Melanie Radford

For years, the bassist has been in perpetual motion while holding down roles in bands like Built to Spill and Blood Lemon. The ungrounded life of constant touring takes a toll, which is what made her debut solo album, For the Sake of Stillness (out now via Jealous Butcher Records), such a salve—both for the artist and the listener.

Radford’s new album is a bass-centered collection of songs built from field recordings gathered on long solo walks, with contributions from friends including Lê Almeida (Oruã, Built to Spill), Jim Roth (Built to Spill), and Lori Goldston (Earth, Nirvana). The music is quiet and warm and deliberately still; it’s everything the road is not.

This fall, Radford pulls double duty, opening a run of Built to Spill and Quasi dates with the new songs before taking her place back at stage right. A few weeks past her album release show, we talked to her about vulnerability, the bass as a singer-songwriter instrument, and why stillness was the point.

Analogue: You're opening some of these Built to Spill shows with your own music, and I don't want to assume that's vulnerable, but I guess I am assuming it's a vulnerable place to be.

Melanie Radford: I think it's a very fair assumption.

Analogue: It's been a couple of weeks since the album release show and more dates are coming up. How are things feeling as you unveil your own music for fans who've known you for so long?

Melanie: It's been really wonderful. I think a lot of people are taking it in almost medicinally, which is wonderful. I'm getting a lot of messages from folks who have listened to the album and really like it and say that it's really beautiful and it's really helping them get through things. And that is kind of the main point of the record. When people are telling me this, I'm like, oh, okay, this is good. I feel like it's falling on the right ears, I guess. Which I'm very grateful for.

Analogue: Was there a worry about that at first?

Melanie: Totally. I like to write slow, minimalist songs right now, and I'm always a little afraid that people will listen and be like, oh, this is really, really boring. It has to kind of fall on the right listeners. You kind of just need to be in a place where you want to hear something like that. And I do feel like more people, especially now, are looking for calming music to listen to. I think because life itself is becoming more and more overwhelming and everything is happening all the time, especially on social media. It's just constant overwhelm all the time for everyone.

Analogue: Even the title, For the Sake of Stillness, struck me as both a beautiful gift in its wording and posture and also maybe a challenge.

Melanie: I think with the title, I really wanted to set the literal intention of it so people understand exactly what they're getting themselves into.

Analogue: A lot of artists stepping out on their own will say something like, "I couldn't hold it back. I had this thing within me, and I just had to let it free." But you just said the intention was to make this thing for people. How much of it is a both-and thing?

Melanie: It is both-and for sure. It was for people, and it was for myself. I needed it. I think my whole spirit really needed music like that and needed to make music like that, because I was going through a tough time a few years ago and then also just touring nonstop. I've said a lot that touring is a very ungrounding experience, so I really wanted to make grounding music to help me out.

But I also just felt like there's a consciousness that I think we're all experiencing together, and I think we are also just collectively overwhelmed and need grounding. So yes, it was for my needs, but I did kind of feel to make it for other people, because I know that other people are going through the same thing in some regard.

Analogue: Was it obvious all along that you needed to make this music and that it would be public-facing?

Melanie: No, I guess not. When I started writing the songs, all I knew going in was that I wanted to make something that was bass-centered.

Analogue: Can you define that?

Melanie: Definitely. It featured the bass as a singer-songwriter instrument—it is the focal point of the song. That kind of songwriting isn't super common, and I wanted to do that for myself and for my instrument, because I really believe that the bass can do anything. So I wanted to give that challenge to myself: hey, maybe I should start writing more as a solo bassist and think of it in singer-songwriter terms as well and just see what happens.

That was my initial intention going in. But then when I started actually writing the music and started feeling the way I was feeling, and letting that kind of music develop that feeling, that's when I started to realize that part of the intention was that it needed to be centered around a meditative, warm state too, if that makes sense.

Analogue: Are you meditative by nature? Is music the meditation?

Melanie: I practice mindfulness a lot. I like to find ways to be present in my body in small moments, especially, again, when I'm on tour. Those kinds of moments are really important to me because my head is just up in the air and I need to find ways to get back on the ground again.

