We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to ask Isakov a few questions to learn a bit more about what it’s like working with an orchestra and just how you take familiar songs and make them something new.

Hi Gregory, thanks for speaking to us. How’s life on tour treating you?

Hey! I am constantly staring up at the sky, thinking I am the luckiest person on earth to be touring with such an amazing group of people. The band and myself have brought along the Ghost Orchestra, an eight-person ensemble that we have been working out some arrangements to compliment our symphony release.

You’ve just made an album with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, featuring reworked takes on some of your catalogue’s best tracks. How did the experience differ from your regular recording process?

It was completely a new experience for me altogether. We played a few shows with the Colorado Symphony and then took the arrangements to the Seattle Symphony and the Oregon Symphony. We recorded those shows, but fell in love with the sound of the rehearsal tapes. You could really hear the space in the music. So we went back to Boettcher Hall in Denver last summer and recorded with the Colorado Symphony in front of nobody. Took those recordings back to the farm where our studio is, and mixed there.

And as a follow-on, how did you choose which songs to record? Was it your decision, or did the collaboration extend to designing the track list?

We recorded fifteen songs and eleven ended up making it on. The songs we had arranged are from my past three studio records, and a new song “Liars” that we have been playing out for a few years at shows. We chose the ones that sounded the best, while maintaining a sense of a good flow on a record, which is important to us.

I’d imagine recording and sharing songs is always a strange experience, in essence handing these personal things over to strangers, but was it even weirder to see them altered by other musicians? Did you feel protective of the original demos? Did the new versions still feel inherently yours?

I collaborated with the arrangers of the symphony scores (Tom Haggerman of DeVotchKa & Jay Clifford of Jump, Little Children). It was great working with them. So many hands made it into these songs. The weird thing about songs is that none of them really feel “mine.” I think when a song is finally recorded I sorta feel like I’m covering it. Always asking “Where did that song come from?” I love that about music.

Your current tour sees you play a number of dates with Colorado’s The Ghost Orchestra, as well as performances with local orchestra’s in several cities around the country (such as The National Orchestra in DC, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra). Is it exciting to play these grand music halls with full orchestral backing? And is the experience different depending on the orchestra?

It’s hard to put it to words—how full of awe I feel playing these shows.Has the experience changed the way you’ll write in the future? Can we expect more strings and lush instrumentation in future Gregory Alan Isakov releases?

You know, I’m not sure. I don’t think I could have this experience with it not affecting other work that I do. I am currently almost finished writing another record. It’s sparse like most records I put out, but who knows.

On your music more generally, what do you consider your biggest influences? Is it other musicians? Do things like art and literature play a part too?

I do love spending time with other musicians. I love going to shows. Gardening and working on the farm is in there. I like to read, yeah, Steinbeck has been a big one lately. I also like to watch cheesy sci-fi movies about sorcerers. Vampires. Wizards. They all probably make it in.

Finally, we always ask this: Could you name 4-5 artists you think we should hear? They can be old, new, popular or obscure, whatever you think is important and good.

Sure. SO MANY. Just to name a few: Johann Wagner, Ron Scott, Esme Patterson, Leif Vollebekk, Ramaya Soskin, Rachel Reis, Samantha Craine, Jeffrey Foucault, Andrea Gibson, Mandolin Orange, John Craigie, Shook Twins, Natalie Tate, Nathaniel Rateliff, Jeffrey Martin. Our guitar/banjo player, Steve Varney, has a new band called Kid Reverie. They are killer.Gregory Alan Isakov and the Colorado Symphony is available now from iTunes (or here if you’re Stateside). He has also just set off on a rather extensive tour, teaming up with different symphonies along the way, and you can find all the dates at the bottom of our preview post.

Photos by Blue Caleel

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Vio/Miré are a band from Providence, Rhode Island, led by Brendan Glasson. Their fourth album, You Will be Spending Time Outdoors, in the Mountains, Near Water, came out last September. Their music is a mixture of folk and ambience, with reed organ, cello, chorals and synths used to create lush soundscapes upon which Glasson’s poetic vocals float. Think Sea Wolf mixed with an orchestral Sufjan Stevens, folk songs written over the top of cinematic compositions.

The album is one of contradictions, somehow sounding intimate and expansive, gentle and harsh, poetically abstract and beautifully simple. In this way it manages to mirror nature in all of its guises – spellbindingly beautiful and callous and cruel and innocent in a way humans are no longer able. For example on ‘Dogs 1′:

dogs are barking in an alley way
they’re fighting over bones
I love the moment till I curse the day
breaking bottles over stones
and I have seen the grass’s easy sway
under spruces overgrown
and I have known the near to move away
how the wind was overblown

As with anything related to the natural world, mortality and death is a major theme. Much of the beauty and sorrow on the record can be traced to the transient nature of life, something that manages to be bleak and comforting and harrowing and joyous all at once. Much of this is barely explainable, much better felt through the music than explained by words, but it is something similar to the curious mixture of wonder, satisfaction and melancholy felt when looking at a range of mountains or rugged coastline. ‘Snakes’ closes with a contemplation of life:

sent to hell to stir and swelter,
I returned and sought my love

but if the way were many days,

if present passed as present does,

how would you ask someone how his journey was?

You would be forgiven for thinking this all sounds a bit New Age-y but it is anything but. You Will be Spending Time Outdoors, in the Mountains, Near Water feels less like a 45-minute album than a landscape, a world which existed long before the album was recorded. Vio/Miré offer a way into this place, and you would be a fool not to take their hand and experience it for yourself.

You can buy the album from the Vio/Miré Bandcamp page.

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Romantic Works is, at least in part, centred around his experiences with stage fright and anxiety, with Henson using the album to explore the issues that have blighted his career as a live musician (‘Elevator Song’ is based upon an attack of pre-concert nerves while in a Glasgow lift). However, the stage fright metaphor/allegory is far from obvious or overwhelming, indeed I would have missed it had I not read the feature on Henson from The Independent. For me, on first listening to Romantic Works, the album sounds like the soundtrack to an arty film, in which even the simplest images and actions are melancholic and sad.

Irrespective of ulterior meanings, this is the album’s greatest achievement – how it seems to stand for a normal existence, its for lush and mournful instrumentation supported by field recordings, serving to highlight the beauty and sorrow of normal life. Again, ‘Elevator Song’ is a perfect example of this, with its poignant mood building up to the final recording of an automated voice warning on closing doors, rendering what at first seemed like a dramatic four minutes as something commonplace, a simple event. ‘Field’ uses bird song, ‘Josella’ the starting of a car, and each takes a familiar sound and gives it attention, supports it with traditionally ‘nice’ sounds of piano and cello, allowing it to it seem more important or meaningful. The album is at once tragic and beautiful, sombre and hopeful and lovely.

Of course, you could argue that my interpretation is not all that far from Henson’s intentions, and that fear and anxiety and the desire to run/hide is intrinsically linked with a modern ‘normal existence,’ opening up a whole new set of questions as to why this may be (and whether we have always been this way). It also refreshing and encouraging to see a young musician begin to describe and address these issues, and it nice to think that there is still a chance for artists to operate successfully under such stresses.

You can buy the album, as well as some nice t-shirts designed by the man himself, from Henson’s website, or stream it over at The Guardian.

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You can watch the video below (with a lovely video from Hana Tajima), and pre-order the album here.

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