Neko Case has called her pal Kelly Hogan “the Zelig of rock ‘n’ roll.” Her name appears in the credits for albums by Mavis Staples, the Mekons, Will Oldham, Matt Pond PA, Amy Ray, Giant Sand, Archer Prewitt, Alejandro Escovedo, Drive-By Truckers, Jakob Dylan, Tortoise and many others, Case included. Hogan’s fourth album has been a long time coming, in part because she’s been busy as a crucial part of Case’s band (anyone who’s seen Case live has witnessed Hogan’s amusing banter), in part because of the nature of the project. For I Like To Keep Myself In Pain (Anti-), Hogan sent letters to her songwriter friends, many of whom she’d sung with, asking them if they would send her a song, either one written specifically for her or one that “you think I could do right by,” as she said. That process started several years ago, and results yielded songs from a veritable who’s who: Vic Chesnutt, Stephin Merritt, Andrew Bird, Jon Langford, Janet Bean, M. Ward and others. Hogan will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our recent feature on her.
Hogan: I wanna talk to you about harmony. Sounds rubbing together in the air—that kind of harmony.
Okay, my name is Kelly Hogan and I am a harmony-holic. It has been about five minutes since I last used. Yes, I just harmonized to the fan in the public restroom at this library. I actually come to this particular library in part just to lean into the resonant tones when the 1910 grandfather clock ding-dongs four times an hour. Oooo, there it goes! Right on cue. Ahhhhhmmmmmhhhhhhhhnnnnggggg …. I’m a dang junkie. Born addicted, and always looking for another hit.
I was singing harmony since before I even knew that that’s what I was doing. In the back seat of our Rambler station wagon, my little brother and I would sing along to the AM radio “Sugar awww honey honey, ” and he would invariably frog me hard in the arm and say the same thing every time—”You’re doing it wrong!” Because I wasn’t singing the melody. I was harmonizing. I wasn’t doing it on purpose, and I didn’t know what to call it, but I just knew it felt good. It was an actual vibrating physical sensation. And I was hooked.
I moved on to stronger stuff when I started singing around the fire at Girl Scout camp and in chorus in middle school and high school. I found out that there’s an even greater rush to be had while singing harmony—not just with the radio or the record player—but with other voices—living breathing people standing right next to you who also know how to do “it”—how to make chords with vocal sounds. How to produce vibrations with your body that make the air change shape and color and temperature. I’d found my enablers. We formed a gang.
We’d skip lunch period to sing. We just had to have it. We were heavily into the freak-out that is Benjamin Britten’s “A Ceremony Of Carols”—but yeah, this is also when “Seven Bridges Road” was riding the charts, so you know we were Eagling it up just as hard. We’d sneak into the cavernous stairwell in the math building, or into the locker-room showers in the gym—the bigger and more empty, the better—because we’d also discovered that we could make powerful choral “speedballs” if we combined harmony with a magical drug called reverb. We soon became experts at scoring organic echo.
It was around this time that I was required to take music theory and, at first, I balked. I really didn’t want to know how it worked. I didn’t want to know the secret behind the magic. It was only when I finally realized that music theory was really math in disguise that I stopped fighting it and jumped on in. I already loved math, and this made it even more of a beautiful phenomenon in my eyes—like some Cirque du Soleil action … music and math, getting it on in mid-air … What a trip.
Of course, there’s more to it than that. Some people are born being able to harmonize, and one can certainly learn how to do it, mathematically—but unless you learn how to blend and swerve and listen—it’s not gonna fly. You can be singing the absolutely correct notes to make a chord, but unless you’re listening and blending, it’s still not gonna work. I live for moments when the blend is so perfect that you have to ask your fellow singer “was I singing that note, or were you?” When it’s really working, you can’t even tell. Edith Frost is a ninja master of this.
I think another one of the biggest things that draws me to it, is that most of the time when you sing harmony you’re not only blending together, but you have to breathe together, too—coordinated, at the same time—and it’s a beautiful way to be communal—to be in a band.
I love harmony so much, and I listen to all kinds, all flavors: the Everlys, the Hollies, the Staples, the Osmonds, Andy Bey And The Bey Sisters, Queen, Broadway stuff, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, Eddie & Ernie, Motown action, bluegrass, Spanky & Our Gang, doo-wop, ABBA, Harry Nilsson, Indigo Girls, the Fifth Dimension, Take 6, all that spooky monastic stuff like those Russian guys singing through their beards and getting all dark about it, Heart, the Cowsills, the Delfonics, those killer Filipino babes in the Third Wave, that armhair-raising shaped-note/sacred harp music, Fleet Foxes, Simon & Garfunkel, the Roches and on and on and on. If we’re coming clean here, then I also gotta say that I have even been known to dig sincerely on some “Coney Island Baby” barbershop, too. I told you I was an addict.
If you’re still reading this, don’t panic—I won’t even go into things like choosing how to shape your vowels, using vibrato or not, deciding who gets to sing the esses, who invented the rule that back-up singers always have to wear black, the different methods of harmonizing with yourself for multiple overdubs, why Steve Albini hate backup singing, throat coat tea vs. Jägermeister … endless vocal nerd minutiae. I’ll just keep adding those tools to my toolbox.
I can only hope that my addiction has made me a better musician, a better singer and a better listener. I’m always aiming for a ratio of 90{e5d2c082e45b5ce38ac2ea5f0bdedb3901cc97dfa4ea5e625fd79a7c2dc9f191} listening and 10{e5d2c082e45b5ce38ac2ea5f0bdedb3901cc97dfa4ea5e625fd79a7c2dc9f191} output. You gotta be taking it in while you’re putting it out. And if you think that sounded dirty, well here’s some more: harmony is all about vibrations and it’s a tremendous physical get-off. Wanna try some? The first hit is free. And here’s the thing—this junk is always free. I guess I’m never gonna quit. Oooo, there goes that grandfather clock again. Ahhhhhhnnnggggmmmhhnnnnngg … That’s some good shit.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9nE2spOw_o
