BAND PEOPLE: Carla Kihlstedt

I’m using the opportunity of this newsletter to highlight expanded versions of selected interviews from my research for “Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music” (University of Texas Press); previously Nels Cline, Josh Freese, Janet Weiss, and Peter Hughes.

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I feel like we used to have many fewer kind of direct paths towards a functional livelihood, and fewer people could actually make that happen. Now, I think there are many more paths and many more tools and many more things you can use, both to get gigs and to get followings and to do this and do that, and to release records and like there’s many more paths to getting your music out in the world, but they’re all kind of flooded and the success of all of them is pretty tentative.

I feel like the equation of whether you have those [entrepreneurial] skills is only partly based on having a good sense of business acumen and organizational skills and all the things that a good business person or PR person would have. It’s also partly a more complicated psychological thing of where some people are simply not set up to push themselves out into the world and to count themselves. For example, I really wrestle with social media and I see people use it brilliantly and use it to really get hundreds of people looking at their every word and showing up to their every gig and whatnot. It is so not in my DNA to go out every day and post things about me, to live publicly and to kind of expose my private [life]. Even the photos that I post, I’m never in any of my photos. I like posting beautiful things that I find. It’s like about beauty, and not about personal PR. So I’m an instant failure. For all the tools that we have for social media available to us, to use it well, you have to have that piece of your personality that’s totally and comfortable self-promoting.

I spent some three years making a music video for us every month, just totally—I did it with my iPhone and I edited them all and I had an old version of iMovie that I was really comfortable with and just put them out to our little subscriber situation. We created a format that I was really comfortable in, [one that] for me that felt like it was more about deepening people’s experience of the music and deepening my ability to express what we were doing.

My name is Carla Kihlstedt and I play the violin. I primarily just play violin, and then I play other things as I need them. I’m kind of a combination of over-schooled and unschooled. What I mean by that is that I went to conservatory—well, starting earlier than that, I began playing the violin at five. My great aunt was a professional Hungarian violinist and she had tried to get every single one of my eleven other cousins before me to try to play violin, with varying degrees of failure. Finally, I was her last hope, and for whatever reason it totally took and I loved it. I went pretty quickly and pretty deeply down that path of classical violin study, and outgrew my local teachers pretty fast. That kind of set the course for the next many, many years of my life, for better and for worse.

It was always clear to me [that] I wanted to be a musician. Over the years of my childhood, I had a really significant and wonderful community around music that was very distinct from my school life and the more “normal” aspects of my childhood. That helps to bolster much confidence, and I got great feedback all the time. I had a lot of encouragement and a lot of one-on-one, great teachers, who put me in wonderful circumstances where I was playing chamber music and was really involved in a multifaceted way in music, so deeply that I didn’t think about doing anything else.

I went to Oberlin College—because, first of all, I wasn’t accepted into Curtis—but beyond that, all the other options just felt so narrow-minded and so focused to a fault. I always had this desire to do art and to read philosophy and to try my hand at dance and do all the things; alongside my mysterious music thing.

I had an instinct (that rears its head into my life every once in a while) to cut off everything I know, or cut off the thing that’s most comfortable. When I got to Oberlin I had long big thick wavy hair that everyone commented on, so I shaved it all off. When I left Oberlin, I had kind of gotten to the point where internally I was already living a double existence. I had the classical aspect of what I was doing, which is why I was there, supposedly. Along with it, I had developed a really interesting alternative bunch of friends and a different community that I’d found really exciting. My closest friend was a dancer, and she and I had done these very experimental, totally unsanctioned big projects that our respective departments wouldn’t give us credit for. Then I won the concerto competition at Oberlin—which means you’re supposed to play a concerto with the orchestra; and I won with the Beethoven Violin Concerto.

The one thing I really wanted to do was play the Schnittke Cadenzas. Schnittke had written these fabulously contemporary cadenzas for Gidon Kremer to play, and I had a recording of them and I just thought that they were the most interesting, thought-provoking addition to the Beethoven Violin Concerto I’d ever heard, so I wrote him a letter, and he eventually got back to me, not very long before he died. He sent me a handwritten letter basically saying, “Good luck. I’m so sorry. I can’t send you those cadenzas, but good luck to you.” So I ended up writing my own.

