Name: René Kladzyk aka Ziemba
Nationality: American
Occupation: Singer, songwriter, producer
Current release: Ziemba's new album The Braid is out now.
Hometown Recommendations: I spent my early childhood in the thumb of Michigan, which is a pretty remote area that not very many people go to. BUT if someone does venture up into the thumb, I recommend stopping at Scott’s Quik Stop on Van Dyke Road outside of Marlette, Michigan. It’s a combination gas station-ice cream store-gun shop and is my absolute favorite place to get ice cream. Get the Mackinac Island Fudge, and don’t order more than one scoop, because one scoop actually means three giant scoops to them. Then, eat it while you drive with the windows down on that two lane highway surrounded by endless fields.

If you enjoyed this Ziemba interview and would like to know more about her music, visit her on Instagram, Facebook, Soundcloud, and bandcamp.



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?

This is the question of all time! I believe there is a mystical well that we can pull from, and I cannot always predict when I will have access to it.

But yes all the iconography and inputs of daily life inform how I go about making creative work, once that well is springing.

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?

No, I find it to be a hindrance to try to anticipate or understand too much about what the finished work will look like from the get-go.

I think when you get a seed of an idea and that idea excites you, your task is to follow it. If you give it some time, it will tell you what it wants. And sometimes you will try out a thing you think it wants and realize you were totally off base, and have to scrap that and start over. It’s not a science and trying to project a scientific method onto creative work can be quite harmful if you want to be open and receptive, in my experience.

That said, sometimes concrete ideas appear to you and you follow them, and when they work out it feels really nice. If it doesn’t work out how you anticipated though, you need to be able to redirect and stay playful. The desire to be able to control a creative output is the dangerous part. That’s not how it works, this is magic!

A case in point: some ideas need much more time to germinate than you could have possibly anticipated when first they were born. On my new record, there’s a song (“We Implode”) that I started writing I think around 2014 or 2015. The lyrics were very diaristic, reacting to my romantic woes at the time and the relationship I was in.



I wrote the first several verses of the song and the chorus, but never knew how to finish it or where it was supposed to go from there: What did it build to? And so the song just sat there, unfinished. Over the years, the melody and lyrics would pop in my head sometimes, they were memorable and I loved the feeling of the song.

Eventually, about a year ago, I picked it back up and started writing more verses from the perspective of today, looking back on that relationship. I wrote a bridge that was a melodic left turn from the rest of the song. It took a lot of workshopping in ways that I never could have planned.

The same thing happened when I went to record it. Initially, it felt like the song wanted the verses to have this kind of power pop grandiosity to them, but when we tracked it they felt all wrong. We ended up doing a kind of inverse structure where the verses are really big and full, and then when you hit the chorus everything pulls back, the rhythm section goes away so we can have a bit of levity.

Background vocals also underwent lots of workshopping and iterations; ultimately they were very inspired by the vocals in the Felt song “Sunlight Bathed the Golden Glow,” which is one of my all time favs.



I’m so beyond happy with how this song turned out, and never in a million years could I have anticipated that it would take this form when I started writing it.

The point of sharing all of this is, sometimes you just need to be along for the ride and follow that idea where it wants to go, and if you aren’t open to it taking you in different directions than you planned, you might miss out on something really special and beautiful.

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’?

Yes but it’s amorphous and always changing. I keep many many notebooks that I use to pour in references and ideas, and then when I’m making something (especially when I’m stuck) I go to these little idea banks and can pluck whatever feels right. You have to feed the well to drink from it.

This is mostly in reference to lyrical content, like for instance I write a lot of poetry that then goes through a kind of distillation when it becomes songs.

When it comes to writing the musical skeleton of a song, I normally do that either on piano/keyboard or guitar and there is no rhyme or reason to how I begin doing that, no real preparation beyond having a usable workspace where I can concentrate – which, actually can sometimes be hard to have depending on how life is going.

For The Braid, what did you start with? If there were conceptual considerations, what were they?

Normally when I have an organizing principle around an album, it becomes clearer to me as the album nears completion, rather than being something I decide at the beginning, though not always.

The benefit of having worked on this new album for a long time is that it has come to feel like a portrait of a chapter of my life, and I don’t really reach for a concept beyond that. I was trying to make something that traversed a lot of facets and reaches of my own experience, and didn’t want to contain it.

My last album before this one had a much more narrow aperture and specific concept. My Dad had died over Christmas, and I set out to write a holiday album about grief. It was called Unsubtle Magic.



At the time, I had this idea that I could compartmentalize and deal with my grief through making an album. Like, that I would complete the record and then would be able to move on. But of course grief doesn’t work like that at all.

I think part of why I set out to really take my time with my new album was in reaction to that experience, and the ways I tried to bypass actually just sitting with hard feelings, not trying to will them away.

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

This is a really fun question because there are so many different ways lyrics can be good.

I think maybe the simplest answer I could give is that lyrics are good when they feel aligned with the voice and persona of the person delivering them, and when there’s something within them that feels true. Not true as in accurate, or even authentic, but more like, essential. Good lyrics have essence baked inside them.

