Mirah - Miracles in Lo-Fi

The daughter of artists, with a childhood as a enfant prodige that included a brief stint on the TV show "Double Dare Nickelodeon Game Show", openly lesbian, Jewish, politically left-leaning, pacifist and a lover of nature, reluctant to open up to the public or talk about herself, keeping her private life exactly where it belongs, in a little house in Portland, Oregon, where she has lived for some years with her girlfriend amid gardening and relaxation. This is Mirah "Yom Tov" Zeitlyn (in Hebrew, Yom Tov means "good day"), a thoroughly singular artist, removed from trends and much else besides, and evidently precisely for that reason able to carve out a small space for herself in the thriving world of female singer-songwriters. Bringing her own precarious ideas of musical syntax to the table, she has dusted off the folk of Liz Phair, the mature, dark songwriting of Lisa Germano, and most recently the musings poised between indie and pop of peers like Cat Power.

To all this Mirah has added generous doses of an artistic personality that is out of the ordinary; she has gathered ideas from painting, the avant-garde, books and cinema, synthesizing it all as best she could, shaping a musical approach that has let her wander freely between musical projects very different from one another, yet all very much in keeping with the artist that is Mirah.

Born in Bala Cynwyd, a suburb of Philadelphia, in 1974, Mirah is the youngest of three children. Raised by parents connected in various ways to the art world and with an older sister (who later became a fairly successful actress), she found herself almost inevitably drawn to the stage, part actress and part singer, with ideas still not fully formed but with a strong urge to express them. Her stint on TV has already been mentioned; as for her family life, she tells us something herself: "I grew up in a hippie macrobiotic community made up mostly of Jews".

So, all the makings of a thoroughly particular existence, lived at the extremes without half measures, are already there. Then it happens that if you live in the United States and you're 18, a whole world opens up before you. Choosing a university is the gateway into society, a form of emancipation, the start of a fun and precarious life away from your parents, away from home. Mirah chooses the state of Washington and enrolls at Evergreen State College (already attended by the likes of Calvin Johnson and Matt Groening), renowned for its courses in the visual arts. And it's precisely during this period that the desire to devote herself entirely to art — whatever that might mean — begins to take shape in her.

She herself tells us about her first encounter with songwriting: "I was taking a writing class. The teacher chose me to write the lyrics for a song that would later serve as the soundtrack for the end-of-year theatre production." To cut a long story short, the first song she ever wrote was a class assignment.

From there, she came a long way: a gap year spent in Norway studying the distinctive wooden cabin structures found scattered throughout Scandinavian forests, along with her first attempts at making music. Nothing much to begin with — a jazz band that played in the city's smoky dive bars and at weddings, work that paid just enough to eat twice a day.

It was on those very out-of-the-way stages that Mirah realized she was on the right path, that art and architecture could wait for now, that music was her destiny. She left the little jazz combo behind and threw herself into an all-female venture that, in the Nineties, brushed up against the riot grrrl phenomenon: the band was called The Drivers, and truth be told they didn't meet with much success, but it allowed Mirah to start making a name for herself — and in a small town like Olympia, with the highest concentration of musicians earning a living from their craft, that was already an important first step into the world of dreams.

The first people to believe in her were the folks at YoYo Recordings, with whom she would later release a covers album: a handful of EPs that met with little success, and not much else. Not much, perhaps, but significant all the same, considering that it was partly thanks to those extended plays that Phil Elvrum took notice of the young outsider singer-songwriter.

A few days later, Mirah found herself in Phil Elvrum's studio recording the vocal parts for Don't Wake Me Up. Thus began, with the one-man band behind Microphones, a friendship and artistic partnership that continues to this day. Phil Elvrum would go on to produce her albums, and she in turn would sing on demand on Phil Elvrum's records. But that's another story — one already told.

Our story instead begins in 2000, when You Think It's Like This But Really It's Like This (K Records, 2000) was released. The album and its artist's name arrived on the shelves more or less in anonymity, as just another release among many: an American singer-songwriter devoted to lo-fi songcraft, produced and distributed by the usual K Records, which by then had already turned this kind of thing into a trademark.

