House of Stairs is known for creating a beautiful, layered sound filled with looped vocal harmonies and tight improvisation. The band’s members come out of a jazz tradition in many ways, though House of Stairs' sound borrows from many places, and doesn’t quite fit neatly under the jazz umbrella.
The Show spoke with Holly Pyle — and she started by talking about how the band self-identifies its style.
Full conversation
HOLLY PYLE: The problem with the word jazz is it's so widespread. So by telling someone, “Hey, we are a jazz band,” they have their own assumption about what that means. It could be Sinatra, it could be Miles Davis, it could be 1920s World War II, 1940s, whatever you have you.
But for us to try and express ourselves as a jazz band never really translates correctly for what we're actually kind of inside of. But as far as the verb of jazz, as far as the way of using improvisation, or prioritizing interaction, we would be a jazz band in that sense.
LAUREN GILGER: OK, so do you think that you're creating a new genre here?
PYLE: I've heard someone use the term psych soul, and I feel like that's the closest one that I've heard to what we might be doing.
GILGER: Because when I listen to your voice, I think of Edith Piaf, or like some of the really old singers.
PYLE: Oh, yeah.
GILGER: Sounds like such a throwback to me. It's so pretty.
PYLE: Oh thank you. I did spend a lot of time listening to jazz. It's more that there are phases of inspiration that where it's almost like I forget where it came from. So age nine to 12 was Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple, Sheryl Crow. And then 13 to 16 was Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys. And then 16 to 19 was Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughan. And then once I got into my 20s, it just got into this other jazz, indie side of things, where the songwriting and the harmonic structures were more influential than vocal styling itself.
GILGER: I want to talk about the way that you sample your voice and loop it live often.
PYLE: Yes.
GILGER: How does that work, actually? And then what do you think that that kind of brings? What dimension does that bring to the music?
PYLE: Oh, OK, so I have a loop station. What this machine lets me do is as a series of buttons. You can press a button, sing the recording live, and then press a button again to secure that live recording into a system, and then you can also sing on top of it over and over again. And I grew up playing piano, but I would never have someone pay me to play piano in my present day, and I don't have a comfortable relationship with another instrument.
And so without this looping outlet, without this ability to put my voice as an instrument, I would feel very limited in my abilities to translate music or how I think in my head about the music. So looping has given me sort of a door to really express what's in my head harmonically and as a band, I love hearing polyphony with vocals and hearing multiple voices on something, and so to be able to have a device that gives me a platform to harmonize with myself alongside a band makes me feel like I'm an actual musician with them, and not just just functioning as a singer, solely.
GILGER: All right, Holly, you're gonna play us a song. Which one?
PYLE: Yes. This song will be called “St. Francis.”
(Music)
GILGER: I want to talk about your songwriting approach. You obviously, and I think this is part of what you were talking about with jazz, too. You improvise a lot and how does that work? When it comes to recording, I wonder?
PYLE: Oh, my goodness, it's a really complicated process, and I wish it was simpler, because a lot more songs would be out if it was but as a band, we make a frequent habit of improvising. Basically, we just allow ourselves to take turns making up things, and we do it in rehearsal as well, and we record everything, and sometimes we'll be in a jam and we hear something that we like, and we try to remember how that sound goes, and we keep bringing it back.
So it's like a filing cabinet. Part one is just all of these improvised ideas. Filing cabinet. Part two is me journaling all the time about life and feelings. And file three are just random things I've become interested in, and they act like their own little dating site, and they sort of meet each other, and at some point they all line up. And then the real work starts, where I'm taking this melodic idea or this improvised idea across the band, and then finding out how these pictures and learning and knowledge and research interacts with the emotion I'm feeling.
So it's sort of like this Rubik's cube by the end of it, where I'm trying to, like, sew and weave a tapestry between these three things. So the songs themselves are really dense and very, very visual to try and understand an emotion.
GILGER: They are really visual. And when you approach it, it sounds like you're sort of painting a picture. Are they really personal?
PYLE: Extremely, yeah. I've often joked that when I started out writing songs, it was always about relationships and the unrequited life. But once I met my husband, I had this love that I was looking for. So I started writing about mental illness.
I've always been really fascinated by psychology, how the mind works, and really trying to better understand my own experience and where it comes from and why it's there. And this process of songwriting, combined with learning about all sorts of random things in general, have really helped me center who I became and why, and what it means and what it translates to, to relate to other people.
GILGER: So I wonder in that, is it in writing such personal music like that, do you feel overexposed? Do you feel like your heart's on your sleeve? Literally?
PYLE: Great question. I had a phase where, when I first started singing these out, like I have a song I wrote about depression and my experiences with panic attacks and taking prescription medications and to sing that and to talk about it, I felt so vulnerable. It felt almost melodramatic, almost like, “oh, here I am with my suffering.”
But what I found was people would come to me and say, “Wow, I really share that experience, and I really relate.” And the pros of connecting to people because of my vulnerability has vastly outweighed the cons of feeling exposed and vulnerable. It serves me so well to feel closer to people as a result of being open.
GILGER: Yeah. And speaking of new music, you're working on your first full length album now.
PYLE: Yes.
GILGER: Tell me about that. What themes are going to be in there?
PYLE: We’re calling it “Epoch,” like E, P, O, C, H, so it's sort of culminating in an era, and it's getting at the story of my own path into connection and consciousness. So I have certain issues that delve with an uncle of mine who dealt with schizophrenia, which is the song “St. Francis,” with feelings regarding the anxiety of my marriage, feelings about jobs that I've worked in the past that felt very disconnected, and just coming to terms with what that disconnection means.
So it's just a progression from feelings of disconnection and disarray to trying to come into something that's more conscious. And so each song sort of has its own stepping stone to consciousness. If that makes sense.
GILGER: I’m sure I'm not the only one who's excited to hear it. You want to take us out on a song?
PYLE: Yes, this final one will be “Inkwell.”
If you’re in a band or know of one you’d like to hear on air, send us a note at [email protected].
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