Veda Hille forges new album Beach Practice out of a global shutdown
The Vancouver singer-songwriter explores familiar themes of love and survival, and yet it sounds like nothing else in her catalogue
IT’S EASY TO imagine the scene: a small woman sits at a large piano in a darkened theatre, during the uneasy tranquility of early COVID days. She carefully places her hands on the keys and begins to sing: songs about her son, her husband, her mother; songs snipped from her active dream life and from chance encounters with the natural world; songs about surgery and swimming.
Veda Hille is making a new record—and, perhaps predictably, its underpinning themes are love and survival. These are motifs that Hille—a brave and frank writer, powerful pianist, and increasingly agile singer—has explored before, yet at the same time Beach Practice is like nothing else in her catalogue. And that’s only partially because it was composed during a time of global uncertainly and personal isolation.
Being untethered from her usual round of musical-theatre productions, touring, and recording was “one of the unexpected benefits of the world shutting down,“ Hille says in a telephone interview from her East Vancouver home.
“Luckily,” she continues, “I was not in a tragic situation, and I had time, and I was given the keys to the Cultch, which was a great boon. I called them and said ‘I’m trapped in my house with my child!’ And they said ‘Yes. Sure. Come and play piano every day.’ And my child is now old enough to leave alone for a few hours, so I got to play the big piano in an empty theatre every day—which was an incredibly moving experience, too. Like, being the only person in this beautiful building with one of my favourite pianos in the world, because I was the only one in the building for weeks and weeks and weeks.
“It was a very steadying time for me,” she adds.
The plan was to continue tinkering with lyrics and arrangements, and then assemble a band to record the new songs in a proper studio. Circumstances, however, dictated otherwise. With no end to the pandemic in sight, Hille decided to accept an unusual offer from her friend and occasional collaborator, Nick Krgovich: why not hand him the songs and let him transform them via Zoom sessions and his kitchen-table recording set-up?
Krgovich, she explains, had already surprised her by using his pandemic downtime to make This Spring: Songs by Veda Hille, a collection of 16 Hille covers recast for his own voice and keyboards.
“He texted me to tell me this; I cried right away, and then called him back. It was a very moving experience, knowing that he’d reworked my songs. He got me to sing on the last track, and I got to hear the songs, and I felt renewed and excited and just so grateful, and we had such a good time. And then he said ‘Send me your demos of what you’ve been working on.’ And I was like ‘No, no: I’m going to wait until the pandemic’s over.’”
She laughs ruefully. “And then we both looked around and I sent him the demos.”
Krgovich wound up building elaborate sonic frameworks around Hille’s bare-bones sketches, adding unexpectedly radio-friendly touches to what the singer-pianist describes as her “usual angular approach”. The results can be startling to long-time fans—who, it has to be said, might never have imagined that Hille’s work would benefit from arrangements that, at times, draw on bedsitter beats, soft soul, and garage pop. (Don’t worry: there are still explosive moments, such as the brief noise-guitar solo on “Be a Tree”, along with subtle allusions to longtime Hille favourites David Bowie and Brian Eno.)
“Nick is an incredible musical polymath,” Hille says. “He hears beats in a very different way—and I’m not able to produce on my own; I’ve always relied on collaborations with my band and other wonderful people. But Nick can summon things out of nothing and set things on a different path, starting with beats and grooves. I sent him songs that I considered unfinished; I’d say ‘Okay, this one is just a sprawling improvisation,’ and he used those songs as is, which was also really freeing. It’s like ‘Oh, you don’t have to slave to perfect it. Sometimes the thing that comes out the first time you play is going to be the thing.”
On Beach Practice, the result is both raw and polished. For every sequenced beat there’s a moment of gut-wrenching confession; as Hille notes, most of its songs were written after she completed treatment for a life-threatening cancer, one that required both surgery and heavy medication. Between that and being a mother, she says, she’s gained a deeper appreciation for the everyday—and for life itself.
“Art, for me, is more essential, but there’s less pressure on it to be the biggest thing in the world,” Hille explains. “Let’s see… How can I put this? Just chasing the small noble truth seems like a great thing. There used to be a lot more ego, for me, in the music, or at least in the performance, in wanting to be adored and wanting to be cool and wanting to be famous. Which of course is where I started out in my 20s, along with a healthy respect for music as a thing. But that was all in there, and I’ve been working to shed it as hard as I can. And things like having a kid and surviving illness and being adrift in the sea of the modern age all help with that stuff a lot!
“I just feel dedicated to the music more than ever—which is also, I think, why I was able to hand it over to Nick and just be so freaking happy to do it,” she adds. “To have the music be reinvented by someone else just seemed an even better part of trying to be less involved—trying to get out of the way of the music. I’m just trying to get out of the way, and be the vessel.”
Veda Hille hosts a release party for Beach Practice at the Cultch on June 4.
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