As a singer and a songwriter, Thalia Zedek is howler with an uncanny grasp of subtlety and dynamics, bringing unconventional beauty to the basest emotions and most sinister chord changes. The Boston-based artist has artfully balanced and refined those extremes over her 40-plus years as an indie-rock trailblazer of note—first with the lesser-known Dangerous Birds, Uzi and Live Skull, then with bluesy, dissonant post-punk outfit Come, then as a singularly open-minded, sonically curious solo artist.
And lest we forget, Zedek is an exhilarating guitarist who thrives in a collaborative setting. The Boat Outside Your Window (Thrill Jockey) is the bracing new release from the latest edition of the Thalia Zedek Band, which also includes pedal-steel player Karen Sarkisian, bassist Winston Braman and drummer Gavin McCarthy. For her part, Sarkisian is a true revelation, providing an ethereal counterpunch to Zedek’s primal strumming, lightening the load in a most empathetic way.
Zedek offered a bit more insight on her latest release to MAGNET’s Hobart Rowland.
Is there a unifying theme running through The Boat Outside Your Window?
I guess it would be distance … physical distance between people on different continents, between those waving from a boat to those on the shore, between one person’s experience of reality versus another’s.
What was the songwriting and recording process like for this album?
Pretty similar to always, with me writing the songs on my own, making demos at home for the band, then working out the arrangements with them together in one room. But the recording process was different this time. Usually, we record in our home base of Boston. But Andy Hong—who I’ve been working with for many years—relocated to Nashville, so we all traveled down there and tracked almost everything at his new studio, Infrasonic Sound. Me and Karen drove down together with the guitars and amps and played a couple of shows in Washington, D.C., and Asheville, N.C., along the way. Gavin and Winston flew down, and we all met up and lived at Infrasonic for the next four or five days.
What impact did the addition of a pedal steel and EBow have on the music?
It was huge. The sounds Karen gets from her instrument are so versatile—anything from standard steel licks to creating sonic clouds and astral choruses. She’s so good at figuring out what each song needs and giving it just that and no more. It makes each song stand out in its own special way.
Former Come bandmates Nancy Asch and Beth Heinberg make an appearance on the new LP. How did that come about?
Nancy and Beth have been living in Asheville for a while now, so to break up my drive home from Nashville to Boston, I stopped at their place on the way back home. We were hanging out after dinner, and I played them the rough mixes we’d just recorded. While we were all listening together, I had a flash of inspiration and decided that “Aliyah” needed some piano (Beth) and “Shoes” needed some percussion (Nancy). We did a bit of practicing on those, and they went into a friend’s home studio later that week and did the overdubs.
This is your 10th solo album in 24 years. When you look back at your work over the past quarter century, what are a few things that really stand out?
This is a really difficult question to answer, but I’ll try. My cover of “1926” (by the Boston band V) on (2001’s) Been Here And Gone seems to have really touched people and is still really special to me. “Bone,” from (2004’s) Trust Not Those In Whom Without Some Touch Of Madness, was used in a movie called Love Song For Bobby Long with John Travolta and Scarlett Johansson, so that has had an interesting life of its own. Each album has really been a progression or a regression from the last. The band has been a three piece, a five piece and now a four piece—and I’ve changed along the way, as well.
See the Thalia Zedek Band live.
