Lily Henley Interview
Below is the transcript of my interview with Lily Henley. This link button takes you to the show notes with all the links, including the video, podcast, Lily Henley’s website, other suggested episodes and ways to support this series.
Lily Henley:
And we want to help you make an album. And it was an album that I hadn't said I wanted to make. It was a crazy email to receive. I thought this has to be a joke. What are you talking about? It's crazy. I'm singing in a minority language that not that many people speak.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. The wonderful singer, fiddler, songwriter and scholar Lily Henley sings in the endangered language Ladino (a fusion of Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish). During this podcast you’ll hear clips from her album Oras Dezaoradas. Blending her roots in American and Celtic music, Lily creates powerful original music that honours centuries of Sephardic women’s voices. These songs tell timeless stories of love, loss, exile, and resilience, sharing her personal connection to this important tradition. You’ll learn about: Sephardic history and contemporary communities, Lily’s unusual childhood and how she’s learned to trust her voice. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on many podcast platforms, and I’ve also linked the transcript.It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode, where you’ll find all the links, including different ways to support this podcast!
Hey, Lily, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Lily Henley:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Leah Roseman:
I've really, really enjoyed your album of Ladino songs as well as your first album, which I hope we'll talk about that too. But I've really listened to your more recent album many, many times. Oras Dezaoradas, is that right?
Lily Henley:
Yeah, that's pretty good. Oras Dezaoradas.
Leah Roseman:
Yes. So hours Without Hours. So you have been studying Sephardic culture for many, many years.
Lily Henley:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And it's a part of your family background. Do you want to speak to that first?
Lily Henley:
I guess I could speak to that for a long time. So I guess I'd ask if you could be more specific. I mean, I do. I am Sephardic and I've been singing in Ladino since I was a kid, and maybe it's helpful to just say what Ladino is. Ladino is our heritage language. It's, I guess what I would say is like a linguistic geography of the Sephardic diaspora. We are of the Jewish people that were expelled from the Inquisition in the Iberian Peninsula in Spain and Portugal, and the language and culture really developed after the expulsion. So people came out of the Iberian Peninsula, speaking Castellano, the older forms of Spanish and Portuguese and other related dialectics, and came into Morocco in the Ottoman Empire and the Ottoman Empire stretched across all of North Africa into the Near East and the southern Mediterranean. So the Balkans, it kind of depends on which period you look at. It was hundreds of years, but all of the languages and vocabulary from Hebrew and from Ottoman languages, so from Turkish, from French and Persian, Italian, Greek, Bulgarian entered that old Castellano and became part of the development of Latino. So Ladino is an Ottoman language.
There's a kind of dialect of it or a related spoken language called Haketia that is the Moroccan version that has a little bit more of the Castellano, maybe more Arabic, and it has the Hebrew, but it has less of the Ottoman influences, but it's closely, closely related. And it was spoken by Sephardi Jews across that whole region for hundreds of years, and then quite quickly was endangered in the 20th century. So it's considered an endangered language by the Endangered Language Alliance, and it's still spoken. It's a living language. And that's one of the misconceptions that my music kind of has two sides. On the one hand, I'm an artist, I care so much about beauty and entertainment and connectivity, and I have a lot of different musical influences, but there's kind of a side to the music that I'm making that is bringing this endangered language and culture to people that maybe haven't heard it or haven't heard it very much, or just don't know a lot about it.
In the United States, most Jewish people come from an Ashkenazi background, so it's much less common in, and yeah, I grew up singing in Ladino, but my kind of deep dive into it has happened in the last decade through many different travels and studies, and some of it has been very official and some of it has just been me being a nerd. So yeah, I don't know, I really attribute that to being a folk musician and just kind of the many years that I've spent learning new tunes on the fiddle and learning ballads and songs from different traditions, that sort of gave me sort of the immediate tools for going deeper into my own cultural tradition.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, wonderful. Well, we'll definitely dive in a little bit later into some of your mentors and specific research, but in terms of your life as a child, I mean, I find it so inspiring that this language was preserved over hundreds and hundreds of years and so much travel throughout a huge diaspora. Did you understand that those songs, you were learning what that was about?
