HOLLY MIRANDA
Unbreakable
Holly Miranda’s songs of heartbreak and alienation will stop you dead in your tracks. I hit the road with her to find out how she escaped a strict religious upbringing to become one of America’s most exciting indie singers
As the steel canyons of Manhattan fade from the rear view mirror of her Fanta-coloured rent-a-car, indie rock chanteuse Holly Miranda coyly nibbles at a small slice of gruyere cheese and a clump of raw caulifl ower. “Timmy,” she says, peeking over the black rims of her glasses, “does gruyere turn you on?” Her guitarist Timmy Mislock inhales deeply as she wafts the wedge around. “Ooh yeah,” he laughs. “That’s sooo hot.” Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” reverberates off the stack of amps crowding the back seat. “I thought so,” Holly sniggers as they turn on to the freeway. “Now let’s get the fuck outta Dodge!” It’s 10am on Sunday morning and the two old friends are en route to Chicago for the first date of a whistle-stop tour that will take them from north-east America to Canada, and then across Europe in support of The Antlers and The XX. Their set-up is the epitome of DIY simplicity – no drums, no bass, no synth, no roadies, no tour manager; just two guitars, two amps, Holly, Timmy and an enchanting collection of songs that make up her forthcoming album, The Magician’s Private Library. The stripped-down approach is partly due to financial constraints – the album doesn’t come out until January 2010, and Holly’s decided to be prudent by saving the record label’s money for a bigger tour nearer its release. It’s also because her close friend, fellow Brooklyn troubadour Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, has taken the rest of her band on the road.
“I’ve known Miles forever,” Holly says as the car plunges into a flooded underpass on the outskirts of New Jersey. “It’s basically our band, just without us. Which is fine as long as Miles remembers that it’s my band and not his! We’ve been talking about going on tour together and sharing them, so maybe we can work that out. It’s not a problem. Well, not yet…”
Until then, it’s just her and Timmy. They’re used to that set-up, sharing an apartment in Wiliamsburg and performing with each other for the last few years. They are so close that people around their neighbourhood think that Timmy is Holly’s little brother. She often introduces him as such. Tellingly, he’s volunteered for the fi rst stint behind the wheel for the long drive to Chicago. It’s the equivalent of driving from London to Glasgow and back again.
“I like driving,” says her 24-year-old BFF. “You get used to it. It’s not like sitting in your room listening to music, which can get fucking depressing. Driving gives me time to reflect and to listen to music. Plus, I’m actually driving to Chicago to play a show. I’ve spent years playing guitar unnoticed in the corner of parties, but now people are actually paying to hear Holly and me play.”
“I like to have someone with me,” Holly echoes, turning down the Dirty Projectors. “I can’t really deal with driving for more than three or four hours on my own. It gets lonely, especially being away from Lola.”
Holly clicks off the GPS map on her Blackberry and gazes at the home screen as the car zooms through the verdant green mountains of Bald Eagle State Forest. Smiling out from behind the glass is her girlfriend Lola, a stunning young model with cropped bleach blonde hair.
“The first song I sang to her was Barry Manilow’s ‘Copacabana’,” she recalls with a giggle, before breaking out into the first verse. “I already miss her. We just went to a Greek orthodox wedding and danced so much that I tore both my calf muscles. But that wasn’t the worst thing – Lola’s sister told a whole room of people how much she hated me. She was wasted, so it didn’t make much sense. But it hurt. I had missed my grandad’s funeral to go to the wedding and all day I kept on getting updates from my mum telling me things like what colour his casket was. It was really hard for me to deal with, especially on top of being screamed at for no reason. It was quite a wedding to remember.”
The car rattles past DuBois as Karen Dalton emotes fragilely from the stereo. A few miles to the south lies Punxsutawney, the town immortalised in Groundhog Day. It seems fitting for the pair to be so close to a place that will forever be associated with inescapable repetition. After all, for the next four weeks they will both be stuck in the same cycle – driving, unpacking their gear, playing a show, repacking their gear, partying, sleeping in a motel and driving to the next venue. Bill Murray would surely empathise.
