[Warning: Another long article, but there will be mp3s at the end, I promise. There's a lot more of the interviewee in this one than in my Willard Grant Conspiracy interview, so it's maybe less of an article and more of a proper interview. Please do give me your thoughts though. I have interviews with both The Young Republic and iLiKETRAiNS to write up as well, so the tips and feedback would be appreciated.]

Meeting Shara Worden at the End of the Road Festival was an interesting experience, it really was. Diminutive, with very rock ‘n’ roll hair, she definitely seems to spend a lot of the interview evaluating me, deciding if I’m one of the good guys or not, deciding whether or not she really wanted to talk, or just to give out answers. It seems like a sort of wariness, born of making the leap from New York club circuit to international indie favourite relatively recently. The attention is something she comes across as enjoying in some ways, but rather mistrusting in others.

Indeed this impression is tangentially confirmed by something she says to me towards the end of the interview: “Someone said to me ‘oh you must be so extroverted, you’re a performer’ and I’m actually a very introverted person, and the need to get up and perform, I don’t really understand it. It’s not about me needing attention. I think it’s about me believing very, very, very much in a feeling and in the power of what that can do for me and for other people, and also so that I don’t feel alone. I mean, I’ve been performing since I was a kid, and it’s a weird thing for me to think ‘am I just in need of attention’. And I don’t know that it’s about needing attention or if it’s more about feeling that you have something that someone else has felt.”

I’ve known quite a few very introverted people who have ended up as performers, and sometimes it seems to me almost as if they use the shield of the performance as a way of expressing things they might find too personal to put into words otherwise. Shara strikes me certainly as being someone who would not like to give someone she doesn’t know or trust the kind of personal advantage necessary to hurt her feelings normally, but her frank and emotional music can in some ways do just that. To My Brightest Diamond though, rather than Shara Worden.

For someone who seems private and slightly protective, it must be odd to suddenly have her work out there being discussed and interpreted by all and sundry. Up until recently “it was almost like I would record these albums and I wouldn’t promote them at all. I had a band, Awry, and we did one tour for two months and that was the only tour we ever did”.

However, when you release an album into the wider world it does, to an extent, cease to be your own and people begin applying their own stories. “It will remain what it is to me, but I’m also really not interested in dictating to other people, and I’ve left gender out of a lot of songs and it’s funny to me because people always assume that it’s about a guy and I’m like ‘there’s no gender there, you know, that one’s about my mom. But anyway it doesn’t matter - sure, it’s a guy, whatever.”

That slight distance again – connecting over the emotion, but leaving the personal details out of it. I am not trying to paint her as cold or distant, because she was anything but, but I do get the impression that the walls would come down very fast if you were to say the wrong thing.

The music of course, is the opposite of this. It is direct and powerful, hitting you right between the eyes immediately. For a slip of a lass, she has a voice like a velvet-wrapped sledgehammer, and she wields it with such total mastery it’s impossible not to be stunned. Her set after the interview was over was about as blistering a rock ‘n’ roll performance as there was to be found at the festival all weekend.

After all the gigs in intimate New York clubs it must be an odd change to be playing in a vast tent where the audience reaction is difficult to gauge. For someone whose music is so emotionally driven I would imagine it must be much harder to perform in a setting where, no matter how much they love the set, the crowd’s reaction is usually lost to the sky. Without that interplay, how do you generate the emotional core of a performance?

“Well” she says, laughing, “you kind of just have to trust”.

“Actually I was talking to Katell Keineg - especially being an opening act for such a long time, an opening slot where people don’t know you at all is a very specific thing, and you’re always trying to grab attention. And stuff that you don’t know - it’s a lot for the brain to pay attention for thirty minutes. You’re gauging how people are responding and whether they were talking or not talking and she said ‘At a certain point you have to stop guessing and stop over-interpreting and just do your thing’, and I kind of from that point on… well obviously that was a kind of pivotal moment for me.”

So does that mean it’s no longer the case that she tailors her set to the audience the way she would as a support act, and that she now just plays what she wants to hear herself? “Well for me it was that way in the beginning and then as I’ve gotten… well certain things change. In the beginning I was aware that other people would hear it but not mindful of what something would be like in a set. And do I really want to have this mood for this long in a set. And there’s been this thing that as I perform more and in bigger spaces that the music changes to fit the set.”

