Ismay

Hellman, a California-based singer/songwriter who records as ISMAY, found that in producer Sam Cohen (Kevin Morby, Norah Jones, Rhett Miller), and the result is Half Truth, out now on Fossil Records. It's the farthest Hellman has traveled from the bluegrass world they grew up in—raised backstage at their grandfather's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival—co-writing nearly half the record and letting go of the technical precision that had long been their comfort zone.

The album also marks a new approach to writing for Hellman. Many of the LP's ten tracks began as poems, a discipline Hellman picked up to become a better lyricist, shaped by the same inquiry into craft driving Finding Lucinda, their documentary project on Lucinda Williams. Hellman was fresh off Woollystar, the intimate festival they co-organize with Margo Cilker, when we spoke.

Analogue: You just finished Woollystar. What's the postmortem on that?

Avery Hellman: My sort of family business has sort of become music festivals. I came of age working at music festivals and understanding the inner workings. And so it was always a dream of mine to kind of host the ideal festival in my eyes. The music is first and foremost, but thinking a lot about the attendees' experience and their connection with music. My dream was to have it in a remote area, have it be an intimate festival, really high-quality music, but not crowded. I grew up going to a lot of really crowded festivals. I got tired of it.

We just finished on Sunday, and it was fantastic. Anybody who organizes events knows that up until you're about 70% of the way done, you're just completely stressing and crossing your fingers that nothing bad happens. But I'm really happy with how it went. It's rewarding to get to not only share my album and my music, but know that I'm allowing other people to do the same and have a great experience watching music.

Analogue: Is there a greater joy in serving as a platform for others or getting your own music out there?

Avery: Most humans are programmed to get a lot more satisfaction out of serving others than themselves, but we're also programmed to need self-expression. You can't really have one without the other. A lot of people who end up working in other parts of the music business start out as musicians, and sometimes they stop playing music. For me, it's important to not sideline my own music. And when I put on my festival, I know it's the ideal situation to put on my own set, which is really cool. It's allowing oneself to be part of a whole, but also allowing oneself to shine in your own right.

Analogue: You've talked about poetry as a way into this album. How did that happen?

Avery: When I was about 25, seven years ago or so, I picked up the biography of Leonard Cohen. I know a lot of his songs, but I hadn't realized that he had started as a poet and had been a celebrated and accomplished poet before he became a songwriter. And I was like, wait a minute, that's why his songs are so good. And then I did this documentary trip tracing the roots of Lucinda Williams. I saw that her father was a celebrated poet and she had grown up around significant poets: Charles Bukowski and writers like Flannery O'Connor and Pablo Neruda. These incredible writers had been in her social circle as a child, her father's social circle.

Those two things made me grasp at an interest in becoming a better writer by writing poetry. I think for a lot of us, we're kind of shoved into it as teenagers and given a poetry test in school, and we're all lost and like, why don't I like this? I must not be smart, or I must not like poetry. And I think poetry really functions better with the developed brain of an adult. So I decided to challenge myself. Instead of just writing a song with a melody and lyrics, I took a poetry class, wrote poems, and then turned those poems into songs. It allowed me to stretch my vocabulary. For me, I really wanted to challenge myself to write better lyrics.

Analogue: What did that feel like in the moment?

Avery: When I was writing poems, it was really fun because all of a sudden I wasn't so bound by rhymes — does it work with your voice, is it a weird word to use, are you talking about the right subject? But at the same time, when we get into an art form, we kind of get safer and safer with it. I know I'm good at singing, so I can cover up my inadequacies in other realms by singing well. You have to challenge yourself to do it differently.

One of the big challenges in writing class was getting feedback. I had to learn that not all feedback is helpful. Some people just do not know how to give good feedback. I remember one woman... I was writing a poem, and she was like, actually, it's not cows, it's cattle. She wanted me to use the correct ranching term. And I was like, lady, I don't think you really understand what I'm trying to get at. I'm not writing for professional ranchers. I'm writing for the general public.

Analogue: That impulse toward betterment, is that natural to you, or is it something that's entered the picture at this stage of the career?

Avery: I think for me, the most exciting part of being an artist is stretching and taking risks and becoming better. I don't want to be butt-kissed and then not actually make better music. I want to challenge myself all the time. We get in grooves as artists in the ways we're used to challenging ourselves. Stretching isn't just playing faster or singing more on pitch—it can also be singing a kind of song that you're not sure is going to work.

