Do you view it as a challenge to move listeners without them having to immediately buy into the words?

I often don’t think about the audience. That’s terrible, isn’t it?

That was my next question for you. How heavily you consider the perception.

I don’t think a lot about audience in the moment when I’m writing, but I’ll listen back and I’ll say, Oh, that feels emotional. Yeah, I can put that out in the world. It’s taken me a long time to release a lot of the stuff I’ve written. It’s really old, a lot of my music, that then is reworked, or something’s put on top, or a bit of lead. It’s never really meant to be heard, my solo stuff, but sometimes it just finds its way out there through different channels. I often record on my own at home, and people send me stuff, and I send it back, I don’t use my computer much but I do use it for that. There’s hours of recording sessions to go through, and perhaps there’s one little bit, and that might be the song. Or it’s the first take. So you’re not really thinking so much about it in the world. The world is always there, I guess. I’m definitely not trying deliberately to challenge the audience.

Is there a particular song on this record that took a lot of takes? Where you had that feeling, when you’re still in the studio and you just can’t seem to leave?

They’re almost more periods in my life where things have happened, and then I’ve had a reaction to it. That’s often how I write music. Not so much painting—painting’s more like a continual inquiry. Songs are often reactions to relationships, or whatever. I’ve been listening back to them all. They’re all pretty immediate. They all just sort of came out. But maybe there was a little, you know, figuring out a riff, or discarding a riff, or playing around with melodies and then discarding it and then keeping something. I never listen back much whilst writing. I just keep going. When I’m recording, I don’t rewind, I just press record, and then it’s hours of short-term memory. Remembering what happened, and then playing around with it a bit more. They’re all pretty much the same. I think a couple of tracks were recorded when my son was born, and I had to be really quiet. I was forced to sing quite quietly. On maybe “Peaceful,” was it? I quite like the songs that maybe people aren’t gonna like the most, like “Last Hay.” It’s me, just singing in the daytime, and it’s a different kind of emotion. I can’t actually remember any of them being hard work. The songs that often make it onto records are moments where I felt it was working.

I have a friend who’s an incredible songwriter, and I always joke that he’s God’s mouthpiece, because things just sort of tumble out of him. He’s great at not being too precious. But I don’t want to remove his agency. When I say that, I sometimes feel bad, like it maybe strips him of something.

It makes sense. I think songwriting is very traditional. You do sit down, and you write poetry. My songwriting is quite traditional. I definitely don’t think I’m that experimental, which has always been my thing, being very fixed in the experimental music world. I do tend to just sit down like a songwriter and goof around, and write music. I’m not pressing loads of pedals. The question to me always is what is experimental, I guess.

You’ve made paintings inspired by music. How often does the inverse happen, where a painting informs a song?

I don’t really paint from music. Where did you read that?

Well, you made drawings inspired by the shapes of guitars.

When I paint, I listen to music, but I don’t think about anything obviously musical when I paint, usually. I just paint, and then I just keep going into the unknown with it, I would say it’s more lyrical. I’m learning from painting that it’s really important to let go of the control and just let it be a thing in itself. Accepting that that’s me, rather than going, Oh, I’m gonna put that away, I’m not gonna look at that for ages. It teaches me to reapproach the work with a sense of self, which maybe I used to not do because I’d see it as more of a time-based thing which you could hide on your computer. With my paintings, it’s really in your face. It’s there, and you can’t ignore it. It teaches me to go back, and work into the song in a way that’s sort of sculptural, with lead guitars, or harmonies. But I’m able to trust in the moment a bit. I always have done that with my music in a way, but maybe now it feels like they’re quite linked up in terms of the simplicity of the way I work within both fields.

Do they use the same part of your brain?

Definitely. They do now. I don’t know if they always did, because I was learning for years. I was just experimenting, and now I’m releasing stuff that I wrote in those moments of experimentation. But I feel like, through doing that for a long time, they’ve just naturally synced up.

