Robin Holcomb & Peggy Lee: Behind the Delicate Sound of 'Reno'
Two distinctive voices in Pacific Northwest creative music discuss their long collaboration, their new album ‘Reno,’ and how geographic community shaped their collaborative mindset to blend composition with improvisation.
Today, the Spotlight shines on composer and pianist Robin Holcomb and cellist Peggy Lee.
These two musicians have been creating music together for the better part of two decades. Their new album, Reno, out September 12, captures something rare: the kind of musical conversation that happens when two artists know each other’s musical language inside and out. Robin’s songs draw from American folk traditions while her piano work moves into territories that feel both classical and completely free. Peggy brings a cello sound that’s equally at home with composed melodies and total improvisation.
Their collaboration encompasses everything from Robin’s early song cycles about utopian communities in the Pacific Northwest to pieces that came from her work on the Donner Party saga. It’s music that’s hard to categorize, which makes it all the more worth your time.
This conversation in the Fall of 2024, off-hours and in person at Seattle music venue The Royal Room.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Robin Holcomb and Peggy Lee’s album Reno)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Robin Holcomb at robinholcomb.com and follow her on Instagram and Facebook
• Visit cellist Peggy Lee online
• Purchase Robin Holcomb and Peggy Lee’s Reno from Songlines or Qobuz, and listen on your streaming platform of choice
Collaborators and Influences:
• Wayne Horvitz - Robin’s partner and frequent collaborator
• Veda Hille - Vancouver singer-songwriter
• Clusone Trio - Han Bennink, Ernst Reijseger, Michael Moore
• ICP Orchestra - Dutch improvising ensemble
• Jerry Granelli - Drummer and educator
Venues and Organizations:
• The Royal Room - Seattle
• Vancouver East Cultural Centre (The Cultch)
• Vancouver International Jazz Festival
• Glass Slipper - Historical Vancouver venue
• Roulette - Brooklyn experimental music venue
Creative Music Context:
• New York Downtown Scene - 1980s experimental music
• American Composers Orchestra
• Philadelphia Orchestra - Commissioners of Robin’s Paradise
• Terry Lynn Carrington - Berklee educator and new fake book project
Pacific Northwest Music:
• Earshot Jazz Festival - Seattle
• Something Else! Festival - Pacific Northwest
• PuSH International Performing Arts Festival - Vancouver
Television Reference:
• Deadwood, HBO’s Western, is the TV best drama ever made - HBO series that inspired Peggy Lee’s Film in Music project
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I need to set some context for listeners, so I won't spend a ton of time in the way-back machine with you, but I want to ask, just by way of getting started, how did you two first cross paths? Were you aware of each other professionally? Did the relationship start personally? I would ask either of you who wants to jump in.
Robin Holcomb: I don't remember the year.
Peggy Lee: I'm not good with the years either, but I do remember you walking into Veda Hille's house. We were doing a project on Nick Drake at the Cultch.
Robin: At the Vancouver East Cultural Centre.
Peggy: And that's before Talking Pictures, I'm not sure.
Lawrence: Early 2000s, to set it in time?
Peggy: No, earlier. I think probably mid-1990s.
Robin: I think I knew of you, or I knew that there were a number of fabulous improvising musicians in Vancouver when we lived here. I think Peggy was in a band called Talking Pictures. We played your music—they did a concert of my music, so they had heard my early record, Larks, They Crazy, I think. So I went up, and then they've done concerts with Wayne and my husband Wayne Horvitz's music and my music, and everybody in the band wrote. That's how it started for me. If it was Veda's house on that Nick Drake project, that's very possible as well. We've known each other for a fairly long time.
Lawrence: So for you, Peggy, it was about being drawn to the music initially—you knew Robin as a writer and composer?
Peggy: Mm-hmm.
Lawrence: I'm so curious about your connection and your migration to Vancouver. You both have such interesting stories in terms of place and where you're from and how you've wound up in the Pacific Northwest. I'm specifically curious for now about what was going on—what was the allure of Vancouver at the time you went there, and why Vancouver?
Peggy: I'm from Toronto, and after university I spent a year at the Banff Centre in Alberta. During that year, a couple of things happened. I realized I would never really want to play in a pit orchestra, which is what almost everybody I knew was doing because the shows were so big at that time. This was 1989. I also really got into telemark skiing and I thought, "Oh, maybe if I move to the mountains I'll do that"—which I never have done since. That was an idea that I had in moving to Vancouver, and just being in a place where I didn't have any kind of history. I thought I could start to create my own story.
