July 2006
On a warm summer night when a light breeze weaves its way like a swimming ghost around bodies walking through coastal thoroughfares, Chloe Day opens the door to her secluded complex that sits no more than 100 yards from the ocean. Her cocker spaniel jumps about in the evening calm as she leads me beyond the courtyard into the airy confines of her home. She is barefoot and dressed in red surfer girl shorts with a darker top to match. I sit down on a large futon couch that rests up against a wall under windows opened against the glow of streetlamps and nocturnal skies. After declining her offer for a drink of various kinds, Chloe Day melds herself into a small armchair and slides into an almost supine position. Her body knows the chair and the chair knows her body.
Chloe Day is a recording artist with two discs released to date, 2003’s The Return Of… and 2004’s Pixie Runway. Pixie Runway has been remixed and remastered for a new digital release on Apple’s iTunes Music Store where it is currently available. The sounds of Chloe Day are at once eclectic and entirely commercial, embarking on an adventurous trip of Rock, Pop, Electronica, Jazz, Trip-Hop, and acoustic Folk-Pop. The songs are a surrealistic dreamscape that embody love, lust, fear, loneliness, beginnings, endings, and a vintage scope of human dissolution.
Most recently having come off of a 14 city U.S. tour while in pre-production for her next solo disc, Chloe Day sat down to talk about music, dangerous experience, sexuality, and the darker side of ourselves. She reveals herself as an artist who is comfortable with her own form, and yet not at home with the deepest aspects of herself. Chloe Day is abstract, sensual, soft-spoken, expressive, unsure, confident, deflective; a woman who obscures herself behind sinuous evasions that are truly unveiled only by the songs she writes and the music she performs. The visual interaction of Chloe Day is marked by an unselfconscious sense of physicality. Seemingly endless locks of long hair frame her face or recklessly spill down her shoulders at will. Hips and legs adjust in her chair with a mind of their own. Eyes alternately drop and direct themselves level to me like a pin that gently edges up a shred of crinoline. And in the soft tone of her living room, Chloe Day is on an emotionally desolate shoreline where the roar of crashing waves drowns out the disconcerting notion of time. Chloe Day is also present with the ephemeral sound of life and love that is just out of reach, but surrounds all of us.
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GD: Who is Chloe Day?
CHLOE DAY: I’m someone who’s always trying to look and figure out who everybody else is, trying to figure out how to connect. Everybody connects in a different way. As far as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with finding people’s buttons: What makes them think; what makes them tick; or just what makes people curious.
How does that equate to who you are as Chloe Day?
Whenever I do shows, I don’t go in with a plan for what to play, which I used to do; ‘cause when you start out on stage, you’re nervous. I don’t care who you are, you’re going to be nervous that first moment unless you’re some little kid who is not aware of how to be self-conscious yet. Every moment of every performance is a way of trying to reflect the audience. I’m trying to connect with who’s out there and follow an empathic flow. When you’re sucked into a song, the sound equals feeling.
When you say that you’re trying to reflect the audience, as an artist, aren’t you also trying to project?
It’s a combination. The message sent is never equal to the message received. I didn’t come up with that theory; I heard it a long time ago and it really made sense in terms of the way in which people communicate with each other. No matter who or what I am on stage, everyone in the audience is going to be looking at me with a different set of eyes. Music is something that has some sort of connection to energy flow. One reason why people have different tastes in music, but not the only reason, is because the energy that comes from a certain type of song is more sympático with who they are.
You mean each person in the audience?
Yeah; and it changes from tune to tune to some degree. Whenever I was sad as a kid, I’d sit in my room and listen to a song on repeat over and over, just lying in bed and feeling sorry for myself. It always involved music. When you’re sad, sometimes you want to step back and be by yourself. For me, it didn’t have much of an impact unless I was listening to something. The energy and the waves around me were something I was lining up with; and no matter how lonely you are, you can feel like there’s something with you or someone who understands where you’re at when you hear a song that you connect to.
So you’re taking certain emotional aspects of yourself that you inject into your songs and hoping that’ll be a reflection of any given individual in the audience?
