SheUnlimited Interview

Simply calling Deborah Henson-Conant a harp player would be like saying that Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel creation was just some painting. In theory, it's correct, but that statement only scratches the surface. I have never seen the harp played in such a way before; straddling this normally serenely played instrument like an Amazon, Deborah sometimes plucks the harp like a guitar, slaps it like a drum, but always with such enthusiasm and passion that you're instantly infected by her high octane energy. Deborah Henson-Conant is very energetic and passionate, connecting with her audience with great vocal quality as well as superior composition skills that transverse the different genres of music.

Invention And Alchemy, her latest and Grammy nominated composition, is fast in some places, slow in others, and seamlessly combines different styles of music. A rich listening experience, this album resonates with great dynamics in each piece, each piece telling a different story while taking you on a different cultural and musical journey.

Q. When you were a child, you wanted a Blues Harmonica. After meeting an old man playing the instrument, you asked your parents for one for your birthday. Instead, you received a blue harp, "the smallest one they had." How did you get over your immense disappointment and bond with it to the extent that you now play it?

You hit on a basic theme in all my work – the paradox of fact and truth. When I was a teenager I didn't want to read novels because I was so hungry for 'truth' that I only wanted to read non-fiction books. Later, I discovered I could often find much deeper truths in novels and stories.

Many of my stories incorporate years of experiences and present them as a single narrative. So, that particular event didn't actually happen exactly as I tell it, but what the story lets me express is a series of deep truths: that I wanted to play music with soul, that I have always been profoundly affected by simple music played by "plain folks," and that I felt my parents completely misunderstood me, particularly about what I wanted to do musically.

It so happened that a harp DID show up in the livingroom and I was taken to a series of extremely uncomfortable lessons where I felt painfully my inadequacy as a girl. I finally convinced my parents to let me stop lessons by telling my mother that no-one would hold hands with me if I had callouses. She knew that was ridiculous, but the fact that I'd go that far to try to cry off the lessons finally convinced her that the harp wasn't for me.

When I got to college, though, my college needed a harpist. I'd had half-a-dozen lessons, so I became the harpist by default.

I've actually written a lot about that in some of the material that’s on my website, HipHarp.com, if folks want to read more about my history and personal relationship with this instrument I play.

That's such a great question. Sometimes I want to make myself cry with my music. Sometimes I'm trying to tickle myself. Sometimes I need to sing about what I love, or build a dream in music. Sometimes I want to create a scene or a story, and sometimes I'm just having fun. Often I am inspired by something very small – a question someone asks – or one I ask myself.

"The Garbageman" is a perfect example. It was a very spontaneous tune. I asked myself one Thanksgiving what I was truly thankful for, and suddenly I found I was singing that song. I was actually in the car while I was writing it, got stuck behind a Garbage truck and grabbed the first piece of paper I could get my hands on – an old bag. When I got home I ran into the kitchen and said to my family, "Hey, listen to my new song." They loved it, sang along, framed the bag and put it on the wall. Then came the fun part – inventing the orchestration.

Orchestrating music lets me create an emotional context for it. There are no stylistic rules. The only rule is that everything I add to the piece must bring the piece more alive and reveal its meaning more clearly.

To bring "The Garbageman" alive for orchestra I mixed stylistic elements of tragic Opera with Looney Tunes cartoons, Bavarian Polka music, Scottish Pipe band music and probably some Marching Band. I didn't do this consciously – it's not like I have a big spice cabinet with "Tragic Opera" on one jar, "Bavarian Polka" on another. After the fact, I can listen and sometimes identify influences that ended up in the orchestration – but when I'm writing it, I just do whatever I need to do to make myself feel the way I want to feel when I hear it. My teacher always said, "We need to become victims of our own work." What he meant was that our own work needs to slay us. I guess we need to be constantly working to shoot ourselves with our own arrow – right in the heart.