Lawrence: Was there a creative music scene?
Peggy: I didn't know that, but there really was, and that's how I met a lot of really open-minded improvisers, which changed my whole path.
Lawrence: When you two were speaking over the answer to the first question, you mentioned the cultural centre. What is that? Is that sort of a place that artists congregate around?
Peggy: Well, there was a place called the Glass Slipper. That was the main place.
Robin: That was a club?
Peggy: Yeah. And also the Jazz Festival was kind of unique in Vancouver. Again, very open-minded—all kinds of improvisers, a lot of European improvisers were coming. It was a very interesting scene.
Robin: The Vancouver East Cultural Centre is a space, a theatre, and there are a lot of music concerts there, but there's a lot of theatre there too. It's an old theatre or an old hospital—I don't know. It's got a very rickety balcony upstairs. It sounds great in there. That's where lots of concerts happen. It's one of many places, not as much lately.
Lawrence: How do you both approach the sort of bridging or the merging of the different musical perspectives? I mean, you both obviously work in the creative music world, but you bring very different—not only individual personality points of view to it, but your social histories, the folk traditions, dance, theatre. I don't like to get hung up in genre classifications, so the question's not necessarily about that. It's more about what you two create together that's unique and informs your other works when you then go your separate ways. What is that experience for you?
Robin: Well, for me it's all music. It's not one thing or another. When I'm writing, it's whatever feels good in the moment, whatever seems appropriate to the music in the moment. Usually when I work with Peggy, we always start with my piano chart, and then she figures out a part from that. Sometimes I write a line for her, but often she invents one based on the piano part and extrapolating on that. How our relationship affects other music—I mean, it's one of my favorite duos to work with, and I look for that in all the bands I play in. I don't always get that, but that's the quality of empathy, intuition, and shared interest in a wide variety of music. I don't know that we've come up with any particular music that she loves and I hate, or vice versa, but I'm sure it's in there somewhere.
Lawrence: Maybe a little later we could do that. We could have that covered. (laughter)
Robin: There are a number of improvisers in Vancouver and in New York who I feel similarly about, differently at the same time though.
Lawrence: They nourish different aspects of your work?
Robin: I guess. Some of them are more actively engaged in what I bring, and none of them are as much as Peggy is. Some of them are not very much—it's more like we're playing parallel music, which is fine sometimes. I think Peggy is unique in that she's, for many reasons, but two of them are she's an amazing improviser and also she's really great at working with songwriters and she's really good at supporting a song. It just makes it a lot bigger, and you don't need other instruments particularly. It's very full sounding what she comes up with. Those two skills don't always come together, so that's really great for me.
Peggy: Thank you, Robin!
Robin: Okay, now let's see what you can do. (laughter)
Peggy: I don't know, it's just Robin's music is so unique—music and words—and I've just found a place that I feel comfortable to use sort of my whole vocabulary, whether it's really active stuff or very simple, pure sounds. It just feeds all the things that I love to do.
Lawrence: How do you engage with the lyrics? Or do you? Is that part of your interpretation?
Peggy: Not literally. It's kind of, for me, almost like when I work with dancers. I'm peripherally aware and try to engage, but not exactly.
Lawrence: I'm always curious about that, especially when I see—I don't want to use the word multimedia because it sort of conjures somebody with a film projector or a slideshow, but multidisciplinary presentations. I find myself as an audience member always trying to figure out where the interplay is happening, if at all. I once saw Savion Glover tap dance at a McCoy Tyner show. I understood the two different African American traditions meeting there—the jazz and the blues and the dance—but as an audience member, it seemed kind of dissonant to me, and I couldn't really tell if the musicians and the dancer were into it. It was very hard to integrate. So apropos of nothing, but it's an interesting experience, like you mentioned playing with dancers. It is interesting to me because I would assume that dancers perhaps get more from the musicians just by function of what they're doing. They're performing along or to the music. But I've always been curious—are the musicians also taking back from the dancers?
Peggy: Yeah. It's not a score that you're just following the music—it's a duet or whatever. It's a collaboration.