Sort of. I don’t sit down and try to write a song. It could be a hook or a melody that bites me. Usually, it’s something that I’ve been processing, trying to figure out what the significance is of something that just struck me. It could be somebody else’s story or it could be something that I went through myself. If I write a story about somebody else, I don’t always realize that I’m writing about that person; but the character that I’ve taken on is the character I perceived. It isn’t really who they are; it’s my interpretation of them. It’s my reflection of that person. That’s what we all are, just reflections of each other. It’s always in the mix; a balance between that and projection, as you said. When I’m writing a song, it’s based on what I’m feeling. It could be a stupid little frustration; and I’ll just write a miserable song. If I’m in a room and performing, and I’ve just played something that’s over-the-top where the energy was really high, that’s the only thing a lot of people are going to hear. If you just did this happy, jolly song, you don’t want to bother doing another one because it’s just more of the same. You won’t feel it anymore because the music will all sound the same. If it all sounds the same, it’s not because all the songs are the same. It’s because the energy that’s being put out there doesn’t change; and people are not one dimensional. We vary or it’s not believable.
How would you describe your music?
It’s all over the map. I never know how to define it because I don’t think my music is very consistent. To be honest, it’s more to do with what I’m thinking about from one day to the next. A lot of it is dark because when I meet someone, I usually feel a little safer with that person once I’ve seen them in a negative situation. Because people aren’t one-dimensional, you’re going to first see just one dimension; the polite, social nicities. It’s the surface that person is going to put out there, which is fine. I don’t feel as though I know someone until I’ve seen them deal with something that is challenging, that presses them to use their coping skills, to deal with it and get mad, sad, frustrated, confused, or whatever. When you see what someone does with that, you’ll kind of feel like you know who that person is, for one. Number two, when you show that you’re not going to judge them because they’re going through something even though you may not have lived that experience, but you know the feeling, then there’s a connection.
What’s your history? How did you start out as Chloe Day?
I was listening long before I was writing music, although I’ve been a writer my whole life. I kept a journal for half of my childhood. Sometimes I’d write in it from ten o’clock at night until 10 the next morning. I’d write everything that had happened to me. It was expressive; it was getting out whatever was on my mind. I was still journaling for a few more months after I moved to L.A.; but life got in the way and I wasn’t able to keep up with it. It’s just as well. I might not be doing music had I kept writing and writing. When you stop doing the form of expression you’re most comfortable with, you have to find another outlet or you’ll go nuts.
And the music?
When I moved to L.A., I had a roommate named Meghan who was from Tulsa, Oklahoma. She’s a very bright, artistic, cool person. She went out and got a guitar and a chord book. I had always wanted to learn guitar as a kid. For whatever reason, it just wasn’t allowed. Maybe it’s a good thing in retrospect. I might not have liked it as much if I had to take lessons and practice; but when Meghan bought the guitar and within a couple of months was playing some simple songs, it made it real. It made it feasible to learn the guitar without a proper lesson at first.
There was a girl that lived with Meghan before she moved in with me. Her name was Fonta. It was her guitar that inspired Meghan to go out and get one. She came over one night after a fight with her boyfriend; and she was so upset. A night or two later, she came over again with her guitar and this song she had just written. She played this song and it just completely knocked my socks off. It was the song that inspired me to start writing. That’s where it started.
What do you mean you weren’t allowed to get a guitar? Did you ask for one?
Yeah. The answer was, “Well, you can take piano lessons. Once you learn the piano, you can get a guitar.” But I hated the piano with a passion. I loved to play it by ear, but I took piano lessons for almost five years and never learned how to read music. It just didn’t make sense to me. Some people learn more visually and some people need to learn by ear.
When did you get your own guitar?
I always wanted to learn Spanish. I was driving across from St. Louis to California and I had this revelation in the middle of Utah, “Wow, I don’t have any commitments. I’m going to Mexico to learn Spanish!” So, I drove down to Tijuana, stopped in a shop and bought a guitar.
Eventually, I met some people who were talking about how a lot of Americans and Canadians that sail down to Mexico are looking for people who speak English to man their boats. So, I went to the boat docks in La Paz. Every morning at 8:30, there’s a radio that comes in with all the people requesting crewmates. Your ride is helping them on their boat. So, I ditched my car in the lot at the harbor and took a sailboat to Mazatlan. Then I hitchhiked not too much further down.
You hitchhiked by yourself? Wow….
