Q&A: Selena Tibert On Her New Single, “In Response”
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY SAMANTHA SORIA ☆
Photo by Amir Nazar
IT ALL BEGAN WITH A VOW — Selena Tibert’s latest single, “In Response,” is precisely just that. It’s a poetic, beautiful reply to her wife Kisa’s wedding vows. Featuring intimate vocals, vulnerable lyrics, and a blend of modern alt-folk with ‘70s folk, it’s a love song that vividly depicts a life filled with simplicity and beauty, even amid personal challenges and shortcomings.
In an interview with The Luna Collective, Selena discusses her relationship with music, creating what she and her guitarist call “guitarmonies,” and the creative and technical processes behind “In Response.” Read our interview below to learn more.
Photo by Belle Shea
LUNA: Your music is described as a blend of modern jazz and ‘70s folk. What drew you to those particular styles?
SELENA: I grew up with ‘70s folk-rock and Grateful Dead. My parents listened to a lot of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Simon & Garfunkel. The jazz element of it really has been something that has been described to me. It’s not my background, but I think similar influences pop up, and that’s why people hear it that way.
I have a musical theater and jazz choir background. I think those chord structures that people recognize sometimes as being jazz-like are a combination of all those things that I grew up with, especially the theater and choir, and maybe in combination with the Grateful Dead. So it’s less of a self-descriptor that I’ve chosen, and more just that I’ve heard it so many times, and I’m like, Okay, I guess it’s jazz-like or has jazzy qualities or chords!
LUNA: Aside from your parents listening to music, do any of them have a musical background?
SELENA: Yeah, my parents are both musicians. When I was growing up, my mom was in a cover band called Somebody’s Mother, and they played music like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Simon & Garfunkel, and the Indigo Girls. She plays guitar, flute, and harmonica, and my dad started playing bass when I was in late elementary school, so that he could play in the band too. They’ve always had different cover bands, and they still have a cover band that they play in. Sometimes I feel like they have more gigs than I do! [laughs]
LUNA: Do you play with them sometimes?
SELENA: Yeah, I do! I play with my mom a lot. When I was in middle school, I did play a bit of music with my parents and their friends. It would be me, a seventh grader, writing these really intense seventh grade songs and then a 45 year-old guy on the drums and guitar [laughs]. Yeah, we had a little bit of a family band for a minute, but sometimes we still do play.
LUNA: I love that. I love a little family jam session. So of those artists that you listened to, were there specific albums that helped shape your music or sound?
SELENA: I don't know if I can think of particular album names, but growing up, I did listen to a lot of what my parents listened to. I also branched off and listened to my own stuff. I was really into Sara Bareilles for a long period of time. But now, I would say, what I’m currently listening to and I think what inspired this sound for the last few years has been artists like Madison Cunningham and Laura Marling. I really like Madison's album Revealer, but I think what's more in line with this song is actually her duet with Andrew Bird. They did an album called Cunningham Bird, and it’s an album of old Fleetwood Mac songs before [Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks] were Fleetwood Mac. It’s all cover songs, and they redid it; it was really cool. It’s very folky and a little alternative, which I love. I’m also really into Flyte right now. Their self-titled album, I really love, and I feel that has influenced where I’m writing now and the trajectory that my music’s on.
LUNA: I know you said that jazz wasn’t your background, but you mentioned the soloing, and I wonder—improvisation is as central to jazz as narrative storytelling is to folk. Is that something you play around with when creating music, and if you do, how do you balance that with the narrative focus that comes with folk?
SELENA: I think by the time a song gets to the recording stage, maybe some little things are improvisational, but most of the structure is pretty much there and plays the same every time. One of the ways I've taught myself finger picking is by playing through classical guitar books. I really like to work out of a book, and I think that those kinds of different chord structures and shapes and stuff come from that. When I'm first writing, I'm just trying to play around and find finger picking patterns that are interesting and not necessarily super expected, like, Oh, I know where this is going next. I really like to subvert that and try to make it interesting.
In the process of recording this, we thought, what if we added harmonies or “guitarmonies,” as we were calling them, to this main finger picking part that's at the beginning and comes in throughout the song? We hadn't done this before with this song, but my guitarist, Jesse Torres is a really amazing musician and was able to figure it out on the spot. I think we recorded a high harmony and a low harmony. I don't think we ended up using the low harmony because it was a little too much, but that was really fun and on the spot and improvisational.
There was a lot of stuff that [my violinist, Zoe Firn] did as well, and some of it was like, Oh, this is a really cool part that you just played. Could we play that again? But a lot of the in-between sections where the violin is doing strange things are just improvised in her first take and might not have even been in that part of the song that she improvised them, but we moved things around a little bit and found the spots that they worked in. So I guess that's how we weaved those two things together.
Photo by Fiona Carlson
LUNA: Lyrically, you treat personal and universal narratives with mythological reverence. I love this. Talk to me more about this.