If I'm working with a storyline, then I'm inspired by what the characters need to say to each other, what they need to feel, to say, to do. Then the music creates an emotional context for the story, the action, the words – or sometimes it just makes a space for people to dream or dance within a story.

Sometimes I'm inspired by wanting – or needing – to recreate an experience, or I'm haunted by a feeling and until I bring it alive in the music I can't shake it.

"Catcher in the Rye" is an example of that: I met a wonderful singer in Scotland named Davey Steele. He had a voice of silk and played a bodhran – a loud, traditional Scottish hand-drum. He fell in love with a harpist named Patsy. They married and, after a great deal of difficulty, they had a child and then quite suddenly, Davey died. I don't want to romanticize this, because loss is loss and this is not a fairytale – it's someone's life. The ache of wishing I could put this man back into the lives of the people he loved is the ache that inspired that song. That's not a story I want to tell the audience in performance, but the story I do tell in concert holds that wish inside it.

Melodies come to me in dreams, in conversation – in fact, melodies, to me, are so married to words that, when I was a child, before I could write music, I'd write just the words – and even after decades, I can read those words and the melody appears in my ears. The songs "Belinda" (on "Altered Ego") and "Berth 'o Bertha" (on "Artist's Proof") are both about exactly the same thing, a huge tree in my heavily urban former neighborhood. But the songs have completely different characters because, in one instance, someone told me the tree was named "Belinda" and later, someone told me that the tree was actually called "Bertha." The names, themselves, spawned these two completely different love songs!

One thing that often inspires me is when I hear a story, often a story I've known for years, and then I suddenly think: "But, wait! What happens AFTER that???" Or when I think, "Right ... but what did it look like from the OTHER person's viewpoint?" or "But what would I, PERSONALLY, feel like in that situation?"

"The Wild Harp," which re-frames the end of a traditional song about a harp-playing soldier, is an example of me needing to go beyond the "end" of a story.

"The Frog Princess" is another example: an entire one-woman show with orchestra came out of the question, "How would I see myself if I were the daughter of the Frog Prince? Would I be afraid I'd turn into a frog like my father did?" For me, her story was a metaphor for my paradoxical relationship with my own parents: my desire to be like them and my fear of being like them – and the question of whether I have any choice in the matter!

Music has such an important role in my life as a form of personal expression, as a solace, as a way to connect with my own emotions. Sometimes I write songs because I need to hear them – I need to have them sung to me, and so I write them to sing to myself. "Congratulations, You Made it this Far" is a song I wrote to help me get through my 40th birthday. I probably sing that song to myself more often than I sing any other song, especially one part:

There are times when you give up, and times when you give in,
Times when losing is the only way to win...

"The Way You Are Blues" (also on "Invention & Alchemy") is a song I wrote specifically for my boyfriend to sing to me, but I absolutely love getting up on stage and wailing out that tune. And I LOVE that I get to take on the role of rock guitarist in the middle of the piece, turn on a distortion pedal and play a highpowered rhythmic jam – on the HARP. That sense of liberation, of turning everything that people think of as "harp" upside down and playing with complete abandon is such a metaphor for finding my own definition of being a woman. Each time I do it, I feel like I chip away at my own stereotypes and prejudices about who women can and can't be.

A lot of times I write music to make sense of things I don't understand, or to express an emotion for something that's just to big to say in words. In "996," at first I just wanted to bring the feeling of the 1001 Arabian Nights alive, to feel what it would be like to be the teller of those tales. It was a sort of joke: "Of the 1001 Arabian Nights, this is night number 996." And then my coach pushed me to answer the question, "Why night number 996? What happened THAT night??" It wasn't until he asked that question that I understood the piece and why it happens five days before the end of the 1001 Nights.

I tell that story on the DVD – and the conductor, David Lockington joins me – but not as a conductor! He sweeps off the stage and returns, dressed as a sultan and weilding his cello like a sword. In this case, I was first inspired by a type of music, next by a story that melody reminded me of, next by a question and finally by the playing of my musical partner in that piece. Each of these elements had a part in developing that story.

