Tag: Carrie Elkin

Rapt Reflects On Life’s Many Endings With ‘Until the Light Takes Us’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Jacob Ware is a bit of a weirdo. Known onstage these days as Rapt, the singer-songwriter has a way of coming up with an album title and writing the entire record around a central sentiment. His fifth studio album – titled Until the Light Takes Us – serves as a direct response to a 2008 heavy metal documentary of the same name.

“I just thought, Until the Light Takes Us is such an evocative title. A few people have commented on that over the years as being unhinged – that I come up with the album name first and then write the album,” he says, adding that the documentary details “all the horrible shit in the ’90s of the black metal scene in Norway.”

From the gentle trickle of one-minute opener “Over Aged Borders” to the dreamy “Fields of Juniper,” Rapt’s latest album drenches in the notion of endings and existence. Heartbreak. Death. Suffocating blackness. Each song, as heavy as it might be, seems to coat the album with both dark and light – stemming from his confrontation with the end. 

Rapt’s delicately-spun indie-folk is awash in luminescent piano, aching between flaky layers of acoustic guitar. Ware finds himself scattering like a tumble weed, squeezed somewhere between the throaty ache of Carrie Elkin and scratchy pangs of yearning (akin to Bonny Light Horseman in their rawest form). His head swims in thoughts of death, leading his writing to root around in the afterlife. It’s a far cry from his heavy metal days, a sharp red underline to this chapter of his life. “I’m always slightly aware of mortality because I’ve had a lot of health issues, in my teenage years and early twenties, like epilepsy. It’s wild. It pulls the rug out from under your life daily, and you don’t know when the next seizures come in,” he says.

“I haven’t had a seizure for eight years now, so I’m blessed. But that shapes you on a subconscious level,” he adds. “It sets up your foundation to be ready for the next thing to happen. In a way, the next thing that happens is an end of something, so I think my subconscious has always thought about the finality of things. That’s probably where that sort of writing interest has come from. In a way, every single song I’ve ever written is about that. I don’t really know how to move away from that.”

Hopping on a Zoom call, Ware spoke with BGS about the afterlife, how the album grew, and the varied creative fulfillment compared to heavy metal music.

Does writing around a title help you stay focused on what you want the album to be?

Rapt: I think so. I’ve definitely done this where I write that phrase and put it up around wherever I’m living. Even if I’m not listening to music, I’ll walk past the album title a few times a day. The edge of my wardrobe is visible and the title I’m responding to now is written on it. One of the last things I look at at night and one of the first things I wake up to in the morning is… I don’t want to reveal it.

[Until the Light Takes Us] is not a breakup record by any means. I’ve noticed a few bits of press here and there, which may have lent it to being that, but it absolutely isn’t that. I feel like a completely different person to my music. I don’t relate to my own music. I would say it’s an album of endings, really. More so than a sort of breakup album. By the time I’ve finished one thing, something else is usually well on its way. And it’s always been like that for me.

What is your feeling about the afterlife?

I tried to look into religions a few years ago, but I have no faith system. I was brought up in a house without a faith system. It’s very hard for someone to start to believe in something unless it was in their very formative years from a caregiver. I expressed it in the title track. I’ve always thought that the afterlife is a sort of peaceful black. I have a sneaky suspicion that the afterlife is a hell of a lot like what it was like before we were born. I quite like to imagine this sort of sizzle reel, where you hang out with your highlights. That’s what I hope is going on.

Science doesn’t ask, science doesn’t answer everything. There are things that science gets pretty fucking close. But there are things that science can’t touch. I try and be mindful of that; I would call myself an agnostic. I think being 100 percent atheist is actually ignorant. We don’t know – we’re 99.9 percent sure. There’s just that 0.1 percent that I think is worth thinking about sometimes.

That’s touched on in the title track. I don’t know where I’m going, but I know that I’ll see my neighbor and my loved ones. I like to think that there’s a highlight reel. And that’s it, really. I’m talking about this as if I planned to write it. I didn’t. It’s the only successful time I’ve ever managed to just write something without thinking about it and letting my subconscious go. I cannot just open my subconscious.

I find lyric writing takes me months. The title track probably took a year to write. Very occasionally, I can get half a song written in an afternoon, but that happens about once every three years. The song “Until the Light Takes Us” is quite insular, and it’s almost says everything that you could say within a song about the afterlife.

“Until the Light Takes Us” is one of the seven-minute songs on the album. Did you have that intention or did it sort of grow by itself?

