The recording project of Loretta Blue, Loretta’s Museum is the perfect vehicle for an artist constantly on the move. Originating from Eastern Colorado, Blue has made a habit of travelling from place to place, rarely staying still for longer than six months. A journey which has seen them train-hop across America, build their own guitars, paint signs for the government in Baghdad and have a song featured on an iPhone ad. This sense of movement extends right into the Loretta’s Museum sound. The project encompasses a myriad of moods and styles across its discography, allowing Blue to set out in whatever direction they wish. The name therefore becomes increasingly relevant. Loretta’s museum, a space in which life’s details can be collected, organised and polished by a single curator, someone willing to invite the public inside.
Those who do are greeted with quite the collection. Released in 2017, Mouth Mirroring Ear introduced the instrumental aspect of Blue’s work, its psych-inflected folk soundscapes charting New Weird America in all of its scale and detail. Sound Portraits From The Gelmer Tastle Odyssey (2020) pushed further into free folk territory, playing the soundtrack to a film both surreal and fond, a description which also fits the 2021 releases, albeit in very different ways. Just compare the off-kilter reflection of ‘Born in September’ from Little Dry Creek to the frantic and dramatic ‘A Bio-Forming Populous Cross Cut Into Oblivion’ on Bowl of Art Fruit. Each of the records might fit under the banner of free folk or New Weird, but even these loose labels fail to portray the variety present. Better to just step in and allow them to stand for themselves.
The good folks at Furious Hooves released the four Loretta’s Museum albums over the past five years, and have recently teamed up with Blue’s own Frillimcaster Records Unlimited to put them out on cassette for the first time. In addition, they also released Collected Streams: Singing Songs 2014-2021, a kind of ‘greatest hits’ release of (as the title suggests) Blue’s work with lyrics/vocals, as a special edition vinyl. Essentially an all-access ticket to Loretta’s Museum, allowing the listener to explore every nook and cranny within.
We took the opportunity to ask Loretta a few questions about the release to dig a little deeper into their influences and creative practice.
Hi Loretta, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us. How does it feel to release a new record and revive a handful of older ones on tape?
Hello, thank you for reaching out. It feels quite exciting to have these new releases in physical form. I love holding objects in my hands and having something tangible to account for the things I’ve created is really important to me. It was also a lot of fun to work with Ryan McCardle in the design and layout process of all these tapes and vinyl.
There’s a noticeable distinction between the instrumental, soundtrack-adjacent work of the four records and the more traditional songs of Collected Streams. Do you recognise a clear distinction between these styles? Are you more attached to one or the other?
I suppose I am a person with many sides for better or for worse, I can’t really tell… But you know, when it comes to making art I’m a firm believer you gotta just go for the feeling that’s closest to you in that exact moment in your life. At times I’ve had a lot to say and felt the best way to manifest those words and feelings was to put it into a fairly simple singing songwriting style. At other periods what worked for me was to just let the instruments do the talking and enjoy the process of bending sound into an encompassing landscape that I feel best portrays my latest phase. I’m not sure I’m attached to one style more than the other but they both hold different meanings to me and each carries a particular set of challenges that I very much enjoy navigating.
I’m always fascinated by the way art arrives to an artist. The mechanics of starting something and seeing it through to its final form. What comes first, what triggers everything else. Could you talk a little of the process in your experience? Curiosity and exploration feel so inherent to the LM sound that the question feels all the more interesting. How do you build something which feels like it is unfurling in real time?
Mmmm, yes, yes… Well, I think when it comes to creating art I always approach it free-style. I almost never have a plan at first. I’ll start with a thought or an image or memory and just see what comes from it with whatever I’m holding in my hand. Then when it starts to grow I get excited and jump up in my seat and say “Ooo! This is fun!” and then I let it all just build from there. I’d say at that point most of the song or painting or poem just creates itself, I’m merely a little vessel for its delivery. When it’s about 90% complete I come back to it and try to wrangle the tangles into something cohesive and understand its direction. I’ve always maintained the belief that making music is a collaboration with the universe just as much as its current state of principles. I think what I mean by that is, I can’t really take much credit for anything I create, maybe just 15% or so? I owe it all to the movement and stillness between the characters and scenery and gravity and trinkets on the trinket shelf. Like I said, I’m just a voluntary vessel.
