Inside The Raw and Beautiful World of Barrie
The post Inside The Raw and Beautiful World of Barrie appeared first on Consequence.
“Baby, I love you,” sings Barrie Lindsay on “Quarry,” one of the singles off her sophomore album Barbara (out March 25th). Barrie sings this line three different times throughout the song: first, in a delicate and hushed whisper, then again with a bit more power behind it.
The last time, however, Barrie completely surrenders herself to the phrase, singing loud, clear, and confidently, eventually turning the line into a dizzying melody that dances around with a childlike wonder.
The song represents Barrie’s unbreakable bond with her wife, Gabby, but it also serves as a metaphor for Barrie’s musical journey: coming from fronting a five-piece indie pop band, Barrie is finally taking the lead as a solo artist and embarking into the unknown.
The beautiful vulnerability that characterizes the phrase “Baby, I love you” and the song as a whole speaks to Barrie’s open-minded attitude when creating Barbara: throughout the album are motifs of blood, being naked, and a sense of rawness that comes with love, loss, and being overwhelmed with emotion.
Barrie’s 2019 debut LP Happy To Be Here demonstrated her penchant for writing dreamy, comforting songs that seem to glow in the dark; yet, behind some of her anxious and impressionistic lyrics was a softness, dulled just enough to pull you in, but not enough to permeate through the band’s energetic bliss.
Part of that softness came from the simple reality of recording an album in a New York City apartment. “It was just by necessity,” says Barrie. “I sang a lot quieter, and didn’t have room to bring in a lot of the instruments that I have and like to tinker around on.”
But on Barbara, Barrie finds herself operating with acres—quarries, in fact—of space. Her pristine vocals are deeply expressive and heartfelt, and she’s creating music with an experimental and unbound joy. For Barrie, the easiest way to create with such an openness is to embrace opposites. “If I were making acidic music, then the lyrics would be sweet,” says Barrie about her songwriting process, “I really like that balance, and that juxtaposition of the sweet and the sour and the acidic.”
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Indeed, Barbara’s strengths come through its sheer originality—whereas Happy To Be Here represented the undeniable and euphoric indie rock that you might hear at an Urban Outfitters, Barbara is an album that truly sounds like no other.
Consequence chatted with Barrie — who we also named as an Artist to Watch in 2022 — over Zoom to chat about the making of Barbara, her appreciation of Frankie Cosmos and Adrienne Lenker, and her artistic inspiration points. Check out the full Q&A below.
We’re just a few days from the release of your second LP, Barbara—how are you feeling about it all?
We’re a week and a half into tour. You get into a weird headspace where time doesn’t exist, and nothing else is happening in the world when you’re on tour. Then yesterday, I was like, “Oh, my God, wait. I have an album coming out.” I think maybe it’s a blessing that I haven’t been thinking about it. But I’m really, really thrilled for this album to come out because I’ve just been sitting on it for a while. I’m really proud of it and I can’t wait for people to hear it.
Since this is technically the first solo album that you’ve made, what was the transition like from writing in a group versus doing it all solo? And since you finished this album a bit earlier, did the pandemic affect that transition at all?
Well, the interesting part is that the “writing” part of music, I’ve always done by myself since I was a teenager, like tinkering on GarageBand, or one piano, or whatever. That part has been consistent throughout it, where it’s always been a very solitary thing for me. So this one wasn’t any different. Like, there could have been no pandemic at all and it would have been the same process for this album.
But as far as being in a recording studio and having other people around to bounce ideas around… that was a big shift, because basically, the only person that’s bouncing ideas around with me was Gabby (Gabby Smith is my wife, who is also a musician). And yeah, it’s a really interesting and scary change.
Every time you come up against a wall or a dead end, you’re like, “Alright, I have to figure out how to get out of this myself,” or, you know, with Gabby. And that’s a big change from being able to be like, “Does anyone have any ideas?” Or like, “What do you hear?” And I think that was an important thing for this album for to be like, “I have to figure out how to get through this myself.”
If you could describe Barbara in three words, what would they be?