I just think I couldn’t make it any shorter. I don’t think I really tried to fight it being seven minutes, but I’m sure that there’s been a longer version of it. I just whittled it down and down, until I couldn’t whittle it down without doing it disservice. And I knew it would suffer for that. I just think that song is destined to be heard when it’s needed.

With endings, there’s always grief. Does that grief still linger with you or has songwriting helped you exorcise that?

That’s hard to answer for me, because I don’t recognize the human that wrote a lot of the songs. I think it might be an epilepsy thing. The medication I take for epilepsy gives me very odd memory and I remember weird little things. I have no memory of so much of my life, and I mean that in the present, as well. The word “remember,” if I really think about that, it’s just like a blur of things. I don’t remember things vividly.

One big thing for me is I cannot paint images in my head. If I shut my eyes and try and picture my best friend’s facial features or a partner’s facial features, or even a fucking apple, at best it’s a Van Gogh-looking painting, so I think it’s quite hard for me to answer that question.

I’m sure it does happen on a subconscious level. I’m sure I do successfully process things through creativity, but it doesn’t help that much. I’ve still got my shit in my head, but a lot of the record is very positive for me. I had depression up until my mid-twenties. I don’t have it anymore. I just don’t. I think life is a beautiful thing. And I think there’s a lot of positive in the record. I think it’s a very odd record in that it’s not… I don’t think it’s depressing and negative. “Until the Light Takes Us” is a positive song. It starts and ends with a letter to myself.

That song is about growing apart from someone because you bonded with them through a shared depression and when one of you isn’t depressed anymore, that bond breaks. That’s what that song is about. But all of this is hindsight. I wrote this in 2022 to 2023. So this all feels very considered and fucking artistic and it’s not. I’m just looking back and trying to work out what the fuck was I was thinking.

Now that you’ve been sitting with the album for a while, what is your takeaway from the creative process?

I guess, just to trust my instincts. I didn’t write it consciously… I think, in a way, I never cared about this record, because I had a lot of stuff going on in my personal life. This was just me keeping the engine going creatively, and then I turned around one day and had a record done. I didn’t know what it was about at the time. I sat on it for a year until I was ready to release it. My biggest takeaway is probably just I don’t fucking care anymore. Just don’t overthink it. If I had to give a tagline to that question: I’m too old to make it as a fucking fresh-faced person and I’m too young to be wise.

I’m right in the middle and when you’re stuck in the middle, you either quit or you just don’t care anymore. And I think I’m in the “don’t care anymore” phase. I’m not going anywhere. The only other takeaway is that I’m not going to do an album for a while. I never thought I’d say that, but I’m going to just do singles for the next two years. I say that, but I’m excited. It feels liberating. When you’re in album land, you’re there at least a year and a half. It’s interesting. I think that might change my writing a bit because I’m not trying to fit a song into a collection of songs.

With your past work being metal, how does the creative fulfillment differ from your current style?

I think metal is very good for connecting with people’s frustrations in life. And it’s good anger management shit. When you’re playing some real heavy fucking music and you slow it right down and you get a groove going, then you look up and the audience are like throwing each other around the room. There’s something cool about that. I think the biggest difference with metal is that the ceiling is a lot lower and reachable with metal. And I think there’s something really special about that.

My biggest thing I enjoy is my audience is far wider in this genre. Metal is very male-dominated and you get used to just looking up mostly at a room full of dudes, beards, and black shirts head banging long hair. And that’s great. That’s a beautiful thing. But I think I slightly prefer the more diverse crowd that I’ve played to. My last thing is also the age thing. There’s a huge age range in the people that turn up at the shows I play now. And that’s a really beautiful thing as well. In France, I had a very elderly lady come up to me and she said, “‘Fields of Juniper’ made me think about something I’ve not thought about in 50 years.” If there’s a reason to keep going, then that’s it.

Photo Credit: David Nix

BGS 5+5: Danny Schmidt

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Danny Schmidt
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Latest album: Standard Deviation
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): “The Widowmaker,” for the exploits of my youth. Just kidding.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

There are two moments that really stand out to me. My wife Carrie Elkin and I got to perform at the Ryman Auditorium for a show with Emmylou Harris a few years ago. That represented so many dream moments of mine colliding in one evening that it was utterly surreal and disorienting. The other evening that especially stands out to me was a show when Carrie and I were on tour with the podcast “Welcome To Night Vale,” and Carrie had just announced she was pregnant, and immediately began to crowdsource the name of our daughter live in front of 2000 lunatic Night Vale fans. It was a beautiful silly moment of shared celebration.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc. — inform your music?