Lily Henley:
Yeah, and I actually have to say, I feel like elders in my community would dislike the word preserved because it really is just a development. Human culture just develops. It's always changing. So for instance, in the United States, when we're playing old time music, sometimes the songs are really old, but they've changed a lot. There's a lot of change that happens. So yeah, I mean, when I was a really young kid, I probably, it's an interesting question. I don't know if I was, I definitely was thinking about my ancestors or the ancestral culture. I do think that that's a common thing in Jewish culture across the board. You think about a lot of holidays have to do with who's come before you and what happened a long time ago and how it relates to your life now, ways of making something modern for you now. But at the same time, probably the most famous song in Ladino is, it's not my favorite song, I'm just going to say, but it's the song Ocho Kandelikas, which is the song for the Hanukkah Festival.
And it was written in the eighties, I think, the eighties by Flory Jagoda who was a modern songwriter who had fled the Holocaust in the Balkans. And what was at one point the Ottoman empire. And she sang lots of traditional songs from her family, but she also wrote so many songs and she was just not, I think the concept of singer songwriter is much more recent than writing songs is. So she just didn't make a really big deal out of, oh, this was my song. I wrote this one, and this was an old song. So you often hear that song introduced by people outside of our community as a traditional Spanish Hanukkah song. And it's actually a modern Hanukkah song in the modern Ladino language that she spoke as a kid. She died in 2021. So I do think that I thought about ancestry and culture and heritage and connectivity to the past, but I also did not think of Ladino as an ancient hundreds of years old.
And actually, Ladino in terms of linguistic development is it's much newer than lots of languages. I mean, a language like Gaelic or the languages that have influenced Ladino, all of those languages are much more ancient than Ladino itself. So I think of Ladino as being a longstanding heritage connecting us back. But I also spend a lot of my time correcting this perception that it's ancient and it's from long ago, and it almost is a correction to the perception that on the one hand, that you couldn't be creative and do new things in it, and that there aren't resources for that. And it's also a correction for people that might do whatever they want with it without doing a real deep dive because it is still a living language and there are things that are true about it and things that are not true. So yeah, I think of it that way, I guess.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Lily Henley:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So on this album, you have some traditional ballads that you've written new music for, and also some of your own original lyrics?
Lily Henley:
It was very nerve wracking to write the ones that I wrote in music for. I don't know why. That to me is, I'm still sort of parsing why that was a challenging thing to do because it's obviously there are so many new melodies for lyrics that are old in, not just in Sephardic tradition, but in every song tradition. And I grew up in the Celtic music world and in the American folk music world, and even in the Rock or popular music, there's so many examples. Like the sixties folk revival had so many new versions of things like new melodies, Martin Carthy and people like that wrote new melodies for old lyrics. When you look up the Child ballad collection, those are lyric collections really. They're like story collections almost. So for some reason I found, and this probably goes back to the root of feeling like Sephardic music and Sephardic culture is somehow this preserved thing.
I felt, even as a Sephardic person, I need somebody's permission. Can somebody tell me that it's okay to do this? Is someone going to be mad? And luckily, I got that permission and I made my album in collaboration with the Sephardic community in Paris, which was the beginning of a really deep dive into Sephardic language and culture. But it's a deep dive I'm continuously on. I can't imagine ever not continuing forward with it. I don't think we're ever true experts of our cultures and repertoires, but I do feel like I needed that permission and it felt really, really natural. It just felt I had these lyrics that felt very present and modern, and some of the traditional melodies that I know, I do sing traditional melodies. There's only one on the album. It's the very last track on the album that's almost solo.(Music)
But I do sing those, but I literally have no memory really of writing any of those melodies. They just happened with the lyrics. And then I arranged them, and I was really fortunate to get the chance through those connections in Paris to work with people like Marie-Christine Bornes-Varol, who's like a foremost expert on Ladino and incredibly fluent. And Francois Azar, who actually is the producer on the album who's a Ladino speaker. So I had the chance to co-write songs, and there are three completely new songs on the album, and I sing them in my concerts, and it feels really, yeah. So the album is composed of both absolutely new songs and these recreated old songs. And I think that writing the new melodies for the old lyrics, it has helped me a lot in creating a genre for myself, like a style for myself that allows all the different influences that are true to me as an artist. I just don't think it would've been very exciting to continue to just make sort of versions of the old songs with their old melodies. Not even because old, but just because someone else's. And I'm a composer and I'm a songwriter, and I write in English also, and I needed something that would help connect all of those influences. And that was kind of the key for me. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I was hoping to include some clips, and of course, your album is linked right in the show notes. A lot of these songs are about strong women, and I thought maybe we could start with the clip of Esta Noche Te Amare.
Lily Henley:
Yeah, totally.
Leah Roseman:
Do you want to speak to that song a little bit?
