Jolie Holland Finds Family and Fame in San Francisco and Beyond

By Melanie Roberts

Photos by Bryan Sheffield

Not long ago, Jolie Holland was getting by as a waitress in San Francisco. Like many whose hands toil for tips, her mind would blindly embark on the distant dreams of a successful songwriter. She highly doubted that one day she would be living out such dreams. Five years and three records later, Holland no longer relies on change swept from dirty tabletops to survive. Rather, she concerns herself with the intangible variety that fits in no pocket.

Holland’s latest album, Springtime Can Kill You, is a highly emotive conclusion to her struggle with change. Her classy, vintage purr couples with fine folk, blues, country, and jazz instrumentation to give elegant strength to songs. Notable are the many skilled musicians whose collaboration is the steel needle through which Holland threads the thick string of neuroses, stitching the album together.

Springtime came about following the success of her first two albums, Catalpa and Escondida. Holland began feeling the unraveling effects of success as she transitioned from anonymous waitress to touring performer who people recognized and wanted to photograph. The unnatural tilt of the only world she had known hit her hard. She reacted by becoming an emotional masochist, locking herself away from the world in what she now refers to as a “really bad social experiment.”

Part of Holland’s experiment was to stay true to a warped tradition she says was handed down to her by the women in her family. Doing so involved playing out the role of “good girlfriend” to a man with whom she was not intended to spend an eternity. When said man left the country for two months, Holland put herself on an “intimacy starvation diet” and fell victim to her own actions. “It was just a really rough period of time for me. Escondida was doing really well, but I was keeping myself really isolated in a way.” Looking back Holland admits, “The way I did it was really dumb.” The sullen song “Stubborn Beast” on Springtime is an apt portrayal of Holland’s last attempt to dig in her heels. Her woeful singing clutches onto a fuzzy, low-fi country sound: “This is still my home and it has never burned before / This is where I’ve taken my solace and my peace / The walls are caving in but I am still a stubborn beast.”

Folly aside, Holland managed to create Springtime around the all-encompassing, humanistic theme of “doing something stupid and fixing it.” And although the lyrics are autobiographical, Holland’s aim was not to get too literal. Rather, she wanted each song’s story to stir up personal emotions, allowing each listener to feel his or her own way around the songs. “I wanted to sort of tell [the story] from the inside out so that people could sort of see their experiences in it really easily,” says Holland.

The album’s opening song, “Crush in the Ghetto” (co-written by Brian Miller), is a clear example of sharing an experience to help the listener relate. The song elucidates the feeling of hope. In it, a flushed-faced Holland giddily soaks up city scenery, high on the hope that new love has brought her. She sings near a capella: “I’m flirting with the birds / I’m talking to the weeds / Look what you’ve done to me.” The sunny, jazzy instrumentation — comprised of electric guitar, French horn, drums, tiny bells, backwards piano, and Hammond B3 organ — boldly jumps in with both feet, taking the listener by the hand and leading him or her through each exaggerated emotion. Holland continues on: “I’m still dressed up from the night before / Silken hose and an old Parisian coat / And I feel like a queen at the bus stop on the street / Look what you’ve done to me.”

San Francisco, whose presence is felt throughout the album, is just one stop of many on the road for this wandering artist. A native Texan, Holland has been running away from cities and towns all her life. While it would appear that her stopover in San Francisco has been her lengthiest as a songwriter, it is always unclear when Holland may decide to pack up and move on. Holland’s restlessness is found in “Goodbye California” on her last album, Escondida: “Goodbye, goodbye, California / Goodbye and I’ll be moving on / I sang you my songs / I know I’m wrong / Fare thee well / And I’ll be moving on.”

Her itch to move around and experience new things landed Holland in quite a few bands, often as a guest fiddle player in bands around Houston. However, her most notable appearance was a two-year term in Canada playing with The Be Good Tanyas, an all-woman, now three-piece traditional band spiced heavily with country, folk, blues, and bluegrass. Holland had large hopes for the British Columbia-based quartet when she founded it back in 1998 (or ‘99, she can’t remember). But when her expectations went unfulfilled, Holland was left feeling frustrated. “I was sort of letting my hopes for what we might have been eclipse the reality,” Holland says. Communication issues among bandmates also led to Holland’s exit from The Be Goods.