Sometimes I'm trying to flesh out a single moment of my life. I don't always realize that right at the beginning. Sometimes I'll write the piece and five years later I'll be in performance, or watching a video and suddenly my eyes go all wide and I'm hit with the proverbial hammer: "Oh, THAT'S what that's about!"

"The Danger Zone," which just won first prize as an instrumental piece in the International Songwriting Competition and is a big feature on "Invention & Alchemy," is one of my favorite examples of that – one of those things where your brain is screaming at you for years and you just can't hear it. I'd written a huge 5-movement work based on a science spoof called "Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown" ("Danger Zone" is one of the five movements) and I was desperate to see a whole orchestra perform it dressed in lab coats. Getting 80 lab coats is no easy feat. Getting 80 musicians to put them on is even harder. But I finally got my dream when we filmed "Danger Zone" for "Invention & Alchemy." Not only is the whole orchestra in lab coats, but the conductor and producer present this wonderful silent-movie-type physical comedy with latex gloves during the intro.

When I saw it on screen, I had the bizarre experience of suddenly rushing through a wormhole in time. Suddenly, I was seeing myself at 15, screaming in the hallway at my parents: "Maybe I WON'T be a musician!!! Maybe I'll be a SCIENTIST!!!" You see, everyone simply assumed I'd become a musician – but I had this whole other fascination with scientific method. I had no idea how to express it, how to pursue it. All I could do was scream in frustration.

Yet ... this piece, even though it's a caricature of scientists, helped me understand that part of me is still there in that hallway trying to express a different aspect of my fascination with the world. It pointed out to me that I want to spend more time with inventors, scientists, philosophers – folks who can help me explore basic concepts of invention and creativity – and it helped me commit to a whole new avenue of work that combines me with scientists onstage (there's more about that at HipHarp.com – in my current series "Inviting Invention" with MIT and the Cambridge Science Festival).

So, you see, one inspiration can lead to another, to another, to another ... and, as an artist friend once said to me: "It's wonderful to realize we really can affect ourselves.

Another great question! Yes, I do tour in different countries and yes, I do try to present my show in the language of whatever country I'm in. I've spent the most time in France and Germany and I really love performing in both countries. One of the advantages of trying to do a story-driven show in a different language is that it made me a much more physical performer. Not being able to rely on my command of the language, I had to find other ways to communicate nuance, and I discovered that I could often do it with my body – a kind of offshoot of a rudimentary sign language.

I also just love language, and love the kinds of insights learning a new language can give into my first language.

The cultures I visit do indeed become part of my music. Scotland and Mexico, in particular, have had a very strong influence on my music and the way I present my shows, while one of the things I love about Germany is the audience's openness to various styles and how they embrace various combinations of music and theatre. In France, I've found a great openness to the harp as an instrument, in part because the Celtic culture is so strong (Brittany, the Celtic part of France, has a very proud Celtic culture) and the harp is very much in the center of that culture. The first time I saw a harp superstar play in a stadium was in France, and the first time I, myself, played solo in a stadium-type situation was in France. I love that openness.

Wow. Actually I know almost nothing about mythology. Maybe that's why I feel so free to make up the stories. When I do read myths or fairytales, I find myself always thinking about ancillary details or characters. Like – when I read about the myth of Persephone being stolen by Zeus and taken to the underworld (and forgive me if I got the names wrong), all I could think about was Persephone's mother! If your child was stolen, and taken underground, how desperate would you feel, standing on the very ground in which she was imprisoned and unable to reach her. I wrote a whole song cycle about that called "Persephone Lost," based on the Mother's experience.

When I read the Frog Prince I started obsessing about how his DAUGHTER would feel. I mean, if your father had suddenly turned into a frog, wouldn't you worry that it might happen to you? So I wrote a full-length children's CD called "The Frog Princess" all about that girl and her fears and her resolution. Oops – I guess this goes back to the inspiration question.

