Holly Miranda

Mon 24th May, 2010 in Features

After being forced to cancel her recent European tour due to the Icelandic volcanic ash, Detroit-born New York-based singer-songwriter Holly Miranda is looking forward to perform at Vivid Sydney Live early next month.

“I’ve actually known about it for a little bit, before anything cancelled because of the volcano but we haven’t been able to announce it until recently,” she says from New York.

The prospect of playing at the Sydney Opera House is a “dream come true” as she has been wanting to visit Australia for a long time with her former band (guitar rock act The Jealous Girlfriends).

On top of that, she gets to collaborate with many amazing artists she admires. An “unbelievable” opportunity, she says.

“I’m a huge fan of [festival curators] Lou [Reed] and Laurie [Anderson] and also Emily Haines and Rickie-Lee Jones. There are just a lot of people I look forward to seeing play and getting to collaborate with them will be amazing.”

A special night in the Vivid Sydney calendar is the Soft Music Night, in which a ‘supergroup’ comprising Emily Haines, The Blind Boys of Alabama, My Brightest Diamond and others, including Miranda, will collaborate onstage in an aural spectacular.

As for her solo set, Miranda will be doing a little more than just playing her haunting tunes on piano and guitar. The atmospherics and many layers in her album, The Magician’s Private Library, are just a hint of what we can expect from her, sans back-up band.

“I’m actually kind of looking to get an instrument range where I should just experiment with things. New songs or just improvising, so I’ll probably do some of my stuff and I’ll probably make up some stuff on the spot and try out some new songs as well.

“Obviously I can’t do the record verbatim by myself, so I’ll be interpreting and just having fun”, which she says is what she likes to see in other artists’ live performances.

Comparisons have been made between Miranda and other contemporary chanteuses such as Feist, but the tendency to play whatever she feels like, her love of sustained falsetto and her New York club scene beginnings have led some critics to hail her as a female answer to Jeff Buckley.

How does she respond to such an adulation? “Those are some big shoes to try to fill. I mean it’s incredibly flattering…I get that comparison more than a lot of the other comparisons I hear like Feist or Cat Power, which I feel are based more on my haircut…it’s a tall ask, but you know I’ll take that I guess.”

Miranda has covered Jeff Buckley’s Lover You Should’ve Come Over and Etta James’ I’d Rather Go Blind, but a more peculiar choice is Tool’s anti-everything anthem, AEnema, which suggests some darker influences than one might initially guess from her soothing melodies.

Identifying herself as something of a dark individual Miranda says she tries to find beauty in the darker and deeper things in life, but qualifies that it’s “not in a sad or depressed way.”

With lyrics such as ‘Every time I go to sleep I kick and scream and dream a little bit/Violently awakening to what’s real is really bullshit/And there’s no light for me’ the contrast between the music and lyrics can be somewhat surprising to the casual listener.

Miranda’s move to New York as a 16-year-old had a huge influence on her as an individual and an artist. Leaving her strict religious childhood behind, she found herself completely surrounded by the creative energy she had felt for so long for the first time in her life.

“New York allowed me to experiment and find my voice. Just being surrounded by painters, poets, musicians and writers – everyone just trying to express [themselves]. I definitely gravitated to the painters and artists, [who are] you know, usually in a darker realm.”

Only with hindsight does she realise she couldn’t even process what exactly she was going through or getting herself into, which was perhaps a case of ignorance is bliss.

“If I’d have been there three or four years later it probably would’ve been a lot harder for me…It’s tough you know. You have to grow up pretty quickly.”

She explains the challenge of being an artist in New York is that one has to work much harder because “everyone” is doing art and music. Furthermore, she says it is simply “really expensive” to be there.

In the big city, Miranda found herself in an extremely challenging and competitive (yet friendly) environment where her peers would “keep pressing harder and just going further” with their music and art. This shaped her music and life to its present form in its exploration of the darker side of beauty and thought.

Despite this, she says even her parents are able to appreciate her music, “I think my parents are able to connect more with the music I’m making now than with The Jealous Girlfriends, which was probably a little loud for them.”

Miranda names her influences as varied as Nina Simone, Leonard Cohen, Edith Piaf, Nine Inch Nails, Jeff Buckley, Tool, Sparklehorse, and a whole lot of Motown.

Combined with her unique outlook on life, her performance as part of Vivid Sydney will be a definite highlight. Even if her knowledge of Australia is limited to funnel-web spiders and Brooklyn-based Aussies Sia and Scott Matthew, her time here should surely not go unnoticed.

Holly Miranda tour:
Wednesday 2nd June – The Studio, Sydney Opera House
Thursday 3rd June – The Studio, Sydney Opera House
Saturday 5th June – The Toff In Town, Melbourne
Sunday 6th June – The Troubadour, Brisbane
Tuesday 8th June – Manhattans, Perth

For complete coverage of things Vivid LIVE head to the FL Hub.