How harpist Mary Lattimore went pop

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘How harpist Mary Lattimore went pop’

Lulu Smyth
Think about a back-up band for a modern pop musician. You’re probably imagining guitars, drums, maybe a keyboard. What instrument you’re probably not thinking of is the harp, but it’s there more often than you might think. Like, listen to the song ‘Shadow’ by Kesha.

[‘SHADOW’ BY KESHA PLAYING]

Lulu Smyth
If you really tune in and listen closely, you can hear the melodic strumming. I even know the musician that’s on the harp here is named Mary Lattimore. And playing this huge ancient instrument in a modern setting is kind of her jam. She’s toured with the pop duo Beach House, and she’s recorded with singer songwriters like Kurt Vile and Thurston Moore. I actually once saw Mary at a concert in Athens in Greece. She played outside. It was like a million degrees. And there were these huge wildfires happening nearby.

Mary Lattimore
It was so hot and ashes were raining down and playing this ancient wooden instrument for these amazing people that were just like enduring the heat and the fires. It was so interesting and so fun, but also so dark.

Lulu Smyth
That’s Mary talking to me recently from her home in Los Angeles. Mary’s music is fairly improvisational. It adapts and builds and morphs. When she’s playing, she’s going through repeating loops which are like variations on the same melody over and over. And those loops are almost like musical snowflakes. They’re different every time.

Mary Lattimore
I can’t remember exactly what I did, but I know that it must have collected some kind of sounds that felt like for that day only. You know what I’m saying? I mean, I’m sure that there was like some melody that felt like it was really connected to the sky, raining down ashes.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lulu Smyth
Right now, Mary’s on tour for her newest solo album, Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, which comes out today. So I’ve invited her on the show to share some of her music and to talk us through how she became a harp-playing indie musician. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lulu Smyth, in for Lilah Raptopoulos.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Mary Lattimore, welcome to the show.

Mary Lattimore
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Lulu Smyth
It’s a pleasure. So to introduce you to our listeners, can you just tell us what it’s like playing the harp? It seems like this huge, unwieldy thing. Like, how many strings is it?

Mary Lattimore
Yeah, it’s, there are 47 strings on the one that I play, which is like the biggest one. Yeah, it’s a concert grand metal harp that I play. And 47 strings. It’s about £85. It is hollow. So, I mean, I can pick it up. I kind of wheel it around on a little cart, on a little trolley. And, you know, you use, you don’t use your pinky fingers, you use eight fingers to play and you kind of hold your elbows up and you lean it back on your shoulder. It’s really, really fun. I feel like the cool thing is that, you know, people think that it’s very complicated to learn it but to me, the cool thing is that you can make it sound beautiful just by playing, like three strings.

Lulu Smyth
Yeah, I was going to say, like, how many of those 47 strings are you sort of using?

Mary Lattimore
I mean, I use a lot of them, but to make a lovely melody, you don’t have to use very many of these strings. The harp, even one string, just sounds beautiful on its own, just, like, plucked in a gentle way.

Lulu Smyth
I’d love to kind of go back to the beginning and talk about how you got here, because the harp is sort of notoriously niche as an instrument and quite hard to learn. Can you talk a bit about how you kind of picked up the harp and first started to learn it?

Mary Lattimore
Yeah, I started playing the harp when I was 11. My mom is a harpist and so there were just harps in my life since I was born. Even before that, you know, like in the womb, my mom was playing with the orchestra. So I kind of grew up thinking that that was, like, a normal thing to have around the house until I got a little bit older. And I was like, oh, wow, the harp is actually kind of weird and unusual.

Lulu Smyth
Mary was trained classically and played that way for a long time, but as a teenager, she was also listening to a lot of rock music — R.E.M., The Cure. And then as she got older, something clicked. She realised that she could use the harp to compose song parts the way that guitarists and drummers do. At the time, she was working on an alternate score to a movie and it set her in this whole new direction.

Mary Lattimore
That was the first time I had ever played anything that wasn’t on the page, you know, that wasn’t like a classical thing. And so that kind of got my wheels spinning, my brain spinning. And so I was just, like, maybe I can write parts, you know, because I’ve listened to so much music and absorbed so much music that maybe it’s time to kind of integrate the harp into music that I like to listen to for fun.

Lulu Smyth
That’s cool. So it’s kind of like an osmosis thing. Sort of absorbed it and then it just naturally feeds into how you’re playing it.

Mary Lattimore
Yeah. If someone can play the piano and like a song like this, like, oh, maybe the harp could have that sort of melodic ribbony line. You know? And so that’s when I started thinking I could write, like I really think of a ribbon, like a winding melody, simple melody played on the harp that could really fit in to a song.

Lulu Smyth
So that’s I guess if we fast forward to now, I find it quite hard to explain your music because you’re sort of a harpist, but you’re not playing the instrument like people you know would expect. It’s a really sort of distinctive sound. So I wonder if you could describe sort of what you sound like, which is a hard thing to do or at least sort of what you’re doing.

Mary Lattimore
Yeah. I mean, I guess at this point I’m playing the harp. I’m adding other instruments to it too now, but I’m also kind of doing a lot of loops with this, with a looper pedal and adding effects to it. But, you know, building these compositions based on these loops.

Lulu Smyth
Yeah, that makes me think of one of the songs off your new album, “Horses, Glossy on the Hill”. There’s that clip-clopping sound. Where did that come from?

Mary Lattimore
Yeah. A lot of times I have this ring that I wear every day. It’s like a silver ring.

Lulu Smyth
No way.

Mary Lattimore
Yeah.

Lulu Smyth
That’s so cool. Like, yeah, I was expecting something like some coconut shells or something.

