More than 10 years have passed since Rebecca Gates put out her solo debut, Ruby Series. The former member of the Spinanes mostly shifted her energy to other projects: coordinating and managing exhibitions for museums, lecturing at arts centers, composing music for dance and film, participating in performance pieces and stylizing photos for magazines. She also did some bookkeeping, retreated to Rhode Island and helped friends build a movie theater. But as time and money allowed, she also popped back into studios to put together her follow-up, The Float (12XU). Gates spoke to MAGNET about the album, about what she’s been doing and about why the state of the music business should matter to everyone. She will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.
I have some questions about your new album that I’d like to get to, but first I’d like to talk about some of the visual work you’re involved in. How do the visual arts describe your work at large?
There’s some visual component to the installation work I do, and I’ve done some photographic work, but otherwise I’m working in sound and in listening. One of the things that’s amazing to me is that a lot of it is live, community-based. I’ve loved music since I was a child, as a listener, but I didn’t really start playing until there was that regional base that was made out here in the West. I wouldn’t have framed it that way, but looking back over time, there’s this thread, whether in my music or curating or working in advocacy, there’s always that thread of a physical, geographical space and the people in it and those relationships. And even a lot of my song writing can be detailed that way. So, it’s just really nice to be able to go into different areas, especially something as big as the Marfa Sessions, to pull together all these different people who were working with sound and all these visual artists and people who worked primarily with visuals, but did other performance with a sound-base for it. It turns out really amazing.
How’d you get involved with that project?
I started working on an audiomagazine called The Relay Project, and I just kind of kicked into that when I quit releasing records. Decided to take a break. It’s a collaboration with Lucy Raven (an editor at Bomb magazine). We really started to investigate issues around listening and creating a space for listening, and we were looking for a place to do a show and Marfa came up as a place that would be really interesting to do it in. We could really get engaged in community there.
Did the Marfa project get you back into the studio?
Marfa was absolutely seminal in me making music again. Marfa put me in the context of “This is my job. This is what I bring to the table.”
There’s a real sense of place in The Float. It feels to me like Portland, like quiet voices talking on the porch, dampened from the world by the weather.
One of the really great things about being able to hit the kind of energy of a project is to get feedback. I don’t like prescribing people’s experience who listen to records by saying what I meant or thought or what started it. I have trouble talking about it because I don’t really like talking about it. Four songs were mixed in Portland; one was recorded here. All rest were mixed and recorded in different places. Very much, each song has a locale for me. Not necessarily a specific response like the Marfa Sessions, but really an exercise. I just know that song started in Paris and that song started in Switzerland, and that song started on the drive from New York to Montreal and that song started on the coast of Rhode Island. I was also driving a lot, so a lot of that was done in motion.
I used to drive across the country quite a bit when I was younger and a girlfriend bought me a Dictaphone because she didn’t want me writing on the road or stopping to write.
When out in West Texas, I would write longhand and I wouldn’t look at it in the passenger seat or in my lap. I felt like a menace to society, though I was careful. I read that Sam Sheppard did that, too. I suppose a lot of writers do that. In terms of demos, I have a of couple really funny recordings. I would maybe play a demo, record it, burn to CD and listen to it in the car, singing over it, then record that with a digital camera or Dictaphone. There’s these totally weird iterations, like some of them are really cool sounding. And sometimes, I’m like, “Oh my god, I can’t delete that fast enough.”
You don’t seem to me to be someone who sets out to make an album just to make an album. That is, you seem to wait for an impetus.
Even when I had a structured label context when I was working with Sub Pop, I never really felt like making records. I always wanted there to be a reason to make a record, so I would wait until there was something that I didn’t hear that I wanted to hear. I think that now I start kind of writing things and they’ll stick, so I’ll know it’s time to sit down and flesh it out. But being out of context of a label, with someone to say, “Hey it’s been a year, what are you thinking?” it’s been good. But then it helps to have someone like a bandmate or a label to say, “You know, what’s going on, where you at?” I got to that point where I had five songs, six songs, and I had some money saved. And then I ran out of money and went back to work. I basically went back and forth, and I got to a point when I set everything aside. I was working full-time in New York, I was involved in other projects and working freelance all the time.
So, how’d you get to the point when you said that you decided you were going to make this album?
Howard (Bilerman) emailed me out of the blue and said, “If you’re not playing music any more, I want you to know that I really love your albums, but if you are making music and you want to make a record, I’m totally open to talking about it.” I really took that as a Bruce Springsteen/Courtney Cox moment. I don’t remember the song, but he reaches out into audience and pulls her onstage. I always have the drive to write and play constantly, but it’s really hard to pull it out and make it external. I really need someone to kind of yank me. I started working with Howard, and then it became just business issues and it took a really long time to get together.