Lily Henley:
Yeah, that's a song that I wrote, and I actually, it's the only time that this has happened, but I wrote a whole lyric in English, and it was, there's this Child ballad that I think was made popular by Martin Carthy. The Child Ballads are, I mean, a lot, probably many of your listeners know, but it's just a collection of all these old English Irish and Scottish ballads. And there's this ballad called Cold Haily Windy Night, or that's one name for it. And I think the underlying story is it has this trope in it. This man knocks on window in middle of night, woman says, no, no, my parents will hear you and then lets him in anyway. And they have a midnight tryst. And then she asks him to marry her, and he rejects her and leaves, and it's called The Night Visitor, the Night Visitor Trope. And one of my favorite singers of the old Trish tradition of ballads, John Doyle, who's an unbelievable guitar player, he has this incredible version of the song, and I was really obsessed with it.
But the story is just so the woman is always done wrong, and the story, it's so frustrating, and I thought, I'll try writing it, but reversed all of the same things happen, but at the end, the man wants to marry her. And she's like, this was fun, but no, and I wrote it in English and it just didn't work. It just didn't feel, it felt forced, and I never performed it. And then when I was working on this new album, I thought, what if I translated into Ladino? And I worked on this translation and I worked with Marie-Christine, who she would never call herself a, she wouldn't say that she's a music expert, but she is a carrier of, she sings a lot of songs. She really knows the older Sephardic Ballad tradition. And I guess when I'm saying ballads, I just mean songs.
We have all these different words for the different kinds of songs. And I said, we know we work. We worked through it, and it was very collaborative. And then I said, what do you think from your perspective? How does this feel? And she was like, it totally works. It's like the strong woman, not to be, of course there are songs in the Sephardic repertoire that where women get done wrong and have a hard time or are complaining or whatever, but there are a lot of songs where women have a strong force. And she said, oh, it just fits right in with those. And that's how I felt too. It felt much more natural to sing it. And yeah, that's really the background to that song. It's the longest song on the album, and it was really fun to record it. Yeah. (Music)
Leah Roseman:
Thanks for that. So I was going to ask you about Marie-Christine, how you met her and what that mentorship relationship looked like. You got a Fulbright to go to a residency in Paris.
Lily Henley:
So I had thought about doing the Fulbright for a decade, and the deadline would just come up every year and I'd miss it. I just wouldn't have the right material. And then basically, I posted this song and I was contacted by the vice president of Aki Estamos, which is the revitalization organization in Paris. They said, we really love this new thing that you're doing, and we want to invite you to come to the Festival of Jewish Culture in Paris and headline the Ladino Day, and we want to help you make an album. And it was an album that I hadn't said I wanted to make. It was a crazy email to receive. I thought, this has to be a joke. What are you talking about? It's crazy. I'm singing in a minority language that not that many people speak, and this is a person that speaks Ladino fluently, and it was very exciting. And so I went there in 2019 and did that and made those connections, and I got to meet with Marie-Christine during that visit. And then the pandemic hit and I lost the album, didn't get released right away, and I lost all of my concerts and everything. I was planning, and I had all this time, and I applied, it took me six weeks to do the application, and I had these connections. I really wanted to go back to Paris. And there's a collegiate level Ladino course that happens there at the Institute of Language and Culture. And she runs a class every week also with advanced students. And she's just a very lovely person. It's hanging out with somebody and going back in time, not so much because of Ladino, but because she's hard to get ahold of. And she lives in near the Gare du Nord in an ancient apartment, and her husband is a native Ladino speaker from Istanbul.
And it was just an incredible connection. And she's so generous to anybody who is really doing a deep dive into this culture and language. I think she always says that learning Ladino and investing herself in Ladino saved her life. And it's so interesting because she's neither Jewish nor Sephardic. I mean, obviously with a name like Marie-Christine, so it's really, but she has such a deep understanding and knowledge of the culture and language that I've heard her speak Spanish. And it's like she has a accent when she speaks Spanish and her husband is a native speaker. And I would go over their house and sit in their salon and we would just speak Ladino. And I don't think I've ever spoken to him in a language that is not Ladino. So that was that connection. And I don't talk to her that often, but she's still a very dear person to me.
Leah Roseman:
And you learned Spanish growing up,
Lily Henley:
So
Leah Roseman:
How close are they these languages?
