Sometimes I’ll e-mail the publicist of an artist that I really admire and request a phone interview — without the hope of much success. Most often (as with my dwindling efforts to get Paul Simon on the line…ha ha), my e-mail efforts go unnoticed. But in the case of Jonatha Brooke, I recently got an unexpected e-mail from her press person, saying that she was available that very afternoon. So naturally, I said yes! Jonatha, who currently lives in Spanish Harlem in New York City (and at the moment is teaching a workshop at Rocky Mountain Song School) was super-generous with her time, spending about half an hour on the phone chatting about everything from songwriting to hip pain and chocolate.
Here’s what she had to say:
Sharon: You’ve said that writing songs, when the process is flowing, is better than chocolate. What did you mean by that?
Jonatha: Well, better than chocolate is pretty damn good in my book, because I am a total chocolate freak and I pretty much have chocolate every day. To me, it means effortless and sublime and painless and kind of mysterious. The best songs are the ones you just don’t know where they came from — when you have this gem on the page that’s truly a new little being, it’s like winning the lottery.
Sharon: And when it’s not flowing?
Jonatha: It’s just torture. At least for me. I’m not the disciplined person who can sit there hour after hours slitting my wrists coming at a song from different angles. I have to give up and walk away, go and make toast, do my laundry or dust the baseboards — anything to get away from the glaring emptiness of “this sucks.”
Sharon: That’s funny, I just did a post last week on the “Does this Suck” factor.
Jonatha: Yeah, and then there’s the really scary ones that are like fake good, like where you start questioning your own…you know that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you think you’re really onto something, how excavating gems in the rough builds on itself and then things flow and then you’re riding this great wave. But what about the times when you get that pit in the stomach feeling but you’re not sure if you’re fooling yourself. You think you’re in love with it and it makes you cry — which is usually my best signal, if it puts me in tears — but then there’s my husband, who is my best and worst critic. He’ll absolutely tell the truth every single time and always has great reasons for everything he says. But he doesn’t get some of the more intricate elliptical Jonatha-y “inside” songs. And then I’ll play the same song for a bunch of girls and then they’ll be weeping around the campfire and the world needs to hear this. So that’s still my question — this just happened to me this weekend, so I’m trying to decide what to do with that song.
Sharon: You’ve had 7 solo albums, you’ve been doing the Indie thing for a long time, you’ve done the major label thing…how do you stay inspired in terms of songwriting?
Jonatha: Well, there’s fear [laugh]. As much as it is torturous, the most frustrating, hard thing in the whole world, in the end it’s worth it and as I get older I realize this is my future — maybe i’m not going to want to be shlepping around the world with two guitars and a really heavy suitcase when i’m 60, maybe that won’t be fun anymore. I’ll just be staying home more and writing more, and that’s my hopefully my nest egg, this is something I can do even if I’m in a wheelchair. So I have to respect it and keep at it, as much as I run away from it when it’s hard.
Sharon: Do you remember the first song you ever wrote?
Jonatha: Yeah, it was an assignment in college, it was called “Love is More Thicker than Forget.” I was taking a composition class and the assignment was to choose an e.e. cummings poem and set it to music. And I got an A, so that was encouraging.
Sharon: you said you’re not super disciplined, do you have any kind of songwriting routine?
Jonatha: I mean, I”m really disciplined about a lot of things — I come from a dance background, in ballet and modern dance. I was a modern dancer until I was 30 but I had ballet since I was 6 so I had a very technical background as well.
Sharon: I was a ballet girl.
Jonatha: How are your hips doing? My right hip is pretty bad off — I mean, I was a professional, throwing myself at walls, lifting men. I’ll need a new hip probably in a few years. But as far as songwriting habits, luckily my career is sort of cyclical. There are three parts to the process — the writing, the recording and the touring. The touring is kind of constant, and I’ll be on the road a fair amount this month, but I’m definitely in writing mode so I do make myself get in this room everyday to work on what i’m working on.
Sharon: Can you write while you’re in the touring phase?
Jonatha: I don’t consciously but then when i get home I realize I have so many little bits and pieces Id idn’t even realize I was working on. It’s a constant, it’s not something you ever stop doing, your brain just starts to work that way. You’ll read the newspaper in the morning and come upon a great phrase, a headline that you could twist into a chorus or line or something that sparka the next line. It’s like OCD — your brain, or at least mine, is constantly figuring out, ooh, how would that work in a song, or, oh my gosh, here’s the melody that goes with that line. I always come home from the road and say, wow, I haven’t done anything and then I realize I have notebooks full of ideas.