Then Mirah's name became less anonymous, Microphones got dragged into the conversation, and things started to make sense. And the sense of it all was carving out something distinctive from the stereotyped army of millions of female singer-songwriters with a guitar slung over their shoulder. And if Phil Elvrum was the vehicle for Mirah, so much the better, really. It made it easier to reach the right audience, without running into the countless ifs and buts of a debut shrouded in question marks: Mirah already had an audience of her own, without having said a word, without having breathed a note — her collaborations, the K Records stamp and Elvrum's patronage were enough. Curiosity was running high.

The record was recorded on a four-track with vintage gear and turns out to be one of the most interesting and radiant examples of lo-fi beauty. Her time within the stable of Phil Elvrum, who here helps his protégée from the production booth, inevitably leaves its mark. Thus a strongly characterized voice (Liz Phair, Cat Power, Lisa Germano), a vivid compositional imagination and an ear for interlocking melody all come together here in their best synthesis, spread across 16 songs for a total of three quarters of an hour of music.

It opens with "Million Miles", a sketch of bare-bones songwriting, voice and ukulele, bucolic themes — "the city is a million miles away" sings Mirah. But it's with the following "Sweepstakes Prize" that the American songwriter reveals the full extent of her potential, crafting one of the finest episodes in her entire songbook, past and future: aware of her own vocal ability, Mirah has fun playing with the stresses of words, redrawing a wholly idiosyncratic metre, her voice accompanying a captivating musical line expressed now through acoustic instrumentation, now through an electric guitar riff. It's also the longest track on the record at 5 minutes, and the first, far from timid, attempt to edge toward pop music.

As the album continues, there's no shortage of episodes more firmly rooted in folk and the American tradition, such as the hymn-like "La Familia", or the folk ballad "Engine Heart", which reinterprets an old traditional for voice and ukulele, adding a drumbeat in the background. Alongside these are more rock-leaning influences: echoes of Calvin Johnson's minimalism, the Cat Power-style songwriting of "This Dance", the fingerpicking and acoustic sonic backdrop of Elliott Smith on "100 Knives". And finally, one can't forget Microphones, above all in the way the melody is hidden beneath a layer, at times unsettling, of drumbeats and assorted synth textures (the closing sections of "Murphy Bed" or "Water and Sleep").

The album closes with the jazzy pop of "Words Cannot Describe", a complete outlier.

At the end of the day, with You Think It's Like This But Really It's Like This, Mirah delivers a splendid debut and a masterpiece of lo-fi beauty.

The first test was passed. Positive reviews from the specialist press, pats on the back from fellow musicians who shared — and still share — the nomadic artist's life, and a string of shows that took her around the country. But Mirah is a forge in full swing, and it's already time for a new album.

With Advisory Committee (K Records, 2001), Mirah takes considerable steps forward: whereas You Think It's Like This But Really It's Like This was a sketch of songs, thrown together as best they could be, stripped of any adornment and presented with the spontaneity of a proposition built around guitar and voice with the occasional synthetic touch, on Advisory Committee Mirah sounds far more in command of the tools at her disposal, plays more freely with synthesizer and computer, leans harder into overdubs, and fills the gaps of an otherwise acoustic songwriting approach with near-dark-tinged musings. But at its core, naturally, the sincerity of her musical approach remains intact, in keeping with her debut album and the musical résumé that preceded it.

The opening track left more than a few people puzzled: with its vocal showmanship, full of ups and downs, roller-coaster shifts in tone and fairy-tale orchestrations, Mirah seemed to turn more elegiac, showing up in her Sunday best for the second date with her audience. There's something of Bjork in "Cold Cold Water", something of Kate Bush: it's effectively a mammoth piece of chamber pop, ethereal and studied, a U-turn off the straight road that seemed to be leading Mirah toward a more mature take on lo-fi songwriting. "Cold Cold Water" seemed to suddenly shuffle the deck, leaving behind Cat Power and Liz Phair to dust off the more majestic voices of female pop instead.