Tomorrow’s gig in Chi-Town also happens to fall on Holly’s 27th birthday, the infamous rock’n’roll age that Kurt, Jimi and Janis failed to live beyond. If she’s anxious about reaching such an ominous musical milestone, she’s not letting it show, preferring instead to spend the next few hours flicking through The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky and writing filthy Madlibs about Rosie O’Donell’s vagina, dwarves and toffee. Yet, on record, her easy-going manner and sense of humour are replaced with darker introspection, and recurring themes of heartbreak and alienation.
“I worry that my songs are too sad,” she says. “But I don’t want to bring people down. I just want to share and uplift. It’s hard sometimes when people come to see a loud band and I come out with a quiet set. Even though it could be loud, it wouldn’t be portraying the songs in right way. Thinking about how people are going to react is intense. But I just have to do what I do. It’s terrifying putting yourself out there sometimes, but also unbelievably exciting.”
Six hours later they enter Ohio, home of the Wright Brothers, Devo, and Ernest Angley’s Cathedral Buffet. However, Holly isn’t in the mood for stopping for some Jesus burritos at the preacher’s food hall.
“My childhood was spent driving to Florida going to these huge televangelist churches that hold 10,000 people,” she explains. “I’m all Jesus’d out. When I was a kid I went back and forth about my belief. I was constantly trying to accept the Holy Spirit but never feeling it in the way I was supposed to. I thought there was something wrong with me. It was a mind fuck; kids shouldn’t have to think about heaven and hell. We literally had prayer meetings on Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, Friday night and some home meetings in between them. When I was 14 I told my parents that I didn’t believe in their God and they told me they were failures as parents. I came out to them a year later. It was the same kind of reaction. When I was 16 I expressed an interest in moving to New York. I was really excited and went downstairs to tell my mum and all she said was, ‘I think this soup needs more salt.’ So I packed my stuff and left.”
Holly hasn’t looked back since. In 2001 she made High Above The City, a DIY album that she sold at solo acoustic shows. Even back then her voice, a bluesy fusion of Cat Power and Marissa Nadler, hinted at something very special. Over the intervening eight years her voice fell “three octaves”, and she edged away from the twee side of folk, thanks to a long stint as vocalist/guitarist in NYC hipster rock group The Jealous Girlfriends. And, while she has matured as a songwriter, The Magician’s Private Library essentially shines a spotlight into the same dark recesses of her soul as it did on High Above The City. New songs like “Joints” vocalise her internal battle with fibromyalgia, a muscular condition that makes it painful to sit still or carry heavy objects, while the outstanding “Slow Burn Treason” with Kyp Malone addresses the pain of a doomed love affair.
“I think with a lot of the songs I’m just talking to myself,” she says. “It’s my way of getting it all out. I have a hard time talking sometimes. Singing is much easier. ‘Slow Burn Treason’ is about letting something burn out that you know is going to burn out eventually, or just ending it and being alone. When I wrote that I was in some shitty relationship, but it was more about how humans have a tendency to stick with something bad because it’s too scary to be alone.”
Dave Sitek from TV On The Radio felt such a kinship with Holly’s voice and subject matter that he offered to produce the whole record, with help from Katrina Ford of Celebration. His claustrophobic beats and ethereal textures give The Magician’s Private Library an undeniably cinematic feel.
“At one point, Dave said to me, ‘I’m putting my finger prints all over this record’, and I said, ‘I know, I love it.’ That’s why you hire a producer. I knew what I was doing by making a record with Dave. I can’t worry about what other people are going to think. I think it’s hard being a female, especially in the indie rock fi eld. People expect a very certain thing from me. Some people think it’s just my voice and Dave’s music, which is totally preposterous, but it’s going to happen. Me worrying about it isn’t going to change anything.”
As dusk descends, Holly looks out of her window at the scenery rushing past. Tractors spray golden yellow corn fields with insecticide, Tootsie Roll trucks cruise into rest areas, and picture-perfect red barns soak up the last of the autumn sun. “We just passed a road called Fang Boner,” she chortles. “You couldn’t make that up. I didn’t know Ohio had many horny vampires?”