Sharon: How long have you been also teaching songwriting?
Jonatha: I think I’ve been doing it more than I realized. It’s not something I ever thought I’d be doing because I don’t know that I’m the most patient person, but I’ve been doing workshops for almost 10 years now — sometimes as little as 2 or as many as 4 or 5 per year. It’s terrifiying in some ways and really exposed, and I’m someone who really feels the need to overprepare and bring in all sorts of goodies for people to hear and or work on and learn. I really come away from it satisfied and thrilled that I’ve done it. It’s that yin and yang, where something is really hard and scary and then you wonder what you were so afraid of when you’ve finally done.
Sharon: You have a workshop called “Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus.” What do you mean by that?
Jonatha: I think you have to imagine someone’s hearing you for the first time what’s going to be different about you? What will catch their attention? A chord change that grabs our heart more viscerally than those same damn four chords that everyone uses year after year? Try that. Stop playing the same four chords. Just quit. Or, maybe it’s a twisty lyric that surprises, that shocks you. I just met the woman who is the lead singer form Divinyls. Remember the line, “When I think about you I touch myself”? Did you see that coming? Think about, is this song you’re writing just for you? If so, cool, you can just keep it to yourself, but if you are aspiring to more than that, think about what it is about you that’s really interesting.
Sharon: Yes, we’ve all been to open mics and seen performers who just go on and on and on in a really boring way.
Jonatha: Yes, did you just rip the page out of your journal and we have to hear it? Are you not distilling the essence of what you’re trying to say? Songwriting is not a short story. I don’t want to hear your journal entry. I need you to work harder and distill it into something magical or at least something different that I didn’t hear yesterday. Please don’t say, “I woke up this morning and something happened.” Don’t do that! I’m a reluctant co-writer, but my favorite co-write is a guy named Eric Bazilian, he was in the Hooters, he wrote Joan Osborne’s “What if God Was One of Us.” He’ll always say, just remember, “She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.” That’s so simple — so don’t get all precious about yourself. If you’re getting too deep and wordy and trying to be really intellectual, you can go too far in that direction.
Sharon: Who are your biggest songwriting influences?
Jonatha: When I was first really discovering that I had a songwriting voice, I was a sophomore in college, and Suzanne Vega was big influence right then.
Sharon: Me too! Huge!
Jonatha: Yeah, and Rickie Lee Jones, Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Karla Bonoff. Oh, and Joni Mitchell, of course.
Sharon: What do you think of today’s music scene, say, like Lady Gaga and folks like that?
Jonatha: I mean, in a way I feel like we’re at the crassest moment in music…hopefully we’re at the peak and there will be a backlash and we’ll look for something of substance again. It does go in cycles, the problem is access, that’s where my quesiton still lies. As much as the Internet has given more people way easier ways to get music out there and recorded, major labels and people with tons of money are still the ones who will be dominating the courses of exposure.
Sharon: Who are your favorite songwriters on the scene right now?
Jonatha: I adore Ian Axel. He is the real deal, sort of a tortured Elton John. So clever and melodic. I didn’t think I would like Joan As Police Woman, I was thrilled to have my mind changed. Feist is doing a good job. And I dig Imogen Heap.
Sharon: What is your current crop of songs like?
Jonatha: Half of them are really quirky upbeat pop songs, the other half are like really dark waltzes. And I love both sides of my personality — but I haven’t found a way to link the two yet. So I don’t know whether I have to make two records, or maybe i just call it “Schizophrenia.”
Sharon: And what was doing “The Works” like, where you set unreleased Woody Guthrie lyrics to music?
Jonatha: That was surprisingly fun, and ways less tortured than usual, obviously because I already had half the job done. I was editing and I was cutting and pasting much the way I would with my own writing. I was lucky Woody’s daughter Nora was very gracious and generous with me combining four lines from a journal in 1946 and lyrics on a scribbled napkin from 1951. She was really trusting of my process. She loved it, she walked in the studio the seocnd day, and burst into tears. She had no idea her father’s words could sound like that. It was pretty deep.
Thanks Jonatha! Jonatha Brooke will also be teaching at the Squam Art Workshops in September.
