Magical mysteries
Her songs are glorious, if incomprehensible. But, as Aldous Harding tells Grant Smithies, if you like them, that’s all you need to know.
It’s an unusually hot summer evening in Cardiff, Wales, when New Zealand’s most fascinating singer/songwriter of recent times picks up the phone.
Real name Hannah Harding, but you can call her Aldous.
I am unsurprised to hear that art surrounds her.
‘‘I’m just looking at this carpet covered in copies of one of my spooky drawings,’’ she says in a slow, calm voice.
‘‘I’ve just made a floor full of lino-cut prints to sell, for some reason. It appears to be a couple of people going for a walk. Hmm. I dunno, man! I can draw, but something about this one is kind of bugging me…’’ Chisels and paint, paper and ink.
It’s nice to think of her over there, 12,000 miles from Geraldine and Lyttleton and assorted other early waystations of her life, tutuing around in her adopted home, making a mess, trying out new things.
I imagined Harding would be utterly consumed with music these days, with no free time, caught up in the knackering work cycle of a touring musician: eat, sleep, travel, do press, play gig, repeat.
Produced in Bristol by PJ Harvey accomplice John Parish, her 2017 second album, Party, led to a mighty surge of global interest, with all the hard graft that entails.
When Harding finally came off a 100-date tour last summer, she went straight into the studio with a collection of songs mostly written on the road.
Her third album, Designer, which was released in April, is a stunner: an engrossing dream-world of wonky folk-pop with no shortage of surrealistic leaps of logic in the lyrics.
Critics gushed over the beauty of the songs at the same time as they admitted being perplexed by their meaning.
‘‘Conundrums you can dance to,’’ wrote one reviewer. ‘‘This album’s nine crossword clues are as easy
on the ear as they are mystifying on the brain’s pattern-recognition systems.’’
The album’s release was followed by another sold-out European tour.
And then in June Harding flew to the States to play live in front of 4 million viewers on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
Wearing a glorious red tent dress, she sat in front of her band, finger-picking an acoustic guitar as she delivered The Barrel, a song so marvellous it rotates endlessly in my head and even spills into my dreams.
‘‘Look at all the peaches,’’ she sang, ‘‘show the ferret to the egg,’’ and I was as mystified and captivated as the very first time I heard it.
Every now and then, the cameras caught Harding’s eyes rolling back in her head as she headed off to some strange place that the delivery of the song required.
And then she got on a plane and headed back to Wales, and she stands there now, looking down at a floorful of artwork she’s not too sure about.
‘‘Well, one of the things I’ve realised about myself lately is that I don’t always know how to enjoy the making process. With some things, it’s not that I like doing them; it’s more that I like having done them. I like to look back and see that I’ve made a nice thing.’’ Sometimes that nice thing is a song. But after that song is made comes the crappy part, where Harding is expected to endlessly explain its meaning to fans, interviewers, social media, the press. What the hell is going on, they will ask, when someone ‘‘shows the ferret to the egg’’? Was Marlon Williams the ex-boyfriend whose ‘‘hot stone started to roll’’ in Weight of
The Planets? Why do you appear to be marooned in Dubai in Zoo Eyes?
‘‘This is a tricky one, because I shouldn’t have to explain anything if I don’t want to. But also, I can’t be so naive as to expect people not to ask those questions, given that my aim has been to create something intriguing. But yeah, I’ve sometimes thought, ‘Can we not just call a spade a f...ing spade?’’’ Harding would rather people felt these songs than intellectually unpicked them. ‘‘Really, if you like the songs, you have understood. If you feel affected, and you keep coming back to hear them again, that’s all you need. A song is not a test.’’
For me, Designer was a gentle but devastating blast to the brain, stranger and more playful than anything she has done before. I appreciated how much beauty and mystery and humour was in the thing. The vocal delivery is a marvel throughout, her voice containing multitudes: there are hints of folkie fellow travellers Joanna Newsome, Linda Perhacs and Vashti Bunyan, the breathy whisper of Astrud Gilberto, an austere low range that recalls Velvet Underground’s Nico. With subtle shadings of saxophone, clarinet, xylophones, samples and strings adding drama to a more trad band set-up, the buoyant, hovering sound recalls classic samba and bossa nova records, but with darker, more peculiar lyrics, as if someone had taken magic mushrooms before rewriting The Girl From Ipanema.
