In this increasingly virtual world, it’s not hard to blame some artists for being guarded. After all, every word you utter is likely to be picked over and commented upon and, the larger your fan base, the greater the likelihood that the dissection will not always be friendly. Nevertheless, there are those artists who, despite the challenges outlined above, place honesty at the core of their work. Arielle is one such artist and she approaches her interviews with grace and candour.
Currently entering into a period of intense activity, Arielle is not only promoting her excellent new album, Analogue Girl In A Digital World, but also a remarkable collaboration with Brian May Guitars. The latter is an especially exciting achievement, as Arielle is the first artist with whom Brian May has ever collaborated on the building of a new guitar line and it’s made all the gratifying by the fact that Arielle is using the opportunity to raise questions about the sustainability of guitar building.
When the video flickers into life, we find Arielle sat, cross legged on the floor of her studio. A thoughtful, open interviewee, Arielle graciously takes the time to answer every question in some detail and the discussion ranges over a number of topics from her ecologically-minded approach to guitar building, to the remarkable trust musicians have to share in order to collaborate effectively.
Lockdown & Communication
I’ve been going through some of the videos you’ve been put out recently on your Facebook site, and you put one out in which you suggested you’ve found the lockdown increasingly hard in recent months and (I hope you don’t take it amiss) but I wanted to ask how you’re doing, if you’re OK and how you’re finding things now that, I guess, you have more to occupy you with the release of the guitar and the new album?
Thanks for asking. I guess it could be controversial that I share so much, but the reason why I share what I go through is because I know that I’m not the only one. It’s so easy, especially during lockdown, to portray that everything is fine and “oh, look how busy I am” and all the good things… and there are really good things. But, as somebody who struggles a lot with depression already (from way before COVID) this has been exceedingly difficult and I was barely posting for seven or eight months from when I was posting almost every day… So, I’m doing better now that I’m more distracted with these things and, I think, just in general getting time to settle from my lifestyle, which was touring all the time to not touring at all. So, it’s been very slow, but getting better. Thank you for asking.
I think it’s a cool thing because there’s an honesty there with your fans, which is nice to see. But also, as you say, a lot of people are experiencing these things at the moment. And, you know, a lot of people are working remotely and it’s easy to forget that the person at the other end of the camera is not necessarily as well and as happy as they might appear to be. So, yeah, it’s cool that people are willing to put something out there and say that it’s OK to share these sorts of feelings.
Absolutely, and I think it’s important as creators. I mean, one of the things that’s most important and integral to me is honesty in my music. So, if I’m not really being honest online, it’s kind of defeating the purpose. And at least from what I’ve learned in working through my own stuff in therapy, it’s important to be honest and open with the fact instead of hiding it. And, more often than not, you get the people who are like “oh, you just want pity”. But that’s not the point, it’s actually to normalise the fact that this is really screwed up and hard and no one really wants to admit that it is. We want to be positive and the intentions are good with not saying it. But I’m just saying that it’s a mess and I think people appreciate it, which is hopeful and nice and I’m glad you brought that up – I think it’s important.
Exactly – one of the most important things in music as a form of communication and art, is the honesty around the emotions, and I think people kind of expect that from the musical side of things, so it makes sense to have that from the communication you make outside of the music.
Absolutely. And it’s hard to do. It’s easier said than done. It doesn’t all come at once of course. And, because we have these platforms, especially when I wasn’t talking for a good while, people were like: “are you still alive?”
And what am I going to do? Make up a lie why I’m not on – it just sounds like more work than it’s worth so, yeah, absolutely. It’s been hard. It’s been hard for everyone.
Sticking with this idea of online communication, you did an interview (I think it was a couple of years back now), where you were talking about how to engage with the wider world and you said that you preferred to be “curious and not critical” and I thought that was such a cool thing at a time when everyone is so polarised (especially here in the UK and the US) and it’s an interesting mindset, but also one that’s quite challenging to maintain.