I’ve always been a lover of photography, both as an appreciator of other’s photography, and of taking my own shots. I love the static nature of the form, the sense of capturing something fleeting. And I love how that static nature forces your eye to choose images that have some sort symbolic quality and associative properties to try and tell a little story in one still impression. It’s a lot like songwriting in that particular way.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

I had only been writing for a couple years when 9/11 hit, so it was a craft I was still learning and not very confident in. But like everyone else at that moment in time, my mind was hard at work trying to process all the emotions and geopolitical realities of the situation. So it wasn’t like I set out to write a 9/11 response song, it’s just that I write about the things that are on my mind, and that’s what was on my mind. But it was such a complex stew of emotions that it was extremely hard to distill it down to what felt like a fair and nuanced encapsulation. In the month it took me to write that song (called “Already Done”) to my satisfaction, I wrote about four or five other songs, cause they all felt so easy by comparison, that they just popped right out.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

Be inspired by everyone and don’t listen to anyone. Cause, y’know … it’s beautiful to be inspired and influenced by the work of other folks in your community. At the same time, you have to have an unflinching internal compass as an artist or you’ll lose your way.

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?

That’s a great question! I think the answer is very often. I question the word “hide” though. Sometimes it is hiding. But sometimes it’s choosing a voice that can best deliver the message, and sometimes that’s not the first-person. And sometimes you’re just writing a fictional account in the third person and realize somewhere along the way that the character is starting to feel suspiciously familiar. I think it’s true that, at the very least, we put a lot of ourselves into everything we create, whether it ends up in a highly coded form, or whether it’s completely straight forward.

I picked songs that in one way or another changed the course of my personal life:

Bob Dylan – “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”

I discovered Dylan’s music when I was a very disaffected 15-year-old. I thought the world was insane and everyone in it was blind. I still think the world is insane, but Dylan taught me that not everyone was blind, at least, and he helped me start getting my head around the madness of it all in a manageable way. I connected very strongly with his worldview (especially with the stuff he was writing from 1964-1966), and it had a powerful affect on my sense of isolation. From across the world, and across two decades, there was a friend who would commiserate with me. It taught me a lot about the power of song.

Carrie Elkin – “Berlin”

This was the first song I ever heard Carrie Elkin sing, on the night we met. We would go on to become husband and wife, and so “Berlin” was sort of her siren song.

Anaïs Mitchell – “Why We Build the Wall”

I heard Anaïs sing this song around a campfire my first night at the Kerrville Folk Festival in 2006. Anaïs was one of about 20 young songwriters huddled together all night around the fire that evening, almost all of them new to me, and almost all of them would go on to become my closest friends and conspirators in this world of music. If the world could’ve heard the songs shared that night among compatriots, I feel like it might’ve fixed a lot of broken spirits.

Mississippi John Hurt – “I Shall Not Be Moved”

This album inspired me to get an acoustic guitar for the first time, and convinced me that if I practiced for 60-something years, I could get good enough at fingerpicking that I wouldn’t need a band.

Ayub Ogada – “Obiero”

My daughter was born to this album by Ayub Ogada. My wife asked me to pick some music for the birth, something that was calming, soothing, and ethereal. Ayub Ogada might actually be an angel. And Maizy was safely delivered.

Photo credit: Chris Carson

BGS 5+5: Rebecca Loebe

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Rebecca Loebe
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Latest album: Give Up Your Ghosts
Personal nicknames: Becca

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?

Ooh, great question! I think this happens in cycles. I’ve gone through periods of writing songs inspired by fiction, or using the stories of people I meet on the road. This tends to happen when my own life doesn’t feel inspiring, if I’m not in the mood to share or, honestly, if I’m just not in touch with my own emotional state.

For me, it’s often more a case of co-opting someone else’s story and then posing it as a first person “me” song! Rather than hiding behind a “you,” I tend to do the opposite – write a song using someone else’s story (or making one up) and then singing it in the first person as if it’s my own… I did that recently with the songs “Lake Louise,” “Tattoo,” “Flying” … and in a bunch of my older songs, like “Lie,” “Marguerita” and “The Chicago Kid” all fall into that category.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

Ooh, that’s hard to say, I’ve struggled with some many of them! I guess you could say I’m a laborious writer. Occasionally a song will spill out (“Ghosts” came out in a single sitting, almost stream-of-consciousness) but often I will labor over a song for weeks, months, and sometimes years.