When discussing her departure from the band, it becomes apparent that the Be Goods’ transformation away from Holland’s original vision of a collective band into something that now functions without her has left a bit of a scar. Holland tries to explain, “They just like to kind of fight about stuff and it’s just really ... it’s yours, and it’s very painful to realize that [you have to give it up].” Holland freely admits that it was hard to walk away from The Be Goods. She also says that she had to quit the band because there was no fun left in it for her. Holland left The Be Goods — and Canada — for good in 2000.

Her time spent in Canada did give Holland a great respect for American music, she says. She also learned a lot about her own stylistic leanings as a musician. While busking, a musician Holland was playing with told her, “Wow! You have a really great Cajun style,” she says. Up to that point, Holland hadn’t even noticed she was playing a particular style. It made sense once she thought about it since half of her family resides in Houston and the other half in Louisiana. But according to Holland, her upbringing had little to do with where she is now. In fact, she says her family was quite discouraging of her musical interest. Despite Holland’s natural ability (she created her first song on a toy piano at age six), she was never given music lessons. Oddly, it was a lack of storage space that got Holland started on her musical path. Holland tells the story: “The only reason I started playing music is ‘cause my mom helped her friend move and she had a piano that she didn’t want to move. So my mom was like ‘Alright, we’ll put it in Jolie’s room.’“

Living in San Francisco, Holland feels the full support of her fellow artist friends. For her, they are the hand-selected family that truly understands her. Such familial units are commonplace for many musicians, says Holland. “That’s what everybody’s got here ... Like a lot of musicians, they run away from their families and just make another family,” she explains. Take one peek at Springtime‘s cover and it’s obvious how deeply influenced Holland is by her community. “All the people on the front of the record are the people that the songs are about or the people that wrote the songs,” she says. For example, “Crazy Dreams” was written by friend and fellow songwriter C.R. Avery.

Holland should hold her friends dearly, as it was a friend who helped jumpstart her career. Catalpa, Holland’s first album, was an art project that she and a friend worked on. She played while her friend recorded her. The friend then chose which songs would be on the final product. News of the art project gone right had Holland at the post office weekly, mailing off CDs to responsive music fans. The self-released recording was so successful that she was able to live off its proceeds the entire year before signing with ANTI-. ANTI- is sister to Epitaph Records and boasts artists such as Tom Waits and Neko Case.

Holland has traveled a long way from Catalpa to get to Springtime. For the first time, she acted as songwriter and producer, an artistic stretch that took Holland far beyond the limits of her comfort zone — an accomplishment from which she takes great pride. However, she admits that she isn’t completely satisfied with the album’s finished sound. “It doesn’t sound the way I want it to. I wanted it to be more forward; I wanted the album to be more pushing,” she says. Holland’s hope was to capture the “fire” that is created during her live performances. “I wasn’t able to get that in the studio,” she laments.

The vocals are another area of frustration for Holland (presumably only Holland). When she was recording Springtime, she came down with a nasty sinus infection. Because of the ailment, Holland was forced to lay down many of the vocal tracks in one take. Her voice couldn’t handle more than that, she recalls.

But something Holland was able to preserve was the music’s natural state with her refusal to lacquer it in glossy production. On Springtime, the snowy, low-fi grumble of “Stubborn Beast” and the familiar sound of a rickety stool as someone (perhaps Ara Anderson with the cumbersome pump organ) adjusts it prior to beginning “Please Don’t” are two small examples of Holland’s dedication to making music that is tangible, a sound that can be felt as well as heard. She is a faithful subscriber to the theory that less is more when it comes to production. In fact, she encourages musicians to do less thinking and be “zen” when making their own albums. “If you think too much, it’s gonna sound like you were thinking. And I hate the sound of someone thinking too hard.”

It’s difficult to say whether Holland thinks about the sound she creates or if it just comes naturally. Certainly her travels have influenced the type and way she comes to music. A found artist (someone who takes objects that already serve a purpose and creates art from them), Holland combs American roots music, picking up old, interesting sounds and styles upon which she can create something new. For anyone who hasn’t yet heard Holland, you may want to hurry; you just never know when she’ll hit the road again trying to pocket change.

www.jolieholland.com

Jolie Holland is set to headline at The Fillmore in San Francisco on March 2 as part of Noise Pop 2007.