Yeah. It’s hard. It’s hard especially when people’s health, livelihood, wellbeing, and survival seem threatened by some of these decisions. It can be extremely hard to be curious and not critical regarding people who don’t necessarily agree with what you do. That being said, what I’ve found is that (even here in the US with some of the things going on) I have friends who believe all sorts of different things than I do. But I’ve determined inside that it doesn’t matter if I debate with them. It’s not going to change the state of the world. It’s not going to change their opinion and so I try to focus on things that I can change.
Like, if I’m honest with people, maybe they’ll feel like it’s OK if they’re depressed and say it openly because I said it to like 100,000 people online, many of whom know me personally and might not agree with my decision to do that. I think it’s important to focus on the things that we can change, and the hardest part about that is when other people still don’t agree with the tactic that you’re taking. Because some people might say that that’s the passive approach and that you have to fight for things. But you have to say “you know what? I have to just fight for the things that I control” and that’s very difficult to do, especially when it seems like it puts other people at risk. It’s extremely hard.
The Tonewood Forest
But, in terms of how you approach things, it seems you take the fight one step at a time – for example, planting tonewood trees for the guitars that you sell, which is a big part of the environmental activism in which you’re involved and, again, it’s a great way to make a positive step at a time that everyone else is busy debating the extent to which environmental damage is occurring.
Absolutely, it’s knowing what to fight for.
I still struggle with this a bit. I made the goal that I wanted to plant for the first 24 guitars – I didn’t know what I was doing, other than Googling online how you plant a tree. When I say I’m planting these trees, I’m buying the seeds online and I get the seeds – all of which are quite different, because they’re coming from many different countries- and I’m trying to figure out how to make them sprout and sometimes it can take months! You put the seed in some dirt in the sun and they say to wait for between three months and year… I’ve really gone through a lot to get these trees even just to sprout!
And this whole process… I can’t tell you how many seeds I’ve ruined in trying to figure out how to make this work. I started doing research on these trees and it’s… oh my god! Ebony? Which is what we’re using on these Brian May guitars… they take sixty to eighty years. I’ll croak before it’s even able to be used for a guitar. That’s really disturbing!
And, you know, I’m not some person who’s been in the tree planting business. I’m just a guitar player who’s not OK with the fact that we’re not replenishing these trees. So, I took it upon myself and I have one other friend, and what we’re going to do is we’re starting a non-profit called the Tonewood Forest. And what we’ll be doing is we’ll be buying plots of land, and we’re going to start in the US, different plots in different areas of course.
We can grow quite a bit in Florida. So, we’ve got East Indian Rosewood – we’re really good at replicating India here. We’ve got Koa – Hawaiian Koa as well as Ebony, from Africa. We’re working on getting some Limba trees, from Ghana, and we’ve also got some Swamp Ash (or Carolina Ash), which Fender uses for Strats a lot of times. And that’s local to Florida, so that’s great. So, we can have those. But we’re missing some of the colder Maples and Spruces and things that don’t necessarily grow here. So, we have our plot here and we want to have a whole forest, as well as plots in different music towns and areas where musicians and children alike (and anyone) can go and study these trees.
So, for example, if you ask someone what a Mahogany Tree looks like (we have those too), I sure didn’t! I didn’t even know what the tree my guitar is made of looks like, how disconnected is that? That’s crazy! So, it’s super-important to give back. I don’t know how many guitars are going to be made… a lot! That’s a lot of trees, so I’m just trying to give back and, hopefully, what I can do is to work with some of the other companies and talk about, maybe educate some other companies in how easy it is to give back and take away some of the loss that we’re getting from this mass production of guitars, all around the world and particularly in the US.
There’s a real legacy-building aspect to this and a great opportunity to create a more sustainable vibe around the music scene and that seems to be an important part of what the next generation of musicians should be dealing with…
Absolutely. It’s time now. It’s time, because we were saying, a lot of these trees… my generation won’t see them and yet we’re… almost every single tree we cut down for tonewood is endangered. They’re not necessarily cut down because of the music part of that -there’s also furniture and stuff that’s being made from these trees. But we’re the 1% that is very specific on which trees we need. So, you can’t just pick any.
