Shoegaze Vocalist Tamaryn Embraces Creative Liberties and Powerful Collaborations

Born in New Zealand and transplanted to the United States at the age of seven, Tamaryn has fostered a fairly nomadic lifestyle, calling California, New York City, Las Vegas, Washington, and Mexico all her home at various points in her life. Over the past five years, Tamaryn has cultivated a sound for herself that draws heavily from 4AD’s dreamy roster of classic shoegaze, while simultaneously creating her own world of texturally intricate, ethereal pop. On her latest release, "Cranekiss," Tamaryn teams up with new studio collaborators to produce her biggest, most beautiful record yet.

Tamaryn Q&A

There are strong traces of shoegaze in your music but you've used those roots and built on them, creating a more contemporary sound. What drew you to those specific sounds, and what about them has made them stay with you as an artist?

Tamaryn: What I'm trying to do is to have a synthesis of a lot of different things that I've loved throughout my life, musically, to create something potentially new or original. Finding those particular bands, the Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, all bands I definitely love, I think that how that sound -- the Kevin Shields-y guitar, bendy, reverb that makes it sound shoegazey from my first two albums -- how that sound entered the music was just that, that was what we had. I had these ideas for a certain creative universe, lyrical place, and archetype I wanted to inhabit as a performer, and Rex John Shelverton, who was my bandmate at the time, was really good at that. So, it was really natural for him, and he was like, "Well you like this kind of bass and guitar sound, let's build off that. Let's infuse other styles." I think that I will always have a little bit of that lush textural element in my music because I think it's the kind of music that invites people in to be immersed in the sound. When you're casting the spell of a song, you want to have signifiers sonically that people feel that they can enter into. If there's a little bit of nostalgia I don't mind because I think it triggers a place in people's minds where they can feel comfortable, that they trust, and then they can explore the rest of the artistic universe that you've created. 

Talk about the process of producing "Cranekiss" and your evolution and growth as an artist from your first two albums, "The Waves" and "Tender New Signs," to now.

T: I think that "Cranekiss" was my bid at trying to set a precedent from now on that whatever I am inspired to do creatively, I can. Nothing is off limits. I had set a lot of rules and parameters with the first two albums, which I think are great, I love those albums. I'm really proud of them. But I wanted to sort of say, without changing to a new band name or reinventing in that way, ok well, why not just say that within using my name, I can kind of do whatever I want now. It definitely is a very different kind of process. I went into the studio with Jorge Elbrecht of Violens and Lansing-Dreiden, who I'm a huge fan of, so it was a huge honor to work with him, and my friend Shaun Durkan, who plays with a band called Weekend. He came in and also co-wrote with us. It was all new people. It was also in a studio. My other two albums, Rex and I recorded ourselves in a practice space. So, this is the first time that I had done a true studio album. It was a really pleasurable, free, easy experience that I've never experienced before, so that was really nice.

You’ve collaborated with Jorge Elbrecht previously with the Turning Shrines cover "1/4 Circle Black." How did your collaboration with Jorge Elbrecht come to be? How was that process of working together?

T: I had been wanting to work with him for years, then his schedule got busy. But before that, we were like, "Let's do one song together and see how it works." I could pick my favorite musician and songwriter in the world, and go in the studio with them, and fail, and not be able to do anything. It's about creating a musical language between people, and that's not necessarily a given. You have to see if it's gonna go down. So, it was cool working with him on "1/4 Circle Black." I got a really good sense that we would work well together. Then, a long time passed in between that. It was a year until we started working on demos for this album. But yeah, I'm a huge fan of his. I think he's brilliant. I think he's an unsung hero for sure.

A lot of phenomenal technical work went into the album “Cranekiss”. For some artists, producing can be really enjoyable, and for others it can be very tedious work. Is producing something you enjoy?

T: That's what was so brilliant to me about this album. Jorge has a very particular self-taught style that has a lot of his own personal flair to it that I have been a fan of for years, so I trusted him a hundred percent. But what makes this record different than something he would do on his own was bringing myself and Shaun into the picture. Shaun is a very emotional, very textural player. His pedals and combinations of sounds are incredibly unique to him. So, when I put the two of them together, it worked beautifully. Shaun and I maybe had a demo from years prior that was really loose and had a lot of potential, but was in no way a song. We could bring Jorge into it, and he could bring his songwriter brain, and help us craft it into something that was beyond what I had even hoped for. There are definitely songs on the record that are the kind of songs that I always wished I could have made. So, it feels great to have accomplished that. It's definitely thanks to a group effort.