Lawrence: On the topic of the lyrics, I'm curious, Robin. When you first started writing, were you thinking of poetry ultimately as song? Did you self-identify as a poet and transition to music?
Robin: They were kind of going on at the same time. I guess you could say I self-identified as a poet very briefly when I was living in Santa Cruz, California. There was a really wonderful poetry scene with people that came out of various schools, and some of them weren't in school, but it was great. People who were translators too. I was on the fringe of that. I was already playing music and writing music some, but I hadn't put words and music together. In fact, I was very frustrated at trying to do that because songs are a lot of what I listen to. I had already, I think, started listening to the Art Ensemble and Cecil Taylor and all that, and started improvising.
So there were these three things going on. I was composing a little bit, and I was improvising, and I was writing words. It wasn't until after I moved to New York in the late seventies—I guess early eighties—that I tried to put the two together, and it was just miserable at the first few attempts. Just awful. I even took a class at one of these free university things—just awful. I kept trying to put them together, and then I got a job again in Santa Cruz. I came back from New York and wrote music for a production of The Tempest. I used some Gamelan instruments—that's what I did in college, was play Degung, which is West Javanese Gamelan music.
So I used Gamelan instruments, some Western instruments, and I set the songs to new melodies. The singers had a real hard time with the melodies that I created, but I could sing them with ease, which I thought was odd but also really interesting. I took that information and then started noticing that was the case sometimes with other singers when I would try to involve them in projects. Then I thought, "Well, maybe I can sing it and play at the same time." I went back to old poems and set those to music. So it was first Shakespeare, then the old poems, and then on to writing lyrics, which was another step that was difficult to navigate. But because in poetry, I like to write very sparsely and use not very many words and evoke something rather than tell something all the time, I brought that to lyric writing, and I think that served me well. The weird rhythms that can happen in poetry also worked well in songwriting for me.
Lawrence: Were you a minimalist by nature, or was that something that emerged for you, either being in New York at that time and around that scene? How do you think about that?
Robin: I wouldn't say so. I wouldn't say I was very influenced by minimalist composers. I would say in terms of writing, maybe I was influenced by Asian poets of various sorts, or just people that—maybe I just didn't have the patience to read wordy poems and lots of words. I somehow figured out a way to put music that didn't come from changes, basically, to words. Then the harmonic progressions kind of emerged from that.
Lawrence: So more of an aesthetic influence?
Robin: I guess, maybe.
Lawrence: I think about—I'm from the northeast originally, I lived in New York for a long time. The sort of "downtown scene," in air quotes, was so impactful for me as a listener and my exposure to creative music. Very easy for me to idealize everything that sprung from that, but it's also true that so much did spring from that well. Do either of you—maybe I'll ask you first, Peggy—recognize or do you see lineage that sprung from that scene, or is what you came up with completely separate from that world?
Peggy: I wasn't really aware of that world, but I think when I moved to Vancouver and started to play with the musicians on the scene there, they were fully aware of that world. So I was sort of influenced secondhand. But also, as I said, because the Jazz Festival at the time brought over a lot of European improvisers, especially from the Dutch scene, that was also really a big influence.
Lawrence: Was cello your first instrument?
Peggy: Not really. I started on piano, and I also played guitar a bit. I started cello because I went to a school in Toronto, grade seven, and that particular public school had a good orchestra program, so I had to choose an instrument and I chose cello.
Lawrence: It's so funny how many people have a similar story as that. It's not that surprising when somebody says they started on piano because that's sort of a thing.
Peggy: It was in the house.
Lawrence: Especially, I think generationally it was a marker of stability or middle-classness—to have—I mean, for me it was an old beat-up Wurlitzer upright that was just always there. Probably because it was impossible to move, but it was always there. (laughter) But the other part of the story that I hear a lot is that moment in band at school, with the instruments and with the teachers, basically finding the one that's calling you and getting to it. I think there was a period of time where there were a lot of gender paths—like the flute or the cello or certain things, like girls were kind of told, "This is what you were going to do." It's really an exciting moment, I think, exemplified by a lot of what we see here. I don't see that as starkly anymore. There are so many great horn players or just, you know, drummers, everything. Like it feels like there's been—it's easy for me to say as a middle-aged man, but I wonder how do you perceive gender? I don't know even the right way to ask the question, but how do you note it, and have you had to note it throughout your career? Do you feel a sense of encouragement or optimism about the female presence in the creative music world?