They start trimming these trees and pruning them incredibly young so that they can have at least an 8ft gap between the trunk and the first branch so, when they’re this big [indicates], they’re pruning them. I’m not doing any of that because I don’t want these trees to even be considered for an instrument at any point. So, hopefully, people like me and these companies can really think about how to sustain the growth of their companies, the quality of their instruments and… what I’d like to start doing is to start looking at more fast-growing woods. People have investigated Bamboo and there are others, I think tropical trees, that grow very quickly in just the matter of a few years. And we could try to replenish and use those instead of the Ebonies and things that take centuries to grow. I haven’t explored super into that yet, but what I’m working on is maybe collaborating… mostly the acoustic guitars are more up to date on that than the electric world so far. So, yeah, I think that any artist and any brand that’s out there right now should really consider their legacy and what they’re doing now and how that’s going to be impacted 30 years from now, otherwise you’re being selfish and there’s no point.
It’s a really good idea but one of the issues throughout the industry is that you get these entrenched mindsets in so many different areas and it’s not necessarily that something won’t work, so much as persuading people to look into the possibility in the first place and I guess that’s very much the case with tonewoods – guitars have been made this way and every little change turns the guitar forums into a melting pot of hatred… so it’s a challenge to overcome tradition in that way.
Yes. Tradition is a dangerous word sometimes. I think that I’m paraphrasing this quote, but tradition is following rules that dead people made. It’s outdated and if people don’t change… and, yeah, people freak out and you get: “oh, the quality’s going to go down and the tone…” [laughs] especially with electric guitars.
And, Yes, 100 percent: the type of wood that you make the guitar out of… well, in my opinion. Some people don’t think it affects the tone, I do – even with an electric guitar, after having ten or eleven versions of my guitar with multiple different types of wood, I can assure you it does change something. However, that being said, I don’t deserve… it’s not my right to keep cutting down these trees regardless of whether they’re endangered or not. There needs to be another way to do things that needs to be normalised. Just because we can’t calibrate what the value of a guitar’s going to be in fifty years, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
And, of course, people are worried the value of a Les Paul is going to go down if it’s made of bamboo versus mahogany versus whatever. It’s not necessarily accurate and I just think we need to look at guitars in a level of respect that they’re not timber, they’re not woods, they’re not lumber – they’re trees. And when you have that disconnect that I had – that I’m totally guilty of until the past year. Only in the past year has it changed. But I think, maybe one of the things that we can do in this tonewood forest, is to have musicians plant one tree and go through what I’ve described to sprout them. One fricking tree and see how difficult it is to replenish what we take. So, hopefully, before tone, we’ll choose the right thing.
Analogue Girl…
I’m conscious that I’ve taken us down this path because it’s such an interesting element of what you’ve been doing, but you’ve got this album coming out and the connection, at least in my mind, is that there’s an element there of challenging perceptions too, because you’ve created an album called “Analogue Girl In A Digital World”. And it was recorded half tape and half digital, which is challenging where we are now with streaming in that desire to make an album at a time when it’s becoming, sadly, an increasingly unfashionable idea.
Yes, unfortunately it is, and I believe there are a few reasons for that – for example, because it’s what the record companies were doing they were putting out singles because it was cheaper for the streaming platforms to just continuously put out content. And I think people… well, I don’t know about this anymore, but in the past, the attention span of someone to go and listen to a whole album was lessening. The third element, of course, is that it’s extremely expensive. It was a lot more expensive in the seventies and the eighties to make an album, but they had big budgets back then. But, to go into a recording studio (you could do it in your house for hardly anything) but to go into a studio is extremely expensive. But to hire all the musicians and do what I did, I mean, just for something like that. I did a crowd-funding campaign for about thirty thousand dollars to do that and I didn’t even finish everything I needed to do with that budget.
So, I understand why people aren’t doing it. It makes sense to me. But, as a pursuit, I think that the art of an album is particularly important, not just for the listener, but also for the completed thought process. You can’t do that with one song typically, even though people latch onto a hit, there’s a whole collection of music that explains and summarises that one song. And you miss a lot about an artist, and I think about music, if you separate that. So, in no way am I letting go of albums. Even though I’ve separated them into singles for promotional purposes, I’m very much a believer that the album is the way to go.
