Lady Queen Paradise and Ditch Lily are musicians. They have played music in the same room three times exactly. They first met each other in 2018 in Michigan when Lady Queen Paradise was on tour. Now, in 2022, they both have albums out on the label Dollhouse Lightning. James of Ditch Lily approached Clara of Lady Queen Paradise and invited them into a collaborative interview process. It was decided that the interview would take place asynchronously, in a shared Google doc. Here are the results.

Ditch Lily Interviews Lady Queen Paradise

DITCH LILY

Your songs have made me a big fan of the little “lyrics” tab you can click next to the songs on Bandcamp. They (your lyrics) make me return to a specific question I am always asking myself: Are songs poems? While I like the ambiguity—not knowing or needing to know for sure—I think it’s a revealing question to wonder about. When I listen to your songs, the music does something so beautiful to the words, and vice versa. To you, what is the relationship between poetry and music?

LADY QUEEN PARADISE

If poems “force a pause,” as I recently read somewhere, sorry, can’t remember where, my music, the music I’m writing now, anyway, doesn’t really force anything. I’m eager to return to the poet’s forcible way, that version of Lady Queen Paradise has been on hiatus for a while. Really, all that I ask of my audience is silence. They don’t have to be present with me if they don’t want to. Of course, when I’m given silence, what I’m being given is trust. And I don’t take that for granted, I like to handle that with care because it’s a gift. Anyway, I find it extremely difficult to read a poem and not be present with it. But I can easily imagine someone listening to my music and wanting to leave the room because it’s not the right moment for them. I guess that makes me a pretty permissive performer. I’m excited to write more songs in the future that take you by the throat but as of right now we’re just looking to caress. I haven’t answered your question, sorry. “Everything is a poem,” right?

DL

Thanks always for showing me Molly Brodak’s poetry. I was so touched by “Materialism (After Molly Brodak).” I think it is such a perfect homage to her. It truly is written after her spirit. The last stanza (whoops, verse) is, to me, a praise of indefiniteness, of transformation, and evokes her presence through her specific brand of wonder. I have a few guesses, but I’m wondering if you had a reason for ending the album on this note?

LQP

Thank you. I would love to hear your guesses! I don’t think I can say.

        

DL

This is my personal interpretation. The few objects, the physical things in “Materialism (After Molly Brodak),” consist of: hands, a head shrouded by clouds, and little lamps. Things that hold, things that give light, things that see and think. In the sparest sense, the tools of wonder. Materials for the sake of examining the immaterial. I think this song, like any final song on an album should, gently nudges the listener to re-listen to the whole album again and re-wonder, re-examine—as I have now, many times. It’s regenerative—mercifully, the album never ends.

LQP

This is a beautiful interpretation. I find that in all relationships, the style of ending can reflect much of the style of building and is just another part of the process of being with something. I’m not sure if it actually happened, but there was meant to be a slight difference between the album tracks listed online and the music on the cassette & CD. I wonder if they leave the same impression.

DL

Do you ever worry sometimes about how the music affects (obscures or punctuates) the lyrics? Like sometimes I mourn the fact that some lines I really labored over and loved aren’t easy to register as a listener unless you’re really paying attention. I want my lyrics to be understood. Although, I’m also aware that some listeners absorb music in a more conglomerate way, and the lyrics don’t even really need to be heard for the song to mean something for them. I guess the second part of this question I’m trying to ask is: what’s the relation or importance to you between the meaning you meant a song to have (if you did) and the meaning a listener forms themselves?

LQP

This is a very interesting question. I don’t relate to mourning a line’s visibility, I think simply because the way I compose reveres the lyric. There is no song without the line, I never find myself wishing something was more visible in a texture or arrangement. It’d actually be so wild for me to talk to someone who likes the songs on this album but wasn’t listening to them with intentional regard for the lyrics. Oh - writing that out, I guess I understand now why many people consider me a folk musician.