What generally comes first to you when you start the writing process?

T: I think what happens is that I come up with a general world and mood and style in my mind of where I'm trying to go with it. Then, I communicate that to whoever I'm writing with through mixes and imparting the muse to people by sharing things with them, and getting in a personal friendship based around mutual things that we like. You kind of feed on all of the things that you've been moved by and you love and then take elements of that as a starting place. I think everyone involved in these albums, we've all had a lot of experience creating our own personal styles, so we're our own sort of best reference points as well. I've never just made a song that sounds like Nine Inch Nails or My Bloody Valentine. It's much more like, let's do something in this sort of tempo, let's start with a guitar, let's let it have a more complex arrangement like something Jorge would do, or have a vocal like one of my previous records. The lyrics always come last. I like to set up at least the chord progressions. Not necessarily the actual arrangement of the song, but I like to have something I'll drive in my car with, blast it and sing along. I like to try to be immersed in the sound and have the lyrics come from some sort of more divining place. Like a magical more intuitive thing versus forcing a set of words or a piece of poetry that I had into a song. I want it to be more fluid and feel like it's born of the song.

Do you think your lyrics have become more personal as you've grown as an artist?

T: I think that the lyrics have always been personal, but I think that I've changed. Some of the earlier songs that we made go back as early as 2004, so I was pretty young. I don't know how much I've matured at this point, but I definitely have a different outlook on life. It becomes a therapy process, where you start to think about the differences between your songs. In my previous albums, a lot of the songs are about letting go and forgiving people, and upon reflection, maybe making myself out to be a bit of a victim, and

What's your favorite aspect about making an album?

T: I'm just a creative person, and I'm happiest in life when I'm being creative. I think that making an album comes with all these other things that aren't necessarily the reason why you want to make an album, like trying to promote it, trying to sell something or trying to be part of a scene. All those things make me really uncomfortable, and I'm not very good at it. But I am happiest and I feel the most alive and content when I'm in a state of creativity. And I'm a collaborator. I don't do everything alone, so it feels very lucky and magical when the right set of collaborators come together with me and there's that moment of people getting what it is I want to happen, and also getting something from it that they don't get on their own. There's a magical factor.

The music video for the song “Cranekiss” is very much a throwback to 90s videos stylistically. How did you create the concept for the video?

Tamaryn: I think that most of my videos have a bit of that sort of editing. I think when I first started getting videos commissioned for the songs, I was a big fan of people like Angus Cameron, 90s directors, people that did videos for Primal Scream, Swervedriver, and My Bloody Valentine. That's what I really wanted. On this album, I wanted it to be less so, but I feel like that song was the one song that still warranted it.

The person who directed that music video was Brian DeGraw from Gang Gang Dance. He offered to make the video, I didn't really have much input in it other than I had sent him all the artwork that Shaun and I had made for the album. There's a lot of mirrors and abstraction. I'm really inspired by people like Nick Knight, people who play with glossy, high-end photography and abstraction.

In the music world, you get a lot of lo-fi psychedelic videos, or big budget, cinematic films. I like more of the fashion film world, where it's less about being a movie and a narrative, and it's not about being burnt up VHS tapes. It's somewhere in between, where it is the way it was in the 90s, where there were budgets for music videos. It was it's own art form in itself, and you could make something that was purely aesthetic and beautiful and contextualize the music in it's own right because there was money behind it. That's kind of where I try to go, somewhere in between those two worlds.

I would love to have a $150,000 budget, and make an epic. I could imagine in my mind what it would be. But in every step of the way creatively, you have certain resources that are presented to you by the people that you work with, and there's a way to express yourself in every sort of tier, I think. It turned out really beautifully. That's all that matters. It's about the song. You want to make something visually that contextualizes the music in the way that it brings it out. It makes the song blossom. When you watch it you don't want it to distract from it. You don't want it to change your view of the music in a negative way. You want it to look like the music sounds.

Tamaryn’s “Cranekiss” is out now on Mexican Summer.

See Tamaryn live Thursday, November 12th with Froth and Roses at the Echoplex in Los Angeles.