I think it’s a genuine art form and one of the things that always is such a challenge is to create an album that has that flow, and that has a complete thought (as you said) behind it. So, I really admire the process and the shaping of the record that goes on once you’ve got the songs. Trying to get them into the right order, and ensuring you have the right segue lengths in between. It’s an immensely powerful thing when you hear it back for the first time as well.
Yes! And it’s hard to do. I mean, for this album I thought of… the way we recorded it, which was very analogue in the approach – which was all the way through, one take, no click. We just played it as a band, and I was like: “no punches! Absolutely not! We play the whole thing in one take – all of us.” And, if anyone messes up and you’re that person, it’s very embarrassing. But, honestly, the calibre of the players I had, there was hardly any of that at all.
We could have finished all nine songs in a day but, unfortunately (or not unfortunately) for that particular thing I separated the studios, so I wasn’t able to do that. With that approach, and also with the gear that we used… we had everything from RC 44 Microphones (which are, like, from the thirties) to sixties and seventies microphones, guitars, amplifiers… all vintage and those kinds of things. I think, to discover what really makes an album analogue, takes many years to find what that period for me (which is the sixties and seventies) – what makes it that way, what makes it timeless? Alongside having amazing songs, sonically, what are the similarities and how can we create that with the affordability of digital. It’s extremely expensive to hire someone to sit there and splice things and do this and that. Just the tape alone is hundreds of dollars, so how can we do this affordably while using digital as a practical, instead of a crutch? I wish… I wish that people would approach it that way, not altering their performances and altering their voices and their sense of time. And just letting it be imperfect. You think the Beatles’ albums were perfect everywhere? I don’t think so! Nobody was! So, that was part of it. That was the humanity of it. So, it was a fun experiment and something that’s going to be a lifelong one, because there’s a lot more to learn.
It’s strange, because I grew up with the albums from the sixties and seventies, and you hear things now and it almost sounds strange when it’s not bang on the click and altered to sound completely perfect. So, when you do hear something that has that analogue warmth and that feel of musicians gelling together in the studio, I think it stands out for that reason.
That’s interesting. Yeah, I guess you’re right. I haven’t thought about it like that, but it’s kind of funny because to me it stands out when it’s not like that. Oh, they tuned, and I can hear it! But we’ve been so trained, probably for the last twenty years or so of people just tuning and tuning and tuning to where it sounds bad if it’s not perfect. But why do we keep going back to the old stuff? With the music that’s coming out right now, whatever’s on the radio, that’s like the hit… I don’t even know… are we going to go back to that thirty, forty, sixty years from now, are we going to go back to that and say, “oh yeah, those were the days!” I feel like we won’t and, again, back to the legacy thing, that’s something that we should think about. It’s not short-term. Everything that we do has an impact, even if we can’t see it at the time, even if we can’t see it until fifty years later.
Just like me building this guitar. I built it for me. My friend and I built it. I never thought that It would be what it is now, but it’s just a momentary thing that felt really good at the time, with no other intention and I think that it’s so easy to see what’s going on and say (especially if it’s your livelihood) “maybe if I sound like this more people will like me so I can keep doing music” it’s a catch-22. You have, as a musician, in my opinion (very humble opinion) – if you want to have an actual career that stands the test of time, or just allows you to sleep at night, you have to do what feels good to you regardless of if you were going to get famous or make money from it. And that’s kind of a suicide mission, if you live in the world we live in now. But I believe that’s what you have to do in order to have any sort of integrity at all.
I agree. One of the things that always interests me about the role of a producer is that, in many ways, they kind of walk that line between commerce and art (depending on the type of producer they are more on one side or the other), so I guess the best place for an artist is to be able to produce yourself and so be free of that persistent t nudging towards formulas that they know work but aren’t right for you.
Exactly. Exactly. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with trying a formula for a song or two. I mean, one as a songwriter, probably writes hundreds or thousands of songs in their lifetime and that’s OK. But, to see that as the only way would be very limiting and I guess that goes back to the concept of the album, which was having the whole thing be around a certain subject. The whole concept was thought out and it didn’t matter if one song wasn’t a hit because it went along with the other ones. There was relation to it, but I knew a lot of those songs weren’t going to be on radio, but I didn’t want to… I guess, alter my ability to be creative with that mindset.
