Diamanda Galás

bones You seem to get treated with a lot more respect outside your own country. Now why is that?

It’s wonderful for me to go to Italy. The food is wonderful, they give me a beautiful fucking suite to stay in, they treat you like a real artist. They do a lot of advance publicity, like months and months, even in advance of the contracts. And then when you perform, the place is filled, the people understand passion, they understand that you could do in the same concert something that might be perceived by some people as avant-garde, and then a song by maybe fucking Petula Clark, and BB King and then maybe Arthur Brown. They don’t have any trouble with that, and then moving on to Pasolini. Because they’ve always had to be accepting of and interested in many different cultures, and they’re bordered by so many different countries and they speak different languages and they have an education and they actually know how to read. That’ll always separate the men from the boys as far as America’s concerned. People don’t read here. If people don’t read, then something happens to the brain. It stops diversifying, it stops building new labrynthine cellular structures. It’s like you don’t exist without a vocabulary of more than seven words. Then what’s going to happen? It’s 7 x 7 is 49 and that’s the end of it.

In Mexico, South America, Italy, Portugal, Greece, places like this, everything is fine. Then I come back and I see the garbage that passes itself off as radical shit. I see these boys in their mothers’ nightgown at nighttime pretending to be rappers, for the record company. It’s this commissioning by the music industry to sound like a fucking moron so you can convince other people to sound like a fucking moron so they can all be fucking morons together, and make no progress while some fucker who’s sounding like a moron is making a million dollars. And that, I think, is evil. That is an inaccuracy, as inaccurate as if to say that Puff Daddy is anything but a little rich boy who went to Princeton University, got out of there and then pretended this moronic crap. And that just makes me sick, because you have to spend a lot of fuckin’ money to go to Princeton University. That’s the fraternity capitol of the world.

How do you go about selecting the material to cover in your song cycles?

I choose to do X number of songs that I get inspired by. You find this song, you like this song. I got the words to “Fire” by Arthur Brown, and I haven’t done it yet, but I’m definitely gonna do that song. I love Arthur Brown. He was just such a monster. Have you seen his videos? His videos are fucking hilarious. I mean, there’s Arthur Brown and there’s Sun Ra [laughs] and there’s Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. I’m just talking about the visual aspect of songwriting, you know. I mean, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Arthur Brown, my fucking Jesus. He had this hat, this little Egyptian thing, and the fire was coming out of it. I did some jazz festivals in the ’80s, and they said, “Yeah, Arthur just did a show last night, and he jumped out in the audience — he was on fire!” I found this song last night by Sharon Jones, and God! [laughs] Damn! My friend Michael Flanagan, last night he sent me this song “100 Days, 100 Nights.” First I loved the song, then I loved how she was doing it. I couldn’t believe that a band like that would exist now. It reminded me of Howard Tate, that kind of power. Then I saw the words and I said, “I’m doing it.” So that’s how it works.

Your decision to interpret the old standard “Autumn Leaves” on Guilty Guilty Guilty was inspired. It’s so beautiful.

My friend Bradley Pickleheimer is a drag queen from West Hollywood. He picked me up from the airport two years ago, I was in his car, and he played me “Heaven Have Mercy,” Edith Piaf singing it. I think it was written for her. I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was, and the orchestration, and these Eastern European chord progressions. And I continue to try to describe to people who don’t know what I’m talking about, I say, “You guys keep talking about such and such song, and you always talk about the singer instead of the guy who wrote them.”

People always say, “`Autumn Leaves’ is a Billie Holiday song,” and I say, “It’s a Joseph Kosma song, all right?” And everybody always says, “Well, nobody would have ever heard it if it weren’t for Billie Holiday.” But that is just not true, because it was huge in France, with Edith Piaf. Nobody needed Billie Holiday to hear that song. Nobody knows that Joseph Kosma had written lyrics, and he and Chopin had written a lot of chansons, and he knew that whole tradition: If you listen to Chopin, if you listen to Liszt or you listen to Cesar Franck, you hear the same chord progressions in the songs, which were incredibly emotional, and you don’t even need to know what the words are to know what the song’s about. When I heard Chet Baker singing “The Thrill Is Gone” –– not the B.B. King song –– I said, “My god, I know exactly what that song is.” I knew immediately what the song was about.

But those chords you’re playing on “Autumn Leaves”! What exactly is going on there?

