Me a River.” Her version is wildly popular, very coy, almost flirtatious, right? But I wanted to have it be gut wrenching. So, that kind of thing is how it started: taking something familiar and doing it in a totally different way. Listening to a song and hearing the potential in it to be something else.

I think that comes from open-mindedness and continually searching and having a voracious appetite for hearing music. The surprising thing for me of late has been exploring classical music and going to as many classical concerts as I can. I think it all informs you if you don’t stay in one genre. If you do rock, I think you should start listening to free jazz. I love Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman. You have to keep an open mind to what other people are doing.

The one thing I do struggle with is when something comes on and it’s too commercial sounding, like a jingle or something that’s a little too corporate sounding for me. I do meet a wall there in my mind and I try to chip it open and find something there, but I feel like there’s so much bombardment. So yes, I still have that kind of rebellious anti-corporate thing going on.

Speaking of your father, I read somewhere that he was an FBI agent. Is that true?

Yeah. My parents met in the FBI in Washington, D.C. And I think if I’m correct about this—there’s different stories from my brothers—but I think that they met at the shooting range. Target practice. And my mother had the… what do you call it? It’s like a title when you’re really good—a sharpshooter? She was incredible. She had a career; she wasn’t a typical trad wife or something.

The FBI seems like a very straitlaced profession. Do you think you were rebelling against all that—in addition to the church music your father preferred, I mean?

Yeah, I think so. I think more so my father than my mother. When I asked him what he wanted me to do, he said, “Sing at weddings.” That’s how he felt I should pursue music. What’s interesting is that he was an incredible artist, too. He could paint anything and he was a wonderful writer, and his singing voice was amazing and he could play guitar. He also had a degree in forestry and a master’s in psychology. He was kind of a universally talented person.

I think that’s where I get any musical ability because I’m the only one that got it. My two brothers didn’t get it, and my mother wasn’t interested. So, I have to give him credit for that because he really encouraged me. But then it came to a point where he just wanted me to perform at certain events, and I wanted to do other things. And then I also wanted to do different things for work, like be a ranger riding horses and doing cool things like that, but those were discouraged. In many ways, I think I was a terrible disappointment to him. I only moved to New York and started pursuing what I really wanted to do after he died. But my mother was encouraging. She would hear the songs I was singing on with Swans, like “Blackmail,” and she was very supportive.

You’ve collaborated with many musicians over the years, and of course you’ve created a huge amount of work on your own. What do you see as the pros and cons of each?

A few years ago, I did an album called Illusory where I had complete control. It was based on field recordings I took on my phone in Europe, and it took a year of minute editing to complete. Sightings started in a similar way, with some recordings I made outside, but then I sent them to Andrea Calderon to add her touch. You have to have a trust thing with people like, “Here’s my framework for this—now you embellish it.” Which Andrea does on this album. I sent her the piano or organ as a guide, and then she added her cello and violins. It worked in a similar way with Neurosis when I worked with them. They sent me these frameworks, and I transformed my journal entries into lyrics and recorded them and sent them back. But in the rehearsals for live, there was a definite back and forth of “Do this, don’t do this.”

How did that dynamic play out when you were in Swans?

There was a certain amount of trust in the studio with Swans, with my singing and my keyboard playing and my arranging and all this stuff. I had some leeway. There was communication, and I was trusted to do that. But live was a different story: I had to stand a certain way. I had to be a certain way. I couldn’t just run with what I wanted to do live. The last tour I did, I took more and more chances and started doing more of what I wanted to do. By the end, I was about three-quarters of the way to what I would have done.

I think that the problem there was, Michael [Gira] didn’t want me to be quote-unquote “theatrical.” Well, I joined a very theatrical band. I was on stage as a keyboard player when there was full nudity involved and standing up on the monitors nude or in long underwear. And I mean, I thought it was very theatrical, a very Theatre of Cruelty type performance. So, I didn’t understand the idea that I had to tone it down—“you’re being too theatrical”—because that was what I thought I was part of. But that’s another story.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by J. Bennett.