The soaring, postmodern pop of Lili Haydn’s Place Between Places began life in her home studio amid the hills and trees above Los Angeles. “Lililand” is what she calls this room, where the walls are covered in red and purple velvet, and where the singer-songwriter-violinist spent the last two years working to capture her “most essential, most ecstatic moments” on record.
On her third album (her first full length for Nettwerk Music), Haydn emerges from this musical workshop with sounds that are inventive and torrid, equal parts Kate Bush and Pink Floyd, with lyrics in search of peace and passion in an unsteady world. “There’s very little calculation, except how do I translate what is most precious to me? It feels like these are urgent times. When you listen to the news or look around, everybody is under the gun. Who has time for bullshit?”
The album title comes from a lyric on her last album, 2004’s Light Blue Sun (Arista) and a song called “Wounded Dove,” composed after the death of her mother, the comedienne-author Lotus Weinstock, as Haydn asked: “Wounded dove, what can you tell me ’bout the place between places?” The question refers to that place between life and what comes after, between the light and the dark, and that mysterious harmonic landscape which is neither major nor minor, neither happy nor sad.
Co-produced by Haydn and Grammy-winning producer-engineer Thom Russo (Johnny Cash, Macy Gray, Audioslave), basic tracks for Place Between Places were recorded first at Lililand, piling on violin tracks and drum loops, before bringing it to her band of players in some bigger rooms across L.A.
“I really had to let everything go. It’s just private moments where I didn’t give a fuck. It was me at the piano, or me and my violin in the middle of the trees of Laurel Canyon, and just following the muse. And when you drop to your knees and all the constructs are blown away, muses have a chance to speak. That’s where this record came from.”
It arrives amid a career that has already put her on stage with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant (soloing on Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” before joining them again across the U.S. as the duo’s opening act), or playing and singing one of her own songs as part of Herbie Hancock’s jazz quintet. She’s regularly shared stages with Parliament-Funkadelic and the great Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and recorded with Tom Petty and Josh Groban. Haydn was even recruited by film composer Hans Zimmer to be the featured solo violin and voice in the final Pirates of the Caribbean.
But her own music is what means the most to her. On Place Between Places, Haydn shows a new sense of abandonment in her vocals to match the fire and grace of her violin. “Now I feel like I’m an artist, really singing and playing with a point of view,” she says. “I finally found my voice.”
Her words and melodies cover a wide musical territory, as rooted in modern rock and avant-pop as in her early studies of Brahms and Tchaikovsky, performed with the usual seriousness and humor, and a balance of virtuosity and wild abandon. There is the unequivocally happy “Strawberry Street” and the dreamy, modern noir of “I Give Up.” Then come the ominous melodies and strings of “Unfolding Grace” or the wistful “Satellites,” on which she questions the endless collisions and conflicts between us. “Why are we colliding with each other? It really hurts when we collide. Why the suffering?”
A committed humanitarian and activist, Haydn also performs regularly for various human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Action Center, and has played private concerts for international gatherings of Nobel laureates. The new album’s “Children of Babylon” has already been adopted by the Global Security Institute to further its message of nuclear nonproliferation.
She began playing when she was 8, and soloed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic by the time she was 15. “Violin resonates with people on a lot of levels,” she says. “In Mississippi or India or Spain – every culture has its violin music, and when people hear that played with a lot of intensity and a lot of heart, it hearkens back to their fondest memories – or their worst. It really has a place in everybody’s cultural DNA.”
A sometime member of Parliament-Funkadelic, Haydn has often been called by leader George Clinton “the Jimi Hendrix of the violin.” And she has her own Hendrix moment on the new album’s final, unlisted track – an epic take on P-Funk’s “Maggot Brain,” a rendition she’s played to standing ovations at the Hollywood Bowl and elsewhere. Finally recorded at the famed Studio A at Capitol Records, Haydn was joined again by the daKAH Hip Hop Orchestra (and conductor Geoff “Double G” Gallegos) as she embarked on a soaring, emotional violin solo, riffing and shredding through a wah-wah pedal and without.
“It’s like surfing a really big wave,” she says. “I really prepare spiritually before I play that song. There’s a peak that I’m trying to get to, and it has to be navigated properly. And if I can do that, skillfully and emotionally and calling the spirit on it, it causes people to freak out.”
That’s a frequent occurrence for Lili Haydn when she performs, and it’s delivered her to concert halls as far-flung as the Vienna Opera House and Carnegie Hall. She will be back on tour with her band this summer, performing the fiery, elegant songs of Place Between Places. “At every stage, and the more I get more spiritually aware and mature, the more I evolve, the more I enjoy the richness of this journey. I would like to share the gifts that I’ve been given.
“This really is an uncompromising version of what I do. There’s no more time for pretending.”
Lili Haydn is now available at:
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Myanmar