Put to the test of actual listening, it turns out to have been just a mirage: already with "Mt. St. Helens" we're back to the familiar informality of the debut album, and the Sunday best is traded in for far more comfortable jeans. The track, though it stretches out to an unusual four minutes, brings the songwriter back on track, swapping the melodic, orchestral pop for a more genuine acoustic guitar, over which a wall of sound and overdubs is built in the liveliest Microphones tradition. The same goes for "Recommendation", which adds a murky use of synthesizers.

The mood then grows heavier, at times downright dark: just listen to "Body Below" to feel the unease conveyed by droning synthetic experiments mixed with electric guitar fuzz. And it's precisely on Advisory Committee that Mirah's interest in sound itself first comes into view: here it may still amount to naive, time-killing experiments (the birdsong in "The Sun"), but in future projects field recordings will become central to the American songwriter's creative focus. Looking closely, nothing here is really new — it's simply the most classic kind of homecoming, back to the fold that raised her: Phil Elvrum's.

Listening to the rest of the record, what stands out is the variety — there's room for almost everything: the brass-band flavor of "Light The Train", the more tried-and-tested indie-pop of "Apples in Trees", and the melancholy round dance of "Special Death". By the end, you're left with the sense of a varied record, less focused and distinctive than the first, but representative of Mirah's artistic curiosity.

Advisory Committee is the album that definitively cements Mirah's name, by now a sure thing in the indie world: with the maturity she'd gained, she managed to carve out her own space in the fragmented musical landscape, striking listeners with a brand of songwriting that stood apart from what was usually heard around. But Mirah is no ordinary person, and right after the labors of her second album — proud of the result and now aware of her own potential — she launches into a series of projects that will grow ever more numerous, feeding her strong desire to experiment, meet people, and create spontaneous projects with them.

The first of these came about almost by chance: Mirah was talking with Pat Maley of YoYo Recordings about the possibility of a project for the independent label. Pat Maley played her a very particular Seattle outfit, Black Cat Orchestra. Mirah couldn't help but love that kind of music; she sought them out, congratulated them, and asked them to take part in bringing an idea she had in mind to life.

The result is To All We Stretch the Open Arm (YoYo Recordings, 2004). The album was recorded in early 2003, when America was waiting to be told what it already knew: the coming war against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. The peace movements didn't wait for that ill-fated spring to begin mobilizing, and neither did Mirah, who, with the collaboration of Black Cat Orchestra, released a compilation of covers of protest songs. The spirit of "No War – No Bush" was making its way into the songwriter's thinking too, as she would go on to become part of that pacifist left that presented itself to the world as the alternative to Bush's America. On the record, songs by Dylan ("Dear Landlord"), Cohen ("Story of Isaac") and Kurt Weill ("What Keeps Mankind Alive?") are rearranged and reinterpreted. There's also room for a gorgeous version of "The Light" – along with "The Monument", the only one of her own songs included – reworked here in an acoustic Balkan key; but what especially intrigues us Italians is her rendition of two popular songs from our own pacifist tradition ("Per i morti di Reggio Emilia" and "Bella ciao").

On the whole, and despite understandable reservations about such off-the-cuff projects, the album doesn't skimp on artistic quality and is a pleasure to listen to: Black Cat Orchestra's near-gypsy music flirts easily with Mirah's voice, and the broad range of folk music gathered here gives everyone something to enjoy. The experiment works, and it marks the start of a friendship and of future collaborations.

Also that same year came Songs From The Black Mountain Music Project (K Records, 2003). Again, this isn't a new album of original material, but the second of the side projects Mirah had been planning and eventually carried out. The story is simple: Mirah and Ginger Brooks Takahashi (graphic designer and songwriter) are friends, and they decided to spend some vacation time in a remote house in the small town of Black Mountain, North Carolina. They brought along a handful of instruments, including banjo and cello, along with everything needed to get their ideas down on tape. The experiment lasted 30 days, and the musical result of that getaway is this record, which has a touch of the pretentious about it, yet still manages to draw you in and move you.