This counts for the song writing as well. “As I’m getting old and persnicketty I’m thinking ‘Well I really need a song at about 155 beats per minute’. I mean, I’m not so calculating but I am sort of analytical about it in a way. But obviously if you don’t start with a strong feeling or an intention or some kind of idea, then you’re going to end up with some kind of mud. So I guess that what I’m saying is that the words, the music, the voice - all of those things when they work in tandem, in collaboration and in balance with each other then we feel things more clearly”

My Brightest Diamond are a group I know because of blogs. Shara Worden’s stock runs particularly high in the blogosphere. Given she hasn’t been performing abroad for all that long the general assumption would be that this international dialogue would be a major benefit as she doesn’t have to persuade each new audience to quite the extent that she might have had to in similar circumstances in the past.

Her income all still comes from record sales though, despite confident proclamations from the evangelists of unlimited free downloading that touring and merchandise would be the new avenues for artists to make the bulk of their income. Shara pretty much laughs at this suggestion:

“I don’t make money touring.” I point out that she’s a pretty streamlined group compared to, say the eight-piece Young Republic. “It’s different because I’m a solo person who has to pay a band. And if I could tour with eight people I would and maybe bext year I’ll be able to. And I’m the sort of person that’ll think like excellent, we’ve got a bit more cash we’ll step up this and have a little more of that. But that’s the drug of the music - as soon as there’s any more money it’s like ooh I need a new guitar!”

She also offers an even more worrying piece of information:

“It’s interesting too on a technological level because I would say nearly 70% of the really great studios have closed in recent years. Bands just can’t afford to pay $200 an hour. What that’s doing to the recording quality? You can say that’s shit, indie this, indie that - but I sang through a 1952 pre-amp and through a $3000 microphone and I was like wowww this is amazing.”

There are some kinds of music and some musicians that suit rough and ready methods quite well of course, but the idea that these tools will soon be out of the reach of 90% of musicians is something I have to say I find quite chilling. De-tuned recording quality should be available to all as a choice, something to use like the rest of their instruments, but the idea that it may become financially inevitable? There is no way to persuade me that this is good.

I wonder too if the democratisation of the music writing and the music review process might not perhaps have served to do a similar thing to musical discussions. Does it remove the depth and the technical skill because the investment required for this sort of reporting? When there are thousands and thousands of words and samples available on the internet for free then who does the in-depth, thoughtful reporting? We amateurs can’t do it because we have full-time jobs, but if our free sites and the ubiquity of free samples put the squeeze on the professionals by robbing them of large chunks of their audience, then won’t that have a negative impact on the quality of debate about music?

“Well in some ways a blog can be a better way of expressing that than some other forms because it can be a longer form. Because what I find with some other forms of dialogue is that there isn’t a dialogue because we’re so interested in selling something - the magazine’s interested in selling something, the radio station’s interested in selling something. Everything gets shortened - everything that I say as an artist - and it’s barely, barely what I said. I don’t make Top 5 lists - I don’t think like that - and you do it because well I have the choice to not do this or I can just get off my high horse and just make a frigging Top 5 list, and my one Top 5 will be different than the next. But you know what I mean, the form in and of itself dictates a kind of thinking and I think it takes away from critical thinking. It’s like what politics have become now where everyone is so fast and so short that we don’t take the time to listen to anyone’s argument - it’s become kind of like Jerry Springer, although maybe that’s a very American thing”

Most American public political, and indeed social, debate has undeniably become an embarrassing circus. Currently it is a shouting contest: whoever is prepared to talk over the other one the loudest and for the longest is the only one who will ultimately be heard. Repetition makes fact, irrespective of content. It is, regrettably, fast becoming that way over here as well.

For someone like Shara Worden, who thinks carefully about things and who seems to want to meet someone in the middle before even beginning the discussion, I can see how this would be anathema. Faced with a similarly aggressive barrage I get the impression she is liable just to glaze over and cease to really participate, and to a degree this interview seemed similarly precariously balanced at times. Shara Worden may close up easily but My Brightest Diamond, on the other hand, would blow you clean across the room with one bellow from those nuclear powered lungs and one brutal swipe of the guitar.

My Brightest Diamond - Dragonfly

shara worden’s site | my brightest diamond site | hype | amazon