Erica Wexler
Erica Wexler released single Wildflower last year and now the singer/songwriter is back with her new album Sunlit Night.
We caught up with her to chat about the album, financing the record herself and what lies ahead.
- You are about to release you debut album Sunlit Night so what can we expect from the new record?
They can expect a record that is very warm in content and if features real instruments and players - there is not electronic anything or fake synths or samples. Also a perspective on life that I hope is fresh as I try to look at the big picture. I try to see things in more of a philosophical way.
- You have already lifted the beautiful Wildflower for the album so how does this track introduce us to the rest of the record?
Thank you. I wanted to make a record that is beautiful as beauty, in terms of fashion, has sort of fallen out of fashion and instead you have to be cool or edgy.
I just wanted to make something timeless and beautiful that people could just feel enveloped in that would just been a pleasure and not harsh. I took great care in the way that it was recorded and mastered and mixed so it would feel like beautiful.
- I gave the album a listen this morning and it has a real ethereal quality to it, great melodies and instrumentation so what kind of record were you hoping to create when you set out making it?
I didn’t go in with a self conscious attitude because I have funded this record myself - through the sale of the Lichtenstein drawings that Roy gave me.
So I just went in and made a record that I wanted to make and so it was premeditated like I had to sound ‘contemporary’ and I just made a record that felt right as we went along.
My arranger has a sensibility that is very compatible with the songs and the material and it does have this ethereal quality but at the same time this earthiness. So it wasn’t self conscious and it just unfolded that way.
I was lucky that I had really great players on the album and they are some of the best players around in New York. They bring so much to the record because they are the fabric, if that makes any sense?
- I had noticed that there are no electronics on this record so how early in the recording process did you make that decision and why did you make that decision?
Before I got ME I had quite a promising recording career in New York as this artist Luna, I had a lot of programming then and it was alternative dance music. I had a big hit with this song Shameless and I was signed to Warner Brothers. But then I got ME and I got pickled for a decade (laughs).
When I set out to make this album my partner Andy Partridge, who is the executive producer, said ‘make it timeless, I don’t want to hear anything fake on this’ and I said ‘ok, that’s a good idea’ and I stayed true to that.
On the song Flesh the original vocal pads were all synths and my partner said ‘they sound like a car ad, get rid of them’. So I had to re-do all of those voices and they were quite extensive and I had to do each note and layer them up - it took me four days but it was worth it.
All of those little details are important it’s like a beautiful tapestry or a home made pizza. Music is a craft and what you put in you get out.
- There are still a couple of weeks until the release of the album but how have you found the early response to the record so far?
Overall it is really… I get emotional about this because I work so hard and I wanted to make something beautiful that would hopefully resonate and touch people or comfort them or sooth them.
I have had some good reviews and people are saying that it is very beautiful and soothing. On Facebook I have a lot of wonderful… My Silent Star is going to be the next single and people from all over the world have been commenting on it - I haven’t had a big media campaign - and sending me really beautiful messages.
The idea of the silent star seems to mean different things to different people; anything from their beloved, someone they have lost and it please me that my music seems to be having a good resonance so far. So that makes me happy as you hope for that.
- You have mentioned Andy Partridge already and he has produced the album and penned a couple of tracks so how did you find working with him?
He is technically the executive producer so he is not really directly involved - he is my partner and that can be tricky as you can get into power struggles (laughs). But he has such great expertise as he has made so many albums and he has such good musicianship and ear.
Like I said with the pads he said that those had to go - those electronic car pads - I would grumble but he was absolutely right.
He was just the right amount of feedback to help me with my lack of experience and he gave me a lot of great advice about picking a mixer and what to look for.
Occasionally he would something and I would ignore it (laughs) but I was, at least, sensible enough to consider it. With everything in life you have people that you trust who give you advice and you take the advice that is right for you - but you also know when it is not useful.
- You serve as producer on this album, as you have mentioned already, so is that part of making an album that you enjoy?
Not particularly (laughs). My arranger is kind of a co-producer but it wasn’t around so much and I would send him things - he was initially around for a lot of the recording for a lot of the players and the strings and drums. But I couldn’t afford to have him be on board the whole time as the project much longer than expected.
Producing yourself is very tricky and I wouldn’t really recommend it. Because you have to sing and produce yourself it is kind of wrenching because you go in and put your performance head on and then you have to come back and put your critical head on.
Your critical head can be very neurotic because you are also the singer and you can’t quite decide if you hit the mark and if you sung it as well as you should have - so you can end up going around in circles.
It is very hard to do both and I wouldn’t really… there are some geniuses like Stevie Wonder and Prince who seem to be able to do it.
But for the rest of us I don’t think it is a very good idea. But I was lucky because I had very good engineers and I could go back to Art the arranger and Andy. So when I lost subjectivity they could say ’no do this, don’t do that’. I don’t know why anyone really wants to produce (laughs).
