Twenty years is a long time to carry something. Meadowsweet (redux) is Yann Novak’s return to an album made in the immediate wake of his mother’s death. Coming back to it now, near the anniversary of her passing, asks what it means to listen back to grief from a distance. The original Meadowsweet was built from processed field recordings and recorded in a single continuous take, its composition shaped as much by circumstance as intention. A hard drive dropout late in the album became, through reverb and accident, something closer to poetry than failure. Woven beneath it all is a recording of an astrology reading, a friend’s sincere attempt to offer comfort. Novak doesn’t believe in astrology, but he recognized something true in the impulse. The album was always about honoring what she asked of him. Returning to it now is just another way of doing that.
Meadowsweet (redux) releases this Friday, April 17, on Novak’s Dragon’s Eye Recordings. Pre-order it HERE.
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What are some of your earliest sound memories connected to your mother? What did her presence sound like?
Like me, she had a very quiet presence, as if she did not want people to know she was even there. This was often due to her being deep in the pages of a book, but also because she never wanted things to be about her, she was at her best when she was helping others. When she did make noise at home, it was often baking or cooking, which she loved to do, or listening to or playing music. The most immediate sound that comes to mind is her playing Für Elise from Beethoven’s Bagatelle No. 25. She was an incredible piano and guitar player, one of those people who could hear something once and replicate it on either instrument. She did not aspire to be a musician, though, or not that I knew of, for her, it was just about playing the instrument. There was another side to her, too, one that fought for justice and equality; in those moments, she made her presence and intellect felt.
Did your mother know you were making music? If she heard your work, what did she think of it, and if she didn’t, do you ever wonder what she would have made of what you do?
I played instruments growing up, and in high school, I was a bit of a rave DJ in the Midwest, so she heard all that. But the work I started making in my early twenties, she knew I was doing it, but I am not sure she got to hear it. I had just re-launched Dragon’s Eye Recordings with my first release in August 2005, she got sick in December of 2005 and passed in February 2006, so I can’t remember if I was able to send her a copy in that window. I do remember that first release was reviewed positively in The Wire magazine. I picked up the issue the day it came out at the newsstand after my shift ended at a coffee shop, and I read it to her over the phone on my bus ride home. I was extremely proud of that, and I remember she was too.
Twenty years have passed since you made Meadowsweet in the immediate aftermath of your mother’s death. What prompted you to return to this album now, and what did you discover when you listened back to it after all this time?
I have revisited the album every 5 years or so because my sister (2 hours ahead in the Midwest) texts me on the anniversary of her passing, so every year it’s the first thing I think of that day. That often triggers thinking about it, and I almost reissued it at 15 years, but things did not align, and I did not have my shit together. I actually started working on this a year early to make sure it was timed right for the anniversary.
Every listen, it seems to get softer. My recollection of recording it was that it was a very harsh release, but I think that was my state of mind, so I think that as the pain has faded, so has my relationship to it sonically.
You’ve described the original Meadowsweet as being composed loosely and then recorded in a single take. Can you talk about why that constraint felt necessary for this particular work, and how that process shaped what the album became?
The process was not linked to this release; I was still very new to making music and performing, and could not afford the most up-to-date laptop. Just before her death, I had done my first live performance. I had a bunch of tracks to play, but each one maxed out my CPU, so I could not make a unified Ableton set with everything in it. So I had loaded my iPod with field recordings and would crossfade between my laptop and iPod, and while the iPod played, I would load a new track.
After my set, I went back to the green room and overheard the headliners making fun of how I had performed. It was really hard to hear, especially because I had been so excited to perform for the first time and had been happy with the performance. Being young and inexperienced, I internalized this experience and felt like I had to learn to perform ‘the right way.’
A lot of those tracks became sections on Meadowsweet, re-worked to be performed continuously. After my mother’s passing, because all this happened during her illness, everything I had been working on became imbued with that grief. So the tracks were produced during her illness, but the final composition was finalized and recorded after her passing.
The album includes field recordings, but not as documentation in the traditional sense. What were you listening for when you made those recordings, and how did you know which sounds belonged in this work?
Back then, I treated field recordings more like raw material to be processed vs specific sounds captured for specific reasons. I think of that time more like a painter might, I did not buy specific paint colors to use on a painting, I picked from the colors I already had when I felt they would convey the emotions I was feeling.
Formally, I know that’s not the most rewarding answer, but I think it speaks to a different time in the history of field recording, or maybe my naiveté as an artist. I feel like we had more room to experiment and possibly make mistakes than we do now. Not everything was under the social media microscope back then.
There’s a technical dropout late in the album that happened because your hard drive couldn’t retrieve the source files fast enough. When did you realize that failure had become part of the piece itself, and what made you decide to keep it?
I heard it as soon as it happened and saw the CPU indicator in Ableton Live go red. Because of the reverb, it actually sounded really nice in the moment, but I also did not know if the reverb was getting recorded in a way that could be replicated. So I continued through the end of the piece and was extremely happy when I discovered the reverb effect was captured/replicated in the final piece.
I went back and forth as to whether to rerecord it or repair it, which I did have the option to do. But after some thought, I liked the authenticity it brought to the piece, and it enhanced the semi-live intent of the piece, so I kept it.