Was the process of making album harder alone?
Not really. I am kind of a solo writer. I tend to write alone, and then I always work with a band, an engineer, a producer—I end up producing myself a lot—and we end up teasing things out or arranging things. I do like it that way.
You just need a little kick in the butt to finish.
I’m always working, so it’s not so much that I need a kick in the butt to get to things. It’s more I don’t see the external possibilities sometimes. I also lost a lot of confidence, and it was something I had to work my way through. I think it was really only through my peers who I really respect saying, “These songs are good. We want to hear the finished version. We want to hear the album,” that I saw the possiblities.
Why did you lose confidence?
I’m not a real ego-driven performer. I don’t think that the world needs my music. I don’t think the world needs me, and the thing I love so much about playing live is not necessarily the applause—of course, you like it—but it’s that space. It’s just an incredibly unique thing that happens when with people in a room where people playing music and there’s that amplification of … even as a participant, being able to be on the other end of it and just kind of creating like what we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation, that kind of geographical-based sound, that architectural-based space. There’s been a real shift in the culture that it doesn’t sound like total b.s. to be saying things like that about rock ‘n’ roll. Which is a way of saying I tend to think in terms of, “Why does the album need to get out? Why is it worth all the business work and all the sacrifices you make?” I think that for me it has to get to the point that it’s something I want to do because I enjoy it and because I think about it a lot. But when the business changes and you become an older performer and the culture shifts and there’s not as many opportunities extended, a part of me was like, “If there are people who want to help me do this” … I mean, I’ve experienced so much generosity, but nobody was like, “Dude, I can’t wait for your new record. We’re gonna get you hooked up on this killer tour and we’ve got these label that are interested in you.”
When was that?
That was off and on, but really most acutely three years ago when I decided I really wanted to finish the record, and I wanted to engage in process of touring, because I really missed that community. A lot of it is also the general mindfuck of being an artist. It wasn’t like I had a super crisis of confidence where I thought I was a terrible person; I just thought that maybe this would be a little easier if I was better or something and it really took people sitting me down and saying, “You know the biz has completely changed, and you need to think about what you want to do and try to make it happen.”
Where does music fit into everything else you’re involved in?
In my lifetime involvement with any kind of music, but especially soul and pop music. There’s a part of me that always wants to keep exploring what that structure is, how it can change. I love, love, love rock ‘n’ roll. I love all kinds of music, but I got to a point with this record particularly, when I just wanted to try and write this rock song that I haven’t heard and haven’t heard a woman sing. I think that a lot of people aren’t playing this kind of rock. I continually come back to music because there’s this adoration and magic and unique place that it holds in my life and the culture.
What does The Float refer to?
I like naming things. I love the idea of trying to make a space that people can bring different things to. One of the things I like about naming it The Float is that it can mean so many things, but basically any meaning it had has resonance with the project.
On Facebook, you wrote that you need to develop a list of “quality pithy lies” about what you’ve been doing for the last 10 years. Have you?
I’m such a straight shooter, and I like listening to people as much as talking and sometimes I get really earnest and just really wish I could more sappy. I have some pretty great adventures that I actually experienced, so I guess I just need to.I’ve got some good truths; I guess I just need to dress them up.
You’re involved in a number of efforts to help musicians, including the Future of Music Coalition and Cash Music, and you spoke out against the Stop Online Piracy Act. Where does the advocacy impulse come from? Are you trying to use your experience to guide others?
It’s just who I am. As an eight-year-old, I worried about nuclear weapons. I thought, “Why wouldn’t we stop that?” It’s a thread through most things I’ve done. Practically, I realize I do have experience, and we do need to find different ways to share strategies as musicians, and just as citizens, to help people. I’m really fortunate that I made records at a time when people were buying them. When record stores still existed. That still happens, but it was the only way you got music. There’s this joke online that says, “In the old days if you wanted to steal music, you had to wear a really big coat.” I felt like if I’m having so many challenges myself and I supposedly have an audience. What is happening for people who don’t have that?
And these issues transcend the music business.
When Obama was elected there was such a groundswell of support, and it was amazing to hear from someone who was articulate and someone people could get excited about and to watch how quickly that fell away and just started thinking about who we are in our days and what we expect and how we can get more engaged and how we can get more engaged. And maybe that’s not important to everyone. But there are a lot of issues coming up if you’re an intelligent person and especially if you’re an intelligent creative person.s.
—Matthew Irwin
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