Lily Henley:
I'm going to give an answer that I heard somebody at Ladino 21, Carlos Yebra López, I heard him give this answer. He's both a native Spanish speaker from Spain and also a Ladino speaker. And I really liked what he said, which was, it depends who's talking to who, because of course, they are really closely related in grammar and in a lot of vocabulary, they're not the same language. Ladino is not a dialect of, I'm not a linguist, but I know that, it's not a dialect of Spanish, but it is one of those languages where it can be mutually intelligible. So if a Ladino speaker is speaking to a Spanish speaker, they'll choose different words. They might choose words that they would not use if they were speaking to a Ladino speaker. There's all, I could go deep, deep, deep into it. I don't think it would be interesting to your listeners, but they are directly connected and also separate.
And I mean, I guess a good example of that is, and it also depends where you're from as a Ladino speaker, and that's all changing all the time because the diaspora is very wide, and it's really hard to maintain small dialectic differences that would've existed between if you were living in Salonica and what is now Greece. You would have one way of speaking, and if you lived in Istanbul or Ismir in what is now Turkey, you would have one way of speaking, it would be intelligible. But for instance, if I was talking to a Spanish speaker, I might say la cozina to say the kitchen, but if I was speaking in a Ladino context, I might use the word mupak, which is a Turkish root word that also is the word for kitchen. So mupak is a word that no Spanish speaker would understand. They would have to put two and two together. So it kind of just depends.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Yeah. That's very interesting. I know with Yiddish that there's definitely that kind of code switching
Lily Henley:
Yeah
Leah Roseman:
that happened using more Hebrew derived words as opposed to German or Slavic.
Lily Henley:
Yeah. And actually I love that you say that because I have heard both of German speakers saying, oh, yeah, I can understand a bunch of Yiddish. We can talk. And then at the same time, there are all these resistance stories of people singing to each other in Yiddish during the Holocaust, and it kind of passing over the heads of people that were German speaking. So it really, yeah, I mean, language is amazing. And it's not that I'm not a linguist, but it's very inspiring to me just how it develops in people's accents. And to me also just because I'm using my ears all the time as a musician, I just think language has so much to do with why music or I don't know what started it, but you can feel the difference in music also in how people speak.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So the first song on this album, du Duermite mi Alma, do you want to speak to that? And we could include a clip.
Lily Henley:
Yeah, that's a song. I mean, at some point I'm going to have to retire. It's a very funny story, and I love telling it on stage, but it's a song that has lyrics that are quite, at least the first part of it is pretty well known in the sort world Sephardic music world. And the beginning of the story says, sleep my darling, sleep my child, your father is out with another woman. And then the second verse says, I followed him and saw this beautiful meal that he'd laid out for them or that they were having together. And the chorus or the refrain says, oh, oh, new love. Oh, new pain. So it's a song of the woman that has a baby and her husband is cheating on her. And I sang this, I created this version. It just happened. It just felt this melody. It just felt the lyrics fell right into it. And right before I recorded the album, I went and met with Susana Weich-Shahak, who's really one of the most important modern collectors. She's at the musicologist, didn't really work as a professor or anything like that. She is just a deep, deep folklorist and song collector. And I just went to her because I just wanted her take. I didn't expect to please her. She's in her eighties and she has really specific opinions about the music and stuff, but I really just felt like I want her take on this new thing that I'm doing and how to, she's a musician, so how does this fit into the melody? And she said, oh, very nice, very nice. But you're missing the second half of the story. And he comes home, she brought out actually two manuscripts so we could compare and contrast the versions, but basically he comes home and he says, open my sweetheart. Open my darling. He repeats the same lines from the beginning. I'm so tired from my day on the road. And she says, well, wherever you spent the day, you can also spend the night. And he goes, demon of a woman who told you. And she says, ombre, Delco, devil of a man. I discovered it for myself, and she locks him out of the house. He's knocked on the door because he's been locked out. And yeah, I just think it's an incredible song. It is one of those empowered women's songs. It's also just when you think about these songs back then, it would've been hypothetically, you would've been so much more dependent on your husband. So it is quite an act of bravery to just be like, you can't come in. And I also think if it were like a Celtic or American folk song lyric, she would've killed him. I think she would've killed him. So I think that that's also, I mean, maybe there's a version that I don't know where she does kill him, but I do think she just locks him out. And in the different versions, there were many locks on her door. She locks. I chose seven, but I think one version had 11. And it's like, okay, so it's happened a bunch of times and she keeps adding a lock. I don't know. So anyway, that's the story behind this song. (Music)
Leah Roseman:
Okay, wonderful. So you're going back to school, you're going to Harvard to do your Doctorate.