Collected Streams gathers work written across a sizeable period, and I’m interested in your relationship to the various songs. Do the older track feel distinctly different to the newer ones? Does your most recent work always feel the most familiar, the most inherently you, or are such things not so simple to explain?
Oh dear. Well, everything feels different for sure but the beautiful thing about creating art is that each piece is a perfect snapshot of where I was at when I created it. A very detailed page from an honest diary, I can smell the sweet potatoes simmering on the cast iron or perfectly see the smile on a friend’s face while he rides a dirtbike in the back yard or the way it felt to really know someone deeply even if only momentarily and just play with stillness in the middle of nowhere inside a rental car. When I listen to a song I’ve made it’s a visceral experience of perfectly reliving my state of mind when it was created.
The balance between the physical and metaphysical is a striking aspect of your work. Songs clearly rooted in physical details—be they of the landscape, persons, life itself—but also reaching beyond this in search of a more cosmic tone. As though to accumulate corporeal details with a certain order or intensity is to transcend them somehow. Where would you map your songs on the continuum between ‘real’ and spiritual? Is it even sensible to make such a distinction?
“Corporeal”. I like that word, I’ve never heard it before so I had to look it up. “Relating to a person’s body, especially as opposed to their spirit.” I don’t know that anything is more spiritual than real, but then again I don’t really know much about anything in particular. I’d say if I had to choose I would say my art creations are spiritual ballads for the cosmic abyss. In that maybe, all I’m doing is swimming in one of many physical planes projecting a voice into the unknown and carefully listening for an echo. I think you touched on an important element of my process, I’m always reaching, though that quest isn’t always linear and sure maybe it’s a little to follow. But the lines between the spirit world and what feels so tangibly visible is often very much lost in the moments of constructing a composition.
Could we talk a little about influences? Be it in terms of the music itself, the lyrics, or moods and themes more generally. Are there any songwriters, poets, artists etc. who stand out as having a significant impact on your own style?
This feels like the hardest question of all. That’s good though, I love a good challenge. Well, I think if we’re being real a big influence for my music and art will always be people. I love characters. Sometimes in the grocery store or out on a walk or at work or on a drive I’ll see someone and they’ll just really fill me to the brim with feelings and thoughts. I’ll write a little poem or take their photo. I’ll sit on the feeling they conjured within me and usually it’ll turn into something, someway, somehow. Maybe sometimes it’s someone I loved and I’ll close my eyes and lay on the floor and find them through a beam from my center and wander in the labyrinth until it’s time, time to turn all that reaching into something that can sit still in the sound field or word stew… Yah, know? Make it into art I guess.
My music tastes are so scattered, I don’t even know… but if I’m in the process of making a record I will solely listen to the works in progress. I’ll play a song I’m working on over and over for months, judging it’s every detail until it sits right in the balance of its concept.
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What’s next for Loretta’s Museum? Do you have anything in the pipeline, or an idea of the direction you’d like to explore next?
I’d like to do an ultra marathon, so right now I’m just training for that. It’s my hope that in about a year and a half I can do a 100 mile race. I’m not sure what’s possible with the body I sit inside of but it feels good to explore my potential and try something a little different. I don’t have any recordings in progress at the moment, actually I think this is the longest I’ve gone in my adult life without creating music. I just spent the last year locked up behind T-Walls and razor wire, I think I just want to explore for a little while and take in the freedom. Maybe something will come but if I’ve learned anything in my years of creative pursuits, something forced just isn’t worth a damn. We are all little artists and there’s always a poem on our hand.
Collected Streams is out now via Furious Hooves and Frillimcaster Records Unlimited, including a vinyl edition which you can get along with the four previous records on cassette in one handy bundle. Half of all sales from the bundles are being donated to Trans Lifeline.
