Side A. You set your needle on the very edge of the record and the sound of crackling starts to fracture your reality. Your world dissolves and you’re in a new dimension as a dreamy piano ballad begins your journey. You live within the blistering heat of these new, impetuous moments, and fall in and out of love whimsically. In this new dimension, you’re a clean slate, impressionable and pure. As you travel, you lose your sense of time and urgency, and you become small to avoid imminent heartbreak, so small that you could disappear in the blink of an eye. When you think that ominous feeling of doom is gone, it follows you the way that thunder always follows lightning. A chime and silence.
Side B. You set your needle on the very edge of the record and the sound of crackling starts to fracture your new reality. Time feels different now. You feel heavier and you walk with purpose. You write to a friend to see if he’s travelled to this new world with you or to a world of his own creation. When he doesn’t respond to your calling, this illusive world darkens and turns cold. There are moments when you forget the malicious things you’ve done. You swear that there are two sides of yourself, you and a shadowy entity. Memories of your previous world are hazy and you feel lost as this one disintegrates around you in fire and smoke. And when you say goodbye and the piano melody carries you back home, you feel bewildered and unsettled.
This is Get Z To A Nunnery.
TO FORGET YOU
I know Patrick Warren arranged this song specifically, does he arrange all of your music?
So, he did all the string arrangements for the record. Going in to making this record, I kind of knew from the beginning that I wanted it to be mostly me and finger-picking [guitar] and piano and kind of let the string arrangements be the band. So, I made him a playlist of references for what I wanted the strings to sound like. And so it’s Dusty Springfield, Harry Nilsson, Serge Gainsbourg, Leonard Cohen, Scott Walker, Nico, the Turtles, the Shirelles, France Gall, Cliff Richard, Mary Hopkin, Marianne Faithfull, Nancy Sinatra, Colin Blunstone, Audrey Hepburn (Henry Mancini), Bobbie Gentry, the Beatles…
A friend of mine said that ‘Into the Night’ sounds like a dark nursery rhyme, and it sounds like ‘Some Velvet Morning’ by Nancy Sinatra.
‘Some Velvet Morning’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. All of my songs have this strange undertone, like they sound like they could be a little bit from a musical and also always just a little Jewish.
I could see that, with all the minor keys.
Yeah, everything just has a little Fiddler on the Roof energy…
I also was wondering, because during this part here [final chorus], I was wondering if you ever get overly emotional when you’re recording songs? Do you ever cry your eyes out and you have to re-take?
So, I love that you asked that. It’s a huge problem. There’s no song I’ve ever recorded where I haven’t stopped and broken down and started crying ever. Because it’s like I have to get into it enough to be there, but I have to still keep it contained, because if I let go for a second, I instantly start sobbing, no matter what I’m singing about. It’s weird, I’m so emotionally unstable in kind of a good way, but I cry at any emotion. I cry at happiness, sadness, things being funny, just anything emotional. So it’s like my system overloads.
I think it’s because we’re empaths and we just feel everything to that degree. When I start singing songs…they could be about literally anything, and I’m just sobbing immediately.
Yeah, there’s certain records, too, that I just can’t sing along to without just stopping. The third Rilo Kiley album, More Adventurous, I can’t sing a single one of those songs without instantly bursting into tears. It just physically does something to me…just completely fucks me up, since the first time I heard it. I used to just put it on in the car and sing along and just sob uncontrollably for like the entire record.
I FALL FOR THE SAME FACE EVERY TIME
I only have one question: what is the stupidest lie that a man has ever told you and you caught him in?
Honestly, I have no clue. I implicitly trust everyone all the time, and I often date liars and people who cheat on me. But, I never learn my lesson. I inherently think that everyone is always telling the truth, and no amount of subterfuge can change my mind. The irony also is that I’m an amazing liar. So, it’s like, we would think that I would know, but I just don’t. I will so rarely catch people in a lie, it’s more like I’ll just be totally oblivious, and then finally, they’ll fess up or someone else will tell me. It’s why magic is not thrilling for me, because when I go to a magic show and they’re like, ‘I’m gonna pick your card’ and then they do, I’m like, ‘So, you did exactly what you said you were gonna do.’ I just believe it’s gonna happen, so it’s not surprising to me. I’m like, ‘This isn’t magic, you just kept your word.’
Finally, someone who didn’t lie to me! Maybe you should be dating magicians. Or maybe not because then they would hide everything from you because they have their secrets.
Yeah, the line between the musician and magician is pretty thin. Also, I dated an actor who was fucking obsessed with magic and… it’s a little off-brand for me.
I mean, it’s a beautiful song even though we’ve heard it for a few years now. I still really like it.