Lily Henley:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, withPolina Shepherd, Ida Gillner, Jean Rohe, Kavisha Mazzella, Yale Strom and Alicia Svigals. It’s a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, notebooks, mugs and more, everything printed on demand. On my Ko-fi page you can buy me one coffee, or every month. You’ll also find the link to sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Finally, if you’re finding this episode interesting, please share it with a friend. Thanks.
Lily Henley:
I did an MA in Ethnomusicology that I finished last May, and I toured straight through my whole MA both as a soloist, and I also spent a year and a half playing with his band called Rising Appalachia, kind of in between several genres. And I played fiddle and guitar and sang, and that was really a test. I have no interest in going into academia and giving up my work as an artist and as a performer. So I just wanted to see, can I do both? But for me, I'm doing this work anyway. I'm just so nerdy. I'm also creating music with people that are incredibly meaningful musicians to me and thinking about developing my craft and practicing my instruments. So it's a lot to balance, but it went well, and I took one year off just to tour and applied to school. And yeah, it's Harvard, mainly because of who I'll get to work with there, that it's the right fit for the project that I'm hoping to do.
Leah Roseman:
Do you want to speak to who you'll get to work with or not?
Lily Henley:
My advisor at Harvard will likely be a musicologist called Alejandro Madrid, who's a foremost expert in sort of diasporic music in Mexico. And I think he's always had an interest in Sephardic music. Actually, he told me that he had considered doing Sephardic music when he was at his dissertation level. And yeah, it's going to be a really interesting adventure. I'm so early in it that I don't know what to say, and I'm sure it'll be a really challenging balancing act, but I'm not completely alone. There are several musicians that I respect so deeply who are also have an academic life. Additionally, Jake Blount is at Brown, and he's an incredible culture bearer and musician, and there are several other people that when I'm really freaking out or just feeling ridiculous, it's just a ridiculous two worlds to kind of live in. And I am trying not to take myself too seriously.
I don't think I imagined myself as an academic before this happened. It just really was, okay, I am doing all this work and every piece of music that I write or arrangement that I create is deeply informed by all this study that I'm kind of doing. What could support that? And that it was like a slow, the Fulbright was the beginning, and it was just like a slow trajectory down into that. But I do reach out to my other touring academic friends because it is a weird and kind of unique, strange experience to be doing both those things at the same time.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, good for you. So your family moved around quite a bit when you were a kid?
Lily Henley:
Yeah, my dad was a physician in the Indian Health Service, which is not India, not Indian, like India, Indian Native people in the United States. So when I was born, we were living on the Hopi reservation in Arizona, and my very first words were in Hopi just because I was surrounded by, so maybe that was, I can't think of the Hopi language is a really vibrant living language, but it's also spoken by very few people. It's a very small population. But yeah, it helped that that's what he did. But my mom was really, my mom just can't decide where she wants to live, and she's always talking about where she thinks she might move next. And so we moved a lot. I think I moved 10 times before I was 10. And all over the United States, I spent short stints in Thailand and in Inuit Village in Alaska, on Kodiak Island and Alaska had very small moments in places like that. And then I lived all over the southwest and the Midwest and the Northeast, and yeah, I don't know any other, I'm not sure. People always say, well, did you like it or was it good? And there were really rough things about it and really great things about it, maybe my perspective on the world and my interest in other people and in other ways of thinking and living. And maybe that comes from it. It was also challenging. It's really hard to be constantly the new person coming in, but I don't know what the alternative would've been like. So I can't really say, oh, it was definitely in comparison to the alternative, good or bad, but that just was, and the longest I've ever lived anywhere was nine years in New York City, but I was traveling all the time, so I don't totally know because I'm a touring musician. I don't totally know what it would be like to ever just be in one place and just be there. So yeah, I don't know.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I mean, it just makes me think about how a lot of us are very tied to our sense of place and our belongings maybe a bit too much, and maybe you gained a certain freedom from that.
Lily Henley:
Yeah, I do feel like I belong nowhere and I belong anywhere. I do feel like my tolerance for being in a strange new place is high when I'm on tour, if we're in an odd place for two days, and some other people, I mean, I'm not the only one who enjoys this, but sometimes musicians are just totally destabilized on tour. You're just like, oh my God, I dunno where I am. I don't know where I've just woken up and I find it, I guess it's always like anthropology. I'm just like, what's this all about? I'm going to be here for two days. What's this? What's this about? Even if it's just sitting in a coffee shop and watching people. So I do feel like I developed that really young and I developed also maybe what I anyway have just as a person from a minoritized background, and that you develop an empathy for other people's, like you have a high tolerance for understanding where somebody else is coming from quickly and explaining yourself to them for good or for bad.
