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sinceileftyoublog · 1 year

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Heather Trost Interview: Processing Descent Through Creativity

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Many pandemic records, no matter how positive they may seem on the surface, nonetheless leak a creeping sense of dread, or at least the unease of the unknown. Heather Trost’s Desert Flowers (Ba Da Bing!) is not one of those records. Maybe it helped that it was technically Trost’s second record finished during COVID, the first being 2020′s Petrichor. But centering around the very idea of oases, growth in a place that’s not supposed to support it, Desert Flowers finds utopia in familial comforts, dreams, and nature, no matter how imperfect. If the psychedelia its name suggests, connotes an overabundance of idealism, the album itself is anything but, marked by determined language and tactile instrumentation.

Desert Flowers simply flows. Opener “Frog and Toad are Friends” is the warm-up sci-fi surf instrumental. “The Devil Never Sleeps” is menacing for a moment only as a reminder for Trost to listen to her gut, her vocals otherwise carried by buzzing guitars and rolling drums. “Blue Fish”, whose arpeggiated wobbly synth line appeared as a motif in Peter Strickland’s film Flux Gourmet, is based on Trost’s dream of a blue fish, thrashing about in a bird’s mouth, speaking to her. “You Always Gave Me Succor” references a childhood encounter with a coyote. Throughout Desert Flowers, Trost doesn’t attempt to explain her relationship with flora and fauna; rather, she finds solace marveling at their very existence.

During our phone conversation last fall, Trost radiated the same enthusiasm for the natural world that appears on Desert Flowers. We went off on minutes-long tangents about our favorite local wildlife refuges, and further talked about her relationship to literature from Greek mythology to, yes, the Frog and Toad series. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: Are desert flowers a metaphor for creating during a global pandemic?

Heather Trost: Yeah, I think so. Because I grew up in the desert, I have a lot of desert metaphors rolling around my brain, and the pandemic was a social desert but an opportunity. Obviously, I would have preferred not to have all the death and suffering of the pandemic, but it helped my creative process to have the time and the space to really sink in, be with myself, and write the lyrics and the melodies in a way that was unhindered by the normal business of life.

SILY: A lot of folks, whether they lived in an urban or rural environment, got a newfound appreciation for and became more connected to nature during the pandemic. Do you feel like that happened to you, especially as it pertains to your music?

HT: I’ve always been really connected to nature, but I had the time and space to take walks or be by a river or go to the mountains or go camping. It definitely helped.

SILY: What’s your relationship to the Frog and Toad book series?

HT: It’s a beautiful book [series]. I actually didn’t discover it until I was an adult, but I fell in love with these two characters. Toad is this ornery character who needs a lot of help coming out of his [shell,] and Frog is so carefree and filled with joy. He’s just like, “Look, Toad, it’s spring! Here are some cookies!” He’s so sweet. I feel like they’re the perfect friends.

SILY: Do you follow the Twitter account that every 3 hours Tweets out random lines from the book?

HT: [gasps] No!

SILY: It’s such a funny juxtaposition on the timeline with the hellish political posts or whatever you normally see. Like you say, it’s so carefree and matter-of-fact. A lot of those lines are simple observations and funny because of it. There’s no opinion.

HT: It’s just, “Time to get out of bed.” I’m definitely gonna have to follow that.

SILY: How did your song end up as a motif in Flux Gourmet?

HT: Peter Strickland is a very distinct filmmaker. He was part of this compilation of short horror films that A Hawk and a Hacksaw composed the music for. He made a music video for us for our last record. He came to us with Flux Gourmet, which is almost this incredible inside joke that he lets everybody in on. He was in a band like the characters in the movie, noise musicians that create sounds while cooking. It’s almost autobiographical. He has this amazing ability to create these worlds. I was writing “Blue Fish” when he approached us to do a song for the film, so I took the main theme and created different remixes of it for different scenes in the film.

SILY: Had you seen the film before sending in your music?