Mmm-hmm. You use your judgment and don’t get into a car with someone who strikes you as too crazy; although during that trip, I spent the night in Puerto Vallarta at a castle of a schizophrenic Englishman who was hearing voices from ancient Peruvian gods. I was looking at hostels because I only had a couple nights left before I had to find my way back to La Paz and then to L.A. in order to catch a plane home for Christmas. This guy comes up to me on the street and asks, “Hey, are you looking for a place to crash?” It was the Englishman. He had just bought a used car from someone; and he was trading his artwork for a month’s stay at his castle in exchange for some groceries or rent money. I was thinking that this guy knows his way around town. He brought up that he could show me some sightseeing; and I knew there was no way I was going to find where I wanted to go. I knew the guy was strange, too. That was part of the temptation. It was adventurous because there was an element of danger. It was not at all a “Hey baby” thing, but rather clearly platonic. I knew he was off, but he presented himself as normal at a glance. I crashed at his castle that night. The next day, something triggered him; and he just flew off the handle yelling at me. I wasn’t going to say anything; I wasn’t going to react; I wasn’t going to get mad; I wasn’t going to cry; I wasn’t going to be sad or upset. I could have been a reflection of his anger and triggered something more because I had the feeling the guy was violent; but I just sat there and said “O.K. You’re mad; it’s alright. I didn’t mean to offend you.” I don’t remember the whole conversation, but then he calmed down like nothing happened. He asked if I needed a ride up the way to find someone who could take me back up the coast. I said, “Yeah.” It was time to leave.
How does that coincide with how you started out as Chloe Day, the artist?
I’m a storyteller. The first two songs I ever wrote were story-songs. I never wrote a song about that experience, but it was all the more motivating to keep playing. When you have an interesting life, it brings more things to share. You have to really live it.
You can’t just be an observer?
Sometimes it is from observation; but you have to be present. You can’t just be standing back indifferently and not think about what you’re seeing. You can’t be passive; but you can be an active observer and be engrossed by what you’re watching, put yourself in that position, and experience it vicariously.
Who are your musical influences?
Everyone from Bobby Vinton to the Beastie Boys. Anything. I love the Beastie Boys. They’ve been sort of a lifelong favorite. Another favorite is a band called Pharcyde. They’re just amazing. My parents listened to old ‘30s and ‘40s Jazz; and they had Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, and Frank Sinatra. Everyone in my family loved Frank Sinatra.
Did you like that music, too? Is that what was playing in your household?
Every so often. I didn’t like Jazz as a kid; but I was exposed to it all the time. I’m particular about what Jazz I’ll listen to, but it definitely did grow on me. I wouldn’t seek it out; I’d rather listen to the pop stations or the rock stations. For awhile, I was obsessed with Rap music. The cds that I’ve bought in the past few years have mainly been cds that friends of mine have made. They’ve been great influences.
You have two discs out: The Return Of… and Pixie Runway. What do you think each of those discs conceptually represents? What do you feel makes them different from one another?
The Return Of… is more jagged in that it jumps at certain points. It’s more abrupt with the song transitions. With Pixie Runway, it felt like every song led so naturally into the next one. It was easier with Pixie because there are more songs. With The Return Of…, it feels like it’s half trip-hop/electronica and half acoustic. There’s no middle ground. Pixie Runway has a little Rock in there, some pop, a little bit of Jazz. It’s more fluid.
But you have a diverse spectrum of music on both discs.
When I hear a cd and it feels like the same energy throughout, I stop hearing it. I start to tune it out. It’s o.k. to have a couple songs that sound similar; but if you don’t have that ebb and flow, then you don’t see it. You can’t see blue without white.
Lyrically, what are the most pronounced themes in your songs?
If the whole world is white, then there’s no such thing as the color white. That’s taking it to the grand scale of an extreme example. Now if the whole world was one note, it wouldn’t be a note. If the whole world was one rhythm, it wouldn’t be a rhythm. My songs have more variety than that; but they wouldn’t engage you if they were all the same to you. No one wants to be pinpointed to their one face that they put out to the world forever. They want to be safe and gradually share. After you feel safe with someone enough to go beyond your politeness and beyond showing them your good side, you want people to see the ugly side. You want people to see what isn’t right, what isn’t perfect, what isn’t always socially acceptable or politically correct. You want people to see your edge because when they see it and they’re still there, it’s reassuring that they can tolerate you as a whole person. Likewise, you have to be able to handle it in people. Everybody’s got that dark side; everyone. And maybe I just like to put little teasers of it out there to challenge people to tap into that aspect of themselves.
Teasers of your dark side?
Yeah. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but I had kind of a conservative upbringing. Even “Spoon,” which is just a fun kind of romantic, ‘loungey’ type song, even that one felt completely risqué.
