Catalpa: Liner Notes

Origins of Catalpa:

The first time I remember seeing a Catalpa was at Kale's farm in Texas, a big strong maple-looking tree with broad, light green leaves. It seems like such a tough tree to have those filmy, Azalea-like bunches of flowers, with freakishly long bean-pods dangling: dichotomous as a tall drag queen in a frilly white dress. The dictionary says catalpa is an anglicization of the Greek, meaning “head with wings,” like baby angel heads on Mexican candles. The song catalpa waltz was written the night it was recorded here, in the same spot Nancy Wolf took that blurry picture on the cover (and these photos were not developed--they were taken from the contact sheet). So the song wasn't finished until the following morning--it is a retroactive love song to Morning Eller. The unsung words are "we sat down to the feast of our youth--and you the first and the last to ever be the first to love me for who I am--make sure I understand, and I'll understand." Enzo Garcia brought over the 8 track and we played all night--ghost waltz and demon lover improv are of that session as well. Chris Arnold dropped something in the room and thus is credited for "percussion." The drum on alley flowers is from Northern Mexico and is three feet in diameter. When played in a hot room, it resonates like a gong and moves right through you; there are no effects on that track. The drum is played in 12/8 and the guitar (a 1960's Japanese Les Paul) is played in 4/4, at that Cabalistic intersection of those meters. I wanna die was written in the back of a moving camper van down a South Louisiana highway, and was recorded at Lemon DeGeorge's Crib Studios. Also done at Lemon's was wandering angus, a W. B. Yeats ballad which Brian Miller set to music, and here also plays the electric guitar. The final sound on the track is designed by Chris Arnold to sound "like a golden apple in the sun." Chris took four hours to create that sound--Does it sound like a golden apple to you? The rest of the tracks were recorded in one session in Seth Augustus' living room, for the sole purpose of his learning the songs. There are two coughs and at least one accident captured on this record. I never intended to release these tracks any further than my neighborhood. This is a rough sketch of an album. Catalpa weighs far more heavily in spirit than in substance. I hope you hear it.

Thanks to all mentioned above, plus Mike Good, Syd Barrett, Tom Waits, Kathleen Brennan, Nick Cave, Will Oldham, Chris Powers, Annie Southworth, Les Watkins, Andy Kaulkin, Heather Fremling, Jeff Abarta and the rest of Epitaph/Anti-, Dan Strachota, Michael Goldberg, Mike McGonigel, all the DJs, Jennifer Tefft, the Rite Spot, the Make Out Room, the Hemlock, Julie Jackson Lusby and my family, Joy Hooper Jackson, Dave Holland, Bud and Bud the Hooper Twins, my darling Samantha Parton, Obo Martin, Sean Hayes, the Rank Stranger, Kate Klaire, Carrie & Sarah, Michael Musika, Deborah Coffin, Sarah and Ashton, Gary Vessel, again all the musicians, and of course my archivist/night-manager/moonshiner, Adam Wolf.

www.jolieholland.com www.anti.com


The Elusive Jolie Holland :An amazing San Francisco-based artist releases what could be the album of the year. By Michael Goldberg

Reprinted from the review in neumu.net on Monday, February 24, 2003

You have to strain to make out some of the words she sings. Even when you turn the volume up, the recording has a slight muffled quality, as if there were a thin wall between you and the singer, whose name is Jolie Holland. As if you were hearing a voice coming at you from the past, all those years between then and now, between her and you. But then you hear those first lines, the ones at the start of Alley Flowers, a song off her new, debut solo album, Catalpa: "Some people say you got a psychedelic presence/ Shinin' in the park with a bioluminescence..." And you know that this isn't some old time recording. You've never heard anything quite like this before. "I'm trying to give people this very spontaneous, from-the-heart sound," Holland said recently.

She sings like a young old-time mountain woman with one foot in the past, one foot in the now. Her voice is comfortable, recognizable, yet different. It's a voice that's sweet and fragile, a voice that understands both hard times and love. When you listen to Holland, you hear a real person singing. At times she just seems to be conveying the story, in the most matter-of-fact manner. For some of Catalpa it's as if a tape recorder had been set up in a room of a San Francisco apartment and Holland simply played her favorite songs, which just might be how some of this wonderful album was made.

Her phrasing is unusual. She sings her words in a way that catches you off-guard. With a weird, dull, rhythmic sound that somehow reminds me of an underwater recording of a train moving down the tracks, and a quiet guitar for accompaniment, Holland sings: "Down these streets I see" - pause - "you comin'" - hesitation - "from afar."