This feeling that Harding has nudged her jazz-damaged folk sound towards Spain or Latin America is reinforced in her video imagery: a wry ‘‘invisible castanets’’ dance move in The Barrel, the mountainous rocky backdrops in Fixture Picture, an assortment a dramatic sombreros and monteras, outfits of a hot Mexican red where before she dressed predominantly in black or white.
‘‘That’s great!’’ she says, but there’s no further explanation, because Harding believes over-analysis kills art.
Not understanding a song, a book, a film, a painting, but still feeling something potent; that can be enjoyable, too.
‘‘Exactly. I don’t know anyone who’s interested in doing puzzles that are already done. That’s just cheating, right? There’s a desire to understand the maker’s motivation so you know what shelf to put it on and where it should sit in your room and in your life. I get that. But I don’t want to diminish a song I’ve thought so hard about during the making process by over-explaining it. Talking about my music is the part of this job I’m the least interested in doing.’’
Sometimes, this shows. In some interviews, Harding can come across as bored, combative, wilfully obscure.
I’ve done interviews with her myself that sometimes felt like this, but in hindsight, it wasn’t her fault. I just failed to find her wavelength.
In truth, Harding is extremely articulate if given time and space. She can be charming and generous and funny. She just doesn’t like to play the game if you trot out the same dull questions everyone else has asked. ‘‘That’s true. If people say to me, ‘So, what were you doing in Dubai in that song?’, or they spend ages comparing me to some other singer, I just shut down, I guess.’’
She’s not an over-sharer, which is rare and refreshing these days. More of an enigmatic withholder.
But Harding never intends to shame people for some of the ‘‘very wrong things’’ they might think about her songs.
‘‘There’s no point being rude to someone about some place they’ve gone, especially when I refuse to take them somewhere else. But sometimes, I need to step in. If someone says to me that Horizon is an anti-feminist anthem, I have to tell them, ‘No, that’s not right.’ But I’m not interested in unpicking my music for people. Everybody has different reference points.’’
It’s true. No two people hear a song the same way.
Songs are magical in that sense. They set up complex resonances with a listener’s memory and mood and personality. They
‘‘To do my thing on a huge American talk show was quite something. But knowing you have just one shot to get it right in front of millions of people? I don’t know anyone who would enjoy that sort of pressure.’’
storm your defences, gate-crash your heart. They penetrate deeply and smack up against whatever else happens to be rattling around in your subconscious.
When I watch Harding’s video for The
Barrel, for example, in which she appears in a huge white hat and pilgrim tunic amid a tunnel of fabric, I’m like a kid again, making huts out of sheets.
‘‘Oh, yes! That’s exactly it! When I was 3 or 4, I went to this funfair with my dad, and there was a woman telling fairy stories. It was, like, $2, and you had to crawl through this tiny tunnel made of sheets and bits of silk, and sort of birth your way through, just like in the video, and it opened out into this draped room with a woman sitting there, telling a story. That really stuck with me.’’
I can relate. I grew up in a pretty broke family in Whanganui where we kids had to entertain ourselves on the cheap. There were a lot of cardboard-box cars, and huts made with sheets hung over chairs.
‘‘Pure magic, wasn’t it? It’s amazing, at that time in your life, how you can make yourself feel so much using very little.’’
That same video clip sparked all manner of mad debate online.
Harding’s tall white hat was some sort of giant penis, apparently. That tunnel of sheets was a fabric vagina. Hannah herself was a foetus in the womb. The bit at the end where Harding dances around in her jocks, with an old-lady mask on her head? Don’t ask.
I suspect people underestimate her sense of humour. Some of the most assiduously analysed bits in Harding’s songs and video clips are hilarious, though I have no idea if that’s intentional.
What did Harding make of her most recent TV appearance on The Tonight Show?
