Julia Holter on the accidental fantasia of Materia

She’s tip-toed through post-language adventure travelogues on Loud City Song’s “In the Green Wild”, sent out a painterly, maximalist S.O.S. from a space above our heads on Aviary’s “Words I Heard”, insisted that “elsewhere” is her name now and sent herself off to sea on Have You In My Wilderness, and demanded a story to explain the “circular magic” of creation on Something in the Room She Moves. 

On that last record, her most recent, Holter seemed to let one crucial facet of her creative world slip: her feet, now those of a parent, must occasionally touch the ground. Even while oscillating between the real world and a place beyond our physical senses in her world, however, there is an overwhelming feeling of love bearing down on our necks in the space she leaves in the arrangements – threatening to flatten us if expressed too clearly. These emotions don’t quite need to be spelled out in Holter’s fantasia, but there are glimpses that make the weight difficult to bear. Maybe this is where the make believe comes in handy.

Over the phone, Julia Holter is not suspended in a fairytale, but in her kitchen baking banana bread, occasionally getting distracted talking through the ephemerality of her creative life while dealing with the concrete reality of actual life. “It's pretty impressionistic for me,” she says of her process, explaining how Something in the Room She Moves, unlike her other records, couldn’t quite taper off and leave her be once she’d wrapped up touring in support of it. “I do think in this traditional, old-school way in terms of albums, where I make the songs with the intent of them being together. I don’t always have a good, logical explanation for why I do things, though I do have to try to explain it.” She expresses this at least twice during our conversation – the fact that these spells and their power weren’t meant to be articulated and analysed aloud, though she knows she has to make the attempt for me. “It’s the instrumentation. It’s the time period. In the case of this particular record, where most of my records start their own world and do their own thing, this one is drawing from [the last record]. It carries a lot of the same poetic feelings.”

The sister record – or daughter record, perhaps – in question is Materia, named for one of the earliest songs Holter wrote for Something in the Room She Moves, appearing on that record in its simplest form with only her voice and her blue Wurlitzer. This new record, which features two other arrangements of that same title track, came about for a few different reasons, but can be traced back to the “material” Holter felt she still had to mine from “Materia” as a song, the melody for which was inspired by the music of Middle Ages nun and composer Hildegard von Bingen. 

“I don’t often write melodies like that,” she explains. “Compared to a lot of medieval chants of her time, this melody would leap more. I would say it’s hard to sing too.” She demonstrates the difference for me on the call, singing one melody where the notes simply step up and down the scale, and contrasts it to the “Materia” melody, which jumps around the scale, elasticising the wonder always slightly present in her voice to deliver a lullaby about love ballooning to a size she can hardly fathom: “My heart is loud / My heart / Tilted hello / Emptiness the dagger it hides / Placing full importance in you.” 

Though she imagined a rendition of the song with “jazzier, complex harmonies” from the start, she didn’t feel the prior album’s sessions provided her with the adequate time to capture the perfect version, if such a thing can exist. Its additional lives seemed not so much a question, but an inevitability, as Holter came back to it when the chance came to record one-off singles. These sessions eventually snowballed into recording half of the new album between tours – as if the space between the creative process and its rendering onstage pushed Holter and her band back onto fertile ground. It helped that the band from Something in the Room She Moves (including a core foundation of Elizabeth Goodfellow on drums and Devra Hoff on fretless bass) also played on Materia, creating further connective tissue between the related projects. “Materia 2” first took shape when Holter asked her friend Jessika Kenney to sing on the track with her, rearranging the melody to move between voices and moving the harmony to different instruments. “I could imagine doing it again,” she muses, “where I stretch the harmony out more in a different way, where I orchestrate it.” 