Robin: For me, I used to always say I haven't found that being a woman has made a difference one way or another in music—in the work I get, in the music I play and the opportunities I have, et cetera. Then I started to think about it not all that long ago, and it still came down to, "Well, there are a few jerks in all the genders," and I still couldn't say men have the advantage, although in many ways they do. I just found my way around that and decided not to go with that, I think.
I started off playing piano too, and I played piano in my school orchestra briefly, and then I took up the bass. I think that was my—I did that for a number of years and played in youth symphony and so forth. They didn't have small basses then, so I had to always stand on a box. That was good. I started conducting in middle school too, because they needed—I mean, I wanted to try it.
But I have been the beneficiary of some very conscious addressing of gender inequality recently. I was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra to write for them because they decided to make a big gesture and commission six women at the same time because they hadn't been presenting music by women. I was one of those. I came up through a program that was sponsored by the American Composers Orchestra, so that's how they found out about me. That was lucky. I think I'd always wanted to write orchestra music, but it wouldn't have happened as easily if it weren't for that program and that moment in time.
Peggy: I guess I would also say that I haven't felt in any way left out or cut out or any of that over the years, but I do notice—like for instance, in classical music, there's a blind audition—that seems to have achieved parity in orchestras these days. But for a few years, I helped this great drummer Jerry Granelli out in Nova Scotia at a creative music workshop, and I felt that women were definitely underrepresented in that. So it made me aware that improvised music and creative music still has a bit of a way to go there, just showing young women that this is something that is open to them.
Lawrence: In a previous conversation I had, I was made aware of the work that I believe Terri Lyne Carrington's doing out at Berklee. Basically, she's assembled with a group of other instrumentalists the new fake book, and it's all female composers. The idea is like, "Let's get people playing this repertoire." I love a solution like that because it's so obvious, but it just takes doing it. (laughter) But it can be so incredibly powerful, and it's such an elegant addressing of an important topic.
Robin: Well, there are a lot of smart innovations in education in terms of encouraging young women—girls—to play music in school that vary. In Seattle especially, and they still have to—it's still hard to get girls to join the band programs. In one of the high school bands in Seattle, there's money earmarked for non-white musicians, for want of a better word, and women—I think young women—to campaign to get them to come. It's still hard, but then I think that turns into more women playing. But I think—I don't know what it's like in the Dutch scene where there are always as many women playing as there were later on from when you started to notice them?
Peggy: I think, no, I think it was mostly men coming over for sure.
Lawrence: What was it about the Dutch scene? What was your connection there, and what was it? Was it simply about opportunity? Was it a community that you were drawn to?
Peggy: Well, the music—the first group that blew my socks off was Clusone Trio with Han Bennink, Ernst Reijseger, and Michael Moore. I'd never heard a cello played like that. And also just how much fun they're having. (laughter)
Lawrence: We forget about that part sometimes. It's like challenging and intense music, and I love when I see the people on the bandstand smiling and laughing, like, "I can't believe you pulled that off."
Peggy: Yeah. And then there was the ICP Orchestra that would come over, and that was also a revelation.
Lawrence: Have you found over the years, do you have to search for repertoire, or do you feel well served? Is your instrument well served?
Peggy: I don't really play contemporary solo repertoire at all. I always feel like the time I would spend learning that, and then the opportunities to perform it—I'd kind of rather just work on my own vocabulary as an improviser.
Lawrence: It's interesting because I think of your work—this is something that actually Wayne has gotten me to think about a lot over the last several months, which is improvisation as composition. Obviously I'm familiar with that as a concept, but whenever I talk to him, that theme comes up repeatedly. Like there's no difference. He's pretty strident on that point, but it's always interesting when a musician talks about—they use the word "I'm an improviser," or "my improvisation practice"—when they use the self-image of an improviser as opposed to a composer. Again, it's a splitting of hairs that maybe as an artist, it's not fun to do, but I'm curious about that. Are you a composer in your self-image?
Peggy: Yes, but not as an improviser. I do compose for groups—mostly my own groups—and I call that composition, but I also say it incorporates improvisers, myself included.
Lawrence: All right, let's not beat that horse anymore. What I'm really curious about now is the project. First of all, I have to ask, is it still on track for December? Do you have a project that's going to be released?
