An Interview With Holland Andrews of Like a Villain
Ben Wills sits down with post-minimalist performer and all-around wonderful human Holland Andrews (Like a Villain) to discuss her music, why she thinks she’s so cool, and her love of The Bad Girls Club.
Ben Wills sits down with post-minimalist musician (and overall wonderful human) Holland Andrews to talk about her music (performed under the moniker Like a Villain), why she thinks she’s so cool, and her love of The Bad Girls Club.
Ben Wills: You think you’re so cool. Why?
Holland Andrews: Shut up! Shut up. Stop it.
Ben: How did you settle on the Like a Villain moniker?
Holland: I don’t know. It kind of just popped into my head. I went under my name, Holland Andrews, for a while, and then I changed it to Eager Machinery, and I eventually got sick of that because I think it sounds kind of stupid.
Ben: Had you done other solo stuff before?
Holland: No, no. I’ve just been changing the name of the Myspace. Like, “This month I want to be called something else stupid.” That one just seemed to stick. It wasn’t a big revelation.
Ben: Your most recent release, The Life of a Gentleman, consists of mostly new material, but also pulls a few songs from your demo.
Holland: We recorded and mixed the album in 2 days before I was going to go on tour, and I hadn’t had a full half hour of music for a set written yet, so I figured I’d just throw some stuff from the demo onto the new album, because I don’t think many people heard the demo anyway. So, you know, who cares. [laughs]
Ben: Why you so lazy?
Holland: [laughs] I just wanted to have a full-ish album…so I just took some favorites…I don’t know. I’m sorry.
Ben: I mean, it works. It’s all really stylistically consistent and cohesive, but there is one track, “Dead Gone, Dead Drunk,” that seems kind of anomalous—it’s almost all percussion and vocals.
Holland: Oh that one. I really don’t even like that song anymore. But so many people liked it, I just had to put it on.
Ben: Why don’t you like it?
Holland: It just makes me uncomfortable. The lyrics are super old; it’s kind of a vulnerable song. I’m singing throughout the whole thing and if I write lyrics they’re generally short and spread out and it’s more of a vague theme. But with that song, it’s more personal. I don’t even know if people are listening to what I’m saying. But I just feel like it’s cheesy ninth grade poetry.
Ben: Is it?
Holland: [laughs] Yeah, kind of. When I wrote the lyrics, I hadn’t slept for a few days and I was walking around in my city barefoot and I was like “I want to write a song in ¾.” I wasn’t even really playing music at the time, and it’s sort of always stayed with me ever since.
Ben: Speaking of vulnerable songs, where’d you get the balls to cover Strange Fruit?
Holland: Ohhhhhhh the balls. I don’t know, I just liked the song. I haven’t experienced any lynchings or know anyone who has—or maybe I do and it’s just never come up. The song just has such a great history and it was sort of a way for me to get in touch with the sad part of my roots. I don’t know. That actually sounds pretty stupid, what I just said. I think that, I could be wrong, but I think the person who wrote it was actually a Jewish teacher. [Ed. Note: Abel Meeropol, Strange Fruit]
Ben: I noticed that you don’t have a bio up online.
Holland: Well, at least the one on the Myspace was just so stupid. I get in these moods where I’m just like “This is all stupid!” and I just want to start over and delete everything. So I got rid of the fake, celestial bio that was totally ridiculous. I have one on the last.fm site.
Ben: Oh so was that on your twitter too? Did I just miss it?
Holland: Look, people need to know where I am, what I’m doing, when I’m hungry, when I’m sad.
Ben: Yo I just ate a peanut!
Holland: I was hangin’ out with fiddy cent. Ate a peanut. It was a’ight.
Ben: You cite Arvo Pärt as an influence and, especially in your more recent work, the minimalist influence is pretty apparent. Yet your music is melodic and lyrical in a way that sometimes seems closer to jazz and Romantic classical.
Holland: I think that probably has a lot to do with what I grew up listening to and performing. In high school, I did a lot of musical theater, singing harmonies… So that could just be something embedded in my subconscious, in the way those musical structures are formed. But it’s not a conscious thing where I’m like “I want to do something like this.” My process is actually a lot simpler than it might seem.
Ben: What’s your process typically like?
Holland: A melody pops into my head and I sing it into my phone and find harmonies for it. I just listen to the same thing over and over and then hopefully I remember it when I want to practice music.
Ben: I tried to do that on my phone once! I was doing dishes at the restaurant I worked at and I heard all these different frequencies in the machinery and constructed a melody out of them, and then I couldn’t get it to play back.
