Earlimart - Hymn and Her

Produced by Aaron Espinoza, Ariana Murray and Andrew Lynch at The Ship | Engineering with additional production, music and “magic-making” by Andrew Lynch | Mixed by Aaron Espinoza at The Ship | Mastered by Mark Chalecki at Little Red Book Mastering

Hymn and Her has been called “assuredly staggering” and “even more accomplished” than Earlimart’s previous album, Mentor Tormentor. In addition to showcasing the band’s signature tension and release, revolving vocals and sumptuous melodies, Hymn and Her also marks the first of Earlimart’s one-release-a-year plan, and subsequently reveals the magic that the band – now scaled down to core members Aaron Espinoza and Ariana Murray – can accomplish in just one month. Deciding to take an opposite approach from Mentor Tormentor, which involved two years of fine-tuning perfection in the studio, the two booked out only the month of November for tracking at their Eagle Rock studio, The Ship, going straight in to record after their early fall tour last year. They also decided to do something they’ve never done before: hire an engineer for the adventure. The result is an album that is lofty yet honest, cosmic yet organic, and cohesively diverse in its stripped-down and earnest vocals, gorgeously layered and comforting blanket-warm choruses and sweetly haunting simplicity.

Performer sat down with Earlimart to discuss the making of Hymn and Her.

Q: How did having a deadline affect the songwriting process?

Espinoza: I think deadlines are extremely good for us. Having those rules and guidelines forces you to make decisions quickly and not over-think every little detail. It’s more about trust. In turn, making decisions quickly changes the feel of the music, sonically and thematically. We couldn’t do all those really complex, grandiose string arrangements that Ariana had come up with for Mentor. It made us basically use the tools we had in the studio and, in a sense, it kind of took us back to where we were in the beginning, when we wouldn’t have thought we even had the opportunity to have a string quartet.

Murray: Also, with doing all that on Mentor, we kind of got it out of our systems. Plus you learn what your own tricks are. Mentor was like school for a lot of that stuff.

Q: How did the songs come together in the studio?

Espinoza: We didn’t have any real songs going in – I just had a couple little ideas and that kind of got us started. We also didn’t have a drummer at the time, so I was playing drums … and I’m not a drummer. In that sense, it was kind of cool because we embraced the limitation with our engineer, Andrew Lynch, who came in and helped me facilitate everything. I’d go in and play a beat that would kind of work with a song we had just started writing, he would record and sample it, then loop that and put it back into the computer. So basically, we were sampling ourselves and building on that. Ariana would take the songs with the drums and the scratch guitar and then she’d start putting all the good stuff on top, and I literally would go out back of the studio and start writing the next song that we had to start recording the next day. After Ariana would finish layering overdubs, I’d sing the vocals, then show her the next song and play drums and we’d sample that and do the same thing all over again. Except for Ariana’s songs – she kind of sat down and worked them out herself.

Murray: Once they were worked out though, it was the same process.

Q: Where did the lyrics come into the picture?

Espinoza: They were written at the studio. I would do these rough scratch vocal things, where I would come up with a vocal melody and mumble stuff. Once in a while you mumble a word that’s actually meaningful and that kind of triggers some inspiration and you just go down that road. It tells you where to go. It’s kind of like translating some sort of subconscious or dream.

Q: The album still feels cohesive, with themes like right versus wrong, salvation, redemption, dreams, etc. running through it – was that intentional?

Espinoza: I’m sure everyone has these weird little fascinations that keep coming up over and over, for whatever reason – you know, mom and dad, booze, God, body parts, marriage – these little standby twitches. I didn’t go in with an overall theme for the album, though. I don’t think we’ve ever gone in with a concept.

Q: Would you say then that the lyrics are more autobiographical than metaphorical?

Murray: I know that when I get to a certain point, I always just think about what is comforting to hear. So sometimes it’s just the real situation I’m in. But I don’t know. I was always fascinated by how Morrissey lyrics could be so vague and so specific at the same time. I analyzed those songs up and down when I was a teenager and still never totally knew what they were about. But you think you do and there is something really comforting in that – you almost don’t want to know what they’re about completely because then it might be disappointing when it doesn’t apply to you anymore. So there’s that weird fine line between metaphor and reality and it’s fun to dip into both.

Espinoza: My take on it is that you’re working in this pretty confined box – you have only so many lines to say this in this verse and it’s all about syllables … so it can be constricting. I developed the Frank Black take, which was more of the abstract. You know he was telling a story or something, but he’d throw out a physical object or a body part and a symbol of something that he was trying to talk about, and it’s so abstract that you could go anywhere with it and it still means something. I always thought it was neat to tell these stories in a short version with a couple little colorful blasts. However, we’re pushing ourselves and it’s fun to try different stuff. “Cigarettes and Kerosene,” that for me is a change in the lyrical part of songwriting. It’s not necessarily a story, but it’s more of a folky, Beat-era kind of rambling that I’ve never done before. There are so many ways you can go – I say it’s this tiny box, but there are so many nooks and crannies within this tiny box, you can keep yourself busy for the rest of your life. That’s the plan.

-Katherine Hoffert