Of the 18 tracks that make up the album, only half can really be considered actual songs; the rest are instrumental interludes plucked from nature, like birdsong, the rustle of insects, the distant sound of wet asphalt, or off-the-cuff instrumental noodling. Among the tracks, the gypsy-tinged "The Party" is perhaps the creative high point for the two songwriters; on "Pure" Mirah tries her hand at a natural dream-pop with rural, western-tinged openness, while "You Were Crying For Love" and "While We Have The Sun" are the episodes closest to Mirah's own songbook.

"Oh! September" (September being, fittingly, the very month in which this experience took place) wraps everything up in the most traditional homespun indie-pop, full of handclapping, flawless vocal melody, and steady, rhythmic music. The project, certainly existential and musical in nature, also has a humanitarian and charitable side: all proceeds from the album were in fact donated to two organizations: Rock 'n' Roll Camp For Girls in Portland and Pentridge Children's Garden in Philadelphia.

After this experimental detour into the North Carolina woods, Mirah returned in 2004 with what is, to all intents and purposes, her best-known and best-selling album: C'mon Miracle (K Records, 2004).

Before getting into it, it's worth taking a step back to describe how the previous albums were composed: up to this point, writing and recording times had been long and drawn out, due to Phil Elvrum's commitments. Things worked more or less like this: the two of them both lived in Olympia, so chances to get together came more easily — a phone call, then a meeting in some huge room, where Mirah would record whatever she wanted, invite friends over, have them record too, capture sounds, and then play it all for Phil. Phil would mull it over, revisit the recordings, add bits here, take bits away there, and before long the thing would be finished and ready to go. This happened now and then, a couple of times a month, whenever they were both in town, which is why the recordings dragged on for so long. That, in essence, is how the first albums came together.

As mentioned, with C'mon Miracle the recording sessions were more intense, and the time devoted to it wasn't the usual weekend snatch here and there: Mirah and Phil gave each other more of themselves, and the writing process wrapped up within three months.

Turning to the album itself, it's worth noting that just the year before, the Cat Power phenomenon had exploded — already with some excellent albums under her belt — which had inevitably made the ground even more fertile for the new wave of female songwriting that Mirah is part of.

With C'mon Miracle Mirah hones her songwriting craft: every note feels considered, little or nothing is out of place, and the listen is made effortless not only by her vocal grace but also by the musical variety packed into the record. It moves from pop songwriting (with lyrics that stay lucid even when tackling a drama like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) to the delicacy typical of Elliott Smith ("Don't Die In Me"), from a more traditional dream-pop ("The Light") to a punchier, punkier pop ("Jerusalem", which sounds like it could be sung by Gwen Stefani). "The Dogs Of B.A." has the flavor of Latin American music, while "We're Both Sorry" sits somewhere between the fairy tales of Tori Amos and those of Bjork.

Two tracks on C'mon Miracle were recorded in Argentina with her friend Bryce Panic (a fellow collaborator on all of Mirah's releases), who had just moved to Buenos Aires: during a short vacation between Brazil and Argentina, Mirah let herself be influenced by all the samba she heard on the radio and in the streets, jotted down a few ideas, and once she got to Bryce's place, recorded the two songs.

C'mon Miracle is undoubtedly a little gem waiting to be discovered, the perfect synthesis of Mirah's pop songwriting instincts and Phil Elvrum's sonic detours: it's the most mature, fully-realized record in Mirah's entire discography, capable here of expressing herself at her best like never before, shedding in some ways her amateurish soliloquies in favor of a more attentive overall vision of sound and music.

In 2006, while waiting for the new album, Mirah released Joyride Remixes (K Records, 2006), a double album collecting her own reworkings and remixes of songs from her three albums. Contributors to the project include The Blow, Mount Eerie (aka Phil Elvrum), YACHT and Anna Oxygen. Credit must be given to this remix album for offering a whole new perspective on Mirah's songs, managing to uproot them from amateur folk and launch them into not-too-timid dancefloor episodes. The track that undergoes the best treatment is certainly "La Familia", which is granted a double version. YACHT also delivers a successful piece of work, reworking "Jerusalem" in their own way, somewhere between house and Xiu Xiu, as does Phil Elvrum, who throws himself into a reinterpretation, between tribal drumming and digital disorientation, of one of the songs from Mirah's catalog perhaps closest to the Microphones (the splendid "Don't Die In Me").