I love story-songs where the lyrics are very concretized, intelligible, and have vivid imagery, and I love nonsensical abstract lyrics that are more focused on playing with words and sounds, and not trying to deliver information in a linear way. I think good lyrics must, of course, be aware of rhythm and shape, and be in dialogue with the music.

I’ll use a song of mine as an example. The lyrics of my song “Harbor Me” are pure nonsense.



Sometimes when I’m writing a song and I come up with a melody first, I just sing gibberish while I get the melody and structure figured out. That was the case with this song, and then as I was trying to write lyrics for it, they weren’t working. There was something about the exact vowel sounds and rhythmic cadence of that gibberish which was the motor the song needed.

I went through the nonsense vocals and identified words that most closely maintained the vowel sounds, word length, and rhythm I needed, and that’s what the song became. The fact that this was how the song was created doesn’t mean that listeners can’t attach meaning to the lyrics, or even that there isn’t some sort of logic inside of them from me, perhaps sent to a future me.

There’s a lyric in the song, “Fiery at the opera house, a cigarette I won’t forget” – years later, I was sitting outside an opera house smoking a cigarette while having an impactful conversation, and I thought to myself, is this the moment that lyric was about?

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 think the creative state and childlike wonder are closely intertwined, in the sense that there has to be a bit of play, of curiosity, of fantasy to the process of making something new to exist in the world.

Part of that boils down to a person’s understanding of what the limits of the possible are. Like, what do you see as constraints on what could exist in the world. To me, a lot of making creative work is unlearning limits that the world tells you exist, or that adult experience would teach you to expect. The ability to dive into fantasy, to fully embrace an idea without projecting too much immediate baggage, criticism, or perceived limitations upon it is one of the surest ways to liberate that idea and let it fly.

There is spirituality in that, because it’s fundamentally borne out of believing that there is something bigger than yourself that you can tap into within yourself. Like, you can’t leap into the unknown without belief and trust.

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?

It really varies based on the piece. I’d like to think I can tell when I’m veering into a place of overworking something, but really that can be hard to discern sometimes when you’re in it.

There are definitely cases where you think something needs more work and then return to the original output and it was already there. Conversely, there are times when something is so strong and potent within an idea that you can keep returning to it and iterating from it over and over. I aim to try to be open to both courses of events, and more!

There’s a song on my new album, “Open Up,” where I pillaged the chorus melody from another song I wrote many years ago on a solstice EP. Probably only the most discerning listeners would notice this (at least, those who don’t read this interview), but I like the idea of these two songs being secretly in dialogue, and love having the freedom to reinvent a melody that felt strong to me back then and still does now.

Likewise, there’s a song on my album True Romantic, “You Feel Like Paradise,” that was repurposed and transformed after first being written for my country band. We had performed it one way for several years, but I wanted to rearrange it and move it toward more of a glam rock place.

That was thrilling as a songwriter and producer, to have both versions get their time to shine.

How do you think the meaning, or effect of an individual piece is enhanced, clarified or possibly contrasted by the EPs, or albums it is part of? Does each piece, for example, need to be consistent with the larger whole?

I love the album as a listening format, and am very sad for the impact that streaming platforms have had on how people consume music. As a listener, I often find that I may feel lukewarm about a particular song, but then when I hear it within the scope of an album, it’s incredible.

I love having a longer span of time to sit with the world that that musician is creating, and think it can help to understand their point of view and be able to hear the lyrics, the hooks, the choices that musician made in proper context. I love to be an active listener, and think sitting with one artist for longer than 3.5 minutes really encourages that.

To answer your second question, of whether elements within an album or EP need to be consistent with a larger whole, no, I don’t feel that way at all. I like being taken on a journey and really appreciate when artists aren’t too beholden to genre or sonic consistency. I love when an album is dynamic and surprises me, taking bold moves and big swings. That’s something I strive for as an artist.

To me, the current preponderance of albums and EPs that contain a very unified and consistent sound across the board is also a victim of the streaming age and what is easier for people in suits to sell. Streaming platforms prioritize and reward artists who hew closely to one sound, one bpm, because they’re easily categorizable and predictable, chill vibes for people to passively appreciate as background muzak.

I find this BORING as a listener and prefer when musicians are daring and multifaceted.

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 like to hierarchize forms of creative expression, and think we can blame capitalism and histories of inequality for why they do tend to be hierarchized by society.

For example, within the art world, folk art traditions that are more strongly associated with women’s work and with home spaces (embroidery, quilts) tend to be valued less highly than those that would be exhibited in a gallery and are associated with men. The notion of “fine art” is also tied specifically to artistic traditions associated with particular classes, genders, and races.

To me, art is the difference between surviving and thriving as a species. Being able to enjoy a beautiful cup of coffee in the morning and to revel in music are both part of that quest of human thriving. They’re different experiences, but are both luxuries that are part of why I love being alive.

I’m a total lush and I love food, so this comparison is particularly apt, because I don’t find coffee mundane at all. Or at least any more than music is mundane. They are both fundamental touchstones of the human experience, and can be quotidian or extraordinary based on the eye (and mouth) of the beholder. Like, there is eating food for survival, and then there is delighting in an immaculately prepared meal.

For me, music is one form of creative expression that I feel especially drawn to, but it’s not the only one, and I feel quite strongly when it comes to rejecting the need to rank any forms of creative output and expression.