FLA 08: Kirsten Parnell

ANYTHING: DESSA: Castor, The Twin (2011, Doomtree Records)

Extract: ‘Mineshaft 2’

KIRSTEN PARNELL

With new music, I very much rely on recommendations from friends – especially my friend Natalie. Frequently she will send me a song by a female artist and it’s a song about being let down by a man and we’re both: This is our thing.

I’d never really listened to hip hop or rap at all, but Nat had seen Hamilton and I hadn’t, and she got me into Dessa because of the Hamilton mix tape, which was various artists covering songs from the musical, doing their own interpretations, or artists doing songs that hadn’t made the final cut. And Dessa performed a track that didn’t make it into the musical, a song called ‘Congratulations’. It could easily have been slotted into the musical, and it would be all the better for it! It’s just a really great song.

With ‘Mineshaft 2’, the entire framing for the song is a warning to her younger self. I heard it about two or three years ago, and then I just went through her back catalogue. The opening line is: ‘Fifteen years from tonight you have to make a decision, the greatest love of your life’s gonna call during dinner…’. And then later on: ‘I used to sing on the roof outside my windowsill/And I came hoping some ghost of me would be here still.’ I don’t think it’s an accident that this song resonated with me the moment I heard it.

I love what she does with words. Before anything else, she’s a writer. She wrote a really good book called My Own Devices, which is a collection of essays, but a memoir really. She’s published a couple of poetry collections. She does a podcast called Deeply Human for the BBC World Service… She has said what drives her is just being able to do stuff with language. And music is one more way of her doing that.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I found a really great quote from her in a newspaper article, and it made me think of you and what you’re doing. She said, ‘Hip hop is the music genre that prizes linguistic achievement over all others. It’s why I took to writing in the first place.’ And just like all types of writing, it’s very hard to get that right. And it also made me think of this huge wave of singers who rap and rappers who sing, and once upon a time, that wasn’t very common at all. The first person I remember doing both on a big hit song was Neneh Cherry. ‘Buffalo Stance’. The verse is a rap, the chorus is sung. A lot of people do that now, to great effect.

I remember there was this attitude towards rap back in the day that it wasn’t music. What I’ve always found unbelievable about rap – and I realise I sound like someone’s grandfather when I say this kind of thing – is how rappers not only remember it all, but can deliver it with that kind of conviction and attention to rhythmic detail.

KIRSTEN PARNELL

Dessa once said in an interview that the reason she does everything she does – sings, raps, writes poetry, has written a memoir, has a podcast about human behaviour – is that she refuses to “pick a lane”. It’s satisfying, I think, to find out what other types of writing musicians can do. And encouraging, in a way – as a copywriter who’s good at writing short comment pieces but who is also trying to teach herself to write fiction, it’s inspiring to see other writers spread their creative wings.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Have other lyricists influenced your writing style, do you think?

KIRSTEN PARNELL

The singer/songwriter Thea Gilmore (who also records under the name Afterlight) changed the way I thought about lyrics. She was another recommendation from my uncle, when I was about 13, and I’ve followed her career ever since. Her earlier work was very wordy – lots of her early songs could stand alone as poems, really – but her lyrics have become less… cerebral, I suppose, and oblique, and more accessible over time. Now I think about it, Gilmore and Dessa have something in common: they seem to approach music words-first.

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JUSTIN LEWIS

What about music as inspiration for your writing, rather than lyrics? You’ve told me that you need to have something instrumental on.

KIRSTEN PARNELL

I like background noise, I can’t really write in total silence, but there isn’t really a relationship between the writing and what I’m listening to. If I’m writing something quite urgent and pressing, the soundtrack from the TRON: Legacy film, by Daft Punk, is really pacey and very motivating. Other than that, I play Classic FM – although if something by Vaughan Williams comes on, I have to stop and focus on that. He’s the one composer that I really engage with, but I don’t really know why.

JUSTIN LEWIS

The Lark Ascending is always number one in the Classic FM Hall of Fame listeners’ poll, isn’t it? It’s funny to think that Classic FM was set up as a sort of classical version of a pop station: here are the hits, here are the ‘famous bits that people know’ of classical music. So it’s the ‘Toreador’ song from Carmen, or classical music from film soundtracks or whatever.

