Hindsight In 20/20: Torres' 'Sprinter' And Understanding The Past
Tuesday, 23 June 2015
Written by Huw Baines
Photos: Shawn Brackbill
Mackenzie Scott, framed alone on the high stage at Rough Trade East, stops tampering with a pedal for a moment as shouts from outside echo between racks of records. “Someone's gotta be a cheerleader,” she laughs before unfurling Cowboy Guilt’s syncopated riff. “Someone's gotta counteract this sad music.”
‘Sprinter’, her second album as Torres, is now a couple of months old. Her description of it as ‘sad’ is deliberately flippant, but remains a sly acknowledgement of its power. Broader in scope than her self-titled debut, its ruminations on death and religion are cut with ideas of change and transition. Having already moved from her native Georgia to Nashville, its arrival followed further upping of sticks as Scott headed for Brooklyn and a period of reflection aided by distance and the evaporation of time. Perhaps fittingly, it was recorded with Rob Ellis on the other side of the Atlantic.
“It was totally a change in perspective,” she says, huddled over a small table at the back of the shop. “An expansion. I’m not writing about New York, but it changed my headspace. It changed me mentally, it changed me physically. I moved there and I just started looking better. I got happier. I looked different because I was happier.”
Scott’s gaze started to drift. She read Ray Bradbury and wrestled with the brutal extremes of love and hate. All the while, the tenets of her religious upbringing, the American south’s structured traditions and the outsider narrative of her time in Nashville percolated. “Lay off me, would ya? I’m just trying to take this new skin for a spin,” she sings on New Skin.
“I do know that a lot of it was about me trying to reconcile a lot of my past, my upbringing with where I am and who I am now,” she says. “It’s a new thing for me to be able to write with hindsight, 20/20 vision. I am so used to just being in the middle of something painful or something I’m trying to work through. There was some of that, but a lot of it was…”
Scott trails off, her attention grabbed by a song pulsing from the overhead speakers. Her eyes fix on a point in the middle distance before she snaps back to her thought, barely breaking stride: “...retrospective writing about a lot of things that I buried or tried to bury, that for a long time I didn’t want to think about.”
In Nashville, Scott turned to an electric guitar to make herself heard. Hemmed in by Music Row and the assorted cliques present in the city’s musical landscape, she embraced its punk fringe elements while shaking teacups at open mics. At Rough Trade, she wrings every drop of noise from her instrument. She induces feedback by hitting it above the bridge and thunders into power chords. Strange Hellos is punctuated by a blood-curdling scream. Though she is no longer confronted by indifference, the belligerence in her performance remains.
“When I moved to Brooklyn I wasn’t looking for a scene anymore,” she says. “In Nashville I really wanted to be part of the local scene. Those were my buddies, those were people I was really close to and I wanted to play shows with them. It was so formative to me. That’s not to say that I stopped liking having a local music scene when I moved, but I had that phase in my life. It’s not something I need anymore.
“I’m not above it by any means. It’s more that I’m interested in touring internationally now. And travelling. When I was trying to become part of that scene I was rooted in Nashville, I was tied to it because I was in school. I wasn’t able to travel. What I always really wanted, ultimately, was to tour the world. Now, when I’m at home in Brooklyn it’s a personal choice to spend my time not playing shows. I just want to be at home and hang out with my friends. Be a nobody.”
Scott’s vocal dexterity and sharp edges are made more prominent by the poetry of her words. ‘Sprinter’ is immediately satisfying in a musical sense - its melodies are intelligent and in plain sight - but its lyrics are to be pored over and rediscovered in fresh lights. The title track finds Scott pounding laps out of a running track as life in Georgia nips at her heels, while Son You Are No Island features the personification of god. The Exchange documents elements of her relationship with her adoptive mother. It’s the album’s quietest moment, but also the song that carries the most emotional and dramatic weight. “I am afraid to see my heroes age,” Scott sings. “I am afraid of disintegration. If you’re not here, I can’t be here for you.”
“I came to England with the demos,” Scott says. “That song was almost exactly as it appeared, only recorded in my bedroom: acoustic guitar, vocal and a little harmony. We tried to record it several times throughout the process. I just kept not getting it right. I was trying too hard to make a recording, thinking about how people would be perceiving it.
“I had the headphones on and it was the whole studio setup. We couldn’t get it right. Rob just kept saying to relax. I never could. It felt so wrong. I was like: ‘Let’s use the demo.’ He said: ‘I have this zoom recorder. Take it outside or back to your room at night or something. Record it by yourself and bring it back. We’ll pick the one we like.’ It think I got it done the next to last day before I left England. I recorded it with a handheld mic outside under some trees.”
In the autumn, Scott will return to the UK with her band in tow. That change is another thing she is happy to contemplate. In keeping with her story to date, the expansion of her live show will be placed in context of her writing process and past experiences. There is no room for complacency or the dilution of her music; every song must at some stage comprise of six strings and her voice.
“I knew I would eventually want this. The band, the bigger stages, the bigger sounds," she says. "I guess when I was in Nashville starting out I didn’t know how it would happen. It was more that I didn’t know what I wanted out of a live band. I don’t know what it’ll become in the future.
“I think that I’ll write the songs the way that I always have. I want the band to mould to whatever it is I’m doing. I think things can get, maybe, lazy. Half ass it ‘cause the band will back me up. I like to go into a writing process with it in mind that I’ll have to tour solo. Not that I want to, but it’s important that I can stand on my own and play these songs with just my voice and a guitar.”
Huw Baines is editor of Stereoboard. You can find him on Twitter.
Torres Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Mon September 21 2015 - BRISTOL Louisiana
Tue September 22 2015 - MANCHESTER Manchester Deaf Institute
Wed September 23 2015 - LONDON Scala
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