Name: Annie Hart
Occupation: Film composer, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist
Nationality: American
Recent release: Annie Hart's The Weight of A Wave is out via Uninhabitable Mansions.

If you enjoyed this Annie Hart interview and would like to find out more about her work and current projects, visit her official website. She is also on Instagram, and twitter.



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

The biggest factor in having an impulse to create is doing it a lot. It really greases the wheels and makes the process almost unavoidable.

I made most of this album in these intense solo songwriting sessions, trying to write 2-6 songs in a day. I did this every month or less with a bunch of friends of mine and a lot of it was junk. But it really helped getting to the ideas more efficiently.

And the more you write, the easier it is to tell which ideas haven’t come from a true wellspring, but were forced, and don’t deserve the light of day.

For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

I make my music by pulling the ideas of the ether.

Either they pop into my head while I’m distracted walking or riding my bicycle, or jump out of me with an instrument in my hand. It’s almost as if I have no control over them, I just have to make time to show up and let the songs come through me. It’s an ability that improves with use.

My song “A Lot of Thought” was something that just popped out of me by chance when I ran the arpeggiator on my Juno 60.



[Read our feature on the Roland Juno-60]

Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?

I mostly need to make sure I am alone. I’m in a house with a lovely husband and two lovely children, and, as lovely as they are, I keep the equivalent of a “keep out!” sign on the door when I’m working.

It’s so hard to get into the flow state with people coming and asking where things are around the house or what time we should eat dinner.

When do the lyrics enter the picture? Where do they come from? Do lyrics need to grow together with the music or can they emerge from a place of their own?

It varies from song to song. “While Without” just came to me verbatim. I don’t love the line “you were hiding, I was seeking” but I loved the tender vocal take from the demo so much. I let it lie, and now I can get into it.



Sometimes, the lyrics emerge with some working after the story of the song reveals itself to me. The song “Boy You Got Me Good” is one example of this.



The story of being stuck in a traffic jam with someone who thinks you are in love with them isn’t something that actually happened to me, but it definitely metaphorically has! I let the song come, then had the characters in the story come out bit by bit through imagining their relationship to each other.

Either way, the placement of the lyrics, to be good, has to grow out of the music creation in my mind, whether you massage them or edit like crazy. If they don’t come with the spark of the music idea, you’re toast.

What makes lyrics good in your opinion? What are your own ambitions and challenges in this regard?

I love a vague specificity to lyrics. I looooove the Stephens Merritt and Malkmus for their ability to name an extremely concrete moment, but couch it in a sort of word collage that evokes a lot of feelings without being quite as literal as describing a narrative in detail.

The song “Nothing Makes Me Happy Anymore” exemplifies this. It’s me talking quite literally about a day when a bunch of people I love randomly called me or came to my house, not knowing I was sad, and me being unable to enjoy their presence at all.



Then it lays out exactly what I did to try sand feel better, none of which worked. But it’s not linear, and you never find out exactly why I’m upset.

I like songs like that because they are more fluid and I find them much more relatable to various situations and shifting scenarios in my own life and the listener’s.

To quote a question by the great Bruce Duffie: When you come up with a musical idea, have you created the idea or have you discovered the idea?

I strongly feel that I have discovered the idea. I have such a difficult time answering the common question “What are your influences?” because to me, every single thing that enters my realm of consciousness affects my ability to interpret these songs that come to me.

However, that doesn’t mean I don’t work at them. On the contrary, most are sparked by this initial discovery, but massaged and worked and re-worked until I feel like I have successfully done justice to what the song was telling me to do.

So, I can’t understand what my influences are, because I don’t shape songs into genres or use references to other songs to base my work on. I guess this means I can’t take credit for creating a song.

Once you've started, how does the work gradually emerge?

Sometimes, it just all comes out in this burst that I don’t clearly remember.

When I read Phillip Glass’ autobiography, he describes also feeling this phenomenon and having no idea or way to describe how he came to the keyboards. I’ll obviously be aware that I’m working, doing take after take until the parts feel really good, but still, there comes a moment when I play everything back and I think in awe, “Wow, I made THAT?!”

On the other hand, especially with lyrics, sometimes I have to work things very consciously. When all the words don’t clearly emerge, like on “Stop Staring At You,” I usually mumble stuff until I like the rhythm placement and melody, and then find words that mimic the syllables of the mumbling.



I get very into the syncopation of certain hard sounds and where they fall into a beat. This process can get very complicated, where I’ll make a grid of each syllable or word, and then make a long list of possibilities of each one. Then I kind of connect the dots to make sentences that feel the best.

This is a very roundabout way of discovering what your subconscious is telling you!

Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?

No control! I just settle on what the ideas tell me to do.

Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?

This doesn’t happen to me too often, but, irritatingly, when it does, it is usually a tempo change, which means ripping the whole thing up and re-doing everything!

That happened on “Hard to Be Still,” I ended up buying a whole new DAW so I could speed up the drums, but I had to do everything else all over.



There are many descriptions of the creative state. How would you describe it for you personally? Is there an element of spirituality to what you do?

I don’t find it as a spiritual side of myself. But, like meditation, there is definitely a need to let yourself free and open to rapt awareness, focus, and non-judgement. I have found this state much easier to achieve by practicing meditation outside of making music and also by keeping a distance from the strongest nit-pickers and judgmental people in my life.

There was one person in particular whose voice frequently lurked in the back of my head. When I achieved the ability to most times trust myself, that voice floated away and instead became what it really was all along: my own voice of self-doubt.

Self doubt can either be a form of sabotage or a hidden way for you to discover what YOU don’t like about your own art. Once you can see it as a valuable tool of your inner voice, it can make your ideas so much stronger and give you the freedom to know what you want to change or enjoy about your art.

Once a piece is finished, how important is it for you to let it lie and evaluate it later on? How much improvement and refinement do you personally allow until you're satisfied with a piece? What does this process look like in practise?

When I am not 100% confident in a song, I let it lie. Sometimes when I come back to it, I’ll rework it to death, sometimes literally, when I cut it loose.  

One of the songs that didn’t make it on the album, I had an amazing producer come and play guitar, and another great bassist lay a wonderful bass line on it. It still made me cringe so much I left it off the record. There’s nothing like song regret! I have one of those on my second album. Why, Annie, why?!

Other times I grimace, grit my teeth and play the song I remember hating and then find myself loving it. One this record, that song was “Waking Up,” that space to evaluate it was really important.



After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Can you relate to this – and how do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?

I don’t really have time to feel that emptiness! I’m on a communal label, meaning, I do all the work. So between pressing, marketing and all the label-y things, I’m also applying for residencies and grants, scoring films, taking care of my house, working a few part-time jobs, and raising two kids.

It’s all a whirlwind and definitely a concerted effort to find time to get into the flow of creation while I’m doing all that.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

I don’t find music a form of self-expression. And I know how dumb that sounds! But to me, like your example of making a great cup of coffee, they are both ways of losing yourself in the present.

I am rather fixated on my mortality and feel quite invigorated and appreciative of my limited time here on the planet when I am lost in the flow of doing something. It can be sweeping the floor, or it can be making a song: both have equal value to my sense of the present.

But making a song allows me to travel and share emotions with people in front of a live audience. And I get a lot of joy from making the world a more peaceful and connected place through performing live. No one wants to watch me sweep.