HT: Yes. He gave us an early version of the film, and [A Hawk and a Hacksaw and life partner] Jeremy [Barnes] and I fit it to the different scenes and created mixes for the different parts of the film where the music was used.

SILY: Was “Blue Fish” finished at the time?

HT: It was almost finished.

SILY: Did the experience of doing the work for Flux Gourmet influence the final version of the song?

HT: A little bit. It helped visualize the sonic world more concretely, in a way. It was like this dialogue back and forth between the film and the song.

SILY: What about the word “succor” made you choose it for “You Always Gave Me Succor”? You don’t often see that word in popular music.

HT: I wrote the chorus years ago, “You always gave me succor.” At the time, I was going through a lot of healing with my relationship with my mom. My mom is great, and I love her, but moms are not perfect, so it was this idea that even though she wasn’t always able to be there for me, she would always be able to give me succor if I needed comfort. One of my earliest memories is her giving me baby Tylenol when I was little. I was thinking about that, and it developed into this more archetypal mother, mother earth thing that we can take comfort in.

That then reminded me of a time when I was 9 and camping in her backyard. I woke up and looked out the tent, and there was a coyote feet from our tent. We locked eyes. It was this electric current between myself and this coyote. Time stopped, and everything dissolved. I had this deep moment with this wild animal. That always kind of stayed with me. I see the coyote as a psychopomp, this guide to the unconscious and the underworld. It’s always been an important symbol to me.

SILY: Do you connect the experience of the coyote with your mom?

HT: I do because it happened when I was so young. It was this early memory, like the early memory of her giving me comfort. It was a moment where I realized you can find the same kind of solace and comfort in other creatures besides my mom.

SILY: I assume the following track, “Despoina”, is named after the Greek goddess. What’s your relationship with that mythology in general?

HT: When I wrote “Despoina”, I was reading about the myth of Persephone. There’s a line in the song, “May the grave of your suffering be buried at long last and descend like Persephone / She turns each tear into a seed.” This idea that, like Persephone, you can go into the underworld. In the myth, she eats 6 pomegranate seeds, which ties her to Hades, and she has to stay there for 6 months, which is why the Greeks believe fall and winter happen. I think it kind of goes along with the idea of creating in a global pandemic or situation where sometimes you have to go into the underworld to mine. You take these bitter seeds and turn them into something of your soul or something creative that comes out. I use those moments of descent and process them through my creativity. That myth really corresponds to moments of grief and sadness in our own lives.

SILY: Do you have a favorite track on here?

HT: “Sandcastles”, and I really like “Blue Fish” too.

SILY: “Sandcastles” is pretty groovy, and the line about “Humanity’s violent creations” melting “back into the mountain and the oceans,” also reminds me of the pandemic on a smaller scale, like when wildlife was appearing in places it hadn’t been in forever.

HT: Definitely!

SILY: What’s the story behind the cover art?

HT: It’s actually a closeup of a mural that my friend Nanibah Chacon painted. The mural is actually at a wildlife refuge near my house. The larger picture is a picture of these animals and children together in a beautiful scene with flowers and wildlife that I like to go to a lot and be in nature.

SILY: What else is next for you in the short and long term?

HT: I definitely want to play shows around this record. I’m hoping to do some touring. I’m always writing songs, so I’ve already started working on new ones. We’ll see: I’ll probably start recording in a little bit. Maybe another record? Maybe an EP? I’m not sure yet.

SILY: Anything you’ve been reading, watching, or listening to lately that’s caught your attention?

HT: “The Debutante” is based on the Leonora Carrington short story of the same title. I read her novel The Hearing Trumpet and then discovered her short stories and wrote that song. I’ve been watching Reservation Dogs. I really Hollie Cook’s record Happy Hour. I’ve been jamming that a lot recently. I recently bought this really funny record, The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds. It’s music that Mort Garson composed for the twelve zodiac signs. Jeremy looked it up online, and realized members of the Wrecking Crew played on it. Unfortunately, it gets ruined by this guy Jacques Wilson citing poetry about the Zodiac signs over it. The music is so amazing.

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