Am I perceptible through my songs? Does what I assign meaning to in my music land with anyone? Can a stranger who knows my music then, in turn, know me? Will we disagree about what that means?

DL

When you sing, do you close your eyes?

LQP

Sometimes yes. Other times my guitar demands my attention, for their relationship to my hands is a distrusting one and they like my supervision. It’s extremely difficult for me to make eye contact in group settings, which is something I’m working on, so though I don’t close my eyes when I play shows, I typically avert my gaze and look at no one.

DL

The whole song, every lyric, in “Surfacing” is temptingly quotable, but the line that really yanked me into the moment and myself when I first listened was “Crawl into what shimmering star I'm reaching for. I seize me, no one else.” Hmm. That’s not a question. Just wanted you to know.

LQP

<3

DL

I notice now that we both used the word “shimmering” in a line that expresses our moving through ourselves, either into or away from. I think that’s indicative of the nature of songwriting in general—examining our proximity to ourselves and how that changes our behavior. What are your thoughts on this?

LQP

What reveals itself to me through the content and affect of my songs is quite stunning. When listening to older music, I hear so much about things I was going through at the time, things I didn’t want or need to understand at the time. But I was able to document it anyway, so a future me could listen and be like, yep. Makes sense you sang that line like that, makes sense, the way you wanted to be heard, I see you, I see it, now. I’m grateful for what I choose to store.

DL

Lines like “I’m right here, my body’s on the other side” in “Look! A Falling Meteorite” and “You’re not on my side” in “Surfacing” and “I’ll be on your side” in “Worthy is the Girl I Love” give a picture of intimacy, love, and care that focuses on various proximities. In “Worthy is the Girl” devotion appears finally as a form of running, devotion not by the recipient's side but on their side, from far away, or while leaving. How does space, and this roaming devotion affect the way you sing your songs? Do you sing them alone sometimes, to yourself? Part two of this question: It’s not fun to feel like someone is reading over your shoulder as you write a song, but it’s also so sweet to think of a song as a gift you are making for someone. Do you have any sort of audience in mind when you write songs? How does their presence (or lack of) change the way you write?

LQP

I like your interpretation of my “roaming devotion.” I’m a Sagittarius rising, so, yeah. I sing to myself in my room all the time. Sometimes I sing into the mirror, other times looking straight ahead. This is a situation where I have my eyes closed, where the stakes are low and I don’t feel like I’ll lose balance if I allow myself to be sightless.

I’ve written songs for other people. And, obviously, about other people. I think a lot about this distinction - is it “for” or “about”? For songs that are for others, I often don’t consider them Lady Queen Paradise songs. It feels almost wrong to perform them. It’s an extension of my relationship with that person, not of my brand. For songs about others, that feels different. I didn’t write it as a gift for them, the song is just how I’ve processed an interpersonal experience. I try to be mindful and move in the direction of mutuality with these things. I care a lot about integrity and never want to misuse emotional material.

DL

What is your songwriting process, if you have one? What comes first—melody, a chord progression, lyrics, an image?

LQP

First I put on an all-black outfit, then I turn off all the lights save for a red light bulb, then I place my hands on the instrument, then, eventually, all that needed somatizing becomes clear to me.

Sensation drives my melodies. The feel of something. I know what “longing,” “despair,” “calm,” sound like in my mouth, through what vocal affect those states express themselves most poignantly. I know what these notes taste like, where they are located in my vocal register. It is like painting, maybe, and having a collection of brushes of various sizes. Don’t use the little brush when you are looking for a wide stroke. That’s just obvious and intuitive. I sometimes feel this way about songwriting. I don’t have that many musical tools, but I do have an intuitive sense of how to use my voice to best translate what occurs inside of me. It can be as intentional as “I should sing the highest note of this phrase on a consonant so as to express a feeling of resistance,” or it can be something that just happens. When there is a song waiting to be written, what I feel is not “music” inside of me but “sensation” and “desire for expression.” Songwriting, for me, is often about those two things.