Holland: Yeah stuff like that, it’s so hard to capture. Especially with machinery. I was walking on the Hawthorne bridge and, you know the metal grating? The cars drive over it and driving at certain speeds it makes different pitches, just from the tires going over the grating. It goes vvppfffhhf pphff phff and I was trying to harmonize with that and thinking “I wish there was a way to do this all over again,” but I don’t think there is unless I—
Ben: You had a field recorder?
Holland: Yeah, and did the whole process on the bridge.
Ben: That’s not a bad idea.
Holland: No it’s not. And all the pipes had really neat pitches and tones to them as well. So I could just write a whole song walking home.
Ben: So when you were doing ensemble work in high school were you doing jazz, like Gershwin musicals?
Holland: No it was like, the fucking Music Man, Peter Pan. It wasn’t that deep. You know, basic Broadway stuff. I was in Les Mis in highschool, but I didn’t really hold any strong roles, it was all ensemble casting. Which I liked because I don’t really like to be in the spotlight as much.
Ben: So how’s that working out for you as a solo performer?
Holland: [laughs] I’m in a few other bands where I kind of hang out in the back, and that’s great, but…I guess this is my chance to say fuck you to all the times I auditioned for all those lead roles and never got them.
Ben: Yeah, I dig that. I like vindictive.
Holland: I should be past that by now, because that’s all so far away.
Ben: No, that shit stays with you.
Holland: [laughs] It does.
Ben: I’m glad it does, because you’re playing out now all the time.
Holland: But it gets, I don’t know. Shows can be overwhelming. People want to talk and buy things and money’s awkward—it’s the worst thing.
Ben: So you’re also involved in some other projects—The Ocean Floor, Meyercord, anything else?
Holland: There’s this other mostly vocal experimental group, with me and three other women. I play clarinet, another girl brings her alto sax and we sort of just get weird with stuff.
Ben: So is it layered like your solo stuff or is it all played live?
Holland: More live. Have you heard of Meredith Monk? She’s one of the old school minimalist experimental vocal women—if there are any other women that do that, I guess. [laughs] She got really weird with her voice, which was great. She’d do that ululation thing and also composed a lot of other works. She’s still producing, but I think she started in the 60s or 70s, she knew Philip Glass and all those other assholes.
Ben: You work in an assisted living home here in Portland for the mentally ill, is that right?
Holland: It’s more like transitional housing, so our patients come from the state hospital or jail or prison and stay with us. We have wrap-around services and everything, so they get counseling and are fed and have a housing specialist who helps them move on, get on section 8, find a place to stay.
Ben: Knowing that, some of your lyrics seem like they could in some way originate from that context.
Holland: Well, my mother was a paranoid schizophrenic, so I grew up in that sort of environment as a kid. But I don’t really know what all the lyrics mean. It’s mostly just shit that I think of that I think sounds cool. So I just put that into the song. And people don’t really listen to what I’m singing anyway. I wish that I had the patience to write out really great songs, but the emphasis is more on the way music makes you feel rather than what I’m singing about.
Ben: Why are your songs so sad?
Holland: Cause I’m sad. Cause I had a sad life. Not really.
Ben: Actually a lot of your songs are really positive. I guess harmonically they’re kind of sad, but lyrically they’re not at all.
Holland: It’s usually because I realize all the melodies are sad, so the lyrics are me saying to myself, I need to write a happy song.
Ben: Are you still watching The Bad Girls Club?
Holland: Is that really on your list? Bad Girls Club is everything that is, well, it basically describes me to a T. All those women, they’re just like a little bit of my personality. I mean, I’m—
Ben: Hella busty and totally belligerent?
Holland: I’m the baddest bitch in the house and all these other bitches ain’t real. That’s basically what it comes down to.
Ben: Well I’m glad you’ve found some kind of community.
Holland: I watched Bad Girls Club til 7 in the morning last night because I had too much coffee and it fucked up my dreams. I woke up wanting to fight somebody and just waiting for somebody to do something stupid. A resident at work said something pretty offensive to me. We were talking about boundaries issues and he said something that I didn’t think was appropriate and then later he came back at me with “Well I don’t even like black girls” and I was like this close to getting bad girl on him, but I didn’t, because I like my job.
Ben: Remember that time you gave me a banana?
Holland: Yeah!
Ben: Yeah, that was dope.
Holland: Was it good?
Ben: Yeah, well, I think I was getting scurvy so—
Holland: I’ve got a pear in my backyard, if you want.
You can download Holland’s latest, The Life of a Gentleman, using the password “thingswillgetbetter”. And then come see Like a Villain perform at the upcoming Smalldoggies reading on Thursday, November 11th at Cafe Magnolia, 1522 SE 32nd Ave, Portland, OR 97214, starting at 8pm. No cover; $2.50 pints; 3 amazing readers.
Like a Villain – A-OK (Live at the People’s Yoga) from Kaleida on Vimeo.
Check out her Myspace here: Like a Villain.