I’m curious about how you feel about people owning your paintings, because that feels so different to me than someone owning a CD or vinyl.

I’m really interested in that, and I have been for a long time. That’s partly why I’ve always tried to have a foot in both worlds. I just wrote a piece about this painter and this conversation she has with Mike Kelley, where she talks about wanting to make art that behaves like music, and why that gets on people’s nerves. I was in the art world quite young, sort of thrown into it and doing these museum shows and hanging out with critics. It was quite terrifying, the way people spoke, the way people revered art. I remember going to this music festival with Elisa Ambrogio from The Magik Markers, and hanging out with Sonic Youth. I remember making a drawing for my friend Byron Coley who I met there, and it was this really scratty drawing of this girl. It was quite funny, and I remember thinking this is cool and they know a lot about art. I met James Ferraro there, and we became good friends, and I had all these weird meetings, and watched shows there that changed my life, because I realized that music could be just as experimental as the art world, and maybe the parties were slightly more fun. I felt like it was a bit more free. I could just move my body and I didn’t have to think about what I was saying or what I was thinking. I don’t know if it’s because of the way I was raised, but I didn’t really grow up with art around me. I didn’t grow up in a big, major city. I found sometimes that music or the club or the venue space felt a bit more interesting at that point, but I still was very much interested in the art world, and wanted to go back into it, and started to research the crossovers. I wanted to understand how the two could be connected. Is that what we were talking about?

I like where it’s going.

For the question, my work stayed quite separate. That’s something I became very aware of. I didn’t want to start playing noise music in galleries. I was this weird solo singer singing songs about emotions, I wanted to be like Johnny Cash. I almost feel like I’ve never really fit in either world. I have in a very specific way, but not in an obvious way, which I think I quite enjoy.

How have you navigated, in both worlds, dealing with the professional critics that you talked about?

Oh yeah, because you were talking about money when owning a painting or a CD? I didn’t answer that question. With painting and music, I try not to think about the money. I go away from the money and just try to find a way to make it work.

I think I’m less curious about the money, and more curious about the ownership that someone would have over a physical piece of your work.

My work is kind of strange. I could have perhaps made more commercial turns in my art career, but I decided to just stay true to what felt right. I guess you could still say it’s commercial, but this ownership thing ... I think when I was very young, it used to upset me, the thought of not being able to see them ever again like loved ones you can’t see. I’d be very upset for about ten seconds, I’d be almost the most devastated I’ve ever felt. But then I quickly was like, nope, I’m fine. I can deal with this. I learned to deal with that as a way to keep going, but also not to worry if things leave the studio or stay in the studio. It’s a continual body of work, that you remember everything you’ve ever made. With painting, I feel like you can remember it really well. With music, I do forget about what I’ve written. If you asked me to play some songs, I wouldn’t know how to play them, not that I’d ever know how to paint the same work, but I can remember the image.

How did you land on the Blurrr cover? It’s the same type of casual image as the Painting Stupid Girls artwork, but it almost feels less intimate to me.

A lot of my images are very intimate moments with people, or at concerts, when I was playing somewhere, away from loved ones. They’re kind of deliberately unexplainable. I’ve always liked that image because it looks like I have little horns.

Is this a selfie? Did you take this yourself?

Yeah, a while ago. I think I was on tour with someone, and the lighting was crazy, and I was just experimenting with the lights. I was making lots of films, as well. None of them were particularly interesting. But I don’t really think I’m a photographer. I’m not very good at photography. I find album sleeves kind of hard, so I always go for this weird in-between space. It’s almost like a drawing. It’s supposed to be a bit off, a bit wrong. But I like it. I like the shapes. Certain pictures of me remind me of my granny, who I was quite close with, who I loved.

That’s beautiful.

Her history was quite interesting. She had this look. And I sometimes look for my family or my mum. I often look a little bit like different people when it’s more blurry. But the title is different. The title comes from a painterly reference.

Nina Interviews - The Teenagers

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