DL

What dictates the lyrics that make your songs their habitat? What most often compels you to write music?

LQP

Being able to hear what my energy sounds like is a pretty useful tool for self-awareness. I like how my soul compels me to be heard. Music is a language I speak, so, I guess the question is what compels me to communicate? Loneliness, love, grief, yearning, confusion, agitation, connection, connection, connection.

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Lady Queen Paradise interviews Ditch Lily

LADY QUEEN PARADISE

The altitude of your songs exposes both the poet and the Michigan in you. I’m thinking of an interview I read with the French poet Yves Bonnefoy. He explained how light stimulates his writing and so he pursues it, that he goes places where light is - that “The snow is a form of light.” He talked of his last book of poetry, Beginning and End of Snow and said it was written specifically with a luminous winter in mind. I’ve lived in New England all my life so I’m familiar with how a cover of snow allows us to hear and see things differently. Mentions of snow in By the Prairie Songs communicate to me your attentiveness to and comfort with winter. What has the phenomenon of winter given to your music and poetry, that you might not have been given by a warmer climate?

DITCH LILY

I’ll be sure to look for Yves Bonnefoy at my local bookstores. He seems like a poet I’d like. Snow and light are so often weaving together in my mind and what I write. It didn’t strike me that they could be a form of each other. But maybe that’s what enraptures me about winter—it is mysterious, it welcomes you to not know. It’s a cold blanket. It requires warmth to survive in, to enjoy. Warmth not only in clothes, though. It makes one desperate. For strange or novel sources of warmth, I suppose. Like calling a friend out of the blue, who you’ve lost touch with. Or drinking lots of cider and cocoa. Writing letters. Lighting candles, lanterns. Fixing someone’s scarf for them after they come skiing down a hill. It makes you gravitate. I always find myself driving north, exacerbating the cold, and the need for more warmth. I think these impulses are probably all over this album.

LQP

Skiing can only occur on the surface of things. If what is unseen carries us, it’s in our best interest to invest in our dreams, don’t you think? What attaches you most to the subtler moments on this album, such as the voicemail at the end of “Been This Way for A While Now,” the field recordings of birds, and the murmur at the beginning of “Skiing”?

DL

This is such a lovely question. I think the answer to it is exactly what you said: these little unseen things carried me, carried the songs, and exposed their innate messages minutely, but perfectly. Before the album was out, I sent a demo of “Been This Way for a While Now” to my friend Brendan and he called me and left that message. That voice message was an affirmation of the song, and it was the song—because the song’s ending lyrics are “I know you do (worry/care).” Brendan’s care made that song more real than I knew it could be. And these are things people don’t often hear in the records they love (!!), the things in their process that made them what the listener ends up hearing and knowing. I think it’s important for people to hear songs as something at a point in its process rather than a finished product. The murmur in “Skiing” is me saying “It’s okay” to my bandmate Josh while he was recording a vocal take. He’d looked at me because he thought I messed up a line, but I chose not to sing a word on purpose, so I said “It’s okay” during the take knowing he could edit it out. Only, I think he just muted that part of the track or something when he sent it over to my friend Elora (who produced and mixed and sang on that song). Elora found and looped that murmur. It surprised us when she sent it back, we’d forgotten it was even in the stems, that it’d happened at all. But I think it works as such a sweet little subtext for the overall message of that song (“It’s okay”), and proof of its clumsy process.

LQP

There are several moments on your album that describe brief, temporal portals. A meadowlark obscured by the speed of its travel, a character “standing at the edge of the outdoor pool at the ski lodge, steam rising off,” or “passing through curtains of falling snow like a threshold.” There is this glowing irresolution that occurs when you enter into the space between perceptible thresholds, the steam of a passage. When you linger in the doorway and allow yourself to be present there. Where were you, temporally speaking, during the process of recording this album? Did the album’s release feel like an arrival? Has its publication brought you anywhere you haven’t been before?