Totally – Pink Floyd are one of my favourite bands of all time, so this idea of a concept album and building an album around a single idea or thought is like the pinnacle of what you can do with an album. And, as you say, the ability to drop things in that don’t necessarily even have to be a complete thought. If you look at The Wall, you have tracks that are a minute long – you’ll never hear it outside of the album, but it doesn’t matter because it’s part of the flow. And I think there’s a secret knowledge that you get as the listener when you’ve got stuff like that and it’s for you and not the stuff that’s out in the general domain.
Yeah! That’s interesting. That’s interesting that you put it that way and that’s true. The secret knowledge. In the last album I did… this is really funny, I forgot that I did it until recently. I was comparing my last album and the newest one, just for the mix. The newest album was mixed, so it was supposed to sound, more closed and small. But the other one was wider and more expansive in the mix. But I had one track, which I don’t think I did on any of the streaming services. I put a forty-second gap of just silence, right after the title track. And then I put a secret track in there that I didn’t put on any of the titles or anything. It’s just a secret. You don’t know it’s there and I was listening to the vinyl and I was like what the heck is this?” I forgot I did it. I was like “is it broken?” and then the song came on and I was like “oh! I tricked myself!”
That’s it. That’s exactly why I did that, because if you’re not like listening all the way and lost in that experience, then that’s going to throw you. Because I wasn’t listening as a listener, I was just comparing, and it threw me. So, when you have things like that, or things like Pink Floyd, it’s special. I try to put those things in there and I’d like to do a lot more of that. Even bigger albums with fourteen songs instead of mine, so that’s a lot more room to play with.
Formative Years
Looking at your biography, one of the things I noticed (and it’s quite rare) that your biography points out that you started in choirs and moved to the guitar a little a later… it’s normally more hyperbolic and “this guitarist was playing guitar form the age of two!” So, I was wondering if your experience of starting out in a choir and then finding the rock music that meant something to you and taking up the guitar – I wondered if that led to you having the kind of open mindset that you so clearly have regarding genre.
Absolutely. That’s a really good point that you made. I think with the classical training that I have, and also starting as young as I did… it wasn’t my parent that were musicians at all. They put me in because one of the teachers said “hey, she’s got a good voice, you should put her in choir!”
So, alright and there was no pressure around it, it was never like “you’re supposed to do this…” I didn’t have anything other than it was really fun. I really enjoyed it and it wasn’t something that I thought I would do as a career, so with that in mind, I think I didn’t develop this thought that I had to be something.
I also had parents that were born in the forties. They were significantly older than any of my friends’ parents. So, I was listening to old doowop from the fifties and jazz that came out of that period and I was listening to old stuff when everyone else was listening to Backstreet Boys. So, I started out in the forties and listening to music to about… where I stop is right around ’83 for really what inspires me in my production and in my song writing typically. I got to explore, while also being in a choir, and learning just the classical elements of it. Understanding harmony and theory, which was helpful, but without the pressure or this energy of “oh, I’m a rock star” That’s never been a thing. I’m a student of music.
And the other element of the choir that really helped is that you don’t have your own identity. You’re a part of one voice – a bunch of people singing at the same time. I couldn’t figure out how to sing with vibrato until I was like twenty. It took me that long because I never had to do it, so in some ways it was a double-edged sword, because I had to take the long approach to being an artist but, as you said, it allowed me to be open with my musical options because I don’t feel the need to have to be anything.
And you learn a lot of trust, I think, as well, when you sing in a choir, because you’re relying on everyone as much as they’re relying on you. And that’s really cool and important too when you think about the blues environment where you may well record with artist that you’re meeting on the first day when you get to the sessions. It gives you a certain flexibility that doesn’t always seem to be there in the rock world, where you form a band and it’s you against the world.
That’s really interesting. Yeah, you’re right about that. And I always thought, as a young girl, guys did not want to have me in their band. I don’t know. There’s still a level of sexism, as you probably know, in the guitar world. First it became: “that’s not cool – that’s not rock ‘n’ roll!” Then it became a come on to me, like “oh that’s hot, now I need it and I don’t care if they’re any good.”