SELENA: Yeah, I think that was something also that somebody had written about my lyrics, and I really liked it. It's fun, like with the jazz thing and the ‘70s folk, these are things that people pick up on [with my music and lyrics]. It's really fun to see those things and get to hang on to them a little bit. But yeah, I like that idea. I think that a lot of what I write, and maybe this song a little less so I feel like this is a little bit more direct, but a lot of my songs tend to be a bit more built in metaphors and not like, Here's the story that's happening, this is how it goes, and here's all the story beats. It's a little bit more abstract, and I think that's maybe where that comes from. There’s a bigger world that I try to build rather than having it be a narrow story.
LUNA: Are there any particular myths, symbols, metaphors, or motifs that you draw from when crafting a song?
SELENA: I would say a lot of my songs, and again, not quite this one, but I would say a lot of my songs do circle around me trying to figure out my anxiety, myself, and battling the negative voice in my head. And maybe that does show up a little bit in this song. I think with [the lyric] “No matter where we're crashing to,” no matter what song I write, even if it is happier like this one, there's still always that little seed of the undercurrent of how I operate in the world, which is from a more anxious place. That is definitely a big recurring theme throughout most of my music, but not as much through this. I’ve described it to friends as almost Sisyphus. Just trying to constantly push that rock up the hill, but can never get it up the hill. So, if I'm thinking directly of mythology, I would say that is maybe the story for most of my songs.
LUNA: Your new single “In Response” is so genuinely beautiful. It’s a song that envisions a life of simplicity and beauty in spite of one’s own challenges and shortcomings. Obviously, it’s a response to your wife’s vows, but talk to me about how it came to be. I’m guessing she’s heard it, right?
SELENA: Yes! Yeah, so we're both very creative people. I wrote a poem for my vows, and she wrote a short story. It wasn't the typical, I vow to be… She wrote this really beautiful short story about us. It was almost a time capsule, a brief look at our life when we're old. We had a couple of chickens in the coop, and one of the chickens, named Dolly, got out and was in the woods, and our cat, who we have now, is still there. I think there’s a fireplace, and a dog sleeping by it, and stuff. It was really beautiful. I didn't initially have the name, “In Response,” but once I was finished with it, I was like, Well, that's literally what it is even though those words aren’t in the song.
It was almost a little bit, in my own way, a retelling of the story that she wrote. I wrote it as a gift for our first wedding anniversary. I wrote it a little bit before the year, and then I quickly recorded a demo. She really liked it [laughs] and since then, I've been playing it a little bit, and then decided to record it. So yeah, she really likes it, and I think that's what the chickens are about because they were in the vows.
LUNA: Earlier, you mentioned the “guitarmonies.” When you described that, I was like, This is my first time hearing this!
SELENA: Honestly, it's a little bit of a joke. On another song, my guitar player and I do “guitarmonies,” and we were like, Let's do guitarmonies in this song! So I don't think it's a real word. We just made it up, and then I was like, I'll include it, because why not?
LUNA: It’s now a new word! With that, can you expand more on the technical side of things when it comes to this song? How did you choose which instruments to use? Did you know which ones you wanted from the get-go to feature on this song, and what was the creative process of bringing all these sounds together?
Photo by Amir Nazar
SELENA: Most of what I've worked on in the past, I've produced by myself, but this one I co-produced, so that was a fun experience. Jason Sill, who was my producer and engineer, did most of it at his studio. But as I said, we've been playing this song for a while, maybe a year before we started recording it, so we already had a pretty good idea of what the structure was.
Everybody knew it. Besides Yuki Nakao, who plays drums, she came in later. But the guitar, violin, and bass is basically how we play it live, except for some extra layers. We didn't have the “guitarmonies” before, and we just came up with that in the room. And then, certain parts of Zoe’s, for the violin, she was already playing, some of them we honed in on, some of them were still improvised.
We came in, and then we got to build off of that. I think in the pre-chorus we reversed the electric guitar so it has an interesting sort of sound. Some of the harmonies at the end have always been there since the demo. There are layers of electric guitars, and there's a couple of layers of acoustic guitars and layers of violin, which we're not able to do live. So that was fun to experiment with what we were doing.
LUNA: Do you plan for this song to be a standalone, or is it part of something else? Like another EP?
SELENA: Yeah! I'm thinking about what I'm doing next. I don't have anything super set in stone, but I am thinking about further going into this more organic, acoustic, folky sound and maybe doing another EP or two. I have another song called “Pine Trees and Wine.” That's also another love song. So I was thinking about doing two short EPs and having “In Response” on one of them and “Pine Trees and Wine” on the other. But I'm not quite sure when that'll happen [laughs]. Hopefully, sometime in the next year, I think maybe we'll start recording, or thinking about recording, in the fall. But yes! I hope to maybe put it in a group of songs in the future.
LUNA: For my final question, what’s something you’ve learned from creating “In Response”—musically or personally—that you think will find its way into future songs?
SELENA: I think simplicity. When [recording] all these parts for guitar and violin, we really threw so much paint at the wall. And what was interesting about it was finding the parts where we were like, How can we bring it down and craft it in a way that still has a lot of stuff going on that's interesting, but also isn't too much. So that is what I will take forward. That it's okay to have a lot of ideas, but then to really pick and choose the best ones. Chip away until you find a little bit of simplicity within the chaos of recording all these different things and finding which parts really work. Tell the story and further the song. That’s what I'm hoping to bring into the next thing that I work on.