Robin: No, it's not. We're still mixing it, so it won't be till after the new year.
Lawrence: Wow.
Robin: This festival got in the middle of it. I mean, we had to stop just before those various things broke up the schedule, but we're all very close. We don't have it ready to go out in December, hopefully soon thereafter.
Lawrence: All right, well let's talk about it anyway. (laughter) At the outset of a new project, and this project in particular, what kind of preparatory discussions do you have? Do you set an intention? Do you say, "Let's make a record that is equal parts composed pieces as well as improvisation"? I love process—even when I ask a noise artist to look under the hood. But I'm curious about that aspect of it. How casual versus formal and intentional is the genesis of a project and the intention setting?
Robin: Well, can I talk about this one? Peggy and I have been playing together for a long, long time, and you would think we would've made a record a long, long time ago, but we didn't. We recorded the music and then decided not to put it out because there was a lot of pedal noise from my piano. Some of that same music we recorded recently and this is becoming this record, so it wasn't a new project by any means. We've not only played together for a long time, but we have in various contexts, and we've performed together and this repertoire keeps developing. We add a new tune or we drop one or whatever. So it's kind of an old project that was never documented or figured out in advance. It just kind of evolved.
Maybe in the future, maybe a next record will be something like you're describing—setting intention and doing this and that. But we did a concert at Big Years Festival this year, and it's very similar to what we played there, which was a combination of songs and instrumental pieces with lots of improvising. It took me a while to come to be able to do both of those things in the same concert, particularly bring songs to improvised music concerts or the other way around. It didn't feel unnatural to me, but people around me didn't think it made that much sense, except for a few people. But in general, people seem to want it to be one thing or the other thing. I didn't agree, but now things have loosened up quite a bit, but I still don't hear that many people doing what we do.
Lawrence: Is it fair to call this a little bit of a summation or a capturing of the development of your project, your joint project to date? Like this is sort of the "we've been doing this a long time, let's memorialize it" kind of thing?
Robin: I guess maybe, but every time we play the music gets different.
Peggy: So yeah, capturing it in this moment. I'm quite happy that we didn't release the previous stuff we recorded because I feel like it's all evolved a lot, and I feel more comfortable in this situation.
Lawrence: Did Wayne also have conversations with you about what the record would be?
Robin: I'm sure we did. I'm trying to think what they might have been. He was definitely enthusiastic about us doing it, and he envisioned that a blend of all the different kinds of music we play would make a good record. He thought it was something he would like to hear and that other people would like to hear. So other than that, we've been collaborating on the mixing and deciding what tunes to use or not and the order of things to sequence.
Lawrence: That's wonderful. My understanding is that most of the recording took place really over a short period of time. You got together for a few days?
Robin: Two days. At a friend's house here in Seattle. He has the same piano—well, his daughter is one of Wayne's favorite students of all time. She's now at Eastman. He has the same piano as is here at the Royal Room, and as Wayne has at home. They're all built the same year, but he has maintained his phenomenally, so it really sounds wonderful. He has a room in his house that just sounds good, and he has a bunch of recording gear one floor below, so we don't even have to see Wayne or him. So we just recorded for a couple of days.
Peggy: Very nice feeling to play in someone's home as opposed to a studio. We had really good snacks and kitchen. (laughter)
Robin: Really good coffee.
Lawrence: When I first moved here, it was in the summer of 2016, and I came here under a little bit of duress. There was a family situation that brought me out here. I moved from New York. It was a moment of extreme self-pity. Like, "I have to go to Seattle. There's not going to be anything there." I moved into this neighbourhood. I lived in the apartments above the grocery store. One of my first evenings here, I went out for a walk and I stumbled—I knew nothing about the Royal Room, and I walked in and I was like, "Wait a minute. What's going on here?" I saw the piano and I was like, "Oh, I mean, they have a Steinway. It must be good enough, whatever goes on." Then I saw Wayne's name and I started to unpack what this place was. In fact, the first show I saw here was Electric Circus. I never would've thought—here I am, thousands of miles from the Lower East Side, and there's just a little bit of that that made it here. In fact, a lot, but it was such an incredible place to stumble into, and as I've been doing this in particular, such an incredible universe of people come through this stage, and now the other stages in Seattle. I'm curious about the Pacific Northwest as a musical place and as a musical community. Can you give me some sense of the role of the Pacific Northwest in your careers? Is it important for you as individuals in your careers? Is there a musical flavour here? Does it have an identity?