Well, at the period of time I was working on a lot of the arrangements to the songs on Guilty Guilty Guilty, I was getting into these films and hearing their songs by different singers, because some of the arrangements you could only hear on the film, for some reason, like Imitation of Life [1959; music by Frank Skinner and Henry Mancini]. Doris Day was in Love Me or Leave Me [1955], and I don’t know who did the orchestration, but it’s just gigantic. [Percy Faith and George E. Stoll are credited for the music.] When I heard the orchestral introduction, I just said, yeah, that is definitely gonna influence my interest in the song. Well, it ended up influencing the beginning to “Autumn Leaves,” which is written in the key of A minor, and so it starts out [sings it], and then you go into these diminished chords, you know, then you go into the major chords, then you go back to A minor seventh, D major…[hearty laugh]

It comes from years and years of playing these songs with my father’s band, and then after that in bars up in Santee, California, wearing a gold-sequined, low-cut dress playing the piano, and then the drummer was this guy with an Afro wig on, singing Charley Pride songs…ugh!

Diamanda Galas

A great song is seen as a good piece of material to work with, like high-quality clay might be in the hands of a sculptor.

If you start off with a song, you master the changes, then you find out what the story is that the composer is trying to tell. Then you look at the words, that’s next, and then you sing the song. When you have a song like “Autumn Leaves,” which has all those changes already in it, those changes are telling the story before the words are. Well, Johnny Mercer wouldn’t say that, but, whatever. I worked with my brother on exactly two songs, and he was so brilliant. I’d give him the changes and he would just have the words right away. My brother could take any chord changes and just get the rhythm, and bam! He was fuckin’ brilliant with words. I don’t know how he did it.

Listening to the new album, I said, Damn, this is the best piano playing I’ve ever heard. John Paul Jones says you’re his favorite pianist, too.

He always says that in his interviews. He is the most generous musician in the world, he really is. That’s another person who doesn’t want to be a woman onstage. A lot of these guys, they really wanna be bitches. He’s the opposite.

How did you two create the music on The Sporting Life?

We did this kind of trade-off where he would give me the rhythm and then I would put the changes on top of that, and then put the words on top of that; or I would give him the changes and then he would just lay down the rhythm. Or I’d give him the rhythm and the changes and then he would say, “No, I think the bridge should be this.” I wrote a lot of them, but then he layed down a lot of the rhythms. In “You’re Mine,” he put a bridge in there that I would never have thought of, just a total rockabilly bridge, and I was like, “Wow, that’s just slammin’.” ‘Cause I was getting into this modal thing, and I was going on and on, and he says, “You know, that’s a little bit repetitive,” and I says, “What?” [She laughs.]

Your admiration for singers seems to have a lot to do with how skillfully (musically) they could interpret and manipulate, even mutate, the words. That’s an art which should not be left in the hands of lightweights.

I never liked Judy Garland, never. And then I saw her on The Judy Garland Show, and Peggy Lee was on it, and they were doing different songs and then a duet. Judy Garland sang “Never Never Will I Marry”…Wow. And there was this rhythm thing, dun do do do do, “never, never…will I marry” dun do do do do. Wow! That chick’s slammin’. I can’t believe that she’s singing like that. It was a total distortion of the song. She knew the changes, but then took it into another thing. Then I took it another step. Because when these singers like Peggy Lee, when they sing a song, they have to sing it straight first. But she knew the changes, she was a great musician, and then when she takes something out, it gets my respect, because you’re still hearing the song; you’re still hearing what the song is about. It’s not like some shit-ass alternative bands who’d take the song “Autumn Leaves” and say, “Oh, autumn leaves, I like those words, oh wow, that’s in A minor, I can do this fast, then it’s like another minor chord,” suddenly it’s three chord changes, duh duh duh, “gloomy autumn leaves — oh yeah, it means deadly in French, wow man,” and then suddenly it is dead, it’s fuckin’ horrible, it’s like the worst fuckin’ thing you’ve ever heard, and they’re, like, all attitude-y about it, like arty. You mother fuckers, why don’t you just write your own songs? Don’t touch that shit. Because that shit is actually classical music, I mean classical to the jazz repertoire, but classical music also, and classic, and just leave ’em alone.

Tape’s rolling, Diamanda, go for it.