DL

I like the betweens, the liminalness of getting somewhere, but not quite yet. I look at my feet when I walk and this makes me a clumsy presence, but it always also makes arrival a surprise for me. I think that’s an instinct.

I was in a state of change (as always). I was moving 8 hours south to a town where I knew no one. I was driving a flower delivery van down rural roads. I was considering joining a monastery. I was trying to get over a break up, struggling. I was missing people. I was loving my dog and his love for me. I was skiing. I was learning how to fry things in a skillet. I was learning how to make floral arrangements. I was writing poetry about my Grandma. I was mourning my childhood. I was touching trees a lot, learning their names.

I think the album’s release felt like a departure. A doorway I left behind and can re-enter. I can now return to it fondly, but I’m not in it anymore and that’s probably for the best. It was a past version of me, an expression of my impermanence. I think those lines you mentioned are trying to express that impermanence explicitly. Inevitably, I think its publication has brought me here, where I am now. I’m its echo. I’m its thankful echo.

LQP

You mention in the liner notes that this album is about “levitation.” Will you say more? Is levitation a prerequisite for flight?

DL

I think of it as absolute untethered-ness, and what else is a song? To be more concrete, I wanted “Cold Dark Lake,” for example, to feel like sitting on a creaking, old wooden boat, bobbing on a lake at dusk, but with just enough light to still see. Maybe that’s as much as I can say about it? … That sort of darkening, the intense, imposing consciousness of being above and below, leaving and arriving, somehow both waking and falling asleep, etcetera. In that song, hope and hopelessness are pretty much the same thing. Maybe levitation is a dreaming sort of flight? Like a goose asleep while flying? I heard they can do that.

LQP

The ambiguous loss that occurs when you’re unable to retrieve what has begun to fade away. The irresolution, the vapors curling into the air. “Snowmobile” captures this cavernous flickering. If there’s a way to glide there to heaven, or to any place where love is activated, I think there will inevitably be a perceptibly spiritual spray of snow, like the dust of an angel’s wings, trailing behind us. What we create when we record music, I think, is just this. An object that acts as a trace of us (or of God). Do you feel this way about your album?

DL

Yes! Exactly. As I said earlier, I am its echo, and, probably, vice versa. I don’t think I’ll ever lose its trace completely. I don’t think anyone can ever totally shed their art, no matter how old, or “bad.” This should be a comfort, right? Oh, and thank you. That is such a generous description of the song.

LQP

While making By the Prairie Songs, did you find yourself abstaining from any ways of being that were, at the time, typical and standard to your life? Did the album give you any rituals that clarified your “irresolute shape”?

DL

Writing songs is hard for me. I’m not really a natural musician and often when I pick up an instrument it feels like the first time I’ve ever picked it up. I guess what I’m saying is that it happened so slowly that I barely noticed the ebb and flow of habits while writing. Oh! Except maybe this: I’d write the guitar part some times, like I did this for “Portrait Mode,” and a few others—I’d write the guitar and record it on my phone, then with the lyrics in hand, I’d walk in circles around the neighborhood cemetery listening to the guitar part with one headphone in and humming the lyrics until the melody took shape. Usually it happened pretty quickly, after a few laps.

LQP

If guilt is the white hare when all snow melts away, what is its predator, the lynx?

DL

O I hope it’s me—if it’s a lynx, I hope I’m a lynx. I didn’t premeditate that line, I don’t know entirely what it means. Sometimes I feel guilty for feeling guilty. I feel guilty for not knowing where the guilt comes from. I think that’s what I meant by that line. It was an attempt to identify the source, and by way of exposing it, eliminating it. Songs, for me, are almost always a tenuous blur between self affirmation and exorcism.

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Inner Connection by Lady Queen Paradise and By the Prairie Songs by Ditch Lily are both available for download and purchase on Dollhouse Lightning