On the Jolie Holland Web site, she describes her music like this: "New time old time: spooky American fairytales."

Spooky. That's certainly a good way to characterize "Alley Flowers."

When you hear the album's second song, "All the Morning Birds," you might think of Bobby Dylan, back when he was a kid in New York, back before he'd really made it, back when he was still a folk singer. Only this is folk by way of some jazz chanteuse. "By three a.m. all the morning birds will be crying," she sings, and as she does, she sweeps you into her world. "And that old highway will be sighing and my dreams feel as cold as my bones on the long walk home/ And my coat is old and growin' thin/ And my feet are numb and stumbling/ And it's many the thought of a long lost friend/ That comes to me again and again." She ends the song by whistling a brief solo. Imagine! Whistling. And it works.

Holland listened to folk, blues and jazz when she was younger, drawing on the work of such artists as Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Billie Holiday, Dylan and the numerous artists on Harry Smith's American Anthology of Folk Music (as well as such tragic rock icons as Nico and Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett) to come up with her own stripped-down modern folk music.

Her music feels at one with some of Dylan and The Band's "Basement Tapes" recordings. You can imagine her sitting on the steps of a rundown Southern farmhouse, singing her songs to some friends and family. There's mystery here. There's an elusive quality to these recordings, and you'll play them again and again. More is encoded - in Holland's voice, the words (often hers, sometimes penned by others), the sparse music - than you can get at. So you keep listening, trying to get to the soul of it all. "Well, I feel like an old hobo - I'm sad, lonesome and blue," she sings during "The Littlest Birds." "I was fair as a summer's day/ Now the summer days are through/ You pass through places/ And places pass through you/ But you carry them with you on the soles of your travelling shoes."

Holland grew up in Houston, Texas, and wrote her first song at age 6. She plays guitar, violin and ukulele. As a teenager she performed onstage, according to her bio, which goes on to recount: "She figured out how to play some Syd Barrett songs, abandoned the concept of going to college to hit the road in 1994, and bummed around between Austin, Texas and New Orleans among visual artists, musicians, circus performers, puppeteers, etc."

Holland headed west in 1997, eventually landing in San Francisco. Before long she was in Vancouver co-founding the Be Good Tanyas. She split before the group's debut, Blue Horse, was released in 2001. She appears on that album, singing on a few songs including "The Littlest Birds," which she re-recorded for Catalpa. Of the Be Good Tanyas' debut, England's Q wrote in 2001, "If you buy one country album this year you should make it The Be Good Tanyas'."

... There's a color photo of Holland on the cover of the album. It's out of focus and the contrast is so extreme that her face appears white and part of it blends into the white background. She's looking down, looking away, wearing a red dress, playing a red accordion. You get this sense of someone who's only half there. Or maybe someone who's moving so fast that she's already on to something new. One can imagine her, like Dylan, morphing quickly from album to album, changing her music, her attitude, her persona. For someone who could make as unique and striking a debut as Catalpa, just about anything is possible.

-- Michael Goldberg is co-founder/Editor in Chief of Neumu (neumu.net). He was Editor in Chief of Addicted To Noise and SonicNet, and a Senior Writer at Rolling Stone.

Musicians:
Jolie Holland - Voice, Guitar, Drum
Dave Mihaly - Drum, Bells
Enzo Garcia - Harmonica, Muted Banjo
Chris Arnold - Musical Saw, Percussion
Samantha Parton - Harmony on Track 6
Brian Miller - Electric Guitar

Engineering:
Track 1 - Chris Arnold
Track 6, 10 - Lemon DeGeorge
Track 7,8,11,12 - Enzo Garcia
Tracks 2,3,4,5,9 - Seth Augustus
Photography - Nancy Wolf
Graphics - Seth Augustus

1 Alley Flowers
2 All the Morning Birds
3 Roll My Blues (Mike Good)
4 Black Hand Blues (Hattie Hudson.)
5 December, 1999
6 I Wanna Die
7 Demon Lover Improv
8 Catalpa Waltz
9 The Littlest Birds (Holland / Parton / Syd Barrett)
10 Wandering Angus (words: W.B.Yates-music: Brian Miller)
11 Periphery Waltz
12 Ghost Waltz

All Songs written by Jolie Holland unless otherwise stated.
All Songs published by Box Tree Music (ASCAP) except tracks 3, 4 & 10 -
copyright control. Track 9 contains lyrics from “Jug Band Blues” written by Syd Barrett, published by Westminster Music Ltd / Essex Music International. Used by permission.

© & P 2003 Jolie Holland Music
Under exclusive license to Anti, Inc.
2798 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90026
All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.

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