Jeremy Barnes
Though Albuquerque-based musician Heather Trost is perhaps known best as a collaborator with acts like Swans and A Hawk and a Hacksaw, she’s also an accomplished artist on the cusp of releasing her second full-length solo record. We loved 2017′s Agistri, and the song remains the same for the upcoming Desert Flowers. You wouldn’t call Trost’s newest a pandemic album, per se, but she definitely worked on its concepts with her husband throughout the lockdowns and beyond. Regardless, it’s an organ-heavy and energetic bit of pop bliss by way of R&B and psych-rock that not only showcases Trost’s penchant for layering effects, instruments and vocals into emotionally-charged numbers, but shows real growth as a songwriter. Flowers drops this week on indie label Ba Da Bing, and with a show in Albuquerque (7 pm Friday, Nov. 11. $10. Sister, 407 Central Ave. NW, (505) 242-4900) we decided to take a little listen and formulate some Qs. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
I’m hearing a lot of psych and R&B influences on this record. How’d you get there? Did your listening habits change?
I’ve always loved R&B and also a ton of psychedelic music. I was listening to a lot of Lee Fields and the Expressions, and I feel like that influenced some of the songs with really nice R&B-like smooth baselines that are moving a lot. Spacious drums. I definitely think that’s a newer influence. Another person I really love is Kathryn Riberio. She was a French singer from the ‘70s.
It wasn’t a conscious decision. I think I was just listening to a lot of music at the time, and it kind of maybe influenced me unconsciously. But when I heard some of [my] songs, I was like, ‘Oh, this kind of reminds me of something I’m listening to,’ like Lee Fields or…I started listening to more dub music, which I really love, and I feel like that kind of influenced some of the sounds—although it’s not a dubby record at all, just a little bit of the sound was influenced by some old Jamaican stuff. It’s definitely organic. When I’m creating I usually start with a melody. I write a lot on the piano, and that’s before I’m even thinking of what organ I’m gonna use, so I come up with the harmony and the melody on the piano first. That, to me, feels like it’s coming out of my unconscious. As I’m recording and also … my partner and the person I record with, Jeremy Barnes, has influences he’s recording from. It’s never like, ‘I want this to sound like an R&B record.’
You’re known for being a collaborator, but you’ve also got some solo cred going after your 2017 record Agistri. Is the new record collaborative in any way, or is it more of a strictly solo thing?
I should say that Jeremy...we’re married, he’s not just my partner, and he and I do so much together. It’s very much a solo record, but we co-wrote a lot of the songs. Even though it’s a solo record, it is a collaboration as well, but it’s first a solo record. He’s got such a good ear, I just really trust his ear in terms of production, and he played a lot of the bass on the record and drums—he’s a drummer first and foremost, so he’s played drums on all of my records. He’s also played some organ and keys. He’d come up with a bassline and I’d come up with chords and melodies.
Can we talk about the recording process? What was that like? And what happens now?
We have a home studio here in Albuquerque. The writing process is actually quicker than the recording process, than the mixing process. Sometimes they’ll happen, like, I’ll work on one song for a while and come up with an idea for another song. I’ll have songs in phases. I think I pretty much started writing in the spring of 2020, and then I started recording in the summer, but that was also sort of congruous with finishing writing the songs. It basically took from the fall of 2020 to the end of the summer of 2021 to finish mixing and recording. That process took a while. I like to take my time in the studio, though, which is what’s so nice about having the home studio.
Then in August of 2021, we went to a studio in Michigan called Key Club Recording, and I did all the vocal recording there. I did that last, and they have a lot of really cool vintage, analogue keyboards, so I laid down some stuff, and we mixed it there. We co-mixed it with an engineer named Brian Fox. I’m definitely happy now, but the mixing process is a lot of back and forth, so even after we mixed at the studio, there were things here and there I tweaked. There’s a certain point where you have to be done, though.
I took a break after we mastered the record and I didn’t listen to it for a very long time until I started practicing and trying to figure out how to do it live. I’m doing a record release at Sister Bar in Albuquerque on Nov. 11, which is when the album comes out. I think it’s sounding pretty close to the record. We’re playing a festival in Austin, a couple shows out there, and I’ working on getting a show in Santa Fe. It’s kind of…I know bands are touring, but we did our last Hawk and a Hacksaw show in Japan in the end of 2018. It’s interesting, because I love touring, but I also love recording and writing, so it’s like, getting back into that mindset. But I’m always kind of writing stuff, so yeah, I definitely have lots of songs going around in my head that I’m working on.