So I didn’t want a relationship to the classical world. I was kind of already elbowing it out at the sides. And when I moved to California after Oberlin, I pulled one of my stunts of just cutting off the thing that was most binding to me, and I didn’t tell anyone that I was a classical violinist. Not that it wasn’t obvious; because, you know, I played in a certain way and I had a certain kind of technique—but I just disowned it. It took me a long time for various reasons, some personal and some event-based. It took me a long time to figure out who I was without that structure supporting me; and without the legacy and the teacher relationship and the whole thing I had entirely grown up on. But I think when I got to Oberlin, I really didn’t know what a career looked like outside of classical music.

If I think about the models that were around me, they were all independent working musicians who did a combination of playing in other people’s projects, getting hired for tours, being part of ensembles that have their own kind of trajectory. So Ben Goldberg was someone I played with from very early on. When I moved out, I moved out to the Bay Area with Mark Orton and Rob Burger from Tin Hat. I think we had aspirations of quote “making it,” which I think a version of what that would mean was—well, it was kind of what happened—like no one made a ton of money off of it, but we toured a lot, and wrote our own music, and released a record every year or every other year. It was never a foregone conclusion; it was never easy. We were never at the top of any booking agent’s roster—we were kind of that working class, the middle class musicians. I played, I subbed with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the Berkeley Contemporary Players; I kind of snuck back into the classical world a little bit. I showed my cards. I actually missed playing that music. I missed those rehearsals; so I guess within a few years, I had my fingers in a lot of different pots, all of which were for me partly about making it work and making a life as an independent musician and also largely about kind of investing in and indulging in like these creative conversations I had going.

I have done less work as purely a hired musician than most of my peers. In part, that’s because pretty early on I had a triumvirate of bands, all of which I was one of the creative drivers of, and time-wise in terms of touring between those three bands, there just wasn’t the time to develop myself as a for-hire local musician, like playing on everyone’s gig. And I was just more driven by the kinds of input I can have in these more truly collaborative groups. That said, I feel like when I was hired, it was truly to help further someone else’s vision—either in a recording situation or in a performing situation. People generally hire me because of my instinct on the violin and not just because they want the sound of a violin.

I don’t think I’m a very good generic violinist. All Things Considered will often play a little Tin Hat thing, and often I’ll have people call me up and be like, “I knew it was you from the third note”—who knows what that’s about. I think as humans, we have a totally well-developed voice recognition piece of our brains and I think that translates over to instruments as well, and phrasing. I think that’s all part of the same part of our brains.

There are some people that are chameleons; that is their skill, is to be a chameleon. Even though people have called me a chameleon because I’ve played—in the course of two weeks, I’d go from playing with Tin Hat to playing with Sleepytime Gorilla Museum to playing my own songs—so stylistically what I would do was all over the map. I think if you really looked at what I was doing, I think I always sounded like me.

As an improviser, you spend your life both trying to work with those tendencies [which] you’ve cultivated as your kind of musical identity, and trying to fight it tooth and nail and explore new territory all the time. The fact is, we are stuck with who we are. For me, one of the most exciting things about being a collaborator is that it’s the fastest and deepest and most exciting ways of stretching your own language. If I think of the ways that playing music with Mark Orton from Tin Hat encouraged certain parts of my instincts; and the ways that playing with Nils Frykdahl from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum totally opened up an entirely other set of aesthetic and stylistic parameters for me that I hadn’t gotten—but I see when I look back at the things I love doing as a classical violinist, I loved playing Bartok string quartet. That was one of my anchors in life was playing that music. There’s something about the physicality of that, the total visceral rhythm and the harmonic world that lives in—that’s the more obvious parallel to make, between my love of playing the string quartets and the way that I played in Tin Hat. But I see as clear a line between playing Bartok’s 4th String Quartet and playing in Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.