It’s something of a coup, surely, to appear on a major American talk show with such a gigantic audience.
‘‘As a child, it was a dream to show up on something like that. It’s like those fantasies you have as a kid of walking on a red carpet somewhere. So, yeah. To do my thing on a huge American talk show was quite something. But knowing you have just one shot to get it right in front of millions of people? I don’t know anyone who would enjoy that sort of pressure. I was nervous, but as soon as the song started I forgot where I was and had a lovely time.’’
Years ago, when she was still living in Christchurch, Harding told me she had to get herself into a very strange headspace before she could perform. To generate the sort of intensity she wanted in her songs, she would drink a staggering amount of Red Bull. Like, a couple of litres.
Now she’s routinely performing to huge crowds around the world. Does she still use sugar and caffeine as fuel?
‘‘Actually, until recently, I was still using Red Bull, but I realised I was gonna lose my teeth and get diabetes if I didn’t try things another way. And really, learning how to be this person off-stage is the weirdest part now. On stage, the music carries you, but off-stage, you have to figure out how to be with people.
I don’t want to go to all the parties and meet new people all the time and have to tame their expectations.’’
I imagine people are often mildly afraid of her. It’s probably difficult to separate the private Hannah, who seems more of a sensitive introvert, from the fearsome persona sometimes projected on stage and on record.
I first talked to Harding a year or two after the release of her self-titled debut album in 2014. She was trying on her own form of Southern Gothic for size back then, singing about damage and murder in a fragile trembling voice. There were pills and hunting knives and graves in the woods. Desolation and dread reigned under dark skies. Baudelaire got a mention.
Written during a period when she felt ‘‘old and cursed’’, they were songs of loss, trauma, violence and anxiety, with fear the primary engine driving them forward.
Harding told me at the time that people were surprised at how she could be so goofy and fun when they met her, because they expected some sort of depressive gothy witch.
‘‘Mmm-hmm. Yes! And the funny thing is – I am all of those things. I AM a witch!’’ Really?
‘‘Nah, just kidding.’’
She is, however, working some sort of strange magic these days.
You have to take your enormous phallic hat off to her. Hannah Harding is singular and original, a musical marvel, making impressive headway in a notoriously tough game.
‘‘It’s so funny you said ‘game’, because as personal and emotive as all this is, it still feels like that to me. Not just the music – the whole thing! It’s all a strange game, and your ratio of strength to vulnerability is always changing, so you just have to make things up along the way. But it’s never a lie.’’
That’s where her confidence comes from, she says. She gains power from knowing this new life of hers is an elaborate game but she’s playing hard and her intentions are good.
‘‘I’m just trying to make a source of value and pleasure, really. That’s it. But it would be great if people didn’t come at me for explanations all the time.’’
Yes, or project their own weird prejudices in her direction.
Harding has suffered a backlash in some quarters, mostly from middle-aged rock bores, for daring to deliver her songs in unconventional ways. In May 2017, she appeared live on British TV before an audience of millions on Later… With Jools Holland.
Dressed all in white, Harding delivered a powerhouse rendition of her song Horizon, the emotional turmoil at the core of the song amplified by her posture and facial expressions.
Her furious demeanour freaked out some poor lambs, who took to their keyboards to express at great tedious length their outrage
over her refusal to sit still, be pretty, sing sweetly and smile.
These men got so angry! They seemed to think Harding was taking the Mickey, just as her career was getting some serious international traction, and that her behaviour reflected badly on rest of us back here in her homeland.
‘‘I know! It drove them crazy! But a lot of the time, to deliver your art in the way you want it to be delivered, you have to think about a time when you wanted to scream and you could not, or you wanted to cry and you could not. You draw from those things, and they make you emotional, and when you’re emotional, you do odd things with your face.’’
You also do odd things with your face when you’re making an effort, she says, trying to do something that’s really difficult.
‘‘You should see my stepdad’s face when he’s lifting something. It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen! So you can’t expect, just because I’m a potentially pretty person, that I won’t allow myself to try out emotional states that might make me look ugly to some people. Those people might just have to think of a better reason for not liking what I do.’’