Back in June, we reviewed Big Dread Moon, the new album from Claire Cronin (and yet another brilliant release on Orindal Records). The album channeled an ancient superstition and brought it into the present day, electric folk songs “[set in the] contemporary moment superimposed with archaic folk sensibilities and Gothic symbolism, presenting a world in which horror and joy and spiritual meaning are just as likely to emerge from a screen as any other source.”
Cronin was kind enough to answer some questions about the record, and lots of other things besides. Take a look below.
First off, I wanted to congratulate you on releasing a record and completing a PhD in such a condensed period. Did it feel like one related endeavour, or a bunch of competing entities? How does it feel to see Big Dread Moon in the world?
Thank you! Both my PhD and the record were several years in the making, so it didn’t feel unduly stressful. I just happened to finish the degree a month before Orindal wanted to release the album.
While it took years to write the songs on Big Dread Moon (the oldest ones are six or seven years old), we recorded the whole thing in one weekend trip to Brooklyn and mixed it over another weekend a few months later. A PhD is a lot of work, but almost all of it is on your own time. I have a lot of anxious energy and find it helpful to shift from one project to the next; working on music was a good counterpoint to studying for comprehensive exams, writing scholarly papers, and planning my dissertation. Also, it became difficult for me to write my own poetry while reading so much poetry, but music was still available to me as an outlet.
I see all of my work as interconnected. The research I did during my PhD (on horror films, poetry, and occultism) bled into the lyrics of the songs. I have only one mind.
It feels good to see Big Dread Moon in the world. Although, besides when I’m performing live, the release also feels virtual. So much takes place on music websites, social media, and streaming platforms. It’s hard to know what the record is actually doing out there.
On that note, I’m interested in the dividing line between your songwriting and poetry. How do you decide which to pursue for any given idea? Does a poem ever become a song, or vice versa?
It’s never a logical decision. My poems and songs cover the same territory; the words come out of the same notebooks. In hindsight, I find that I sometimes test out an idea in one form and then bring it to fruition in another. For example, I have a long poem called “The Wolfman Poem” that I wrote around the same time as the ‘Wolfman’ song, but the poem is much angrier, much bloodier. The same thing happens in reverse, where a song turns into a poem. Sometimes they’re both good enough to publish or record, but usually one is clearly stronger.
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One of the most impressive and interesting features of the record for me was how you centre on eerie and mythic qualities yet evoke a modern setting too. The world of the record is antiquated yet contemporary, with TV screens and oil lamps existing within the same setting. Did you work toward this, or did the environment of the album emerge naturally?
This is the product of being a person with a superstitious, medieval mind who lives in our contemporary world. Like most of us, I spend much of my day looking at screens. I also read a lot of old stories, recite ancient prayers, and have a fondness for period piece films and TV shows. Musically, some of the songs sound old because they’re basically folk songs played on electric guitar. These melodies and lyrical structures have been transmitted down to us through generations. I’m singing as a living person to living audiences in the twenty-first century, though the music is much older than us.
One of the interesting things about ghost stories is the degree of repetition. The slamming door, the extinguished lights, the levitation. I think this is how I made the link to the alien abduction phenomenon in my review—both ideas rely on well-worn motifs, to the degree that it becomes impossible to know whether this similarities support or weaken the claims. Shared experience might normally be corroborative, be there’s the possibility of a kind of unconscious conditioning, a replication of an old tale. I wondered if you could expand a little on the idea of repetition and its importance to your work.
I’m not sure that my work uses repetition in the way that you’re describing it, but I agree that this is an interesting topic.
There’s repetition in the formal conventions of the ghost story genre and in the ghost itself, who repeats her own traumatic death when haunting. And my songs have a haunted quality in part because they contain the fragments of older narratives and images and melodies. This is more of an unconscious effect. I suspect that this kind of haunting repetition is true of all popular forms, particularly folk music and folklore (which ghost stories and alien abduction narratives are part of).
Within Big Dread Moon, certain motifs also recur, but I think this is because the songs were were written from the same well of feelings. In several songs, I was trying to get at the same sentiment or memory, and I made this attempt from different angles.
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We can’t talk about Big Dread Moon without the general horror film question. Which eras/directors are your favourites, or influences?
I love supernatural horror the most. I watch a lot of contemporary films but also appreciate the haunted house cycle from the 1970s, as well as the usual classics. Some random favorites include Suspiria (1977), The Shining (1980), The Others (2001), The Ring (2002), Insidious (2011), Unfriended (2014), Demon (2015), and Hereditary (2018). I’ve also watched many seasons of the paranormal show A Haunting (2005-2018).
I wanted to ask you about Jason Molina. I’ll admit that, when I read the title before listening to the record, I read it in his voice. I mean, try it. Big Dread Moon. Of course, no one person can have a claim on such imagery, and I’m perhaps betraying my naivety in regard to the wider folk/poetic tradition here, but I wondered if you consider Molina an influence?
Jason Molina was definitely an influence. I’ve been a fan of his music since I was in college (more than a decade ago) and I helped promote a show for him when I worked at the student radio station. We met for a moment at a venue. I felt very sad when he passed away.
We come from pretty different backgrounds (though we both attended Oberlin College for a time), but there is something about the earnest despair of his voice and the religious, mythic imagery in his songs that resonates with me.
We always ask this to close, so here goes. Could you name four or five artists you find yourself drawn to at the moment? They can be new, classics, popular or obscure, whatever you find yourself returning to.
Reading: Eugene Thacker on pessimism; Jeffrey Sconce on technology and psychosis; ghostly short stories by Edith Nesbit, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Robert Aickman.
Listening: Aldous Harding’s latest record, John Fleagle’s covers of medieval folk songs.
Big Dread Moon is out now on Orindal Records, and you can get it from them or the Claire Cronin Bandcamp page.
Photo by Stephanie Sutton