KIRSTEN PARNELL

Funnily enough, I’m not especially fussed on The Lark Ascending. ‘It’s too popular!’ When I was a teenager I was absolutely that kid: ‘It’s too popular.’ Whereas I love the ‘Romance’ from the Serenade in A minor – it’s annoyingly hard to find on Spotify, but around the 4:12 mark, it starts to build to this really beautiful, stirring climactic moment that sounds to me like pure joy. I also love Dives and Lazarus. I haven’t actually listened to that in ages, but you’ve just reminded me how much I love it.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I always enjoy reading your highly entertaining blog but have you other writing projects in mind at the moment?

KIRSTEN PARNELL

I have been trying to finish the draft of a novel for over two years now and I’ve now written the ending. I haven’t written it chronologically, because I knew that writing something that big would be difficult, so I’m about two-thirds of the way through, and it’s all about filling in the gaps.

I’ve never run a marathon myself, but people always say, about Mile 21, you hit some kind of emotional wall: you’ve done so much, but you’re still not quite at the end. It’s hard to maintain motivation, especially with a full-time job and bits of freelance work and other things I want to write.

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JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m going to quote your blog now. ‘Listening to a record in order is still like getting to know new friend or lover discovering what makes undefined, angry, wistful, sad, delighted.’ One of my rules of this series is that I’m not judging any choices (unless invited to) because I think music is one of the most personal things to people. You can’t help what you like. I’ve never been keen on the term ‘guilty pleasures’.

KIRSTEN PARNELL

I’m sure Nigella Lawson said something like, ‘Why should you feel guilty about anything that gives you pleasure?’ I agree with that wholeheartedly. My musical guilty pleasure – and the only reason I feel ‘guilty’ is because it’s bad feminism – is I really love John Mayer.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think we all have at least a handful of people where we have to separate the art from the artist. How do you separate the work of John Mayer from John Mayer?

KIRSTEN PARNELL

He’s what I’d call a musician’s musician. I think he’s more well-known in the US, but the people over here who do love him tend to be musicians. He’s an incredible guitarist – I’ve seen him live twice and each time cried at least once over one guitar solo or another. And he plays with really good musicians too – the first time I saw him live, as the John Mayer Trio, I went with my boyfriend of the time who was (indeed, still is) a drummer, and he was more excited about seeing drummer Steve Jordan and bassist Pino Palladino.

I love the way Mayer covers a variety of genres while always sounding distinctly like himself. There’s the standard male singer/songwriter stuff, there’s the folky album (Born and Raised), there’s the bluesy-rock stuff from the Trio, and there’s his latest record, Sob Rock, which sounds like an homage to the 80s, and sounds like Mayer is having a good time and not taking himself particularly seriously.

My stance on ‘judging the person or the work’ is something of a cop-out: everyone has to decide what they can live with. Mayer has definitely said some offensive things in interviews (though not for a really long time) and had a reputation as something of a ladies’ man, which I think put people off him or at least distracted them from his musical output. He had such a reputation a few years ago for just working his way round the women of Hollywood.

[But against that,] I have to go: I’m so sorry, I still quite like John Mayer.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I wanted to ask you about music lessons at school because you were telling me that the environment didn’t sound very inspiring for you.

KIRSTEN PARNELL

They were always on a Friday afternoon when you were at your least engaged.

This was up to year nine, the first three years of secondary school. And then I shockingly didn’t take music as one of my GCSE options. My guitar lessons weren’t at school, but with an external teacher, and I just didn’t enjoy it anymore. I’m only musical on one instrument, and even then, ‘musical’ is doing a lot of work.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was the second-last year at school to do O level music, that’s how old I am, and I just went back to look at what was different about the GCSE course, when they brought that in, 1987, and one of the key aims was ‘to expand beyond the Western classical tradition’. Now I love classical music, but it can’t just be that, particularly not if you’ve got a mixed ability class who are not all going to be in the school orchestra, or even go on to be professional musicians. You might get one or two of those in a class. But most are not going to do that, and you still have to find some way to engage them. My music teachers at school were, like, older than my parents and the idea they were going to say, ‘Well, today, we’re going to examine the work of Joy Division.’ It wasn’t going to happen.