Ooh, I would say it it’s raw. It’s cheeky. [Laughs] And I would say it’s full, full-weighted, you know? Yeah, full in every sense.
How do you manage to balance these really raw and vulnerable feelings and emotions with pop music?
I think the key to a lot of great artists is the balancing of opposites and of extremes. If I were making music that were much harder to listen to, like if I were making acidic music, then I think the lyrics maybe would be more sweet. I think it’s a subconscious effort to balance it all out. I understand that there’s totally music that can be really aggressive and the music and the lyrics can also be aggressive, and that can have a powerful effect, but I really like that balance and that juxtaposition of the sweet and the sour and the acidic.
And I like it to be packaged in a in a nice little bow, so that if you’re like, “I just want to hear sweet sounds and nice melodies and harmonies,” and totally just like turn your lyric brain off, and if you’re like, “I wanna get to a deeper level with this,” then you can zone in on the lyrics. I like offering the different levels of how to hear music in my songs.
On Barbara, there’s definitely a larger emphasis on synths than on your previous work. What inspired that change? Do you write predominately on keys or on guitar?
Yeah, I think it was more of a keyboard-first kind of album. I got into music in the first place because I’ve always been obsessed with sounds and timbres. And I’ve just saved up a bunch of sounds that just do something physically to me, that just tickle my brain in whatever way. I wanted to start with what I had and see if I can dive into the sound and figure out why I’m drawn to it and complement it with other sounds. With this album, I had a lot of time and space and freedom to do that to explode these sounds.
Who are some artists (besides Gabby) that influenced the sound and the style of this album?
It’s funny, because I didn’t take in much music, or media in general, during the course of making it. But really the ones that I would say penetrated last year, were Frankie Cosmos. Especially, lyrically. I think she writes incredible lyrics. I love how she can strip things down to such a minimal place, and it can still be so effective. I didn’t go extremely minimal with this album, but I think there’s a real power to like, killing your darlings and being like, “Okay, um, is this song effective? Or am I only just trying to make it feel big?” Because I just packed on layers of sounds and I was always wondering, “How can I get it to its core? What’s the most that I can peel away from it?” And so I think I had a lot of that in mind and was like, “What would Greta [Kline] think of the song? Am I gilding this lily?”
I’ve also always had a practice of trying to think, “Would this song stand up, like, at a campfire?” If someone was on an acoustic guitar, and they were like, “Let’s sing this song,” would the song hold up? Or is it like, “Oh, it really only works because it’s got a bunch of production tricks on it.” Gabby also got me into Big Thief and Adrianne Lenker in the past couple years in a way that I had never really connected with it before. And I think, similarly, Adrianne Lenker’s lyrics.
I’ve always liked lyrics, but it’s a slow process, and I can be impatient with it. But with this album I wanted to write like I don’t get a chance to edit these lyrics. Like, once they’re out, they’re out, and you have to sing them every night. I wanted to speak lyrics that felt true and will ring true for the rest of my career, or however long I have to hear when we play these songs. So those two artists made me be a lot more thoughtful about lyrics and deliberate about them, and honest as well.
Do you have any favorite lyrics on Barbara?
It’s funny—over the course of playing these songs for the last week on tour, I’ve been finding myself reacting to the lyrics in a way that you know, you don’t get a chance to when you’re just writing them or you know, thinking of them analytically. And every time I come to this lyric in the song “Concrete,” I’m like, “This feels right. I’m glad I’m saying this out loud,” which is: “Go love yourself, it matters, you’ll love the rest in time.” Because I keep finding with how people move through the world, I just it’s so crazy if like Donald Trump, or like Putin’s parents, just loved them, or taught them how to love themselves, like, we would be fine.
It’s just a simple truth where I feel like if you have a platform, and people listen to your music, and are listening to lyrics… I know that you can just say whatever, you can just get away with having boring lyrics or meaningless lyrics, and certainly sometimes that’s a totally valid route. But it feels like a privilege to have people listening to you. So I want to say things that feel important to me. It’s a simple truth, but it took me a while to learn that lesson, and I’m gonna be working on it for the rest of my life probably, but it’s so important. I feel good saying it every night. Like, it’s just a reminder to people to love themselves. And that little bit helps make the world better.