Peggy: A while ago I might have sort of said the weather has something to do with it—the lushness, just the natural beauty of the area. Being a little bit separate, it's not as easy to travel or have people come here, so there's a little more kind of community feeling—like not everybody trying to get away, but building something in the community. I always sort of thought there was kind of a Vancouver sound that was separate from Toronto, for instance, and maybe here separate from New York. I don't really know.
Robin: I know that there was for a number of years kind of a corridor of Portland and Olympia and Seattle and Vancouver, and it was easier to travel, I think, back then, and bands could go and do little tours up and down, and they'd get radio support in the different towns. Audiences got more than one chance to see a person or a band if they wanted to. That no longer happens because of a variety of reasons, including that it's really challenging to come from Canada to the US. It's a lot easier for us to go up there.
I think there is a Seattle music scene, but I don't know that it has a sound that's particularly different from other places, and I don't feel like the place makes that much of a difference for me compared to living in New York. I just enjoy living here more than I did in some ways back there. The pace of life is different and things don't cost quite as much.
Lawrence: Depending on where you are.
Robin: The Royal Room has been an exception to the musicians forming venues. It's just not like having a storefront or—there are, there have been venues like that in Seattle and in Vancouver, or playing in a restaurant that already exists. This was centred around the music for the most part, so that's been great. I don't know that there are many places like that anywhere but the BIM House, I guess—that venue in Cologne, Stadtgarten. But there's food, but there's music, and the music is kind of the main thing.
Lawrence: It doesn't even have that jazz club vibe where you have to spend a certain amount of money, or the meal is going to be exorbitantly priced because that's the only way they can keep the lights on. It is a music room.
Robin: Even in terms of the perception of the group of people who live out here now or have for a while, for me, I think more of the Vancouver improvisers than I think of the Seattle improvisers. I don't know why, because there are many of them here. There have been different periods of time where the West Coast composers were a big deal—Lou Harrison and different people—but I don't know. I just don't look at it that way so much.
Lawrence: Have you worked consistently over your time in Seattle? My perception from the outside looking in is it feels wavy. I'm wondering for you, was it a straight line, or did you step away? Do you always perform? It was hard for me to get a real sense—partly because archiving isn't great of this world. But I'm just curious—what's your relationship with performing?
Robin: It depends if I have a recording. There definitely have been long periods of time where I didn't perform very much, and during some of those periods of time I was writing music, or in some of those periods of time I wasn't thinking about music that much. But it hasn't been like I'm always performing, and I can't really explain why that is. I'm thinking about performing more now and I have been lately, and I imagine I will continue to do so just because circumstances change so much. I don't know that many people take as much time away from performing as I do. Some do, but not many.
Lawrence: Can I ask one question of you? When you've made records of different bands—is that what it was called, Film in Music?—would you say that was a concept first? So that's different. Do you want to talk about that? I think it's interesting, and if you don't, that's fine too.
Peggy: That project came to me because there was a series that would go on up in Vancouver, again, presented by the Jazz Society, Coastal Jazz and Blues, called Time Flies. Wayne did this—I don't know if he ever did it. I don't think so. But that's where Wayne met Sarah, I think, Sarah Schoenbeck. So ten musicians would play over maybe three or four nights in various combinations—trios, duos, solos—just mixing it up every night and all improvised.
But I had this feeling that there's the music—say there's a trio on stage, there were seven people backstage drinking and eating and chatting, and then the next thing that would come up would have no relationship to what had just happened. So I kind of thought of a piece that would have everybody together and some composed parts, but also really good stretches of just purely improvised trios or duos or solos, making it like they're all characters in some production so that everything was related over the course of the set.
Lawrence: Sort of forcing them to listen. (laughter)
Peggy: And it was—for some reason I based it on the series, the HBO series Deadwood.
Lawrence: Oh, sure. That's a great one.
Peggy: So all the titles and all the music was kind of informed by that series—the darkness and the—I don't know. It's hard to explain, but it was a really fun project to do. Just think about the musicians as characters and then composing group pieces for them and then imagining—because remember in the series, some guy would get up like Al Swearengen would get up and just give a soliloquy on his balcony. That's what I felt like the improvisation should be like—"This is what I'm saying right now about this situation."