And usually they’re doing it like they want to be so influenced by Billie Holiday. It’s so funny, ‘cause they’re doing it back-asswards anyway –– you don’t do a song because you wanna sound like Billie Holiday; you go to a song because you go to the song. I can’t even listen to Billie Holiday. I heard Billie Holiday for years, I can’t even listen to her, because there’s just so many other singers out there that nobody’s ever heard. She did what she did with that voice, and it worked really well. But there’s Lorez Alexandria, there was Dinah Washington, Carmen McCrae, there are millions of things happening that are fantastic, and people don’t hear about them –– or maybe they want it just pretty. Like Sharon Jones, you know, she used to support herself as a prison guard at Sing Sing.

Some people might be surprised to hear about your high regard for Doris Day.

My favorite subject in the world is Doris Day. Here we have a woman who people thought of as just a pretty face, a dancer and a Pollyanna. I don’t care about that; what I know about this woman is, she had the most incredible legato I ever heard in my life, for pop music or jazz or whatever. And they don’t call it jazz when she does it, they look at her and think “pretty little blond white girl, so she’s not a jazz singer.” Well, that’s a bunch of shit, because she is, man. Legato legato legato. Her phrases aren’t chopped up because they have to be, because she’s run out of breath — uh uh, if she decides to finish a phrase, it’s because she decides to finish a phrase. I really respect that, because she could take those phrases the way Peggy Lee could listen to an Ellington song that nobody else would ever sing because they couldn’t hear it, and she would sit there and she would do that line of an Ellington song and then she would write the words to it. She would write the words to it, but she’d sing the head of it and the words to it, in the right time, not missing a single page, ‘cause she could hear it.

And that’s amazing. I mean, these broads don’t get credit. Their image is so flashy that people aren’t looking beyond it. And then Doris, the timbre of her voice — ahhhh — there’s a stone for it, this emerald quality. I’m not saying that I like all the songs she sang, or had to sing, all those real stupid purebred Pollyanna fuckin’ Christmas songs or whatever, I’m not interested in that. But when she’s singing beautiful songs, where you have a full orchestra, and the voice is not supposed to be fucking around or doing that horrible scat singing that I hate.

The Curse of Ella…

Yeah, though when Ella’s doing it, when she takes it to its most far out, when you hear the multiphonics and it could be part of the Korean vocal tradition, then I love it. But if it’s just straight-up scat singing, I mean, that’s just, I’m like why? When I hear singers now doing that, I’m like, you know what? You should shut up. Someone should take your skull and just bury you like the Indians would do, in the sand with your face looking up to the sun, and then tell you, right as you’re about to die, you can’t ever sing scat again.

Really, it’s so insulting. It truly insults Ella Fitzgerald, as far as I’m concerned, because she was diabetic, and she had to play in Stockholm and then go to Berlin the same night, she did two gigs a night, and then, under the circumstances, the way they traveled in those days, with diabetes? She was an incredible workhorse; she was a workaholic and a great singer.

I’ve studied Ella Fitzgerald, I really respect her as a musician. But I just hate scat singing, with the exception of some of Betty Carter’s stuff — not all of it, ’cause it tends to sound all the same after a while. I just don’t like it, because I’m like, Why would a singer ever want to sound like a horn player? Why would you want to make those double-stops, why would you want to interrupt your vocal line or legato unless you had to already? It’s hideous. Awful.

On Guilty Guilty Guilty, you do a version of Ralph Stanley’s “O Death,” which you say is a love song, too –– for the Grim Reaper. In “O Death,” there’s an interlude in the middle that seems plonked down on top of the song, like it wasn’t meant to be there yet appears somehow related, you just can’t put your finger on it. You’re doing that with your voice, but it sounds like a hovering spacecraft. Is that an example of what you call “multiphonics?”

I was reading something about a doctor who heard the sounds of people in the military when they were suffering really horrific stuff, and he heard these sounds. Roy Hart, this English singer, ended up doing a tape that I heard, where he sang the words “I am Dionysus,” and he sang it from the lowest possible voice, which is the bass, to the highest. That really was impossible — no woman can do that, because you have to be a male to go that low with the kind of power that he had. Unless you’re gonna rip your throat apart.

Just for the record, your own range is what? It’s been reported to be up to eight octaves.

Oh, they’re just fuckin’ liars. I don’t think they know what they’re talking about. I don’t even know what it is. People say three octaves, four octaves, five octaves –– I have no idea what it is, but I sure know it’s not eight octaves. I mean, maybe when I go into multiphonics, it’s a detached octave down there.

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