Loneliness and The Solo Artist: Jess Abbott Talks Tancred's 'Nightstand'
Thursday, 31 May 2018
Written by Huw Baines
Photo: Shervin Lainez
One of the enduring challenges facing any writer is making people feel as though they’re in the room, and experiencing things in real time. On ‘Nightstand’, the new Tancred album, Jess Abbott’s solution is to load up on specifics.
“Make my way down the elevator and hit the street in the morning sun,” she sings on the opening line of Queen of New York. A couple of seconds later we’re in step with her as she joins the “ranks of people with no sleep and last night’s make-up on”.
The song is the sort of faultlessly melodic pop-rocker that lit up 2016’s ‘Out of the Garden’. It has a peppy gait underpinned by a mix of post-one night stand self-reflection and the lingering buzz of meeting someone new and sharing a spark, even if only for a short while.
As we settle in alongside her, we blend into the crowd walking the pavement. We’re alone again. Following the release of her last solo record and departure from Now, Now, the Minnesota indie-pop band with whom she played for the best part of a decade, that’s just how Abbott felt.
She was lonely, and decided to counter that. She read a lot, took up hobbies and made a point of meeting new people. She sought out experiences and slices of knowledge. The moments collected on ‘Nightstand’ build a multi-dimensional picture of that period.
“I think this album was deeply therapeutic for me to write at that time in my life,” Abbott says. “I wrote it a year to a year and a half ago, and I was in a period of extreme isolation. Connecting with people was kind of like a vice, you know? Both a healthy and unhealthy vice: trying to connect with people to experience loneliness together, experience life together and learn from other people. Each song was a piece of that puzzle.”
The record has two sides that, while not in direct competition with each other, steal the limelight at times. Firstly, there’s the bright, pop-facing Tancred of Queen of New York. Secondly, there’s the more introspective, downtempo Tancred of the shimmering opener, Song One. Abbott’s musical approach reflects the searching nature of her lyrics, pushing fresh textures into the foreground.
There are moments when ‘Nightstand’ feels like an album that was exhaustively workshopped during the recording process, from Apple Tree Girl’s sweeping strings to the pinpoint percussive heft of the final song, Rowing. Its instrumentation is rich and layered, with pockets of space here and there to drive home the quiet that accompanies solitude. The reality, though, is that Abbott walked into Lewis Pesacov’s studio in Los Angeles with the songs already meticulously mapped out.
“I sat there and wrote every single part,” she says. “I wrote the demos with programmed drums, but I was building these drum beats because I knew exactly what I wanted. I don’t play drums and I don’t play bass, but I sat there and took the time to create some kind of general outline for exactly what I wanted, which I hadn’t done on any other Tancred album.
“I pushed myself to do new things, I wrote all the string arrangements. The only texture in the studio is this ethereal little sound on Just You, and that was something I knew I wanted but I didn’t know exactly what to do. I wanted the producer’s help on that. I would spend weeks writing a song and days demoing it. Half these songs went through three different phases. I have step by step demos and some of them are night and day before I landed on these versions.”
Abbott’s Tancred discography could be described in a similar way. Each record has sent her writing spiralling in a new direction, and side-by-side comparisons show different approaches and preoccupations. They feel like points plotted on a timeline, much as the songs on ‘Nightstand’ do.
Here, her investigation of new musical territory has been helped along by feeling at home while working alone. It’s an interesting subplot given the record’s overall focus: the solo songwriter who exists in isolation versus the human being who wants to feel in tune with the people out there on the street.
“I started doing Tancred for fun on the side, and I think I put out my first album when I was like 19,” Abbott says. “You can hear a vast change with each album of mine. I’m figuring it out in real time. My first album sounds like the bedroom album of a 19-year-old. My next album sounds like the emotional album of a 21-year-old, and so on. Getting to this point with these songs now, I feel like I’ve really situated myself comfortably writing music isolated.
“Writing about loneliness is a consistent theme in my music, but the way I write about it now is a lot more realised. The songs on this album are about loneliness and the human experience of that. But I think that I wanted to write about loneliness in a relatable way that brings you closer to people knowing that we’re going through these things together.”
On Reviews, the record’s lead single, she hangs an image out there for us to catch hold of: “When I see lines of trees, I feel like you’re with me.” Even when divorced from context, it sticks with us. We can add our own colour between its lines, creating another new connection.
'Nightstand' is out on June 1 through Polyvinyl.
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