The song “Growing Up” was very difficult to write. I started it at an off-the-grid writing retreat in the West Texas desert. The chorus came together quickly, and it felt like the start of some sort of empowering anthem. Then I left the retreat and my phone started to blow up; it was October of 2017, and while I was out of town the Harvey Weinstein scandal had broken. Suddenly many thousands of horrible, important stories were being dragged from the shadows to the mainstream narrative of our culture. It was a desperately needed, incredibly important step but it also knocked the wind out of me and muted my desire to write an empowerment anthem.

A month or so later, I was at another retreat and decided to give the song another try. This time, I played it for a friend who pointed out that sometimes growing up isn’t empowering. Sometimes it’s just a bummer–the punches keep on coming and we have to pull ourselves up and dust ourselves off over and over and over again, because it’s the only option. That friend is the wonderful Megan Burtt, who became a co-writer on the song for, as she puts it, “bringing the bummer.”

For the month prior to that moment of clarity, I had really agonized over this song; it was so hard to reconcile the message I wanted to share about strength and resolve with the more painful realities of the world. Once we decided that it’s ok to not be ok, the song clicked together pretty quickly.

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

Ha! My ideal pre-show ritual includes a delicious meal with lots of fresh local veggies, a thorough, full-body stretch, twenty minutes of Metta meditation and about twenty minutes of vocal warm-ups. Doesn’t that sound nice? In reality, I usually end up doing lip trills backstage while I put on my makeup and eat dinner out of a to-go carton in my lap. If I’m really lucky, I can get through the whole vocal warmup routine in an app I like called Vocal Ease.

Whenever possible, I try to sit with my set list and think through what I’ve come to say and why. I work to make my show about the audience and to give them the experience that they need, whether it’s humor, catharsis, or a mix of both (usually a mix). It might sound corny, but when I started thinking of my show as a service for the audience, rather than being solely about my own creative expression, it totally changed my approach and made me feel a much deeper connection to the work and to the audience. I certainly haven’t cracked the code, but it’s fun to try.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

“Be Nice, Dammit!” I’m half-kidding…but not really. Before I was able to do music full-time, I worked a ton of different customer service jobs. As a bank teller, waitress, and grocery store clerk, I saw over and over again how someone in a bad mood could say something surly and ruin my day. One unkind customer could throw me off and leave me in a worse mood for everyone else I interacted with that day (side note: I might be too wimpy for customer service!).

On the flip side, I saw over and over how someone who took the time to look me in the eye and speak with kindness could immediately improve the quality of my day. A nice interaction could wipe the slate clean, and leave me in a much better place for everyone else I talked to that day.

I decided during that time to make a deliberate practice of being as nice as possible to every single person I meet for the rest of my life. It’s been about 15 years and I still work at sticking to it every day. The way I see it, it takes about as much energy to be kind to someone as it does to be neutral, and the potential impact is worth it. If I give someone some good energy and that helps turn their day around, then perhaps it will positively impact other people they deal with later in the day, and maybe those people can positively impact other people…. Maybe not, but there’s no harm in trying, right?

I know this all makes me sound like some saccharine-y sweet Pollyanna-ish wannabe do-gooder, and I promise I’m not that. I’m a cynical optimist; I know that there are dark, sad truths about the world that we can’t change, but I think that making a habit of being extra kind to people and expecting nothing in return is a cheap and painless way of attempting to improve the world in which I live even slightly.

Anyhow, that mantra has become my mission statement for life, and it’s definitely impacted my career. I make a point to work with people who value kindness. There’s no way of knowing for sure, but I think there have probably been some doors that have opened for me because of someone liking my vibe. And I’ve sold a ton of t-shirts and tank tops (and even panties) that have my little mantra on them. Right on top of a beautiful illustration of a human heart, it says “Be Nice Dammit!” So if nothing else, it’s put food on the table that way.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?

I love to read. I think of it like fertilizer for my brain. When I’m reading a good book, it seems like all of my writing improves — songs, yes, but everything else I write too. Emails… essays… even my Facebook posts sound smarter!

I love to read epic, immersive fiction (recent favorites have included Shantaram, Life After Life, Simon Vs. the Homosapiens Agenda, Cutting for Stone…a bunch more…) and I’m also a sucker for a wry memoir. I’ve probably listened to Tina Fey’s Bossypants a dozen times, and I could read any chapter of any David Sedaris book anytime, anywhere.

Photo credit: Velvet Cartel