Now three years on from her last album of new material, Mirah continues to follow an artistic path all her own, far from record-industry logic, rejecting the standard "album and tour" formula in favor of increasingly offbeat artistic experiences. So Share This Place: Stories and Observations (K Records, 2007) isn't really a proper album, but yet another collaborative detour that brings her back into the arms of the Black Cat Orchestra. For this project Mirah drew inspiration from the work of entomologist Jean Henri Fabre, author of several scientific books notable for being written from the insects' point of view. A world seen through the eyes of insects, in other words, already celebrated years earlier by the film "Microcosmos". And so the album too unfolds as a cycle of songs about the life of insects and the inevitable comparison with human existence.

Then, for the music, there's Spectratone International, the name behind which the Black Cat Orchestra operate, a group long devoted to synthesizing worldbeat music with a particular interest in the Middle East, Latin America and Europe: here, out of necessity, that takes shape through a preferred use of accordion, strummed acoustic guitar and a flute from Middle Eastern tradition.

The instruments are plucked, they move and stop, they lash out and then scurry away, never settling into a linear progression; ultimately they're onomatopoeic, or at least they strive to be, musically depicting the sounds of insect life and its movements.

The whole thing is then filtered through the skilled hands of Steve Fisk, who crafts a full, cohesive ensemble sound, while also adding an inevitable artificiality that clashes with Mirah's discography and her way of being.

Getting into specifics: "Gestation Of Sacred Beetle" certainly pleases, blending Mirah's folk songwriting with a small Eastern-tinged orchestra; "Following The Sun" is, among all of them, the one that leans hardest into a fairy-tale atmosphere à la Kate Bush; the multi-part Bjork-like suite "Song Of Psyche"; and the ballad "Love Song Of The Fly". Beyond that, Mirah repeats herself a bit too much, the compositional standard is too flat, and quality is the first casualty of a project that's simply too big.

Indeed, because Share This Place is part of a much more elaborate project, which includes a series of stop-motion films viewable on the disc's final CD-ROM track – the film is by stop-motion artist Britta Johnson. Now, the risk with projects like this is that the music becomes just one of many communicative vehicles, not even the most important one, and therefore hard to classify, for our purposes, within an artist's discography. Another risk is that the idea matters more than the result, with the inevitable sacrifice of musical quality in favor of a pure, primary expressive urge. And Share This Place does suffer from putting expression ahead of music, the idea/project ahead of the result. So take it for what it is: a collaborative detour.

In 2009 Mirah returned with (a)spera, a particularly deliberate work, almost representing the definitive maturity of the songwriter who had broken through five years earlier with C'mon Miracle. The spread the American songwriter lays on the table is especially rich: there are sips of fingerpicked melodies ("Shells"), banjo incursions, hints of vocal jazz ("Gone Are The Days") and ethnic flourishes ("Country of the Future"). Opening it all is a striking "Generosity", with appealing violin touches and a sincere melody, delivering one of the album's best moments. A record that makes clear, if it wasn't already, just how strong Mirah's love is for music, its craft, its instruments and the musical staff itself: among the many instruments listed in the credits (cello, trumpet, flute and tuba) we also find the magnificence of the kora (the highly regarded 21-string African instrument already well known to anyone familiar with the music of Mali).

The new collaboration, this time with Thao Nguyen (frontwoman of Get Down Stay Down), produced Thao & Mirah, a handful of songs that – at least in the first half – are creatively arranged by Merrill Garbus aka Tune-Yards to deliver a duet-merger between the two artists. Tracks like the electro-ethnic hip-hop of "Eleven", the dub-soul with Puerto Rican horns of "Rubies And Rocks", the serenade worthy of Vashti Bunyan with its rhythm of breath, mouth, strings and trotting bass drum on "Little Cup", and the folkish uptempo of Spanish trumpets and marching drums on "Folks", close to the quasi-symphonic experiments of Sufjan Stevens, are threads that intertwine and culminate in results that are almost fireworks-like.

Contributions by Michele Saran ("Thao & Mirah")

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