I don't know if it's really good or really bad, but I do feel like at any time somebody asks me what my background is, I have to say something, I have to explain. It's never going to be I say it, and they completely know exactly what I'm talking about. There are so few Sephardic people in the world. I think there are less than 2 million of us worldwide. So maybe it's an extension of that that I am very comfortable being like, I'm weirdly here. I do have moments where I wish that I really belonged. And I had a lot of those moments as a kid. And I actually think learning Spanish was a big part of that, that I felt very connected to the Spanish speaking community where we were living in the Midwest. And I felt more accepted maybe just because of maybe my appearance and my background and their background.And so I learned Spanish almost as a way of just fitting in. I just really, I am still working on a more adult kind of Spanish, but I really got around, well as a teenager in Spanish because it made me feel like I belonged. And that's something that I think we all have to, maybe this is just my opinion, but I do feel like getting to a place where you feel inside of yourself that you belong, and also that it's okay if you don't belong. Those are two things that if you are going to move around the world outside of wherever you are, you kind of have to make peace with.
Leah Roseman:
Well, let's talk more about the songs on the album. So a lot of them are about exile. I was thinking about, I probably can't pronounce it, Arvoles Yoran Por Luvya.
Lily Henley:
Oh Arvoles Yoran Por Luvya
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Lily Henley:
That song, it has a story that goes with it that may not be true, but it is true kind of in the Sephardic kind of consciousness, which is that it's an old song. The lyrics are older. I don't know exactly how old, but it's an older song. People say that Sephardim from the Balkans because during the Holocaust, the Ottoman Empire fell in 1921. That was one change in the Sephardic world because that was the empire in which Sephardic people were living on both sides of the Mediterranean. And then when the Holocaust happened, Sephardim that were in the Balkan area really suffered like 97% of Jews from what is now Greece. And I think a similar percentage from Serbia or from and Bosnia, all of the areas and the Balkans died, I don't want to say died. They were murdered and it was a massive trauma that is still an ongoing trauma in the community.
And people say that this song was sung on the way to the camps by Sephardim from Salonika, and I've heard that it might just be like we don't know if it's really true, basically. But I will say that I had to, this song reminded me a lot of American old time songs, just songs or even bluegrass songs, these songs that have traveling to a distant land with nothing, and it kind of has this. So I wrote this kind of fiddly sort of melody for it that is very upbeat. And my greatest collaborator and partner Duncan Wickel is playing cello and fiddle and all kinds of things on this track so beautifully. But still, when I was singing it, I had to kind of bear in mind the history of these lyrics and just a way to be sensitive to that while also kind of giving this whimsical life to the themselves because they predate any of that history. So it's kind of a fun wild little one.(Music)
Leah Roseman:
So I was going to ask about Duncan, you've been collaborating with him for many years, and so on the record, there's tracks over layer because he's playing different instruments, but when you do it live, I guess it's different.
Lily Henley:
Yeah, I think about this a lot. And I just think Duncan is a super multi-instrumentalist and plays and sings and plays all different instruments at a really amazingly, and he is my longest collaborator. We've been playing together since 2011, and I'm so lucky to be able to collaborate with him. He plays with lots of other people and I've learned so much from working with him. But I will say that he's much more of engineering of an artist that deals in the recorded art form. And there's just this big difference with a recording. You are missing the live music factor, but you can add all this layer to it and it's like a different art form. It's sort of like, I always think it's sometimes irritating to me when you see a music video and the lyric is, I don't know, about an apple. And the person in the video holds up an apple and eats it. And it's not that that's never acceptable, but film is a different art form than music. So you don't can transmit a feeling in a totally different way. And so that's kind of how I think about it. I have all these ways of playing these songs live that are paired down a little bit from the album, but of course there's the live factor that gets added in the live experience and just being so present with music and hearing somebody's voice in real life, just you and that person. And in the recording it, it's a recording. So we add things that we'd like to hear that maybe, yeah, he doesn't have eight hands, so he can't play cello and fiddle and bazookie and guitar at the same time. But they're both really wonderful ways of hearing the music in their own right, I think.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Did you want to talk about your first album? I mean, it goes back a while, but it's so beautiful. Words Like Yours.