“I’m tempted to go into the corn fields and shuck my husk,” Timmy retorts as he pulls off the I-80 freeway. Chicago is still 200 miles away, but they’re both tired and eager to celebrate Holly’s last night as a 26-year-old. Unfortunately, Ohioan supermarkets don’t serve liquor on Sundays, so they end up in a bar called, imaginatively, The Bar, in a strange little village called Montpelier. Its main claim to fame is a 15-foot waterslide.
“Do you think we should pull the guitars in here and play a show?” Holly asks Timmy. They look around The Bar. A woman stumbles out of the toilet and wipes her hands on the next woman going in. She then slurs something and starts nodding along to “Chop Suey” by System Of A Down. On the wall behind her a sign proclaims Hard Times Call For Hard Liquor. The out-of-towners decide to stay inconspicuous by ordering a meat pizza and a few cans of Bud. They leave the mullets to shout obscenities at the Dallas Cowboys. After discussing the merits of Tool, Holly lifts up the round plastic pizza divider. “I used to use this as a table in my old My Little Pony doll’s house,” she grins tipsily. “I would make GI Joe and Barbie porn. Boy, they were some romps. Didn’t you?” Timmy shakes his head and buys a six-pack, to go.
Two hours later and the pair have set up their amps in a Holiday Inn room and are belting out loud covers of Pink Floyd and Etta James. It’s 12.30am and this is their fi rst tour rehearsal. “I can’t believe no one has actually complained about us yet!” Holly exclaims. Timmy takes her to the bathroom and teaches her how to shotgun a beer can by spearing it with the car keys. She gurgles it back and goes out for a smoke in the cornfields. After calling Lola, they crawl into a double bed and pass out.
Holly’s 27th year begins with breakfast at the Coffee Basket, a quaint little diner that greets you with a souvenir guide to 9/11. Inside there’s a group of eight women with the same middle-age haircut looking at Holly and Timmy strangely. Maybe it’s because they’re both dressed in black, rapping about panties and Holly’s necking back painkillers. “You are not missing out on this,” she winces, pointing to her stomach. “It’s like there’s a grumpy janitor in my uterus poking at me with a spork. I hate playing shows with my period, although it usually makes the performance more emotive! And then I go off stage and collapse.” After breakfast and a quick hit of weed in the car park, they get back on the road.
Joan Jett and Beastie Boys soundtrack their mid-afternoon entrance to Chicago as Holly attempts to explain a dream she had last night about holding hands with Emily Haines from Metric. In the distance the monolithic Sears Tower looks like a huge taser gun threatening to electrify the ominous grey clouds.
Later, at the Subterranean club, eager students chat excitedly while waiting for Holly and The Antlers to emerge. Even some of Lola’s family have travelled to see her play. Backstage, she has a couple of whiskeys to dampen her first night nerves and tells the headliners that her biggest fear of performing is being sick on stage. Luckily, when she steps into the spotlight that doesn’t happen. Instead, the crowd stand transfixed as Holly serves up her heart on a plate for half an hour. Timmy’s frenzied guitar stabs push her musical fervour into the red, with the stripped down electro-acoustic versions of “Slow Burn Treason”, “Forest Green Oh Forest Green” and “Waves” wrenching every emotion out of her tiny body. It’s a stirring performance.
Afterwards, Holly goes outside for a sneaky spliff while Timmy packs up their gear. Tomorrow they drive to Detroit, where her parents are coming to watch the show. Slightly drunk she breaks into “The Tracks of My Tears” by Smokey Robinson. Knowing that she’s going back home to perform in a city that holds so many confusing memories, it’s hard to ignore the poignancy of Smokey’s lyrics as they reverberate down the quiet back alley, but Holly just laughs as she reaches the song’s crescendo. She throws the roach away and walks towards the car.
“My Dad always said to me, ‘Opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one – and they usually stink’,” she says. “It’s true. I’m my harshest critic. But I’m trying to learn to go easy on myself. If I can truly express myself, and give an ounce of that to somebody then it has all been worth it. That’s evolution, baby.”
The Magician’s Private Library is out in January 2010 on XL Recordings. hollymiranda.com
“I like to have someone with me,” Holly echoes, turning down the Dirty Projectors. “I can’t really deal with driving for more than three or four hours on my own. It gets lonely, especially being away from Lola.”