There are different ways to practice mindfulness in small ways. While you're eating, you focus on your jaw, and you focus on what you're tasting and how you're feeling in your body as you're eating. When you go on a walk, you don't listen to anything—you just listen to the sounds around you and focus on your movement and your body going into the ground as you take your steps. I just try to practice a lot because it helps me recenter myself. So I guess in a way, I'm kind of a meditative person. I don't really sit and meditate; I actually practice that as much as maybe I should, but I find other ways, smaller ways to do that. I find it sustaining.

Analogue: Does the impulse to write music and release it go back farther than people may realize?

Melanie: Yeah, totally. I did a similar project 10 years ago when I was 21. At the time, I had just gone through a breakup and was reflecting on the idea of vulnerability, and I created this conceptual set and performance around the idea of vulnerability. I wanted it to be really minimalist, and it was vocals, bass, and cello. My friend Jake Saunders played with me, and it was a performance that we did as a one-off in Boise. I really loved the exercise of it and what we were creating, and I remember thinking, maybe I should pursue this and lean more into this. But then I started playing with Built to Spill, I got more active with Blood Lemon, and things were taking off in my personal life, so I just let that part lay for a long time—until probably when I started writing this record a few years ago.

It's been something that I've been wanting to explore for a while. I kind of consider my solo project as my art project, and I think it's important to have an art project in your life, whatever kind of medium it is. My solo project allows me to be way more conceptual and not really think as much about populist ideas of songwriting and licensing and performing for mass audiences. It's nice to have this solo project that is very much just based in a concept that I want to explore.

Analogue: But you are performing, and it made me wonder—how did the record release show go?

Melanie: It was great. Again, I want to explore it more, so I really wanted to do a full band performance with very specific visuals. I worked with this amazing person—their name is Gardena—and I've seen them work with projections before. They do crazy projection mapping, so they can map a projection to a space, and they're really familiar with the chapel that I was performing at. We got together a month or so before the performance, and I talked to them about the visuals I was seeing. The idea was to immerse the listener in this cathedral setting, so we used Gothic cathedral archways, and inside them were portals that were moving, and he was using reflective light from crystals and stuff. It was crazy. And it went in all different directions, so it wasn't just a projection in front of you—it went all around the room.

I wanted to create a fully immersive experience, because the album itself is fully immersive. It was cool to work with him on the set and let him listen to the field recordings and know where they were going to be in the set, so we could change the mood of it. There's a song called "Seagull" that features very prominent sounds of waves, and he made sure to change the whole environment into this gorgeous blue hue, with water reflecting on everything, and it really transported the listener to that place.

That's what I wanted to lean into, and I hope to do that more. It's something I wanted to experiment with and learn how to do, because I just don't really do stuff like that in my other projects. We're very much straight-ahead rock bands that are very much about the song and the active performance, but not really about the lighting and the specific showmanship kind of stuff. I've been wanting to let myself experiment in that direction more. It went really well; it was a really fun show, and I think a lot of people enjoyed it because of that reason.

Analogue: That feels challenging then, because you're in these rock bands that are straightforward, not thinking about these things, and now you're tasked with opening some of those shows—where those things are not a consideration, and yet they're very important considerations for your music.

Melanie: I definitely have to pivot, and that's just because of money. For me, opening for Built to Spill, I'm doing double duty, so it'll just be me and my friend Jim Roth, who is one of the original guitarists in Built to Spill. He's traveling with me, and he's playing pedal steel, so we have to scale down the show so we can perform it between two people and make it a more appropriate opening set for two other bands afterwards.

It's still going to be fully immersive. I'm still having field recordings and working with the sound engineer on ways to bring that into stereo sound for the folks who listen to this opening set. But it is going to be scaled down, and I don't know if we're going to be able to include the projections—I'm still seeing what that's going to look like. But I still have full intention of transporting the listener, and I think it will still translate pretty well. It's interesting trying to figure out ways to do the full artistic concept, and then find ways to also make it smaller and more affordable when I need to.

VISIT: Melanie Radford

Photo: Travis Gillett