You have to be sensitive to when you’re working on someone else’s vision. You have to keep their vision in mind and not overstep your bounds. So usually when I am in situations like that, I try to go in by starting with the more dutiful, respectful—go in and don’t open your mouth until you really know what’s happening, and what they’re trying to create. And then once you are in and you have their trust and they have your trust, [you can ] kind of try to push things in the way that your instincts want you to push.

I think it is incredibly important [to be easy to get along with]. Especially when you’re on tour, when you’re working really intensely with people, and the work is about five percent of your time together. That other 95 percent, some of it is sleeping and some of it’s vegging out in your hotel room. But there’s a big chunk of that, right around 50 percent, where you’re just hanging out in the van and you’re making decisions together and you’re figuring out where to eat and you’re, like, waiting on a train platform in February in Austria at 5 a.m. You can make each other miserable; and if you’re really miserable, it’s really hard to play good music with people. I know there’s examples of all different kinds of bands that don’t get along; and they stay not only in different hotel rooms, but in different hotels across whatever city. It’s possible. This sounds like hell to me. That would be so intolerable.

I also think that I’ve gotten to the point musically where I like to try to embody that age-old adage of—when you’re working on music and you’re very opinionated—"hold on tightly, let go lightly.” Meaning that if you really are convinced about something and your bandmates disagree, those kinds of disagreements can be the source of bigger, strife within the band. Be convinced of what you think; and then if someone has a better idea, let go of what you thought.

For me, touring has gotten easier and easier. I do less and less of it because of my family life, but it’s gotten easier and easier in terms of what behaviors of my own and other people’s I let affect me. Because man, do you run into everyone’s deep dark secrets and personal tendencies. Like, if you’re on tour with a dear friend who you then discover is a total control freak; man, are you going to run into that in every second of every day. So you have to learn how to be easygoing and let stuff go—both of your own and other people’s—and you have to be able to have to figure out what you need for self-preservation. Like, if everyone’s hanging out at the bar one night and you need to decompress and go do whatever you need to do in your hotel room, get very comfortable with what you need to do to get to that open, kind, generous [mindset]. As I get older, I realize how difficult it is to be basically open and kind and generous all the time. You know, we do get crankier as we get older, so…

I’ve been in all manner of bands [with] all manners of political structures at the core. And I feel like a band that has one clear leader—the most successful ones are the leaders [who] are both strong and clear, but also incredibly generous, and [who] acknowledge the input and importance of the other people they chose to bring along. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum was exactly the opposite. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum was as socialist a band as I could possibly imagine there being, in every way, [including] in the way we wrote music—it was a collective, so everyone brought material in. If I really were to be honest I could tell you that [there were] unspoken leaders of that band: the unspoken creative leader of that band was Nils Frykdahl; the unspoken logistical and functional leader of that band was Dan Rathbun—but the political belief system that held it together was very much an egalitarian. Everyone is part of every part of it. And you do what you what you’re able to do. Dan built many of the instruments, fixed the bus, retrofitted the bus to suit our needs. I ended up doing a lot of our graphic design and silk screening, and I did a lot of the cooking on tour. Everyone kind of did what they were able to do. Everyone worked the merch table. Everyone took turns driving the bus. You took the shift that made more sense to your body. Nils is one of the champions of driving through the night because he could, and he kind of thrived on lack of sleep in a way that I don’t—hence the song “Sleep is Wrong.” And even in terms of ownership of the music; that was always an interestingly complicated conversation, and to this day I don’t actually think that any of us actually registered any of our songs. There’s a sign of being uncomfortable with money, period. Like, no, we would just rather not have it, thank you.