You know, me too. So, the recording of this song is actually really one of my favorites on the record, because Ethan [Gruska] is playing piano, and then Blake Mills is playing the guitar that sounds like a harp. And it’s really interesting playing, and the vocal sound is this piece of outboard gear called an eventide. It’s sort of like a doubler that separates your voice, but it was a little bit broken, so there’s this little crackle on it, and it’s not really supposed to happen, but I love it. Of course, my favorite sound on the record was just a broken piece of outboard gear, as it always is. The mistakes are, in my experience, always my favorite part of records.
So, does Ethan play the piano for every song?
He plays on ‘the Bad List’ and he plays on ‘Into the Night’, although I wrote that piano part. I wrote that song just as an instrumental piece, but he just plays better than I do, so he played it. But, I play the piano on ‘Berg and I.’
TIME FLIES
The way this song was written was actually kind of interesting. I was dating Joe [Keefe] at the time, and he was in the other room, finger-picking this guitar part and was like, ‘Fuck, that’s really cool.’ So, I tried to figure out how to play it, but just sort of bastardized it and turned it into something completely different. I was like, ‘Babe, I stole this thing and broke it and now it’s mine.’ I wrote that song with that part that he had been working on, and then he sat down with me and he wrote the pre-choruses, and then we sang the part in harmony together. It was just like this is…this is some shit, right? He’s got such a beautiful voice. I think I’m gonna do my next record entirely with him because he’s produced a couple of songs so far, and they’re really cool sounding. You know me, just keep all the ex-boyfriends around, it’s what I do.
So, the flow so far for this record is very dreamy, and I love that. I also love how there’s like a split between the sounds. Because you get to ‘Into the Night’ and then ‘Calm Before the Storm’ has a completely different sound in a way. But, I was wondering, when you’re writing instrumentals, do you hear it differently in your head? Have you ever made complete changes between your head, performing it live, and recording it?
That’s a good question. It’s really different with each song. With this song, we just wrote it with just me and Joe playing guitar. Most of the time when I write songs, I don’t write just instrumentals or just lyrics first, I write it all at once, and it just kind of falls out and I’m just like, ‘I’m done, but I have no recollection of how I did this.’ It’s like I black out. But, there are some moments like ‘Into the Night’ where I just wrote a whole piano piece, just trying to sound a little like Chopin, and then I played it for Ethan actually, and he said, ‘You should write a song over this, you already have your melody, it’s already all there. Just write lyrics.’ And so, I sat down and did that. But for something like ‘Time Flies,’ we wrote those harmonies at the time, we wrote the whole song with just two guitars, and then when we got in the studio, Ethan kind of went down the rabbit hole of making it sound really Twin Peaks, hence the floaty keyboards and the baritone part.
INTO THE NIGHT
So, this is a song that started as just being a piano piece. I had already written a few lyrics years ago about sort of what it could potentially be, but then I started writing and just sort of realized it’s…Yeah, this one is a trippy song because it’s kind of about…I kind of had this terrible eating disorder for many years, and I realized it was like my response when things are really terrible is to try to get really small. I think when things get really, really bad in the world, there’s an instinct to hide and to get small, and I realized that that was kind of what I was doing, just trying to make myself smaller and smaller because everything around me was so big and so bad. That is kind of what that song is about, that ‘when life got too heavy, I got too light.’ It’s definitely one of my favorites on the record because it’s so personal, and dark and emo.
It is, it’s like a gothic, indie emo. In a baroque kind of way.
Do you know how to read sheet music, or do you just go with it?
I used to. I grew up playing piano and I read music, and I played classical music. And as soon as I started playing guitar, I was like, ‘I can just figure out how to play rock songs and then I can write my own.’ I just fully stopped, which is really tragic because I should take that back up. If I gave myself a week to just re-learn how to read music, I could do it so easily, but I’m just so lazy.
CALM BEFORE THE STORM
Alright, so like I said before, the tone changes for the album. Did it take a while to figure out the order of the tracks that you wanted, or did you just throw it together?
Yeah, no, I’m big about the order on my records. We finished [this record] a year ago, but there were more songs and different songs on the record than what it is now. ‘All Out of Tears’ was on it, and a couple of other songs that were just outside of the world of what this record is, and that made it a little less cohesive. I sat down and thought, ‘I need to just focus on what the heart of this record is and just make it that.’ Because as it is now, the tone changes subtly and it takes you on a journey. I really love records that once you sit down in the world of them, you are just in that world and nothing takes you out of it, so that was kinda what I tried to do with this. I had to figure out what this record really was and take off the songs that didn’t really gel with that. It definitely took a while and I really like good transitions, that’s a big thing for me.
