je suis la garçonne

Pitchfork: The lyrics on the new album are impressionistic in the way that they wind around a topic, but you also add real details, as if to ground them. What’s appealing about that strategy to you as a writer?

JV: You know, the Richard Buckner vibe— and that is a big influence for me. His words are just about a sound and barely about meaning, but I could find all these crazy meanings in there. In his song “Loaded at the Wrong Door”, there are lyrics that are totally heartbreaking and beautiful and heavy, but you really couldn’t say exactly what they’re about. Still, I found these intense personal connections with those words because they flowed out a certain way.

Bob Dylan wrote good words, but the underrated thing about why he is one of the best, if not the best, songwriter is that his words always sounded good with his voice. He rapped them. After growing up in a Neil Young/ Bob Dylan/ Indigo Girls/ John Prine/ subjective-songwriter kind of world, I finally realized I didn’t have what they had, or I couldn’t do it as well, or I wasn’t exploring deep enough.

The subconscious thing I figured out in “Flume” started giving me more meaning. When we play live, “Flume” is still the song I can get lost in the most. The images in that song are more mysterious, yet more visual to me. With this new record, I attempted to build odd landscapes that you could exist in that had weird feelings but also cool-sounding words. That said, I worked harder than ever on these new lyrics. You can really fuck up by not caring about your words. You can’t just say, “As long as it sounds good, it’ll be cool.” I really wanted to go deep— I went as far as writing-out words on the page and making sure they looked good, reading-wise.