One way in which I am a chameleon is that I can function in any number of these political structures. And as long as I know the rules and know what’s what, I’m fine. And my life used to be—if you were to look at a core sample of my life and take a look at a slide show of one night a month, it would be ridiculous. One night would be sleeping in a bus with a bunch of stinky sweaty men; it’d be a tour driving through the night and living basically in a commune. And then the next month, I’d be staying in a four-star hotel in Mallorca on tour with Tin Hat; or I’d be sleeping on someone’s couch. So I think being a collaborative musician teaches you flexibility in every aspect of your life. It teaches you a kind of non-judgmental flexibility: “Okay, here’s the story tonight.” And it might be that the venue that you’re playing, and sleeping on someone’s couch afterwards, is one of the most fabulous local, heartfelt, open-hearted experiences you’ll have all year. Very quickly you learn not to judge things or experiences by their outward appearance. And not everyone is set up to do that. I have good friends, who I’ve toured with a lot, who just simply would not go for that. Like “I’m too old for this shit, give me my good coffee and my down pillow and my solitude at night after the gig.” And it’s all a little more complicated for me now because I’m family and if I tour with my family, of course, that’s like a whole other level of ridiculous.

I used to be on the road ten months a year, and now I’m on the road a few weeks a year. I do many more one-off gigs where I’ll fly somewhere, do a rehearsal, do a gig—I just flew to Germany last month to play the Moers Festival and we turned it around in two-and-a-half days. I’m hoping to get to do some more traveling with the family when it makes sense, but we actually did one when my daughter was first born, for the first two years of her life, we just took her everywhere. We just loaded her up and took her, she didn’t care. She didn’t care where she was as long as I was around. And now she’s got friends and opinions and things that make her feel comfortable. I just was at the Ojai Music Festival last week and I went with both kids. My husband Matthias stayed here, and even though both my parents came out to watch the festival and my sister lives an hour and a half away, it was still very complicated to be there with us. And again, I’m the middle-class musician and I can’t hire a nanny, because I don’t get paid enough by the Ojai Festival or any other gig to spend. It would cost me that much to hire a nanny, unless I found some fabulous volunteer nanny that just wanted to do it. So at this point I either travel without them when I can; or if it seems like something that would be exciting for them to bring them to I basically agree to forfeit much of my income to that. Or I rely on my extended family, which is also complicated in its own way. I know my friends Nils Frykdahl and Dawn McCarthy, they have three daughters and they’ve done a lot of touring with all three kids. They are a band together and they load up in a touring vehicle and they’ve done tons of traveling with the three of them, but you have to have the passion. Both parents have to have a passion for that kind of traveling, in that kind of like scrappy DIY existence, and to be able to roll with the constant punches. You think got touring with a bunch of potentially poorly socialized musicians is complicated, add kids to the mix.

For example, after I went to the Ojai Festival, I got a lovely email from the woman who organized the Ojai Festival saying, “Hey, by the way, the house you were staying in, which had a lovely pool, has just billed us for 250 dollars damages to their swimming pool pump.” Because evidently my daughter was terrified of the big snaky white swimming pool pump and pulled it out of the water, and there it stayed pumping air and burned the whole thing out. So now I’m paying much of my fee to the people whose house I ruined. And on my way to the gig, twenty minutes before I had to leave, my son got a hold of this suntan lotion bottle and squirted it directly into his eyes. And this is a gig that was one of the big breaks of my year, it’s a beautiful festival, one of the best classical music festivals in the country, playing my own big song cycle that I wrote for the International Contemporary Ensemble, like a very high stakes gig. I rinsed his eyes out as much as I can and he feels like he’s okay. Finally we get in the car and we’re driving literally by the hospital—which happens to be between the venue and my house—and he starts screaming at the top of his lungs, “help me open my eyes, help me!” So I’m in this position of like, okay hospital or show, hospital or show, like I drive by the hospital and [say] “I’m sorry kiddo, I hope you’re not blind by the time my show’s done.”

So yeah, very complicated in all kinds of unpredictable ways, and my husband doesn’t like surprises. He doesn’t weather the constant challenges that come up when you’re traveling with kids—the constant challenges of traveling, period—so I think I could probably muster a dive into the van, make it, travel with everyone and deal with it as it comes, I could do that for a little while, but I can’t—you have to—it’s difficult at best. So if you have people that don’t think that that is a great adventure on board, it’s not going to be a great adventure.