I think it’s nice the way the first half of the record is really sort of dreamy, and then ‘Calm Before the Storm’ is the last song on the first side [of the vinyl], and it feels like it’s about to take you to a new place. This is the oldest song on the record. I wrote this when I was 20, which is cool because the songs on this record span an entire decade. I’ve been in bands this whole time and just never fucking made my solo record. [‘Calm Before the Storm’] is about my boyfriend at the time, and I remember I was watching a Frank Sinatra movie, and I can’t remember what the movie was, but I watched it and I was like, ‘I want to write a song like this.’ So, when I wrote ‘Calm Before the Storm,’ I wrote it imagining it being like a Frank Sinatra song in a musical.
And then, yeah, the string arrangement, I was just like, ‘Make it as much like ‘Moon River’ as possible, I just want it to feel like that.’ And so at the end, there is like a bell chime, that is really similar at the end of ‘Moon River,’ and it’s nice, because it’s like DING and it’s the end of side one.
So, I did have one question, you usually have someone singing with you live, is there someone singing on the studio recording?
Yeah, that’s Phoebe Bridgers.
LITTLE COLONEL
This is probably one of my favorites on the record, it sounds like you’re reading a novel. It’s so literary, in a way.
That is because I wrote this song in one night, and a couple of my friends were on tour together and I had just written a song called ‘Lazarus,’ for my friend Dave Rawlings. Basically, how I started writing this record was I sang on Cassadaga, the Bright Eyes record, and at the time, Bright Eyes was touring, and Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings were opening for them, and me and [Jason] Boesel (JJAMZ) went out and visited them on tour. I met Gil and Dave and we all hung out and when we all got back to LA, we would have these parties that were just song circles. It was like [Alex] Greenwald (Phantom Planet, Phases, JJAMZ) and me and Boesel and Gil and Dave and Conor [Oberst] (Bright Eyes), and just really interesting groups of people, and we would just have these parties where we would all drink and sit in a circle, and everyone would just play a song. I had never done that before. I was always in a band and I’d never written songs that I could just play alone, so that’s kind of how I started writing these songs. I was like, ‘I’m going to these parties, and I’d like to be able to play a song and impress these people that I love.’ And so ‘Lazarus’ was one of the early ones, which is a song that I wrote about me and Dave being friends and me telling him to move to LA, and Conor heard ‘Lazarus’ and was like, ‘Fuck, that song is so sick, why don’t you write me a sick song?’ Both of them were on tour together, and I was in my house and I wrote a ‘Little Colonel’ in 30 minutes and recorded it and sent it to them and they were on the bus. And I wrote it as a letter to a friend on tour, it’s not like me reflecting on my life. The lyrics have evolved a bit over time, but that was the thing: a song was requested, and so I was like, ‘Alright, give me an hour.’
Oh, and that’s Phoebe Bridgers singing on this one, as well.
BERG AND I
Have you ever performed this one live?
I have! I’ve actually played it at a few shows. ‘Berg and I’ is a song…There is a short story by [Jorge Luis] Borges called ‘Borges and I.’
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
I read this short story and I started playing this game through email where you change all the information to be about you, the other one, the one called Berg. So that’s how this started, and I would change all the information in the details so that they’re my taste and what I do and then send it to a person, and then they do it about themselves and send that to another person. So we had this long email chain going on, the Borges Game. He’s [Borges] sort of talking about the difference between who is Borges as a man and who is Borges as a figure, as a writer, as the creator of this art. But, I love that concept of the self as the self and the self as Other, and I turned it into the song itself. I started writing the song when I was really young, when I was like in my early 20s, on tour with the Like.
We were a teenage girl band, just traveling all over the world, and we just raged. The song is technically about blacking out and cheating on my boyfriend, but through the lens of Borges. I started getting pretty dark and destructive in some of my behaviors and a lot of it was being fucked up and doing things that I wouldn’t normally do, but then realizing that that is still me, which one is me? It’s the me that blacks out and does destructive, terrible things, is that me or is it me when I sober up and I’m like, ‘Who the fuck is this person? What did she do?’ Or is it both of us, or is it…None of us.
CHARADES
Who’s singing on ‘Charades?’
‘Charades’ is also Phoebe. And then the guy singing is a singer named Malcom McRae from a band called More that my dad produced, who are fucking awesome. They recently put out two singles and their record will be coming out probably next year. But, they’re so good. He sounds like Roy Orbison, you’re just like, ‘How the fuck does a modern person sing like this?’
How do you decide who you want to feature on your songs?
Honestly, yeah, it takes sitting down and trying to visualize it, because I write all these harmonies when I’m writing the song and I sing all of them, so then when it comes time to thinking about who could sing this, I just think about people’s voices and try to imagine who would do this better than me.
