By Madison Bloom
Pitchfork | March 8, 2022
The first time I saw Aldous Harding live, she was onstage in Brooklyn wearing all white. In the middle of her set, the modest crowd suddenly parted like the Red Sea, making way for a middle-aged gentleman as he vomited profusely down his T-shirt. The incident took place five years ago, but Harding remembers it well. Talking via video call last month, she says she considered halting the show mid-song to see if the poor fellow needed assistance. “But then I thought, if I were a big enough fan to stand at the front and feel that ill and remain, the last thing I would want is for the performer to stop what they were doing and go, ‘Can we get this loser a towel?’” she adds with a laugh. So she just kept singing.
Harding recalls the fiasco from her mother’s backyard in Geraldine, New Zealand, a pastoral town with a population just shy of 3,000. A clothesline strung with laundry ripples in the wind behind her, cutting across the Zoom window like orange and blue bunting. It is summertime down there, and the air, Harding tells me, smells of flowers and livestock from surrounding farmlands. The singer-songwriter grew up just 10 minutes away from where she sits, on her family’s organic farm. “When I was young, we moved around a lot,” she says. “But this part of the country is probably the most at home I feel anywhere.” It is also where she wrote some of her upcoming fourth album, Warm Chris.
Since her 2014 self-titled debut, Harding’s music has always slid through the corners of any box it’s been plopped in, whether it was labeled gothic folk, chamber pop, or “fetching surrealism.” Her early lyrics read like Roman mythology, set against keening strings and choral melodies. Along the way, her live performances and music videos became more theatrical, marked by elaborate costumes and a vaudevillian talent for facial contortion. On her international breakthrough, 2019’s Designer, she wriggled into new forms still—a twitching imp in pilgrim garb, a manic clown—while her songs got stranger, funnier, breezier.
She remains in this off-kilter space throughout Warm Chris, her third collaboration with producer John Parish, who’s worked alongside PJ Harvey and Jenny Hval, among others. The album is an ensemble of spry art-pop, spare piano numbers, and Baroque oddities. A song might hint at an origin point or influence, but Harding is not all that interested in listing them out. It’s enough of a chore, she says, to corral all of her “people”—that is, the creative forces vying for control in her brain. She is exhausted by the idea of whittling this troupe down to one fixed identity.
Harding is not one to classify her work, and she’s especially hesitant to describe how it’s created, all of which can make interviews a challenge. But her resistance is born of discomfort, not malice. “It’s like somebody who doesn’t like to dance because they don’t like their body,” she says. “Suddenly I’m in the middle of the floor, and I’ve got my hips working, and I just feel awful. You know?”
Even so, she is patient and kind throughout our chat, dragging on a cigarette and scrunching her brow as she pauses between thoughts. Harding’s focus is often confused for severity, but that only makes her wry sense of humor more delightful to encounter. “I’m quite shy when I talk about my process,” she says, before citing the mockumentary legend behind Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. “I worry that it’s like a Christopher Guest film, where I’m like, ‘I grew up watching my mother cook from under the kitchen table.’” She adopts a velvety American accent as she embodies the character, lampooning the pageantry of self-promotion.
Pitchfork: Your voice is very elastic and can shift quite dramatically across an album. Are you actively sculpting it to fit each song, or is the change involuntary?
Aldous Harding: It is both. I use my voice like an instrument, and—like language or clothing—I don’t feel like different kinds aren’t mine to use. It just happens, and unless I listen back and go, “Oh, I’m in trouble with that,” I just leave it the way it is. For me, taking identity too seriously is really detrimental to my music. People say to me, “Why don’t you use your real voice?” But what people don’t understand is that I don’t know what my normal voice is anymore. In a lot of ways, I feel like the songs are like secrets that the muse is keeping from me. I have to listen, and then it tells me where the gaps in the universe are, and then I try to fill them with good intentions.
I don’t really feel anything when people call me a musician. It feels wrong. I’ve never felt like a musician. I feel more like—and this is another real Christopher Guest moment for me—a song actor. Because the last thing I wanna do is pay $45 and see a bunch of musicians play their instruments for an hour and a half. [laughs] Maybe I’m just saying that because I’m not as instrumentally gifted as others, but I don’t wanna see a bunch of musicians up there, playing.
There’s definitely a theatricality to your facial expressions and gestures onstage. How choreographed are those?
It’s kind of a chicken-egg situation. When someone’s lifting weights, or about to fall, or trying to control a dog, the face and body does what it has to, to get through the action. And often I feel like the things that I do with my face seem necessary to get through the moment, whether it’s because it needs it physically, I need it emotionally, or whether I think that’s what people now expect of me. It’s not fake, because I did it. For whatever reason, it’s necessary. And I certainly feel different each record, physically.
How did you feel making this record?
This record came a lot wilder, but cleaner. This was the easiest one. It just came really naturally.
Did you feel physically lighter?
Yeah. Much lighter.
Your music and videos can often be humorous in an offbeat way. I wonder: What do you find funny?
I like people falling over. Or people trying to deliver good news in a humble way. I really like people who don’t normally exercise, post-workout. I like listening to love songs and looking at animals—that really gets me. More than anything, I like watching people try to hide their true feelings. Like people pretending not to be nervous on game shows while they’re shaking like a leaf, and you can see that something inside them’s about to break.
In your recent video for “Lawn,” you wear intricate makeup and prosthetics that make you look like a lizard. Why a lizard?
The reptilian thing just popped into my head. These reptiles are just like mascots. Maybe it’s a subconscious play with temperature. The album’s called Warm Chris, perhaps my brain went, What’s something that’s cold?
What was that like to film?