The two bands that I toured with most in my life were Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Tin Hat, and in both of those I was the only woman. I always relished it when another woman would come on tour with Sleepytime, for example, when Dan’s wife—who’s a good friend of mine—would join, or Nils’ partner Dawn. It was always really a welcome change. I honestly never did spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. It felt like those relationships were as much family as anything, and it honestly didn’t faze me one way or another. Recently I’ve done a bunch of other projects that involve more women, and I’ve totally enjoyed that. I do think women are inherently more complicated—myself included, in many ways. And I know that might be a—I don’t mean to throw the gauntlet down by that statement, but I can tell you as a mother [with] a boy and a girl, that’s true in my experience, both in my own life and in my life as a parent. It wasn’t on purpose that I was the only woman in those two groups. It was really by happenstance. I am putting a new group together that’s going to be all women. I’m excited about it. If I could give myself another dose of diva, I would—but I don’t mean that as a sexist thing, as like a particular[ly] female thing even, actually mean that [as a] gender neutral qualification—I think the fact that I don’t have a whole lot of diva in me is also is what’s made collaboration so important in my life.

I have such a push-me pull-you relationship with my violin. And in fact, I’m at the point now where I feel equally dedicated to—or maybe more dedicated to—my craft as a singer than I do as a violinist. That’s partly what I mean about the over-schooled versus unschooled thing, is that I was very much as schooled as one possibly could be in the violin [up to] the point where I veered off. But through college I was so dedicated to the craft of playing the violin; and when I moved out to the Bay Area and joined the band as a singer and started improvising, everything else I learned from that point was totally a result of unschooling, just learning from my peers, learning from my surroundings, taking what I knew already and trying to use it in a different context as a singer. I tried to teach myself about breath control from what I knew about bow control—I just tried to use the tools I had in one area and apply them to another. I think as a result it took way longer than it would have if I were a schooled singer or a schooled composer. [My experience] both as a composer and singer all came after my formal schooling was done. At this point, I don’t have a voice that fits into a particular genre or style. I kind of sing how I sing, but I feel very close to it. I’ve done a lot of work on just what it means to breathe, and what it means for your voice to resonate in your body. A lot of deep investigation of my own; and then standing up next to someone like Nils Frykdahl, that was more schooling than any school could possibly have been for me. I feel the same way about other instrumentalists and other composers and other arrangers that I was standing up next to, some of the people I stood up next to for years on end, was better school than anything I could have paid for in an institution. So right now I feel like, at various points, I felt very restricted by the violin; and so my response to that was I would have distance myself from it; and then dive back into it and try to find other models for it. You know, like what happens if you listen to a Marc Ribot solo, and try to replicate that angularity and that chordal kind of thickness, what happens when you play in a band with two heavy metal guitars? What happens when you try to apply that to the violin? What skills do I have that they don’t have? What tools do I have that they don’t have? What tools do they have that I can’t currently access?

I think I learned more about how to play the violin from looking at non-violinists than I did from looking at violinists. I have a kind of rebellious streak in me, so all the people that I should have been looking to, all the wonderful traditional violinists, the different styles that I really should have spent years emulating—the rebel in me never let me do that, because I always felt like there’s 50,000 other people doing that. I always felt more motivated by the musical conversation I was having under my nose, in rehearsals with the people I was actually working with—I was always more motivated by that direct challenge than I was about the hypothetical challenge of, look at Stéphane Grappelli, how can I do that? Like, that was too many times removed for me. It’s [more] of a short-term, “Okay, who’s right here, and what can I learn from them?” So as a result, my violin playing is very distinctive because I didn’t really have the right violin heroes. All my heroes didn’t come from the violin camp.

I don’t think [I’ve ever been fired.] Maybe I should go and get myself fired. That sounds like it should be on my bucket list. I think I’ve been not invited back, but that’s too subtle to really call it firing. Yeah, I don’t think I have ever been fired. Damn, I feel like I’ve got to make that happen. I’ll put a Facebook post up.