If these ephemeral, ever-evolving versions of the vision feel in line with the fantasy world to which her other records have held fast, the viscera comes back into focus with the actual sound of the band’s contribution, almost as if the players give Holter something to hit up against as she’s arranging. “Most of my music comes out of these improvisations that I do,” she says, talking about the onslaught of new material that seems to organically work once she started going back into her project files mid-tour to find new ideas, “which is probably what a lot of people do. It’s important to me to record everything, so I capture little weird things that happen. I’ve always had a pretty free approach – or free at first. Often, I’ll just press record and let it record for 20 minutes. Often, nothing good happens, so it takes a long time.” It’s surprising, given the immediacy of certain melodies in her more straightforward offerings, that they don’t just spring out of her in a divine call to the muses, ready-made. “I definitely don’t have a strategy in the way a pop artist would have a strategy,” she laughs, “or an analytical, clever approach to writing. I’m not really smart enough to make pop music, honestly.”

Yet, in that inertia between herself and the players, the resulting work isn’t formless, nor entirely avant-garde. The record title itself, according to Holter, comes out of a need to evoke the “corporeal, visceral. ‘Materia’, the word, means earthly, and the etymology involves the word ‘mother.’” From there sprouted the record’s first three new tracks: the slippery chamber jazz flair of “The Laugh is in the Eyes”, the witchy, grandiose “My Lost One”, and “Fantasy”, which feels weightless even as it slowly merges into a battle march, like the scene takes place submerged in water, rendering all gravity useless for its four-minute run. For all the particular push and pull in “My Lost One”, from a structural point of view, the movement is never erratic or threatening. It’s as if the gossamer wail of the sax appears just to guide the song’s vaguely described search party home safely. Even when the rhythm unhinges and speeds up for the conclusion, it feels designed and never without purpose – just don’t expect to analyse what that purpose might be. The lyrics alone are like a secret you’re straining to hear through a door, leaving you to beg for the key, if not force the abstract shapes into a frame of your own making.

“A sentiment or an emotion is the central, dominating force in almost all of the songs, like with the last record,” Holter agrees elliptically, never quite landing on the exact sentiment in question while walking through the development of each track, “which means that the writing process tended to be pretty conventional. I spend a lot of time on text, because it’s challenging for me. I’ve done a lot of songwriting teaching recently with students, and in interviews, people ask, ‘When do you know a song is done?’ It’s so hard to answer, but there can be this very annoying feeling that you have with a song when you know it’s not done, which isn’t the same as when you’re tired of it.” It’s an impressive feat, then, that she’s consistently able to chip away at the appropriate amount of space to suspend the emotion and hold it there, even after a period of letting it gnaw at her. It’s yet another paradoxical element of her process. 

Listening to the relatively minimal meditation of the ten-minute track “My Twin”, for instance, its length would lead you to believe that it was one of those songs she’d need to labour over to perfect. But according to Holter, it emerged as “all basically one improvisation that I did in 2020, and I edited certain things and had to write the words afterwards, but the melody and harmony are almost exactly the same as they were when I improvised it, and I just kept it. It’s very wandering, but I had a fondness for it.” Like in all of her lyrics, there is an openness left for any listener to read themselves into, holding surprising tenderness that still never quite gives itself away. It’s a magic trick evident on the last record as well: the ability to emote without spilling blood, to express a visceral experience without having to hold a receiver’s hand. Even in the lyrics’ most childlike turns (“This life I see here, this good life so nice I cry my eyes out / It starts when I’m right here / These wonderful things I’ve never known”), each image she draws out imprints itself against the spare arrangement, making every breath sound intentional. 

By the time Holter is calling for her titular twin to “Sing out, sing out, sing out,” at the song’s close, there’s no longer any element of mystery to the “poetic feelings” she’d worked so hard to condense and release just so – only the light she lets touch the open space she leaves. In those blanks we’re left to fill in, nothing is illegible or imagined like I might have imagined her fairytale world would be at one point in my time following her work. Sometimes, the folklore you’re attempting to decode in a song might only be an artist checking their oven to see if they’ve burned their banana bread, but that doesn’t make the image any less worthy of song. In Julia Holter’s fantasy world, every jumping melody is another day conquered, and every tempo bending with the tides is a search for the millions of lives you can pull out of any song you write.