the hum / By Bob Doran

Where You Go With The Notes

Patty Larkin: reinventing folk, Collie Buddz’ reggae and SLAM Fest details

(April 24, 2008)  In a certain sense, Patty Larkin is your basic singer/songwriter, a woman with a guitar who plays chords and melody, works on them to fit her intelligent lyrics. She’s been doing it for 20-some-odd years, starting out busking on the streets of Cambridge then learning jazz licks at Berklee. Then about 10 years ago her music took a new turn. Experimenting in her home studio on Cape Cod, she began adding new layers to her sound, typically working with an engineer and a producer, bringing in musicians to create her own luscious take on alt. folk.

For her new record for Vanguard, Watch the Sky,she took the next step and did it all herself: played all the instruments — acoustic and electric guitars, lap steel, National steel, banjo, bass, bouzouki, toy organ and electronic loops — and engineered the recordings on her own.

Patty Larkin. Photo by Jana Leon.

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She explained the process when I called her at her studio last week. “I would go to my friend’s barn in the morning and write something, then come back before three o’clock when the nanny left — I’ve got two adopted kids now — then basically work at night or whenever I could on the production.

“The other thing that was different, because I had developed this catalog of loops of sounds and ideas for songs, I was able to go back and use those as the basis for new material. Like the song “Beautiful’ that came from something I had in storage. “All Souls’ was another looped track I had done. I wrote much of it on the fly.”

The result is a very 21st century sound (asked what she’s been listening to, she mentioned Bjork and Beck, and you can hear echoes of their sort of sound in her work), but the heart of it all is still the song. And she writes great songs.

“I think the important thing for me as a songwriter is to get the chords and melody down,” she said. “Even if you change the lyrics, there’s something that happens in the initial stage of writing that is really important. You find the personality of the character you’re singing in. It might be a tiny little inflection, or the amount of vibrato, or where you go with the notes.”

What she describes is evident on “Hallelujah,” a song on Watch the Sky, where the lyrics say “I’ll see you “round in the downtown.” The notes float up and down with pauses that take you for a ride not unlike the emotional ride in the lyrics.

Now the trick is translating the laptop layers into live performance. “On the new material I play about half with just acoustic guitar and vocals,” she said. “The other half is on electric or with looping. I use the gizmos to get those flavors going. I’ve deconstructed the songs, got them to a place where I can play them live. It seems to be working.”

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