Lily Henley:
That's so nice of you. I mean, I am sure other musicians can relate. When you hear yourself on an album from over a decade, I can just hear how much has changed, how much better I've gotten, hopefully. And also maybe I was really young when I was writing a lot of that music. I was in my early twenties. And I mean, in a lot of ways you're the same person that you've always been, but there are things that I would change about how I did my lyrics or the drama. I feel like when you're in your early twenties, there's a lot of drama.
Your perspective is a little bit, I don't think, not to dismiss anyone in their early twenties, it's just stage that I kind of went through. But that was just such a fun, I mean making that album, it was with a full band, Haggai Cohen-Milo, who's also on my recent album and is an amazing bass player, lives in Berlin now. He was in Boston, he's on the album, Dominick Leslie, who is most recently played with Molly Tuttle in Golden Highway and is a really old, really dear friend of mine was on the album, I don't even know how old he was, 20 maybe. He was really a real baby with hair down like this. And Jordan Tice, who plays with Hawktail and has a really amazing songwriting career of his own plays guitar on it. And Duncan, who was 22 on the album and mostly plays fiddle.
I think that that was the other thing, making that album. We made it with Omer Avital who had been the producer of several projects that I really loved back then. And it was really making a live band album. There weren't a lot of overdubs. It was, and I think I had not learned a lot about making room for myself, kind of taking the difference between being an egotistical singing diva person and just saying, I need a little room for my vocals and my interpretation to be central. And I think that was just a huge learning process. And also, I don't know who can relate to this, but the process of hearing a mix and hating it and having to take a deep breath and be like, this is fixable. I'm going to sit down and explain how I want. It's nobody's fault. I'm the only person that can express how I want to sound. That was all a huge learning process that happened with that, the making of that album. And I'm not sure that you can really, if you're an independent artist and you are really deeply involved in the creative process, I don't know how you get past those learning curve stages. Everybody goes through something like that.
You hope that you go through them in a way where it's not a painful growing pain, but there's just developing your ear, understanding how things work, understanding how to use a microphone, understanding the tone that you want done. The violin is a really difficult instrument to record. It just has so many good and bad or not bad, but it has so many nuances of sound. How do you want yourself to sound on your recording? So for me, when I listen to that album, I kind of hear my learning process. There is one connecting thing between the two albums, which is there's a song on the first album in English that I took the melody from and recreated it in Ladino. It's Morena Me Yaman on the new album. And it worked thematically, but it also, I just really loved that melody that I'd written a long time ago and I wanted to give it a new life.(Music)
Leah Roseman:
So I love to ask singers about the, it seems like because not a singer, that the voice is an instrument and it's separate from you as a person and it changes and it's vulnerable and how you relate to that as a singer.
Lily Henley:
That's so true. And I think that's a really, I agree. So I think it's an instrument, and I just don't think of myself as an expert in this. I do feel like singing has come very naturally to me, which does not at all mean that I haven't gone through a lot of my own learning processes or processes. I don't know what the plural is. But anyway, that process that I've gone through has still happened. But I will say that I've chosen over my life to take very few voice lessons, not because I done my own, listened to what people say about vocal technique or listened to tons of singing and made decisions, but just because the voice is so, I mean, any instrument should be like this too, but when you're learning an instrument that you have to play with your hands, and this is just my take.
Some people may totally disagree with me, but I do feel like there's this curve where you have to learn how to hold, you have to learn how to produce the sound. And at the very most basic level, we can all produce mostly sound with our voices and we can sing good or bad. Everybody can make a sound and sing. So it feels like I kind of didn't want to end up all up in my head about how I was using my voice. I wanted it to just happen really naturally and kind of have my own way of approaching it. And it's still just a process, but it does feel like a relationship that you develop around trust. Can you trust it to come out and to be able to control it. And especially on stage when people in the audience are not always aware that maybe your monitor is feeding back weirdly, or you can't hear yourself at all, or the person, you can only hear this one instrument for some reason, and it's like the wrong one for grounding.
And there's just a million things like that. You can't stop and be like, excuse me, pause. I need to make sure that I can hear myself. You have to just pretend that this thing is not happening and be a professional. And I feel like those situations can make you feel really distant from the production of your voice because you open your mouth. It's so vulnerable. It isn't like, for instance, playing the guitar. Your hand is on a fret. You can feel, you could be like, I know I'm in the right place even though I can't hear myself. It's like you really have to feel inside yourself that what's happening and trust that the sound is going to produce the way that you want it to, and that you'll be able to work with it if it comes out in some different and new way because of the situation. And so, yeah, I do feel like I haven't thought about it this way a lot, but I would say that it does feel kind of like a relationship that is a longstanding relationship that you have with this thing that's happening that's kind of separate and also part of your body.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Lily, I saw a video you put out during the lockdown days of the Pandemic. It's on YouTube, and it was talking to people about self-care, and you said at that time you were working on your guitar playing. It was less fraught than violin.