It’s kind of hard to even explain what it’s about. I wrote it when Ryan [Ross] (Panic! At The Disco, The Young Veins) and I were together, and I remember sitting on the floor in the living room while he was not there and writing this song. I was just at a point where I was so kind of disengaged from the gravity of life. It was around the time when we were dating and both of our bands broke up at the same time, and we were just kind of lost. And it’s weird when you’re in a band for that long, that starts that young. You know, I started the Like when I was 15 and we broke up 10 years later. So, when that happens, it’s like your entire identity is so tied up in it that trying to imagine what your life is without it just shreds the fabric of your reality, and I think there was a while where I just kind of… I felt like I was other… to myself. Both of us were just kind of floating in this life without being tethered to any of the things we once understood.
I built my identity really strongly and really knew who I was very young, and so when that band broke up, it was just like, ‘Oh, I am at sea, and I know how to swim, but I don’t know how to get back to shore.’ I think that was the thing, we were both just pretending that we were still tethered to the earth when clearly we were just kind of floating in uncertainty.
So, I did take to Twitter for some questions and there’s one from @castielspn. They asked if there’s any influence from a movie or book specifically for the album’s aesthetic. So, visually or even musically.
The Get Z To A Nunnery is clearly on purpose, so I think there’s an element of Shakespearean themes pretty prevalent throughout this record and a feeling of tragic gravity in that way. Movie-wise, my old bio was like, ‘This record sounds like if Laura Palmer didn’t die and Roman Polanski made a movie about her 20s, scored by André Previn, with lyrics by Scott Walker, sung by Dusty Springfield,’ and that kind of sums it up.
Do you have music video ideas for every song and will you execute them?
So, I already made them. On Friday, when my record comes out, I made a whole visual album. It was an interesting quarantine project, so it starts with the ‘To Forget You’ video, but it’s a whole 37-minute movie. It’s the whole record. And I basically made videos the only way I could in quarantine, so I have ‘To Forget You’, that’s already done. I had Lauren [Rothery] re-edit footage from ‘The Bad List’ that we didn’t use to make a new video for [that], and my grandmother gave me home movies. She and her husband were best friends with Rod Serling, the narrator and creator of The Twilight Zone, and so I had these home movies of them and Rod Serling and his wife in the 60s, on vacation in Europe. So, that’s one of the videos for ‘Time Flies,’ and then for all the other videos, I basically stayed up all night for two days in a row just researching copyright laws and what is public domain, and I found a bunch of movies and home videos and crazy stuff that’s public domain, and so I re-edited all these movies into being videos for my songs.
So, like the original Night of the Living Dead is public domain, so I edited the whole movie into being a video for ‘Berg and I’ And there’s a movie starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and it’s really crazy what is public domain, but so it’s basically this long movie that goes from home videos to actual videos to movies, and the whole thing has subtitles that look just like normal subtitles, but they’re all the lyrics. It’s a really cool way to experience the record because you get to see all the lyrics. You know, it’s a hard thing to just sit in your room and just listen to an album. It’s nice to have some other sensory input, so it’ll be a perfect thing to just put on TV and you get to see all the lyrics, there are visuals to everything, and it’s just the whole record.
So did you edit yourself or did you have someone edit it?
I edited most of it. I learned how to edit during quarantine. I edited most of them and Molly [Adams] edited a couple and actually helped me construct the whole thing and put it all together. We’re just in the process of finishing that. So, that will premiere on Friday with the record.
EPILOGUE
Did you write this piece yourself?
So, ‘Epilogue’ is just the string arrangement from ‘Little Colonel’. So, when we were making the record, we made instrumentals for every song, but on ‘Little Colonel,’ I played the guitar and sang at the same time, so there’s no isolated guitar part. So, when we made the instrumental, it’s just the strings and a little bit of piano flourishes, and we listened to it, we were like [surprised look]. It’s kind of my favorite piece on the record, it’s so fucking beautiful, and we were all really excited about it at the time. Then, when I went and shifted the whole focus of the record to just being this world, I listened to it again, I was like, ‘This should be our ending.’
It was kind of the moment, because I re sequenced the whole [record] to try to make sense of it and make it flow, and then I was like, ‘Okay.’
Because it ends with ‘The Bad List’ and that feels like the emotional end of the record when me and Ryan sing, ‘Say goodbye.’ and then that literally is the epilogue. All of the credits for the video go up over ‘Epilogue’ and it just feels like the end where you’re kind of left going like, ‘What just happened?’ And it’s such a creeping feeling of dread, that piece of music, too. It’s like when you read a book and you finish it and you feel just really unsettled, that’s kind of what that song sounds like to me.
Be sure to follow Z Berg on Instagram and Twitter, and order her debut album Get Z To A Nunnery here!