“The first song I sang to her was Barry Manilow’s ‘Copacabana’,” she recalls with a giggle, before breaking out into the first verse. “I already miss her. We just went to a Greek orthodox wedding and danced so much that I tore both my calf muscles. But that wasn’t the worst thing – Lola’s sister told a whole room of people how much she hated me. She was wasted, so it didn’t make much sense. But it hurt. I had missed my grandad’s funeral to go to the wedding and all day I kept on getting updates from my mum telling me things like what colour his casket was. It was really hard for me to deal with, especially on top of being screamed at for no reason. It was quite a wedding to remember.”
The car rattles past DuBois as Karen Dalton emotes fragilely from the stereo. A few miles to the south lies Punxsutawney, the town immortalised in Groundhog Day. It seems fitting for the pair to be so close to a place that will forever be associated with inescapable repetition. After all, for the next four weeks they will both be stuck in the same cycle – driving, unpacking their gear, playing a show, repacking their gear, partying, sleeping in a motel and driving to the next venue. Bill Murray would surely empathise.
Tomorrow’s gig in Chi-Town also happens to fall on Holly’s 27th birthday, the infamous rock’n’roll age that Kurt, Jimi and Janis failed to live beyond. If she’s anxious about reaching such an ominous musical milestone, she’s not letting it show, preferring instead to spend the next few hours flicking through The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky and writing filthy Madlibs about Rosie O’Donell’s vagina, dwarves and toffee. Yet, on record, her easy-going manner and sense of humour are replaced with darker introspection, and recurring themes of heartbreak and alienation.
“I worry that my songs are too sad,” she says. “But I don’t want to bring people down. I just want to share and uplift. It’s hard sometimes when people come to see a loud band and I come out with a quiet set. Even though it could be loud, it wouldn’t be portraying the songs in right way. Thinking about how people are going to react is intense. But I just have to do what I do. It’s terrifying putting yourself out there sometimes, but also unbelievably exciting.”
Six hours later they enter Ohio, home of the Wright Brothers, Devo, and Ernest Angley’s Cathedral Buffet. However, Holly isn’t in the mood for stopping for some Jesus burritos at the preacher’s food hall.
“My childhood was spent driving to Florida going to these huge televangelist churches that hold 10,000 people,” she explains. “I’m all Jesus’d out. When I was a kid I went back and forth about my belief. I was constantly trying to accept the Holy Spirit but never feeling it in the way I was supposed to. I thought there was something wrong with me. It was a mind fuck; kids shouldn’t have to think about heaven and hell. We literally had prayer meetings on Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, Friday night and some home meetings in between them. When I was 14 I told my parents that I didn’t believe in their God and they told me they were failures as parents. I came out to them a year later. It was the same kind of reaction. When I was 16 I expressed an interest in moving to New York. I was really excited and went downstairs to tell my mum and all she said was, ‘I think this soup needs more salt.’ So I packed my stuff and left.”
Holly hasn’t looked back since. In 2001 she made High Above The City, a DIY album that she sold at solo acoustic shows. Even back then her voice, a bluesy fusion of Cat Power and Marissa Nadler, hinted at something very special. Over the intervening eight years her voice fell “three octaves”, and she edged away from the twee side of folk, thanks to a long stint as vocalist/guitarist in NYC hipster rock group The Jealous Girlfriends. And, while she has matured as a songwriter, The Magician’s Private Library essentially shines a spotlight into the same dark recesses of her soul as it did on High Above The City. New songs like “Joints” vocalise her internal battle with fibromyalgia, a muscular condition that makes it painful to sit still or carry heavy objects, while the outstanding “Slow Burn Treason” with Kyp Malone addresses the pain of a doomed love affair.
Dave Sitek from TV On The Radio felt such a kinship with Holly’s voice and subject matter that he offered to produce the whole record, with help from Katrina Ford of Celebration. His claustrophobic beats and ethereal textures give The Magician’s Private Library an undeniably cinematic feel.