Mary Lattimore
No, no, no, no. It’s just a silver ring that I have tapping, tapping on it through the effects and then just adding layers and layers and then taking away layers, you know, kind of like impressionistically creating some kind of confection or some kind of, like, mood or trying to paint with sounds or something like that. I feel like I’m using the harp as a tool and the pedal as a tool to get to a feeling, maybe like a mood.

Lulu Smyth
So your first solo album was released in 2013. You’ve since released four more, not counting those in collaboration with other artists. And it feels, I mean, this is like one of my favourite albums of yours, so maybe I’m biased, but it feels like it was on Hundreds of Days, which was released in 2018, where you really started experimenting with more instruments to create a different kind of ambient music. Like, I mean, do you agree with that?

Mary Lattimore
Yeah.

Lulu Smyth
Can we go through, can we just have a listen to ‘Baltic Birch’?

Mary Lattimore
A lot of reverb on it.

Lulu Smyth
Right. And that’s the echo effect in there.

Mary Lattimore
Yeah. I had this artist residency in outside of San Francisco and this national park. I had all this quiet time. There was barely any cell phone reception there. And so I just thought I wanted to take what I was doing to another level and just to have no rules and just have total creative freedom in this place. I would say that a lot of my songs are kind of melancholy. I just like sad music, you know? So I also like having a darker, harsher sound sometimes with the harp or with my music, because it’s not as expected, you know?

Lulu Smyth
Yeah. Like here it gets like really sort of heavy at the same time. Then it gets more kind of, it’s not quite chaos, but it’s like feels very, just barren to me. And there’s like a little switch. Like, I don’t know if you can hear it in that clip that’s like a little squiggly. That’s the only word anywhere that I can use to describe it. It’s like a little squiggly thing. This is very surprising.

Mary Lattimore
Yeah, it’s funny with these, the songs, with all my songs, I feel like I never play them the same way twice because I never can. It’s so much improvisation. And so if you asked me to play a swivelling thing again, I could never I could not do it probably because I don’t know how I did it.

Lulu Smyth
Yeah, it’s interesting. Like, sort of, when you’re talking about how you write, is it purely improvisation or, I mean, do you write it down or record yourself singing it, or do you need to kind of jam on the harp.

Mary Lattimore
I just jam. Yeah. It’s like it’s purely emotion based. It’s just like, OK, I want to try to sit down and just make something and then I’ll just, like, start with a few notes.

Lulu Smyth
And it also seems like a lot of your music is inspired by a sense of place. Like you’re saying, Hundreds of Days is inspired by the residency and your new album is called Goodbye Hotel Arkada. I’m interested how you find inspiration from places and sort of translate it to music.

Mary Lattimore
I don’t know. I just have a real love. I’m like a pretty nostalgic person, and I really love the idea of being able to capture a moment and then have it preserved in this art form. I guess to be able to revisit it. I would say that my memory isn’t that great, You know, like I have a hard time sometimes remembering stuff the older I get. And so I feel like with these records, I can go back and listen to it and then I’m transported. So maybe it’s like a selfish thing also to just really take from that moment, because I know that it will never happen again usually. It’s like pre nostalgia almost or something. Like, where you know that you’re making a memory of making something and that you’re going to look back on it and, and then just think about where you were at the time and maybe people will listen to it and remember where they were while they were listening to it or something too.

Lulu Smyth
Yeah, that’s such a nice kind of way of describing art as sort of anticipating, remembering something.

Mary Lattimore
Yeah, totally.

Lulu Smyth
I also, I love the names of your songs as well. A lot of them, I feel like a lot of them are really poetic, like “And Then He Wrapped His Wings Around Me”, but they can also be quite, like, almost tongue in cheek. One song in this album is called “Music for Applying Shimmering Eyeshadow”.

[‘MUSIC FOR APPLYING SHIMMERING EYESHADOW’ BY MARY LATTIMORE PLAYING]

And yeah, I wondered if you were like doing that as you were sort of thinking of.

Mary Lattimore
I wrote that song partly, it was like around the time I had toured with Beach House. They had kindly asked me to open for them and I wrote that song kind of after coming off of that tour. and it started off being a song about space, kind of like outer space, like I was like wondering what space smelled like, and I just decided to Google it. And the answer was like, It’s an astronaut. safe space, smells like walnuts and burnt tire rubber from tires. Something. It was like a pastry. Some kind of croissant or something. And I was like, oh, that’s interesting. I’m going to write the song about what space smells like. And then once I had written that, I was, like, you know, this doesn’t really sound like what I wanted it to sound like, the description of space. And so I was like, this song sounds like what I would want to listen to in a green room. You have that quiet time before you go out there and play for people. And that song kind of morphed into a song that you would listen to as you were, like, sort of preparing for, you know, this experience of performing.

Lulu Smyth
Yeah. And I wonder how you describe this album.

Mary Lattimore
This album I would say I made it under not such a time constraint, made it over the course of several years. And it has a lot of special guests on it. So I invited a lot of friends and people that I admired to write their own parts over top of mine and to play with the music on top of the harp. And I really love this kind of, like, collaborative sound. It feels different than other records of mine in this case, because I you know, these people’s personalities, like musical personalities, shine through. It was kind of a pastiche, like kind of a collage of songs from, you know, a couple of years, I guess.

Lulu Smyth
Amazing. Mary, thank you so much for coming on the show. I could talk to you forever.

Mary Lattimore
I know! I had so much fun. Cool. Thank you.

Lulu Smyth
Mary Lattimore’s album is called Goodbye Hotel Arkada, and it’s available now.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to the FT Weekend podcast from the Financial Times. Next week, Lilah is back and we’re sharing a conversation she had about food writing during the recent FT Weekend Festival. I’m Lulu Smyth and here’s my excellent team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco. With original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Shout out this week to our intern Monique Mulima, who has been a huge help and who is leaving us after this week. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.