Are you saying that you give a certain predominance to the dark side of yourself?
Maybe. It’s not all darkness, but there’s more of it in the music than there is the ‘la-la’ stuff.
So, you feel that some of where that dark side comes from is because you had a conservative upbringing; and some of the songs you’ve written felt risqué, but now they don’t feel that way?
Yeah. Things that I was afraid to express suddenly became fun to talk about because I could. It’s something other people can relate to if you’re honest.
Your songs that are more driven by sex appeal seem to represent different stages of life insofar that a song like “Lolly” might be taken as a coquettish reflection of pre-teen or teen sexual awakening; but a song such as “Curves” is more worldly in its sexuality. It feels much ‘older’ than “Lolly.”
It’s weird because those songs are about three months apart. When you hear “Lolly,” you can see somebody singing it down in New Orleans or you can see the cheerleader’s image. When you hear “Curves,” you’ve got a girl or a woman who is saying, “Hey, you’ve gotta look at me or I’m gone.”
Are those songs mirrors of your different sides?
Probably; but sometimes I can’t even pinpoint an experience that I’ve had. With “Curves,” I don’t think I’ve ever been in competition with a guy’s car. I’ve never had a guy who was paying too much attention to his drag racing to notice me.
How about your acoustic folk-pop material? That style seems to be where you started. What place does it have in you now?
It’s still my favorite way to write. This is probably such a cliché, but when you’re just sitting with a guitar and having fun with it, it becomes an extension of yourself. You vaguely register what chords you’re playing, but you don’t think about what you’re going to play. You just sort of let it flow out. It’ll start to sound like something; and it just feels like magic, like channeling it. It feels supernatural when that happens. You’re taking the voice outside of yourself and letting it speak through you.
Your music has many moods and an array of different genres. How do you decide what songs get the Electronic treatment and what songs are given a more eclectic Rock or acoustic setting?
It’s not a conscious decision. A lot of times, the electronic songs start with the electronics; and the lyrics and melody will just automatically follow. Usually when the songs start off, I know right away what they’re going to be. Usually; not always.
You’ve been on tour quite a bit in the past year or so. Who do you see as your audience and how do they see you?
My audience is so much random chance so far. Most of the touring I’ve done has still been in the early stages where the bulk of my audience has never heard of me. Maybe they’ve heard of me if there’s an article they’ve read; but they’ve never heard me play before and have never heard the music. So, I’m always playing for new people, which I like right now because it means a challenge of trying to figure out who the audience is and where they are in their head space. I don’t know these people; so I’m going completely off of gut feeling instead of presumptions about what this person is going to like or not. People have a sense about the flow of music. When the songs fit right where they need to in my head, they always do in the audience, too.
What image or images are you trying to project of yourself? How do you want people to absorb you?
It depends. When I went to Albuquerque, there was an article and picture in the gay newspaper. A couple of people, I could tell they were trying to fish out of me if I was gay or straight. I knew one of them was gay; she said it. I don’t know if she came out because she was trying to find out if I would be interested or if she was just curious. There were a couple of guys who came out to my show that read the same article. It’s funny. If people figure that you’re speaking specifically to their audience, they’ll be more curious to see you. Everybody I met that came out because of the article was ridiculously cool. I met some awesome people that night; and I wonder how much of that was because they came in with a positive impression. I guess I’m using that example because it wasn’t something I expected. I didn’t go out there knowing about the article; I had no idea. It took me off-guard; and I feel that every time it takes me off-guard. People will come up with an image where I have no idea what they were seeing, what song they heard, or what feedback they might have heard from a friend. I think the press makes a huge impact. The nature of an article will form more of an impression in someone’s head than the actual performance will. People are primarily visual.
If that’s the case, then they would be more influenced by your performance than words that they read on a printed page.