- You have said that this album saved you from a life rotting away, a life without meaning or hope' so how has this record and music in general helped you cope with your ME?
I get emotional when you say that because it sounds so dramatic but it is sort of true. In my travels with ME I have tried so many therapies and I have met cancer patients, a lot people with ME that are really ill.
When you have chronic illness it devastates your life, if it is particularly devastating, and it goes on for years and years. You identity get eroded and you get self obsessed with ‘how do I get better?’
That in itself is a problem but it is normal. It is like anything that is negative and you over focus on it then it has it’s own dark power (laughs) because you are feeding it.
Finally after ten or twelve years I decided that I could sell these Lichtenstein drawings and make the album that I had always dreamed of making - I would have made an album for Warner Brothers if I hadn’t have got ill.
But now I could make an album with a different perspective because I was older and wiser. But it gave me purpose and meaning and music is a very joyful experience, at best.
Making an album is hard work - particularly when you are going everything yourself - but it did give me a focus and allowed me to do something that I felt was important and it did pull me out of this dead end that I had gotten in to.
Now I am very grateful that I am well and I don’t like to feel sorry for myself because I have always met people who had it worse than me. Sorry it gets very emotional that subject.
- You have said that you have funded the album yourself you have produced it, written it, sung on it so it is very much a project by you. How liberating has it been to be able to make an album that you have wanted to make? And what were the difficulties that come with that?
It was much more challenging that I ever expected because it is such a grand record. One of my engineers who was a cheer leader for me in New York and he said ’if you were doing this kind of album on a major label you would have everyone meddling. You would have three executive producers you would probably be fighting with the producer.’
So you do have the stress of having book every studio, being involved in every edit, record every musician, sing every vocal and I had to manage endless hard-drives so it was very challenging and it took longer than expected.
I was producing a grand record with a perfectionist streak that I have but in the end I made the record I wanted to make. I have made an album that I am proud of and whatever comes of it I made the album that I wanted to make.
The worst thing is that you make an album, for whatever reason, that you are not happy with because there have been a lot of outside influences and then it doesn’t do much then you feel ‘if I had made the album that I wanted and it bombed I would at least think that I did the best that I could’.
- There is an incredibly personal feel to all of the tracks on this album so what has inspired you to write these tracks? And how much do you draw on personal feeling and experiences when you write?
I write from my heart and I write songs that mean something to me. A lot of the songs are about getting through difficult situations and coming out the other end as opposed to just whinging.
There is a time to just whinge and express a feeling but I have a tendency try, maybe because I went through ME and had a father with mental illness, that I have to figure out how to get to the other side otherwise I would have drowned in negativity.
They are very personal and I just like to write songs… I take a lot of care with my lyrics. I love Lily Allen as I think she is one of the best contemporary voices. She looks at the bigger picture about things and her songs are about the fear or a girl who is turning thirty and how she feels.
She likes rhyme and there are not a lot of artists that do that anymore. I hope, not that I am anything like Lily Allen, but I like to think that my songs will be supportive to people in some way.
- You come from a very creative family - your father being a screenwriter - but where did your love of music start? And is this the career that you always saw yourself having?
My dad originally tried to write musicals so he had a great love… he was primarily a playwright but he had most of his success in films.
He had a lot of plays produced but because he had terrible manic depression and so he might have a play that was going to Broadway and he would go cuckoo and terrorise everybody and that would be the end of that (laughs). So it was amazing that he did as well as he did.
So I grew up with theatre and music all of the time and it was all different kinds of music, for which I was very grateful.
So my little young head was like a giant music stew and I think that that is why I like melody - in the end a song should be melody as that is really what you remember. The best songs are melodic and, in any genre, the songs that stand the test of time are all about melody.
I just had a lot of musical influences and my mother and father were very encouraging of artistic things. I just felt pulled to music and I liked the… I did some acting but I didn’t like the lack of control that you had and I felt like a puppet.
Auditions are horrible experience (laughs) as you are sitting in a room filled with skinny blondes and they are all starring at you - it is horrible.
So I basically somehow to writing songs because you could express something very personal and it was your and no one could mess with it.
Actors have it really rough as they cannot do their job or do what they do unless someone hires them where as you write or you paint or write a song without needing anyone. I have great joy in writing a song.
- Finally what is next for you?
There’s a lot of promoting the album so I have radio interviews coming up and we are getting some good feedback from radio - there is a London station that is going to us My Silent Star for something.
I am just going to be promoting the album so people can hear it. There’s a saying ‘if the tree falls in the forest and no one hears it did it really fall’ so you have to get it out there and find your audience - that take a lot of time and work (laughs). So I am going to be shoving it out into the collective space.
Sunlit Night is released 18th March