Tell Me The Answer: Julia Holter's "Have You In My Wilderness"
An esoteric, confusing, and beautiful record
Let's start with a moment towards the end of Have You In My Wilderness (2015) - midway through track 8, to be precise, the moment the structure of "Betsy on the Roof" starts to (gloriously) fall apart.
This album is all about location - real-life places (Mexico is mentioned a couple times), distance and closeness (the title poetically 'brings' you to Holter's location), and relative position. This particular song explores a position in space relative to someone else, frozen in time like a diorama, as the narrator looks up from the ground at a distant figure on the roof of a high building.
Holter has said in interviews that "Betsy on the Roof" is her favorite song from the album to play live precisely because it has no defined narrative or meaning. It's just meant to express a feeling of desperation and longing, and that becomes a canvas to explore a wide variety of similar emotions through improvisation. The first half of the song is slower and more ambient, relishing in a dreamlike, drifting atmosphere, but it gradually (very gradually) builds up tension and volume, until you can't imagine the soft, relaxed song can bend any further or it'll snap. Then (this is where the drums come in on live versions) those restrained, polite, dream-pop vocals turn into dramatic pleas, begging the figure on the roof to tell her… something? Whatever "the answer" is, it seems like she desperately needs it, as she repeats the same few lyrics arrhythmically over and over against the 2/4 beat until they become less words than arrangements of mouth-sounds placed over twinkling, irregular embellishments from the piano and sound effects. Then suddenly you realize the six-minute-long song has come and gone in what feels like about three, and "Vasquez" abruptly begins.
It's important to note that Holter is classically trained and takes a lot of influence from classical music; I can just about picture what the sheet music must have looked like for some of these songs. Her alma mater, CalArts, is known more for visual art and animation than music, boasting graduates such as Pendleton Ward of Adventure Time fame, and accordingly, great attention has been paid to the textures of individual instruments as well as the way they accumulate and change over time, like the musical equivalent to a moving picture.
There's definitely some literature in there, too, as "Lucette Stranded on the Island" is based on a character from a Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette novel. Would you believe the innocuous-sounding lyrics about “the man being gone” are the inner narration of a woman dying of blood poisoning? It seems a little far-fetched, yet a close look at the lyric sheet and a few interviews with her confirms it to be so:
“She runs away with this Russian prince and he takes on her on this cruise ship, but then he hits her to steal some jewellery and leaves her stranded on a Balearic island,” Holter explains with enthusiasm, her droll Californian tones warming up for the punchline. “She dies of blood poisoning from the wound that he inflicted on her. It’s really horrible.”
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/19/julia-holter-have-you-in-my-wilderness
This isn't the only song to hide dark meanings behind playful or upbeat tones. Among a few others, "Vasquez" sets the story of the doomed Wild West bandit/outlaw Tiburcio Vásquez, a folk hero who was seen as a defender of Mexican-American rights in the 1870s, but was eventually killed by the US government ("Bandido they call me / No one knows the story / I hate an imperious glance / In the gold country…") to dry-sounding drums and a perplexing synth line. It feels like he's being channeled or resurrected to tell his tale in the modern day, with the whispered line "up what you now call the 14" referencing the rock outcrops that now bear the outlaw's name along California's State Route 14. All of this is in SoCal, right near the singer's hometown, Los Angeles.
Another highlight, "Silhouette," waxes philosophical about language's inability to express the full range of human emotions in the context of a tumultuous relationship. At the same time, it's a passable pop song about waiting for your lover to come back. The album is full of double meanings like this.
The music itself is similarly hard to untangle (in a good way). This was marketed as more 'pop' and less influenced by ambient music than her previous record Loud City Song, and though it still trends slow and dreamy, there are certainly some pop hooks and catchy refrains throughout, like the thoughtful chorus of "Feel You" and the tender, questioning one in "How Long?" Multiple listens are rewarded with more and more subtleties and details.
It sometimes seems to live in the same sonic realm as Romantic-era classical music, sneaking past the ear easily as background music but revealing otherworldly hidden depths on a closer listen. To rephrase: it's both pleasant background noise and a deep, interesting foreground listen. That's important - it means it's achieved exactly what it's going for. I mean, what better could you ask for a fusion of pop and progressive/experimental music? Some of this stuff sounds like Brian Eno with pop hooks. (On the other hand, a closer comparison would be Joni Mitchell, an influence she's mentioned many times. The album is subtly influenced by '60s pop ballads, especially the Laurel Canyon scene, which included Mitchell as well as the likes of Neil Young and David Crosby.)
Finally, we must draw our attention to the beating heart of the record, the baritone sax solo on "Sea Calls Me Home." Recorded in collaboration with session sax player Danny Meyer, it jumps out with a sudden declamation after a quiet passage and fights a delayed copy of itself in the right and left ear. The demented, avant-garde cousin of a pop sax solo, it's played distinctly non-radio-friendly, taking more influence from modernist classical music and Pharoah Sanders than "Careless Whisper." It's the loudest, most confrontational point on an otherwise soft album, and it proves the extremes Julia Holter is really capable of going to.
Overall, this is an excellent album that achieves everything it reaches for. I would rank it a III on the rating scale, the same tier as fellow restrained indie intellectuals The Dismemberment Plan’s Change.
