Name: Crow Baby
Members: Cherilyn MacNeil, Jean-Louise Parker
Nationality: South African, Berlin-based
Current Release: Crow Baby's new album Get Yourself Together is out via pop-up.
Recommendation for Berlin, Germany: The Botanical Gardens in Berlin are really under-rated. We love a good bike ride through Treptower Park along the Spree and out into the woods. There’s a ferry that you can take to cross over and then you can have a coffee at Nalepastr studios and that’s really fun too.  

If you enjoyed this Crow Baby interview and would like to know more about the band and their music, visit their official homepage. They are also on Instagram, Facebook, tiktok, and bandcamp.



When it comes to experiencing strong emotions as as a listener, which albums, performances, and artists come to mind?

Joni Mitchell - Blue
Big Thief - Two Hands
Andy Shauf - The Party
Deerhoof - Future Teenage Cave Artists

There can be many different kinds of emotions in art – soft, harsh, healing, aggressive, uplifting and many more. Which do you tend to feel drawn to most?

We love busy, crazy, fun music like Deerhoof and weird, kooky women like Cate LeBon and Aldous Harding.

But we also love sad and soothing music, like Andy Shauf, Big Thief and Julia Holter.

I have had a hard time explaining that listening to death metal calms me down. When you listen to a song or composition, does it tend to fill you with the same emotions – or are there “paradoxical” effects?

Generally, we think music has the power to transform your mood, and so it follows that usually, emotions follow where the music leads. But certainly noisy music can become like a wash or a “white noise” that holds you. And of course, the feelings music conjures will have different effects on different people.

With Crow Baby, we use the music to create space for silliness, strangeness, joy and release of aggression.

In as far as it plays a role for the music you like listening to or making, what role do words and the voice of a vocalist play for the transmission of emotions?

Words are extremely important to Cheri. She’s a sucker for a story. For Jean-Louise, words are important in a different way - more as cryptic picture-painting. Working together means that we mesh these two approaches and do a bit of both, which is super fun.

Vocals are definitely extremely important to us. We love the juxtaposition of soft vocals over harsh music. The voice is such an emotive and versatile instrument, and in Crow Baby we use our voices to convey many different feelings. Sometimes we’re whispering sultrily, sometimes talking in an ironic monotone. Our voices whoop with ecstasy or squeal with madness.

This project has definitely expanded us both as vocalists and lyrics writers.

When it comes to composing / songwriting, are you finding that spontaneity and just a few takes tend to capture emotions best? Or does honing a piece bring you closer to that goal?

In general the demos always contain the most raw emotion. We used a lot of our original sketches as part of our album.

Our approach to recording is also to try and do as few takes as possible; To have a more casual, low-pressure approach and to take the focus off of perfection (which is entirely what Crow Baby is all about for us.)

If you perform something 15 times, it starts to lose its meaning. In the first takes, you are telling a story and you are feeling it as you do it. So if something isn’t working, we find it’s better to just leave it and come back to it another day.

How much of the emotions of your own music, would you say, are already part of the composition, how much is the result of the recording process?

Crow Baby was born out of a music-making game, where each of us would take a turn to record an idea on guitar, bass, drum machine or vocals, and then pass it on to the other one to make a layer, and back and forth like that. So the things that happened were very spontaneous and surprising.

And then, when it came to actually crafting those ideas into full songs, we would follow the feeling that each of those play sessions had produced. We pulled different emotions out of each other than we might usually use to fuel song-writing, and this was really new and fun.

What role do factors like volume, effects like distortion, amplification, and production in general for in terms of creating the emotions, energies or impressions you want?

Of course certain production techniques amplify certain emotions. Volume and distortion add “aggression” and energy. Delays and reverbs add softness and dreaminess.

We used these tools a lot on our vocals to juxtapose different parts against each other - like dueling voices in your head!

We also played a lot with granular delays and tremolos to add a sense of chaos and confusion to the music.

In terms of emotions, what changes when you're performing live on stage, with an audience present, compared to the recording stage?

Live, the music gains even more energy and loss of control. We tend to go really crazy with the “hysterical woman” element, and there’s a lot more screaming.

All the emotions are amplified because they are being experienced by the audience and mirrored back to us, and then we respond with yet more energy. Crow Baby is really fun to experience live.

What kind of feedback have you received from listeners or concert audiences in terms of the experience that your music and/or performances have had on them?

Generally people love the unbridled fun that a Crow Baby show delivers. Our music is a mix of emotional searching and child-like play, and there’s an absence of cynicism, which we’re completely uninterested in.

People love that it’s genre-bending and musically interesting as well as a light-hearted good time.

Would you say that you prefer to stay in control to be able to shape the emotions or do you surrender to them and allow the music to take over? Who, ultimately has control during a live performance?

We do have control over the emotional quality of the music - that is part of our craft as musicians and performers! But there are two of us with equal control, and that is something new and different for us.

Sometimes we surprise each other, do something that makes the other person laugh, or brings something to a song that takes it somewhere else. We trust and admire each other a lot, and are able to follow wherever the spirit leads, so that’s pretty special.