Lily Henley:
That was probably, there was a period in the pandemic where my friend Phoebe Hunt was doing. She was asking all of her musician friends to post something. I can't even remember what it was for, but I think that's what it was. Yeah, I mean, I think because the violin, it was the instrument I wanted to play as a kid. I came to it later than other people, I think to some degree. I started when I was 11, which on the violin is actually quite late, and I didn't take a ton of lessons. I took maybe a few lessons and then studied every summer at fiddle camps and stuff like that. So when I got to conservatory, I went to New England Conservatory for my undergrad, and I was in the improvisation department, but I had a lot of, in order to be able to play a different style than what I had been playing, it took a lot and it was very, like I had kind of music school trauma, I guess it's fine, but I do feel like every single thing that I've done on my own as an adult musician has felt more free than that relationship.
And it's also brought me back to the fiddle. I've been able to take that energy that I feel like learning an instrument like the guitar, which has eight zillion, zillion ways of being played, and you can do it at a basic level, or you can do it and be like a crazy virtuoso and any number of genres, but it's also a really restrictive and rigid instrument, but it's also an instrument that's so nice to play and sing with all of that feeling of learning, that instrument and of singing has brought me back to the violin in a way that has felt less fraught. I'm able to come back to it. That's probably what I was talking about. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I was curious. I'm a violinist and I'm always interested in people's origin stories with
Lily Henley:
Totally
Leah Roseman:
The stress and finding their voice and finding,
Lily Henley:
And it probably, it's not even about the violin. I feel like you could feel this way about any instrument that you've just done from an early age and gone through all these, especially because whatever instrument you play when you're younger, maybe you feel this way too. You identify strongly with it. You're like, I'm a fiddle player. And so then you're like, what if I fiddle and I don't like what I did? Who am I? I think that's the big thing for me about instruments that maybe are newer or you didn't use to say, there was a period when saying that I was a singer, came later. I mean, I sang all my life, but I never said, oh, I'm a singer. And so I think when I really started singing seriously, I was like, wow, this is cool. And I don't feel like overly, I wasn't immediately overly identified with it, so I didn't feel like, oh my God, my identity is living and dying with how this is going. And maybe that's also how I feel about academia, that my identity as a musician is lifelong. And sometimes it's a lot of pressure on myself, so it's nice to have a thing to step out into, but I'm really conscious that that can happen with anything that you do a lot and you say, this is what I am. You can end up identifying so strongly with. And then if it doesn't feel, if something's not going well or you have a bump in the road, you're like, oh my God, who am I? What am I?
You get really all up in your head. And I guess just for me, it's very important to have these experiences that pull me back into this is creative, and I love this. I mean, I love music. I think about music all the time every day. So just reminding yourself that that's why you ended up with this identity, because you loved it so much. And you love people that love music, and you love all kinds of, I love lots of music that isn't music that I'm even going to perform. It's just music that I love.
Leah Roseman:
There's a track on your album that's just instrumental. It's you and Duncan playing Fiddle, right?
Lily Henley:
Yeah. Yeah. And actually, I know that my producer, who doesn't come from the fiddle world, was like, why would this be on the album? It's just fiddle tunes. And for me, it was like a throwback to all the nineties records that had songs and tunes. I just was like, I want a set of fiddle tunes. There's some fiddle tune on one of the songs on Avre Tu Puerta Serrada, and actually there's one fiddle tune that's by a French composer that I grew up playing that was a really important tune to me as a kid. And then I wrote these two tunes and he was like, okay, it's fine. But I was like, he doesn't understand. He wasn't alive during the nineties, folk. He wasn't involved in the nineties Celtic revival, and he didn't have all those albums that I had. (Music)
Leah Roseman:
Thank you so much for this today. I really appreciate it.
Lily Henley:
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really love this podcast and the way that actually really, I know it's nerve wracking for interviewers to be, oh, I'm going to be on film. But I've really enjoyed seeing, I love seeing the behind the scenes clips of the person. I just feel like that's so awesome to see the person who you're interviewing in their house talking about the thing. And anyway, I just really appreciate everything you're doing.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thanks. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