Music was set up almost in the same way as PE as a kind of punitive form in that if you didn’t already seem to show promise, God help you really.

KIRSTEN PARNELL

Unsurprisingly, I hated PE – that was just so stressful. The only thing I was good at was hockey. No explanation why, no idea, but that was fine. Everything else. Just an exercise in torture.

JUSTIN LEWIS

There was this threat of punishment if you weren’t good enough. And the curriculum of music when I was doing it: it was basically, classical, hymns, the odd folk song, and that was about it.

KIRSTEN PARNELL

And that canon would have nothing to do with your actual experience of music in the real world. I'm now trying to remember what music we studied in those classes. I don't remember if we covered any classical music, but nothing stands out. For some reason, we studied the song ‘Cry Me a River’, the torch song from the 50s, recorded by Julie London.

JUSTIN LEWIS

The definitive version.

KIRSTEN PARNELL

And also I remember spending an awful lot of time learning about Glenn Miller. I mean, no disrespect to Glenn Miller, but I think that is just baffling. Given that this was a bunch of twelve-year-olds in about 2002.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I gather that in the 90s, they had Help! by The Beatles and The Works by Queen on the GCSE syllabus. Whereas we’d studied Lieutenant Kijé by Prokofiev in 1985/86, which did have two very familiar themes in it. One of them got borrowed by Sting for ‘Russians’, which was a hit around the same time, and another section, ‘Troika’, you always hear at Christmas because it’s in Greg Lake’s ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’. But no mention was made at any point that these had a connection to recent or current music. There was no acknowledgement about how it all linked up. And I think sometimes you have to try and join the dots, because studying and understanding classical music is a lifetime’s work.

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KIRSTEN PARNELL

In my teens there was a singer called Michelle Branch, again from America, who had this one big single, ‘Everywhere’, which quite a few people would recognise. Like Alanis Morissette, she was a female singer/ songwriter, big gutsy voice, lots of guitar-driven stuff. So completely my thing. As soon as I heard that single, again I bought the album, loved it and then came the second album, listened to that a lot.

And then she did that record with Santana, ‘The Game of Love’, and then she didn't do anything for about 14 years. She kind of disappeared. She ended up, I think, changing labels, and she met the drummer from The Black Keys at a party who remembered her. ‘What are you doing now?’ And in the end they agreed he’d finance whatever she did, so that he would own the rights to it, and now I think they're married with children so, it worked out.

But with that third album she finally toured in the UK, 2017-ish, and I saw her in London, and I was super emotional because obviously when you discover music when you’re a young teenager, as I was when I discovered her, it gets into your blood, and you're so alive to it. To go to that gig in London, finally, and just feel like I was there with my teenage self.

For a long time, I had a theory – and I still feel this – that the music you love as a young teenager stays with you, because you discovered it when you were particularly receptive to, for want of a better way of putting it, art that made you feel things. Imagine my delight when a data scientist tested out this theory for the New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opinion/sunday/favorite-songs.html

[Sample extract:

‘Consider, for example, the song “Creep” by Radiohead. This is the 164th most popular song among men who are now 38 years old. But it is not in the top 300 for the cohort born 10 years earlier or 10 years later. Note that the men who most like ‘Creep’ now were roughly 14 when the song came out in 1993. In fact, this is a consistent pattern.’]

KIRSTEN PARNELL

There’s another interesting example from that piece. The Cure’s ‘Just Like Heaven’ is a favourite song of women who were 41 when the research was done [2018] – they would have been 11 when it was released. Essentially, the research found that for men, music taste forms between the ages of 13 and 16, and for women, it’s slightly earlier – between the ages of 11 and 14. Which maps on to when puberty happens!

I find that little study reported in the NYT so pleasing. Falling in love with music at that age – 11–14 or thereabouts – is such a pure thing, and when as an adult you return to your teenage favourites, you’re back there in an instant. A lot of what I write is either for my teenage self or for the daughter I might have one day (I have to write it down because as a former teenage girl, I know how unwilling they are to take advice). I think we neglect the fragile, porous teenage selves we carry with us at our peril.

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You can follow Kirsten on Twitter at @kirstofcomms. Her blog can be found at inbetweengirl.com, and she has an occasional newsletter too.

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