An astrology reading is woven beneath the processed field recordings. You’ve said you don’t believe in astrology, but you included it anyway. What did that gesture mean to you then, and does it mean something different now?
One of the things I liked about field recordings back then was the way they could introduce a narrative. Not in a storytelling sense, but the ebb and flow of activity, and how that gave me as an artist something to respond to. Bringing it up here, taking it down there, it almost felt like a duet, where I was responding to another player.
The person who did the reading was a customer at the coffee shop I worked at, and we did it in the shop. The recording was filled with the din of customers, ebbing and flowing over an hour, a coffee grinder, and all the other sounds you might imagine in a coffee shop in Seattle on a busy weekend night. Using the recording was about giving me something to play off of, it determined section lengths, where I could be quiet, when I had to be loud, etc.
Sadly, my external hard drive (not backed up) died in December 2006, and I lost all the original files as well as my entire archive up to that point. So I can’t actually revisit the raw recording, all I can do now is experience the fragments we can hear in the finished work. Since my relationship to astrology has not changed, I think this is the most meaningful way for me to revisit it.
When you were making Meadowsweet, were you trying to capture your mother’s presence, or were you trying to understand the space her absence created? Or is that distinction even meaningful?
That insight was entirely hindsight. When I recorded this record, I was an emotional disaster, I was totally a mama’s boy, and my mother was awesome! All my friends knew and loved her, and my whole friend group got excited when she would come to visit Seattle. Even before that move, it was the same in high school. So I was devastated, crying 5 times a day. That is why, if you go back to the original release, the album description leaves a lot to be desired… I had no idea what I was doing, I just knew the gesture had to happen.
My on-and-off boyfriend at the time had just had major surgery and needed full-time care, so I was reluctantly thrust into the role of caregiver. I only got to go back to see her twice, for a week each, in the time between diagnosis and her passing. So we did not get much time together after her diagnosis, but she left me a letter where she told me to follow the creative path I was on and to fuck society if it got in the way (yes, that was her vibe, but not her exact words, those are just for me). Looking back, the album was my first attempt to honor those wishes.
The album title references a plant with its own associations and histories. How did you arrive at Meadowsweet as the name for this work, and what did that word mean to you when your mother had just died?
It’s actually nothing that poetic, the original cover was an image of my mother standing in a bush of flowers. I was not able to attend the wake for my mother due to being stuck back in Seattle, there were 3 huge panel collages of photos made by a family friend, and a lot of those photos were scanned for me afterwards. I picked the cover photo from those, but my dad and I were unsure of the photo’s provenance. On the original release, we credited my dad as the photographer, but we are not even sure about that. I decided to name the release after those flowers in the photo, and my father guessed it was meadowsweet, and I just went with it. It felt right because it’s a beautiful photo of her, and I had never seen it before. She could be quite secretive, so a lot of things were lost when she passed, so having to guess what the type of flower was felt appropriate.
You made this album in 2005. The tools available for processing sound have changed dramatically since then. When you remastered it now, were you tempted to rework anything with what you know and can do differently two decades later?
As I mentioned, all the files were lost in a hard drive crash (go back up your fucking shit if you are not), so reworking from the source files or stems was impossible, but a fair amount of work had to be done. All we had were the WAV files I pulled from a copy of the original CD-R in my archive. We actually had to stitch the separated track back together so we could master it, then Lawrence did the mastering, then we reinserted the track markers. That may sound easy, but getting it put back together without clicks was a feat; it’s actually one of the reasons I did not do it at 15 years, I could not get past that hurdle back then. But I have to be honest, all the magic was 100% Lawrence English; I just approved things.
There’s something about sitting with an album like this for twenty years and then revisiting it. What’s it like to encounter your own grief from that distance? Does listening to Meadowsweet (redux) put you back in that space, or are you hearing it as someone else’s document now?
It’s somewhere in between. I don’t think the final product was ever about my grief; the act of making it was about my grief. I wanted the end result to be something beautiful and complex that honored her and her memory. She was a high school teacher with a banner in her office that said ‘Question Authority.’ She was so loved by her students that a sign had to be made for her front door to signal if she was accepting visitors, otherwise her students would have spent all their free periods at her house with her. She would not have wanted people sitting around feeling sad for her; she would want them to get back up and go fight the injustices of the world now that she couldn’t anymore. She did not know that about herself, but everyone she touched saw it in her, and I think knew the assignment.
So revisiting the album is not about revisiting grief, it’s about remembering and recommitting to the assignments she gave, to continue to be creative, and to fight for those who can’t fight for themselves.
Can you tell me about the last conversation you had with her? I’m not asking for anything profound or final. Just what you remember about being in a room with her and talking?
As I said, I did not get to spend that much time with her in those last few months, so the time we did have is etched into my memory. The last night of my last trip, my father and I went to her house. I cooked Zuni Cafe’s Pasta Carbonara, having home-cooked meals together was a thing the three of us had done my whole life, but me doing the cooking was a new dimension. Then my father left to give us some time together, and we sang along to music. I had introduced her to a lot of indie stuff she may not have been exposed to otherwise, and she loved to sing along. The last song we sang together was “Wake Up, Little Sparrow” by Devendra Banhart.
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