I think, as artists, we have the opportunity to put a human face onto history. I am absolutely not an historian – I don't even stick to the facts when I tell my own personal history. But I'm not looking for the facts. I'm looking for the human truths.

And yes, I have studied a lot of non-standard theatre from Shakespeare intensives to movement, New Vaudeville, storytelling and mime. It's not that I want to be an "actress." I study these things to have a broader palette to help me tell my own story and play my own music.

Such great questions! I think you need to understand what my home life was like. My mother lived to sing. She sang everything from nursery rhymes to Operatic Arias with equal conviction. She would often describe the story of the opera and then sing the aria, and have the audience in tears. So I grew up with the sense that you could create scenery, costumes and scenario all just by describing it. Then, once the scene was set, the music comes in and brings it all alive.

My mother also took music extremely seriously. So seriously that I think it made it impossible for her to perform publicly. On the one hand, it meant that I and a handful of others in the world experienced one of the world's greatest singers up front and personal on a regular basis. On the other hand – only a few people ever heard her. Those who did often had their lives changed. But she felt like an utter failure because she was completely unknown.
I saw how seriously she took it and I knew I couldn't do that. I saw how obsessed she became with singing lessons and how it seemed to destroy her voice and I decided never to take singing lessons.

Music is very deep to me, but it's also very, very funny, and very complex. You can sing a love song that's passionate, sexy and funny all at once. I love to create context. Often when I sing "The Nightingale," which is a kind of lament for the sound of my mother's voice, I precede the song with some of the absolutely silly songs she used to sing to me when I was little.

I also love the sound of human speech and love combining variations of words and music. As a kid, one of the few albums I had was called "Word Jazz," and it mixed spoken word and music in a way in which the music reflected and amplified the stories.

Finally, when I was in music school, I heard a recording of a woman called "Anna Russell" who did absolutely wonderful spoofs of opera.

I'm always interested in working with artists – and non-artists – who I feel I can learn from (and that includes a LOT of people). Some of the people I'm most interested in working with are Bela Fleck, Dave Matthews, Sting, Yo Yo Ma, Bobby McFerrin, Eddie Izzard – hmmm... just realized those are all men. Female artists I’d love to work with are Tina Turner, Ani DiFranco (a great urban-type storyteller on top of being a great musician), Regina Spektor, Bjork, Evelyn Glennie, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson. Then there's the Kronos Quartet, Michael Moschen, Mark Morris, a German group called Kleine Tiershau, a French group called Illico, a French director called Alain Sachs, violinist Didier Lockwood – aaargh, don't get me started! And that's just some of the PERFORMERS I'm interested in working with – it doesn't include the inventors, scientists, dancers, authors, etc.

I really love what I learn from collaboration – and I don't just mean collaboration with other musicians. I was invited recently to an event called "Ideas Boston": a 2-day event during which inventive people from diverse fields each gave a 20-minute presentation about their work. My mind was so stimulated by it I couldn't sleep – but in a GREAT way! Afterwards I asked myself: why do musicians always work with other MUSICIANS as opening acts or collaborators? Why not have a philosopher as an opening act, or a nuclear physicist or an architect? So I've really broadened my concept of collaboration since then. (Folks can read more about that at HipHarp.com – the Publicity page links to Press Releases about a series of events I'm now doing called "Inviting Invention," which sets up onstage collaborations between myself and scientists, journalists, dancers, theatre troupes, etc).

I actually think that this particular DVD brings my performance to a wider audience and enhanced the quality. One of our goals with this DVD was to bring people even closer than the front row, and to CAPTURE rather than PRODUCE the experience of a live performance. One of the reasons I'm so proud of this project is that I can tell, from the response, that we were able to do that.

I'm particularly proud that people seem to like to share the DVD across generations. My experience of music was cross-generational, as was Jonathan Wyner's (the producer). We each grew up living with professional musicians, so professional-level performances were, for us, something that lived right in our homes. I think that instinctively we both needed to create that experience with this DVD: a very high level of artistry and production, but with the kind of accessibility you can only get when you have an intimate, personal relationship to the music and the musicians.