It should just be an equal playing field, but it’s not yet. So, what I did was, that I just ended up going off on my own because it ended up having bad dynamics of guys that want to sleep with you on the road, or you’re in a bad and there’s just stuff that guys don’t typically have to deal with on that level.
So, yeah, when you speak about having that trust… actually both of the studios and the session players that I picked, the first ones in Nashville, where we recorded to tape. I’d never met any of them before. I trusted the owner of the studio – he brought in all these players and this is what I do. I trust the players enough to where I give them cell phone demoes of me banging around with my acoustic guitar, just so they can get the chord progression and the idea of the structure and I let them come up with their own parts, even though I have all the parts in my head. I’ve learned to let them create the parts and usually they’re better than mine and if they’re not, I’ve got it and I can say “hey, why don’t you try this?” and then we play it all the way through in one take. That’s the calibre of these musicians and the trust that we all have that we’re going to be there when the time is ticking and my wallet is open to however many – 1500 dollars a day to make this stuff happen, with an extremely specific time frame.
And once you have that trust with musicians that are competent and able – that know and don’t rely on the technology, they know their stuff. You can do amazing stuff that allows the music to have an organised feel, but at the same time, very wild and on the edge. Because none of those takes were ever the same. We played the song through five times, and we’d pick our favourite take all the way through. Like that’s the one. And they’re all different and magical, and I think a lot of people don’t have that trust any more, but that’s what makes a lot of the old stuff really fun. You write the song and then “OK go! Record it!” It’s pretty cool.
Yeah! I guess that’s where you find those happy accidents that become part of the recording – the “I got blisters on my fingers!” moment that kind of screams out of the record and makes you go “yeah! That was an awesome session!”
Exactly. Exactly. There was nothing like it. I could easily record whatever – like two or three albums a year, just doing it myself, but there’s no point to me right now, with where I’m at. If I miss the experience of that – of a bunch of people working together and having fun and that spur of the moment thing that challenges everyone as musicians and players to be the best that we can be in that moment – in a way we’re not typically challenged – “oh, punch that in again?” NO! You’re going, just learn the song and go… that’s pretty special.
…and It’s something I think you find more in the blues or jazz world. I think if you did it in the rock world – dropped a musician in the studio with some strangers and said “right, record that!” you’d be met with horror!
Yes! It takes practice. It takes… I’ve been working up to this for years, starting with just doing it for other people – being the session player who had to everything in one take. Then, the last album I did, I had the drums and bass recorded at the same time while I recorded some rhythm. Then, this time, I did my guitars and vocals at the same time with the band, live. So, I’ve been working up to it very slowly and then, also, with some of the acoustic stuff, playing it all the way through without stopping both the guitar – the acoustic guitar – and my voice. So, it’s a muscle that needs to be practiced over, I think, many years to get to that point. But it’s really cool.
Final question…
I’m aware I’ve taken up a lot of your evening, and thank you so much for all of this, so my final question is with the difficulties of the pandemic – you’re releasing an album, do you have any thoughts about how you’re going to promote it to the fans?
It’s a good question. What I’m trying to do is that I’ve got quite a bit of behind-the-scenes footage that I’m going to share and what I’d like to do is really expand on the things I’ve learned – a lot of what we’ve talked about today in approaches to each and everything I did from the album cover. The text, “analogue girl”, I actually wrote in tape. I cut tape and spliced it and wrote “analogue girl” and scanned it and sent it to the graphic designer because each element has something incredibly special in it. So, I think if I break apart the album enough, because it is worthy of it, this is how I did it anyway, and really allow people in on what it was like and also, I believe, how it’s going to influence the next stuff that I do, it should at least keep it current enough that, by the time touring happens, I’ll be ready to tour that one and be like “alright, I have another album out now!” You know, simultaneously to talking about this one, I am still trying to have a follow up, so yeah – talking about that… gear. Everyone loves a good gear story, including me. So, you know, I’m going to do my best with what I can and it’s interviews like this – you asked some great questions that make people want to read those, so thank you for doing obviously extensive homework!
It was an absolute pleasure and thank you so much for this time. I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you.
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