The only thing I was interested in was being at the end of it, having not wasted everyone’s time and money. That’s all I could think about. I remember just standing there and trying to be nice to my skinny little body in the mirror. It’s a long time to see yourself splayed out. We were in makeup for four hours. But we kind of wanted the lizard costumes to be a little bit funky around some of the joints. I didn’t ever want people to think that we were lizards. I wanted people to think that we were models who’d been asked to be lizards. The story is about the models, not the lizards.
You’ve talked about how you don’t like to detail the meaning of your songs. Why is that?
I just want everyone to feel like a philosopher. You put on a record, and that record belongs to you for that 40 minutes. That’s all I wanna protect. It’s not myself. Well, actually, no, that’s a lie, because I’m trying to protect myself in that I don’t want people to go, “Oh, that’s not what I’d hoped—remove from cart.”
Even so, I couldn’t help but wonder about the Warm Chris song “Tick Tock,” which sounds like it’s sung from the perspective of someone who’s exasperated by people that want to know more about them.
Those verses on “Tick Tock” are very much two people after they’ve just shot up, talking about themselves as though they’re successful. It’s supposed to be disorientating. And that’s why that character showed up, because I was like, “Who’s someone that’s really disorientated that doesn’t know they’re disorientated?” A junkie. It’s this conversation in a smoky room between a couple of people on some beanbags.
What it’s about though, I couldn’t tell you. I think lyrics like “All I want’s an office in the country” sound like someone who can’t really make up their mind. And then the chorus comes in clean and says, “Well, if you don’t get loose now, you better forget it.” And that’s the thing—I know what I’m trying to feel when it’s coming out, but that’s why I don’t like talking about what the songs are about, because all I can talk about is what I’m trying to follow at the time. I feel like I’m being interviewed about a robbery, and I didn’t see their face and I wanna help, but I don’t really remember how it felt.
Do you feel like you go into a trance when you write?
Yeah! It sounds like such a silly thing, that I can’t recall a lot of it, because it is like a trance, or like someone else is doing it. And I can’t call all those folks back to help me. Were you ever in a school play, and you were on stage and you’re just like, “What happened? I blacked out”? When people are asking me about things like this, I wanna help us get there, but the memories have been stolen. Whether they were snatched up for the music, or whether I just can’t face them, I don’t know. But it’s hard for me to go back and talk about it because it feels like it had very little to do with me, I mean this person. And I don’t wanna just fill gaps with words.
It’s just this overachieving thing that I have, like, I’ve never written a letter in my life because I always used to screw them up and throw them in the bin. I never sent people letters or mail because the pressure was too much.
Where does that pressure come from?
Maybe being told that I could do anything, but feeling like I didn’t want to, or not agreeing with those comments. Expecting to have this big palette accessible to me all the time, and not having it. And even if I did have the right stuff, having enough purpose and sense of self to march around with it.
Do you feel like you don’t have any purpose or that purpose is something you don’t like to burden yourself with?
Probably the latter. I just know that if I try to get all my people together and say, “This is me now,” there’ll be an uproar. There’ll be this horrible barn dance of excitement, rejection, failure, glory. And they’ll all be touching each other and sweating. And then I’ll just sit in the middle and cover my hands and just scream and go, “All right, forget it.”
Do you mean all of this would happen within your mind?
Yeah. I’ll say, “If you’re gonna behave like that, forget it!” So I just try not to overthink it. It’s a bit like that Bill Callahan song: “I can tell you about the river/Or we could just get in.” I’m worried that if I talk about the river, I’m not gonna wanna get in.
In the past you’ve said that songwriting can be a “spooky” experience for you. Why?
A lot of my writing is done in silence. The one example I really remember of that is my song, “Treasure,” off Designer. I wrote that song in complete silence. It was like coaxing an animal, like holding a piece of bread in my hand for ages until the duck or the hedgehog or whatever had enough space to come and take it from me. I remember sitting on the deck and smoking and looking out and letting all the imagery come from the different corners of my brain, and then organizing it. After two hours, I would write it down and try again. I had a melody, but I wasn’t singing along.
It was all in your head?
Yeah, I wasn’t constructing it. I was inviting it. Imagery is easy for me to follow, but I can’t write about things that are in front of me, so I have to kind of meditate and make a path. The muse is pretty intimidating in the sense that I sometimes feel like I’m a kid and I’ve been hearing these noises and I’m like, “Ghost! Show yourself!” It’s like this weird, unnecessary therapy where you’re like, “Tell me what’s wrong with me.” You let it come in, you gain its trust, you get all the information, and then you work.
Are you ever freaked out by the results?
I’ve never been disturbed. I’ve been, if I can say, moved. I’ve been proud of myself for letting it happen, for being still and present enough to allow something to happen. Because that’s not really something I’m good at day-to-day… see?! Wasn’t that just the worst conversation you’ve ever had?! Doesn’t that just sound like I’m trying to tart up the writing process?
Do you think that your music is vulnerable?
Totally. It’s vulnerable in the sense that it can be rewound, fast-forwarded, stopped or deleted, not bought, criticized. But we don’t care. Like if there’s a list, it’d be nice to be on it, but I’m not really ashamed of my family. This is almost too sad to say, but in a way I think that these records seem to be filling gaps in the universe. Maybe I’m filling gaps in my universe, and there are people that have the same issues. Sometimes it does feel like I’m collecting eggs for some invisible apocalypse of intimacy. Like I’ve got this storage room of things that I’ve known, that I can go back to, that other people can go back to.
I really do try not to overthink it, but then in moments like this, when I’m forced to think about it, I realize there’s a lot to think about. And maybe some of the things I write about are too painful to think about. But they never feel heavy at the time. The most emotion I feel when I finish something is a quiet completion, like I just got lifted out of the pool and into the sun.
Featured Image: Aldous Harding (Photo: Emma Wallbanks)