We did that, in part, through the use of what we called "White Rabbits," an interactive part of the DVD that allows viewers to drop behind-the-scenes (as if into a rabbit hole), and get much more casual, direct insight into the pieces. The viewer actually controls this function by watching for the White Rabbit symbol on the screen – it’s a lot of fun to see kids work with them. I remember seeing my 11-year old niece watch the program for the 3rd time, chanting "Where's the White Rabbit? Where's the White Rabbit?"

So there's this experience we hear of over and over – of this being a very social DVD – of folks sharing it with friends, family, kids, grandparents – and of people enjoying watching it together and interacting with it. On the other hand, it's a very, very personal DVD. Someone told me recently that, on his birthday, he shut himself in a room with the DVD and watched "Congratulations, You Made It This Far," just for himself.

One thing that's exciting about my career is that I get to play in many different situations. In the space of a single month I might go from a television appearance to a One-Woman Show in a small theatre to a show with full symphony to a stadium appearance in front of 17,000 people. They're each exciting in their own way.

One of the things I love about playing with a symphony is that, as a kid, I felt like I never could get close enough to the music. I wanted to crawl inside the radio, underneath the piano and right into the middle of the orchestra. On stage with the orchestra, I finally get to do that. And for purely selfish reasons, I write whole sections for the orchestra where I don't play at all, but where I can just stand on stage right in the middle of all that music.

When we were filming the DVD, my brother and my Aunt were in the audience and I knew exactly where they were seated. As I sang one of my most personal songs, "Congratulations, You Made It This Far," I looked straight at my brother and spoke directly to him. I could embrace him from the stage with my words in a way that was more free than I could ever do in person. And every time I see the DVD I can see that moment where I "locked in" on him. It's very important for me to be able to see the audience, at least a bit. Sometimes I get concerned when I lock in on a single person that the others will feel left out, but, in fact, I think that actually lets the audience in even more.

SECRET RITUALS? Hmmmm ... well, I never eat before a performance. But that's a practical issue. I don't seem to digest food quickly and I'm nervous about burping into my microphone, since it's glued onto my face – so I generally eat 3 or 4 hours before a performance.

I almost always wear my cowboy boots – and often dress them up with silver chains or strands of rhinestones, and I almost always wear one red earring - a spray of ruby-colored rhinestone stars.

I often reread notes from my teacher, Tony Monatanaro, before a performance. These are notes about performance, about trusting the audience ("just stand up there and let them smell your trust"), about the role of the performer ("an ambassador for the audience" into the world the performance creates), about the honor of being in the position of performer ("Treat the theatre like a magical place. The event, the gathering, is important, not the material.")

Waiting to go on is the most difficult time. I'll just be in the wings aching to get on stage. Maybe it's like waiting to be born. There you are in the dark, not really knowing what's about to happen, seeing just a spill of the light you're about to step into. Every time I step on stage, I feel as if it's the last show and the first show – the last chance and the first chance – to bring this music alive. Each show seems especially important. A chance to speak, to be heard, to reach through, to bring this thing I've created – this thing that creates me – to bring it to life.

Invention And Alchemy. Prepare to be blown away, astounded, up-lifted and rejuvenated. Energy. Energy. Energy. Amplified with a passionate confidence, almost a desperation, that has you perched on the edge of your seat from start to finish, leaving you in no doubt as to who is the master. Prepare to willingly enslave yourself, to be led wherever this artiste wishes to take you. It is refreshingly exhausting; you will need a long nap afterwards, the kind a young child or baby gets after a satisfyingly exhausting adventure filled day...

WARNING: IF YOU DON'T INTEND TO FEEL ALIVE, TO FEAST ON THE WONDER THAT IS INVENTION AND ALCHEMY, DON'T BY THIS DVD…

We would like to thank Deborah Henson-Conant for sharing with She Unlimited, the pioneering network for women.