With Sam, he comes from a very different background than I do musically. I come from a bluegrass folk background, and he comes more from an indie rock alternative background. Bluegrass is very much about technique and speed and knowledge of a wide array of songs and the ability to deliver music live in a really precise way. Whereas indie rock is more about melody and composition and the uniqueness of the sound. I think it's interesting to pair those things together because they kind of challenge one another's assumptions. But Sam is really good at being honest, which I wanted. I wanted someone who would be like, 'That song just isn't doing it for me.' That's what I want.

I don't think I was ready for that in the beginning. It took a lot of building up of the inner muscles of confidence to know that it's okay to admit when something isn't working and letting somebody shape it and make it better.

Analogue: Does this album feel like a furnace moment, where you come out different on the other side?

Avery: Yeah. A big part of making this album was letting go of what I did before. I was used to emphasizing the guitar playing—playing more interesting parts that would be challenging or unique. With this album, I had to let go of those as crutches. I had to emphasize simpler lead melodies on the guitar rather than more complex ones. Something that indie rock and Sam is really good at is: how do you make something that sounds maybe not super complicated, but is cultivating your own unique little tone in this moment in the music?

Analogue: What did you think you'd get from working with Sam versus what you actually got?

Avery: I think he was actually more subtle about his influence than maybe I thought, but yet he had a lot of influence. Almost half the songs were co-written with him or somebody else. In sort of perception land, indie rock music is more simple, but it's also more complex in a different way. I think the music sounds more different to others than I thought it would. To me, it's obvious that it's still me, but it does have more groove and more indie rock, alternative production influence.

What is Sam's magic touch? I think when I went into it, one of the things I was really interested in with Sam was the way he developed songs. You'll hear it in his own music or in Kevin Morby's album that he produced. The songs really develop over the song length. It's not just guitar-singing, guitar-singing, then it's over. It's got these interesting tones that allow the song to expand. But I think those choices are a lot more subtle than I had realized in listening to his music.

When I listened in advance, I was like, oh, this is such a monumental shift to bring in this twelve-string for four bars. But in reality, it's so subtle. And I think that's why he's such a great musician. What he's able to change in a song is subtle, yet it's so profound. He has such an attention to these little moments.

Analogue: You played the whole album at Woollystar. What's it like to bring these songs into the live setting?

Avery: It's definitely stretching me. I decided to play the whole album in order, and that was hard because there are songs that are really easy to play and songs that are really different, like "The Letdown" and "Torture Either Way". I just don't usually play songs like that. There's a singing style that's so not what I'm used to, a little bit more irreverent, not so focused on pitch and technique, just different kinds of melodies. And those were songs I co-wrote with Sam. With my last record, I'd been playing songs for like two years with a live band all the time. Whereas with this, up until last weekend, I'd never played most of the songs live. You'd think, okay, I've played a lot of live shows—being a folk musician, I've probably played live more than a lot of people get the opportunity to. But playing the more indie style is actually really musically challenging for me.

Analogue: In a pleasing way?

Avery: Definitely. It's like a muscle that still aches. I'm not used to the delivery style as much. With indie music, it's more about the parts and the song and less about the perfection and purity of the notes. And the songs are just challenging in terms of their arrangement. That goes back to Sam. He has the little tiny shift with the arrangement of a song, like having a little riff that changes the feel, the groove, the hits on what part of the measure are different. And that's just hard for me. As artists, there's a safe space of writing songs with this groove and this kind of chord change. With Sam, I definitely had to change that pattern for myself.

Analogue: Do you see yourself coming back around to the more traditional folk sound eventually?

Avery: Having gone down this road of pushing it every album a little bit more into a more indie experimental direction, it has definitely allowed me to come back to folk music and appreciate it. When I was starting as a musician, about 10 or 12 years ago, I was like, I like Bob Dylan, I like Alison Krauss, I like Gillian Welch. But I didn't see where I fit in that folk music world. I didn't see myself replicating those artists and doing it in a way I was excited about.

Now that I've made all of these albums pushing farther into the independent, experimental realm, I do feel ready to eventually get back to the more traditional folk sound, but do it in my own way, from my own standpoint. Trying to sound like them was just not, in my mind, a good idea creatively. And I didn't see the point. So I think you're right, where you sort of push it and push it, and eventually you can come back to what was originally interesting. There's this cartoon of a person climbing up a really steep mountain on a cliff, and they're about to reach the top, and at the top somebody is meditating, and the person meditating is their mom. So it's kind of like circling back to the wisdom of the original source. I do feel ready for the next thing I'm doing.

VISIT: ISMAY