Julia Holter

On the release of her recent single The Laugh Is in the Eyes, we caught up with Julia Holter to discuss the links between the new song and Something in the Room She Moves, one of our favorite records of the past year. In The Laugh Is in the Eyes, the singer-songwriter’s voice dances among floral flutes, bursts of color and delicate soundscapes and choreographs a stunning art-pop composition. As in the album, physical, bodily sensations are enhanced in this piece with synesthetic plays giving scents to the words, colors to the music, sounds to the smells. Julia Holter’s new creations are a visionary experience cutting across what surrounds us by showing a continuum in cosmic matter and constant fluid transformations of human and nonhuman bodies. It sounds a little bit like Ovid, a little bit like Epicurus and a little bit like posthuman philosophy, but her music is also deeply anchored in the bodily and personal experiences lived by Holter during the composition time of the songs.

Hello Julia! How are you? Congratulations on your last album! It was one of our favorites this year. I also loved the new single that you recently released, and I think we could start this interview by talking about it. The Laugh Is in the Eyes seems to me a metaphorical celebration of the human imagination and its transformative power. Can you relate to that?

Thank you so much for the support! I would say yes that sense you get from The Laugh Is in the Eyes feels similar to me. A lot of my record Something in the Room She Moves was interested in the shifts in feeling amid transformation of states - in the most basic sense, an example is: we are inside and feeling stuck, we go outside and smell the flowers - evoking a change experience like that.

The title of the new single is extrapolated from the lyrics of the song Spinning (which is stunning btw). Why and how are these two songs connected?

I wrote The Laugh Is in the Eyes in the past few months, and it grew out of a Logic project file I had made while working on SITRSM. So it’s not actually an old song, it is entirely new, but it came out of that project file, and it felt akin to the record. And the interest in sensation and color feels related to me.

In Spinning after momentary blindness (“Some cologne leaving me blind / The laugh is in the eyes / The joke is mine”), a multi-sensory, synesthetic vision manifests itself. Could the new track be the result of that flamboyant nocturnal epiphany? The Laugh Is in the Eyes has a kind of nocturnal, mysterious feeling too.

Yes, I think it has all of that, but maybe also a little day too. I feel like it has a kind of combination of day and night; where Sun Girl has this feeling of a kind of desire to run away from the sun and Evening Mood and Spinning dwell in the mysterious night, this one finds mystery in brightness and color and day.

I was very intrigued by the fact that Something in the Room She Moves begins with a mantra that serves as an invocation to the sun. It reminded me a lot of a common literary topos in classical but also medieval poetry (for us Italians Dante’s Paradiso), that of the invocation to the muses and Apollo (god of the sun, but also god of music and poetry). Sun Girl seems to play ironically with this lyrical tradition. In this context, I would argue that your newest work could be read as a modern reinvention of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, since bodily transformation and love are main themes in your songs as well. Was this intentional in some ways?

I wasn’t thinking about any literary traditions but maybe you are onto something here haha. We definitely are always looking to natural world sources for poetic inspiration, it’s the way to try to explore a feeling and share with other people, because we all understand what the sun is, we need it, we feel warmed and calmed by it, we feel overwhelmed by its intensity, etc. Same with the ocean, or trees etc.

In Materia you sing: “Can you fool a mystery sea? / On the rough womb / Summer bathing on a stretch of / Memory mistaken for what’s here right now”. It seems like every possible material (re)birth and transformation comes through this watery womb. Why does water play such a central role in the sequence of bodily metamorphoses throughout the album?

I don’t know, I was channeling this mystery, this darkness, (like in the Helene Cixous text “Writing Blind” that I reference when talking about “Spinning”) and then I took it to this underwaterness. While writing these songs, I was either pregnant or had had a baby recently, and there is a lot of the physical body in that experience, and a lot of the body is water. So that is probably where it was coming from, but it was not a deliberate choice to focus on water – it just happened.

What inspired the visual aspects for this album? The video that you made for Spinning seems to me very much connected to your friend’s painting which you chose as the album cover.

Yes the Giraffe sisters who made the “Spinning” video pulled the color inspiration for the video from Christina Quarles’ painting (Wrestlin’), which is on the cover of the record. But coincidentally, the parachute they thought up and found matched pretty well with the painting. That was crazy. In general, I chose Quarles’ painting for this record, because I love the complexity of movement of the body in that painting, it just felt right.

Are you already working on something new? Could you reveal anything about it?

Yes, but I never can really explain anything I’m working on while I’m working on it. Still figuring out what it is!