Lawrence: Statements.
Peggy: Yeah.
Lawrence: It's interesting that you give that example because I can remember a long time ago being in this sort of collective of improvisational musicians, and whenever we would play, before we would get on stage, somebody would say, "Let's play about this," and it could be a topic in the news or whatever. Even hearing myself say those words, I realize that to a certain extent it sounds flowery, but it's helpful because it's just a focusing mechanism to keep everybody from overplaying and not playing against each other. So I think there's a lot of value in that. Even the other level of intention you brought to it in terms of some of the specific mechanisms that the show used, like the soliloquy—wouldn't it be great to be able to write like that? (laughter)
Robin: Getting back to the question about composition versus improvisation or whether they're the same thing. I think when one works without anything like that, without any structure predetermined or prompt or anything, sometimes something happens within the composition that becomes the focus of the composition and people commenting on it or changing it, or I think that's one way structure develops, or sometimes people ignore it all. But I think that's really exciting to be on stage and have no idea what's going to happen and just—there aren't any wrong notes and you make it all music.
Lawrence: It's so exciting when it locks in. And you have to be so present because it's so fleeting. I'm really curious about—you both mentioned sort of, to badly paraphrase you, how special the place was where you recorded the new project. I'm curious, are you still able to surprise each other when you're playing? I don't necessarily mean intentionally try to surprise each other, I mean do you look up from your instrument and say, "Wow, that's"—you know, a twenty-some-odd-year musical relationship and I'm hearing something exciting and new? Or do you need that? Does that happen?
Robin: When we do songs, I tend to play them pretty much the same way. Not exactly, but they have relaxed in some ways, or the rhythms have changed a little bit sometimes, and Peggy has some parts that have become kind of set, but they aren't always. And then there's when there's improvising—that's a whole different story, I think.
Peggy: But I think even within the set stuff, just the being present makes it different every time. That's exciting.
Robin: What did you say—that you don't consider yourself a composer as an improviser or something like that? I don't know what you said. You said you write music and you feel like you're a composer then, and you don't really care. You don't really look at it that way.
I don't really care what we call it, but for me, as a vocalist—when I sing, I didn't start singing in public till long after I started writing songs and so forth. I don't improvise as a vocalist. I mean, I can make my voice do all sorts of things. I just never do.
Peggy: Oh, okay.
Robin: Which is kind of an odd decision.
Peggy: Has anybody asked you to?
Robin: Every once in a while. I usually weasel out of it. (laughter)
Lawrence: One other question. We touched a little bit on this at the very beginning when you were praising each other. (laughter) I'm curious, are there things that you've taken from each other as either players or composers that you can point to and say, "That I've integrated, that was important in my development"? Are there elements of each other's work that you can point to as touchstones in your own development?
Peggy: The goal is to have your own sound—recognizable sound—and Robin has her own sound.
Robin: So does Peggy.
Peggy: I just feel like all the subtleties and every little detail—and it's not detail like exacting this or that. It's more just like breathing, and I feel like that's the goal, and I feel like that's what it's all about.
Robin: I feel like—this is an odd way to answer the question, but sometimes I'll be playing with someone, not Peggy, and I'll really miss Peggy, and I'll try to put into words what she does and just a little bit, like, "Can you just, instead of going this direction, can you consider this direction or whatever?" It's hard though, and the results are never the same, but they're different in a good way. I wouldn't say it's—use the word "fresh" necessarily, but it's always a little bit different when we play together, which I guess keeps it fresh, but I just don't particularly like that word.
Lawrence: There's something that I find so particularly attractive about what I hear when I listen to both your music separately and together, which is that sense of integration of silence and space, and it's so much more clear to me now, especially understanding maybe the Western or Northern European connections to a lot of your work and listening, performing life, some of the feedback that you expressed. So I appreciate that insight. That will help me as a listener, so I appreciate that.
Robin: I often say that my voice has changed over the years, and I describe it as I sound more like an old goat the older I get—just the quality of my voice. Peggy has always brought this incredibly wide timbral palette, as they say, to the music where it can be really screechy and scratchy, and there are all kinds of really nice blend that happens when it's not all pure notes, clear pitches. That makes for a really different blend. I think it's great, but it's not intentional—it just is the music.
