Part 1

Name: Selina Heyligers-Hare aka Hendrika
Nationality: Canadian
Occupation: Singer, songwriter
Current event: Hendrika's I Can't Remember EP is out now.
Recommendations: Education (book) - Tara Westover; "No Quarter" - Led Zeppelin

If you enjoyed this Hendrika interview and would like to know more about her music, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, and facebook.
 


Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in writing lyrics or poetry? How and when did you start writing?

Yes absolutely. I started singing supposedly before I could talk, writing melodies before I said my first words.

My parents were arguably some of the most influential people in the Yukon arts community. My father owned and operated the local music store and my mother was a luthier. They were both musicians, my mom played 60s folk and bluegrass, and my dad, traditional tunes, bluegrass and old country.

I spent my childhood hanging out at his store while people came and went, participating in drum circles he hosted there, falling asleep on my mothers jacket at the local coffee house and attending weekly kitchen jams at Pete and Mary’s cabin on Shallow Bay.

These Sunday jams hosted musicians from every walk of life, although the common theme was old time and easy folk tunes, all the best jazz and rock musicians in town would be there playing “Whiskey Before Breakfast” .



I remember not the exact day or moment I wrote my first lyric, but I do remember the visuals that came with the fire to create. I remember sun shining through tall green grass, a warmth of spring, I remember feeling held by nature, feeling soft and comfortable.

I remember writing lyrics about that feeling, my crooked, backwards, almost illegible penmanship streaking the page, leaving indents on the next. A child who believed in fairies and that the wind moved with her thoughts, sitting in her mother's flower garden with her journal.

Entering new worlds and escapism through music and literature have always exerted a very strong pull on me. What do you think you are drawn to most when it comes to writing?

For me, my writing is very personal.

In my younger days as a teen, when I wrote for my rock band or just for myself, I tried to tell fictional stories or speak of others experiences but it never felt genuine to me. I was listening to ACDC, Led Zeppelin, Poison, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Alice Cooper, Boston, Nirvana …

I wanted to write songs like them, but every time I did it just didn’t quite get there. Even if the intention to connect was there and a part of me was in the song, the intrusive thought was “who am I to tell someone else’s story?”

Not only that, but I found it much more difficult to write outside of my own experience. The only “downside” to very personal writing is that it can be limited by your emotions. Just as the process can be expedited, it can also be thwarted by those same emotional protectors of your psyche.



Writing can be very cathartic, but if you are in a place of avoidance it forces you to deal with your feelings, and if you’ve been running and hiding from those feelings, it can start to become almost a negative process in your mind. Avoidance tricking you into thinking that you don’t enjoy creating, the critic tricking you into thinking you’re not good enough and you never will be.

These parts are there for a reason and with good intention, but for many years I was so out of touch with myself and overwhelmed by their presence that it took me months maybe a year to write one song, fighting them along the way.

But as I continuously “do the work” in therapy and focus on accepting those parts as a part of who I am, they begin to work with me instead of against me.

What were some of the artists and albums which inspired you early on purely on the strength of their lyrics? What moves you in the lyrics of other artists?

The Beatles: I loved Paul’s lyrics, he thinks about how a word sounds and fits within the music. Many lyrics “don’t make sense” but the way they sound sonically and where they’re placed harmonically gives you a feeling and lets the listener place their own ideas and experience into the lyric. They are also so visual, it gives you these beautiful, surreal, psychedelic images in your head.

In this way the Beatles, namely Paul, inspired me to write with that in mind, that I held the power to conjure beautiful imagery and art inside someone else’s head.

“Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind
Possessing and caressing me”



Led Zeppelin: I loved the fantasy injected musically and/or lyrically in their songs. Lyrically it’s always so visual, telling stories of travellers, often of Robert Plant leaving his woman, the classic ramblin’ man song. Or they spoke of more mythical, existential journeys, of vikings and hobbits.

It also showed me a blatant sexuality that I as a teenager was very attracted to. Rock music is loud, unapologetic, they talked about love and sex in a way that was so overt, at a time when sexuality is confusing, not talked about and suppressed, hearing lyrics such as

“Hey hey baby when you walk that way
Watch your honey drip, can't keep away”

Was, evidently for millions of teenagers, very liberating and empowering.

The more mythical lyrics inspired me to work around a subject, to educate myself and describe the subject or the story in a way that keeps the listener engaged, in a way that doesn’t “give away the ending”, in a way that keeps you guessing, that makes the listener stop and think about where that lyric, device or idea comes from.



Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: I love a good super group. Their lyrics were so intentional and poetic. I was inspired by their depth, the way they strung words together so seamlessly it felt like a warm hug. The way they used devices like alliteration to make their writing sound pleasing and connected.

“Helplessly hoping
Her harlequin hovers nearby
Awaiting a word
Gasping at glimpses
Of gentle true spirit
He runs, wishing he could fly
Only to trip at the sound of good-bye”



More recently I’ve been inspired lyrically by Gregory Allen Isakov, John Prine and Lukas Nelson.

Have there been song lyrics which actually made you change (aspects of) your life? If so, what do you think, leant them that power?

I have quite a literal answer to this question. When I was a baby my mother used to sing “World of our Own” by the Seekers as a lullaby.



She sang it to me every night and when I got older I started singing it. The lyrics were her way of assuring me that she was there with me. Her way of showing how much she loved me and how she wished she could run away with me and start a new life. Those lyrics embedded in me a sense of home that I carry even with her gone. They shaped my love of being alone, my need for calm and quiet, my search for a love that can one day be in that world with me.

What leant them their power was that my mother was the vessel and what those words meant to her. She imbued her own intention and emotion into them and passed it to me, I took them, took her meaning and made my own. For her, it was a communication that she would gift me a good life, that she loved me so much that she could just forget the world, that I was her real world and what mattered most.

For me now, those words sit in my chest, they care for me when I’m alone, they hold memories that the original creator has no knowledge of, the song became something new when I first heard its melody from the voice of my mother. I don’t ever listen to the original because it’s not right, it’s not acapella, its not slow, it’s not how I know it to be.

That is the power of song and poetry.

It is sometimes said that “music begins where words end.” What do you make of that?

For me, I think this saying is meant to convey that sometimes what can’t be said with words can be said in song. Music puts a feeling behind a sentiment that can’t be ignored. It’s an innate part of who we are as humans, it’s something we can’t name or fully understand but that pulls on our heart strings.

Harmonic choices make us feel a certain way because of their harmony or dissonance. They can also make us feel a certain way because the tonal qualities or chords chosen hold nostalgia that may be conscious or subconscious to us individually from other music we grew up with or that our parents grew up with. They allow a person to be incredibly vulnerable and give a voice to the more delicate sides of ourselves that we often struggle to show and release.

Often, lyrically, songs focus on something that’s very accessible and that many people will be able to understand. Something that effects most people as humans, something emotional, it finds a way to put a specific feeling into a few words and that paired with the right harmonic choice can double the emotional effect.

Like when you listen to Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to me Now” tell me you’re not screaming it from the rooftops thinking of your lost loves and that one who got away.



It opens the door and lets someone see you, for you.