Happy To Be Here definitely felt inspired by New York City, and Barbara does as well, but in a much different way. Does environment play a specific role in your writing and recording process?
Totally. Actually, in a really simple and practical way, because the last album, I wrote all of it and recorded the vocals in my apartment, which is, you know, a little studio apartment in Brooklyn. So I was limited by how much noise I could make. So it was just by necessity, I sang a lot quieter, and didn’t have room to bring in a lot of the instruments that I have and like to tinker around on because I was just like, “I can’t, I have no place to put this accordion,” or the cello that was just sitting at my parents house. So it helped this time being able to have more space and more room to be louder and make more sound.
This newer album has more sounds on it and bigger sounds, and I kind of like wail and shout a bit more on this. And temperament certainly plays into it, for sure. Because it feels like in New York City, especially the first time, we were like, “How do we cut through the noise? How do we make a space for ourselves in music industry, it’s so hard to break into.” And there was like this kind of impetus to just make really undeniable music that’s catchy and will get attention.
And then I think with this second album, it was thinking less about how it be received and more about like how it would feel to make it. I was living in a really rural place in Maine with my wife, and pretty much nobody else was in the town. So we were just spending a lot of time by ourselves and with our own thoughts and thinking less about people around me, and more about myself, because there were no people around me.
Are you still living up in Maine? Or are you back in New York City?
We moved back to New York about a year ago, and moving back was crazy—by the time we moved back, it was like we were past due. I was living in Maine where my dad spent a lot of time growing up and it was hard being surrounded by his memories after he died, and it’s so isolating and we had no friends there, so it was really nice for a while, but then after a time it becomes like oppressive being so isolated. So coming back to New York was really welcome. But also, we were like, “Oh, my God.” It’s so loud, in every sense of the word. So in many ways, it felt awesome just being able to see friends and people our age and then also, we realized we can’t have peace here—you to find your own way to make peace.
Did it feel better leaving Maine and moving back to NYC knowing you had finished the record?
Yeah, totally. I think it would have felt really hard to move back without finishing it. Because I don’t think I would have been able to like access that same state of mind in New York.
Where will you make the next record?
That’s a great question I’ve been thinking about—I don’t know if doing the last time completely by myself was like getting something out of my system or if it’s just the way I like to do it. Maybe on the next one, I don’t play anything at all. I have session musicians and go to LA. I don’t know, I’m trying to let it come to me.
Definitely. We deserve “full pop-star” Barrie, with a hands-free mic like Britney Spears.
For this tour, we were like, “I don’t know,” when trying to figure out how we wanted to play these songs live. I really think the production is so important. Because that’s the instrument that I played on this album, you know, producing, and if we do it live with four people or whatever, it’s impossible to produce the same sounds. So I thought, “You know what, let’s fucking dance and just do a lot of tracks.” And so we were desperately trying to figure out how we could do a Britney Spears ear mic. But we couldn’t pull that off. But we have these costumes and we have full choreography. It may not be a Dua Lipa show, but it’s very much like, “Let’s have fun!”
What are you hoping fans take away from Barbara?
Well, the best I can hope for is what I take away from art that moves me, which is that it should be whatever you need to take away from art. The art that’s inspired me particularly recently is not even art that I’m like, aesthetically drawn to—basically, what I’m trying to say is, it’s people who are doing things and making things that are just doing their own thing and not worrying about reception. There’s something incredibly inspiring about particularly visual artists who are just like, totally fearless.
And it’s being able to embrace that in yourself. Just fearlessly being yourself and doing what you like and what you want. That’s the best thing that you can get from art or give in art. So I hope it brings people some kind of comfort and confidence and connection and love that you get from good art. People get it in different forms, and I hope that it brings that to people, whatever they need from it.
Note: You can grab tickets for Barrie on tour here.
Barbara Artwork:
Inside The Raw and Beautiful World of Barrie
Paolo Ragusa
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