I do hope to God I can teach my kids some more financial skills and planning tools than what I have used. I have two adjunct faculty positions; which of course the lovely part of adjunct faculty is that it’s very flexible, and it still allows for the kind of time it takes to live your own life and have your own musical career. The bad part of it is that it doesn’t pay benefits. It doesn’t really help besides having a regular paycheck, which is lovely. It still keeps you outside of those more stable structures that people who have solid full-time jobs can enjoy. There might come a point at which I feel like I need to do it differently, and I’m already starting to think about what that means, partly because of where I am. That’s the other aspect of what’s kind of changed me as a musician in terms of having kids is that we made the decision to move here to Cape Cod. This is the first time in my life that I’m not living in a musical community. I’m living in a wonderful community where there’s all kinds of possibilities and all kinds of support for interesting ideas. And Woods Hole is a mecca. It’s a hub of independent radio production in this country—for a couple different reasons—and also one of the main hubs of oceanographic research and science. But I distinctly do not have any musical community here.

My husband is more interested in, and does a better job of, putting himself out there in the community and just being a drummer for hire of all different kinds of [gigs], but I’m really having to look at what it means for me to functionally be a musician in an everyday way right now. And so more of my attention is going to composition commissions and towards one-off gigs as either a singer or a violinist. I’m in a kind of lovely position of having a handful of great people that I really admire and love [who] have written music specifically for me and specifically with me in mind—so I have a handful of wonderful gigs that I love, that are not my gigs. I’m not the leader, but I get to go and shine in the way that they’ve kind of crafted for me specifically to shine—which is great, and that’s kind of more and more happening as a singer these days. That’s been just a pleasure, a pleasure to be a side person. But in a context where the role was written for me. That was the best of both worlds, because you get to stand up and really do your craft, not as a generic musician, but as someone very specific with a specific voice. But it’s also logistically easier for me to be involved in because it’s not my gig. I’ve got at the moment a nice mix of things that I’m responsible for and things that I get to ride on the coattails of.

I think every binary sounds simpler than it actually is in practice. But I think that also binaries are helpful for conversation; [they] help us to see the general shape of a certain spectrum of involvement. I think that’s part of what defines your involvement in any given project, is how much one side of that is tempered by the other side. I think even when you’re just being a craftsman you are still clearly using every ounce of your artistry to craft something that fits a specific role; and when you are able to indulge in something that is more your own vision unfettered by someone else’s definition of what the result is supposed to be or where it’s supposed to fit, you’re still using every ounce of craftsmanship you ever had. So I think it is a line and I think no matter where you are on that line, both things are informing your choices. I thoroughly enjoy both.

Sara Kirkland Snider has a piece called Penelope that is a gorgeous song cycle, and Shara from My Brightest Diamond is the definitive voice of that project—she’s on the recording, she’s performed [it] a bunch, but Shara is also very busy with her own projects. And so several times now, they’ve asked me to come and sing that role. So I am definitely a craftsman in that case, although my craft is so informed by my experience as an artist that I can’t quite separate it. That said, I learned more about singing from singing that role than I had ever learned from singing fifty songs of my own. The phrases were very long, and often they were very controlled, but emotional; and what I had to bring to that was a kind of singing that I hadn’t ever—it was an extreme way of singing that I had explored before, but never in quite that way. So I feel like I came off of singing that piece a way better singer. So I do think that there is a way in which the putting your voice and your skill set and your artistic instincts into someone else’s form is so invaluable and teaches you so much about expression—songs teach you how to sing, and if you’re only ever singing your own songs, you’re only ever going to sing in one particular or maybe a couple different ways. The kinds of things I’ve learned through being at the mercy of someone else’s writing or someone else’s ideas have been equally profound.

So I don’t think I could judge [where I fall] on the scale of craft to art. You kind of imagine craft being like a beautiful cup or a beautifully [made] chair. A piece of art may or may not be functional, but it has some other kind of beauty that follows its own logic. I can’t judge which of those is more important to me, and one couldn’t function without the other. I do love creating things where no one’s telling me what it has to sound like, where I can just literally go in and with my eyes closed and my ears open, and follow some thread as far as it will go, and as deeply as it will go. I love that kind of surprise where you can keep your eyes closed and then worry about what is later. I love that, but the parameters of having to fit into someone else’s work are also—I relish that too.