“At one point, Dave said to me, ‘I’m putting my finger prints all over this record’, and I said, ‘I know, I love it.’ That’s why you hire a producer. I knew what I was doing by making a record with Dave. I can’t worry about what other people are going to think. I think it’s hard being a female, especially in the indie rock fi eld. People expect a very certain thing from me. Some people think it’s just my voice and Dave’s music, which is totally preposterous, but it’s going to happen. Me worrying about it isn’t going to change anything.”
As dusk descends, Holly looks out of her window at the scenery rushing past. Tractors spray golden yellow corn fields with insecticide, Tootsie Roll trucks cruise into rest areas, and picture-perfect red barns soak up the last of the autumn sun. “We just passed a road called Fang Boner,” she chortles. “You couldn’t make that up. I didn’t know Ohio had many horny vampires?”
“I’m tempted to go into the corn fields and shuck my husk,” Timmy retorts as he pulls off the I-80 freeway. Chicago is still 200 miles away, but they’re both tired and eager to celebrate Holly’s last night as a 26-year-old. Unfortunately, Ohioan supermarkets don’t serve liquor on Sundays, so they end up in a bar called, imaginatively, The Bar, in a strange little village called Montpelier. Its main claim to fame is a 15-foot waterslide.
“Do you think we should pull the guitars in here and play a show?” Holly asks Timmy. They look around The Bar. A woman stumbles out of the toilet and wipes her hands on the next woman going in. She then slurs something and starts nodding along to “Chop Suey” by System Of A Down. On the wall behind her a sign proclaims Hard Times Call For Hard Liquor. The out-of-towners decide to stay inconspicuous by ordering a meat pizza and a few cans of Bud. They leave the mullets to shout obscenities at the Dallas Cowboys. After discussing the merits of Tool, Holly lifts up the round plastic pizza divider. “I used to use this as a table in my old My Little Pony doll’s house,” she grins tipsily. “I would make GI Joe and Barbie porn. Boy, they were some romps. Didn’t you?” Timmy shakes his head and buys a six-pack, to go.
Two hours later and the pair have set up their amps in a Holiday Inn room and are belting out loud covers of Pink Floyd and Etta James. It’s 12.30am and this is their fi rst tour rehearsal. “I can’t believe no one has actually complained about us yet!” Holly exclaims. Timmy takes her to the bathroom and teaches her how to shotgun a beer can by spearing it with the car keys. She gurgles it back and goes out for a smoke in the cornfields. After calling Lola, they crawl into a double bed and pass out.
Joan Jett and Beastie Boys soundtrack their mid-afternoon entrance to Chicago as Holly attempts to explain a dream she had last night about holding hands with Emily Haines from Metric. In the distance the monolithic Sears Tower looks like a huge taser gun threatening to electrify the ominous grey clouds.
Later, at the Subterranean club, eager students chat excitedly while waiting for Holly and The Antlers to emerge. Even some of Lola’s family have travelled to see her play. Backstage, she has a couple of whiskeys to dampen her first night nerves and tells the headliners that her biggest fear of performing is being sick on stage. Luckily, when she steps into the spotlight that doesn’t happen. Instead, the crowd stand transfixed as Holly serves up her heart on a plate for half an hour. Timmy’s frenzied guitar stabs push her musical fervour into the red, with the stripped down electro-acoustic versions of “Slow Burn Treason”, “Forest Green Oh Forest Green” and “Waves” wrenching every emotion out of her tiny body. It’s a stirring performance.
Afterwards, Holly goes outside for a sneaky spliff while Timmy packs up their gear. Tomorrow they drive to Detroit, where her parents are coming to watch the show. Slightly drunk she breaks into “The Tracks of My Tears” by Smokey Robinson. Knowing that she’s going back home to perform in a city that holds so many confusing memories, it’s hard to ignore the poignancy of Smokey’s lyrics as they reverberate down the quiet back alley, but Holly just laughs as she reaches the song’s crescendo. She throws the roach away and walks towards the car.
“My Dad always said to me, ‘Opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one – and they usually stink’,” she says. “It’s true. I’m my harshest critic. But I’m trying to learn to go easy on myself. If I can truly express myself, and give an ounce of that to somebody then it has all been worth it. That’s evolution, baby.”
The Magician’s Private Library is out in January 2010 on XL Recordings. hollymiranda.com