The words that people read on a printed page give an impression that can be larger than life. You know, “If this person is in a newspaper article, should I have heard of them?” I’m basing that on a really strange experience. Before I went back to St. Louis this past December, I had done club shows and some in-store performances. Most of the audience would be either people who just happened to be there or people I was friends with; but I hadn’t had a show yet where the room was packed with people to see me that I didn’t know. There was an article in the paper a few days before the show. We didn’t even send anything into the paper, so we weren’t expecting it. The place I played filled up. I recognized, maybe, five or ten faces. The rest were just people that had read the article. It became something that was out of my hands and out of my ability to shape. I was so nervous when I realized how many people were there. It felt like a defining moment that could make or break what was going on. They could come out and have this high expectation because they read this nice article. I could be totally different than what they were expecting; or they could walk away from the show happy. Maybe the upped ante in terms of the pressure enhanced the performance; because sometimes when you’re a little nervous, you do better because of it. I think that night, I felt obligated to give a show that met the expectations in terms of being very present and stepping beyond what I had done before. I felt like I performed outside of my own little box. I stepped outside of safe territory because I knew I had to, because the article was describing me a few steps down the road. I didn’t feel like I was there yet. If I was there, I sure didn’t know it. So, I can’t answer the question too easily about how people perceive me because you never do know. You never know when you become well-known in a city.
You’re from St. Louis and you’ve been to many different cities on tour. What do you think is the difference between Los Angeles and the rest of the country relative to both you as an artist and your music?
Here in L.A., there’s so much over-stimulation and over-saturation. There’s so much to do in L.A. It’s a metropolis. First of all, you have to get people motivated to even get out, face the traffic, and drive the 20 miles that they would have to go in order to get to whatever club it is because everything is so spread out. Sometimes it’s almost like asking people to go out of town for a show. People have expectations, too. This is Hollywood. Out here you’re supposed to be famous. I think it’s a different perception. There’s a little bit less respect for musicians out here than there is in other cities. I mean, people aren’t surprised to hear you’re a musician. They almost expect it. So people start to drown it out with background noise, just the information. People don’t become curious. It’s almost like people have a jaded picture of what a musician here is. There’s so much talent falling through the cracks in this town because people aren’t stopping to hear. They’ve heard too many other things that were disappointing, people who weren’t taking their music seriously enough or paying attention to what the audience wanted. It’s about being honest on stage. When you hear an act that is out there because they want to look like a bunch of Rock stars, but they don’t do the music for the fun of it or they don’t enjoy playing with each other as a band, the room can feel it. It’s uncomfortable and you don’t want to tune in at that point.
If that’s L.A., what’s the rest of the country?
The rest of the country, I think even more so because I’m a girl, will be more intrigued that you play music. They don’t expect every other person that they meet to be a musician. If you meet someone from central Africa in the Midwest, it’s interesting; but if you meet someone from central Africa in east Africa, it doesn’t mean anything.
Why is it that because you’re a girl, they’re going to be more intrigued?
Well, there just aren’t as many. I haven’t met as many girl-guitarists. If you go to an open mic event, there’s four times the guys. Four times the musicians I work with are guys over girls for whatever reason.
How do you balance sex appeal with attention to the music? Do they compete or are they one in the same?
I probably underestimate sex appeal insofar that I don’t focus on it enough. It’s an effort for me to remember that I have to think about what I look like on stage and not just go out there however I feel like. I think that right now they’re very much in balance. When I go on stage, I’m just going to look right to whoever I was when I wrote that song. You do it enough and you start to forget that people are watching you; and you start to feel them with you. You stop looking at the audience so much as an audience, but rather almost as your tribe that are going through this roller coaster ride with you; and you have to lead it in the direction that maintains their attention, that keeps people engaged. At the same time, you can’t think so much about what you look like as opposed to portraying whoever you were when you wrote the song.
So, given the sex appeal that’s there in the visual, in your voice, and in your music, why do you feel it’s an effort?
It feels a lot more natural now; but it was kind of scary in the beginning to show that side. I was brought up to think that was not your public image. It’s that conservative background, religious family.
It feels more natural because you can get away with it once you break through some personal barriers?
That’s part of it. It’s not something you should hide. Everybody has some side of themselves that they can relate to; the seductress. Everyone sometimes feels like they step into your shoes, or have stepped in those shoes at some point. You can be a 70 year old housewife, but at some point in your life, you have put the moves on a guy. Everyone has gone there.
What’s your vision for yourself as an artist and how do you think that vision relates to the rest of the world?
I like to see myself as someone who will be unexpectedly real. I don’t want to put on airs. I’m not going to b.s. about who I am, or what and why I’m doing what I’m doing. When I have songs that are particularly important to me, people will hear the songs as an invitation to come out and admit that they felt that way, too. I want to take people on a journey to see all the sides of themselves, and know that what they’re looking at is real because it’s something that they relate to.
-- Greg Debonne
© 2006 All Rights Reserved
