‘The day I drank tea with David Lynch’
Ahead of her sessions at the Word Festival today, Hollie Fullbrook aka Tiny Ruins talks with Vicki Anderson about making music with David Lynch, thanks to Lorde’s intervention.
While David Lynch made her a cup of tea, New Zealand musician Hollie Fullbrook hugged her coat around herself and paused to briefly consider the curious chain of events which had led up to that moment. It began with a tweet. On September 5, 2013, the visual artist, musician and surrealist filmmaker and director of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and Eraserhead tweeted to his more than 3 million followers: ‘‘Dear Twitter Friends, I heard a group I really like called Tiny Ruins. You should check this out.’’
Over that cup of tea in his Los Angeles studio, Fullbrook politely asked Lynch how he had discovered her music.
He replied that he’d seen a Tiny Ruins video on YouTube.
‘‘But the morning before his tweet,’’ says Fullbrook, ‘‘our single from Brightly Painted One went to student radio in Los Angeles. I think he must have heard it and looked up the video of me playing.’’
While they drank tea, Lynch told her that he really liked the video. She finds that funny. ‘‘My dad says it looks like I’ve escaped from jail in that video. I look really a bit rough around the edges,’’ she says. ‘‘I asked David if it was the video where I look like I’ve escaped from jail and he said ‘yes, that’s the one’.’’
Fullbrook was in the middle of a United States tour a year later in 2014 when she got the email that led to the cup of tea. She remembers waking up on ‘‘some Boston musician’s floor’’, having crashed at their house after a gig. While the Boston musician made tofu in the next room, she checked her emails.
In her inbox was a message from Lorde.
‘‘It is a clear memory of reading this bizarre email from Lorde,’’ she says. ‘‘I was dossing down... it was all very bizarre. But Ella took the initiative to call David up and said to him, ‘Would you like to work with Hollie?’ She is incredibly brave and the kind of person who takes the initiative on things that she thinks could be cool.
‘‘I got an email from her saying, ‘Can we make this work?’ I was totally blown away.’’
She had a few days off in New York at the time and so Fullbrook ‘‘took a chance’’ to go to Los Angeles and record a song, Dream Wave, with Lynch who co-wrote the Twin Peaks’ theme and has recently released two solo albums featuring collaborations with Karen O and Lykke Li. He’s also working on the next instalment of the cult TV series.
The song, released earlier this year, was originally intended for the soundtrack that Lorde curated for the Hunger Games.
Lineofbestfit.com described Dream Wave as ‘‘a tranquil, paredback track with vaguely folky melodies and a gradually rising sense of the macabre’’.
I say it’s dreamy and elegantly beautiful but occasionally sounds like a grungy dolphin having sex with a radio transmitter.
It’s the first song from Tiny Ruins’ upcoming third album.
‘‘It was a real experience with the inventor of surreal. It was a really wonderful experience, I feel so grateful for having been given that time with him and that he was that generous to give it,’’ Fullbrook says.
‘‘I think it says a lot about him as a person. That he would pick up someone completely obscure out of nowhere and give them a chance and give them his time ... Not that I feel unworthy or anything, it is just very humbling.’’
After that life-altering cup of tea she remembers stumbling around Los Angeles thinking, ‘‘Holy shit, the world is so connected and so much smaller, that’s how it made me feel’’.
She is ‘‘sitting in a sunbeam’’ on the doorstep of her Auckland flat as she says this.
‘‘It was crazy that he stumbled across us.’’
Fullbrook and I first spoke in 2011.
She was about to embark on her first nationwide tour for her debut album, Some Were Meant for Sea.
She’d bought a new coat for the occasion.
We talked for nearly two hours that day. It was the kind of conversation you remember. Strangers talking about the human condition – life, death, sadness, music, joy.
In the years since, it has become habit that whenever we speak I always ask about her coat.
In 2011 she told me that when she wore it, she wrapped it around herself like a shield. It afforded her some warmth and protection from the darkness that sometimes tries to chip away at her spirit.
Like the year, for example, when she grappled with sadness and often struggled to write her beautiful, often fragile and poetic lyrics. That coat has seen many tours. Travelling sounds exciting but a lot of touring as a musician is banal.
‘‘You’re not free to run loose on the town wherever you go. I always tell people that it’s like the Amazing Race but you’re not on TV and there’s no prize.’’
She lives for the magic that happens when she’s performing.
Like the time she found herself having a ‘‘pinch me’’ moment on a stage in Glasgow playing Four Seasons in One Day with Neil Finn.
Tiny Ruins was conceived in 2009 by songwriter Fullbrook to describe her solo output. Now Tiny Ruins includes Cass Basil on bass, Alex Freer on drums and Tom Healy on electric guitar.
In 2014, Tiny Ruins released Brightly Painted One, their first album with British indie record label Bella Union, home to indie music royalty Beach House, Fleet Foxes and The Flaming Lips.
It won Best Alternative Album at the 2014 NZ Music Awards.
Label founder Simon Raymonde, himself a well known musician from the band Cocteau Twins, was at a Tiny Ruins show in Auckland when he discovered them.
While continuing to be based in New Zealand, Tiny Ruins has toured throughout Australia, Europe and the United States, opening for artists such as Beach House, Joanna Newsom, Fleet Foxes, Father John Misty, The Handsome Family and Calexico, among others.
After a successful collaboration with Bic Runga, most recently, Fullbrook, who moved to New Zealand from Bristol at the age of 10, toured Europe earlier this year, performing songs from Hurtling Through – an EP she recorded with Hamish Kilgour of The Clean.
‘‘That was great. It was pretty full on – a show every night of the tour for three and a half weeks,’’ she says. ‘‘That was quite a ride. We were almost like a comedy ... it reminded me of that movie, The Trip. We get on very well. I’m pleased with that EP, it was quite cathartic to make and I think I learnt a lot doing it.’’
On Saturday August 27, she’s talking about songwriting as part of the WORD Christchurch, Writers and Readers Festival.
She has three gigs today, starting with an early morning songwriting workshop. Then she is on a panel as part of Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd’s book, In Love With These Times, and she is also part of a session titled Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?
When David Lynch interviewed her as part of Sydney’s Vivid Festival in June, Fullbrook told him that she endorsed his own metaphor about the birthplace of ideas: ‘‘the other room, where the whole puzzle already resides’’.
It’s the session that she’s most intrigued by: ‘‘That’s going to be a tricky one, it’s always difficult for writers to talk about that.’’
Just like when she had that cup of tea with Lynch, in Christchurch this weekend she’ll be wearing her new coat. Some might say it’s symbolic. ‘‘I wore the original one until the lining had fallen out, the ends were all ragged,’’ she explains. ‘‘My new one is going strong.’’ Was that cup of tea to her taste? ‘‘You might be surprised to know,’’ she says, and we share a laugh at how strange the ordinary can sometimes seem. ‘‘That David Lynch makes a really nice cup of tea.’’