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.
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