Ten years ago, Arielle Silver had lost sight of her future as an artist after three well-received releases and accompanying national tours. The singer-songwriter didn’t feel she could continue so she decided to take a break from music. Arielle moved to Los Angeles, divorced and remarried, and embarked on a new journey. She taught yoga philosophy, worked behind the scenes in the music industry, as well as writing and publishing her essays and poems. She was also nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets.
After Arielle was rejected for a Ph.D. program, she built a “she shed” in her backyard. It was there, surrounded by volumes of her journals, that her love for music was rekindled. Her inspiration renewed, she dedicated herself to write one song a week, which culminated in the collection of songs that would become her album, A Thousand Tiny Torches (July 2020).
The singer-songwriter returned last year with a holiday single and performances including the Hotel Cafe in Hollywood, house concerts, and listening rooms. Her plans this year to tour the west and east coasts were canceled or postponed due to the global pandemic. However, Arielle is live-streaming her concerts on her Arielle Silver Music Facebook page every Friday evening.
Arielle says she is no longer wrapping her ego and identity up in performing which is not about the song and the listener. She is now interested in feeling a connection with another person. She sees a song bridging a person’s experience with another’s that will ease the way for a heartfelt conversation.
I recently interviewed Arielle Silver in-depth via email about her new single, production process, her break from music, her renewed inspiration to return, her songwriting process, touring in a vegetable oil-fueled van, and so much more.
Congratulations on the release of your new single “Headlights” from your upcoming album, A Thousand Tiny Torches, an indie-folk Americana collection. What is the theme?
“Headlights” is a jangly country-folk-pop song about times like we’re in right now with the pandemic – times when things feel uncertain and fearful – and it’s a reminder that even when we can’t see too far down the road, we can move through this little by little by following the beam of the headlights. It’s a song, ultimately, about finding a light in the dark, and about faith, both of which are themes that recur throughout the upcoming album.
What do you want listeners to come away with after listening to your single?
There’s a delightful joyfulness in “Headlights” that I hope lifts people’s spirits. Life is tough right now for a lot of us on a lot of levels. A touch of human kindness goes a long way. There’s a feeling of kindness that I believe this song captures in its recognition of our shared experience of finding our way through tough times. I hope listeners feel buoyed by the music and words. I hope it gives them a sense of hope.
Explain your production process for your album.
I typically write alone, and with simple tools – just paper, a pen, my guitar, and a phone memo recorder. I believe that no matter what bells and whistles you might put on later, a song’s got to be able to stand on its own. But once you get into the studio, the creative collaboration and kismet of a band making music together takes over.
For this project, we started with a long weekend in August where we laid down drums, organ, and bass. Denny (Weston Jr.), Carl (Byron), and Darby (Orr) brought so much playfulness to this song. They’re all fantastic people and magnificent players. I remember listening back to takes of this song and dancing around Secret World Studios feeling ridiculously happy.
The rest (guitar, piano, percussion, mandolin, and vocals) were all done over the next month or two, as schedules aligned. It was magical to hear the transformation from my original guitar/vocal version. Every time a new part was added – particularly Mike Mullins on 8-string mandolin, Jesse Siebenberg on percussion, and Shane Alexander’s backing vocals – I felt the song lift a little more.
And then came the painful part – leaving some of the solos on the cutting room floor. A big part of recording is editing since you’re not only trying to capture the best performance of all the players, but the best performances that go together, and hopefully keep it in the realm of a traditional song length.
Your album was produced by Shane Alexander, tracked by Michael Gehring at Secret World Studios in the Sound City Studios complex, and mixed and mastered by Grammy-winners Brian Yaskulka and Hans DeKline. And it has a “sterling cast of players” with credits from Lady Gaga to KT Tunstall. How did the opportunity to work with all these incredible people come about? What was the experience like?
“How did the opportunity come about?” is a great question. Many years ago, I got some good advice about making music. “Play with people who sound like what you want to sound like in ten years.”
Ten years ago, you had three well-received releases accompanied by national tours, yet felt you couldn’t continue. Why did you feel this way even though you still wanted to sing and write songs?
Back then music was everything to me, and demanding that anything be “everything” puts an impossible strain on things. Music was my deepest solace, my future ambition, my job, my creative outlet, my identity. Unsurprisingly, at some point, things began to crack. Any touring musician will tell you that life on the road is hard. Nashville songwriter Mare Wakefield has a road trip song called “Love Vs. The USA” where love doesn’t win against the pressures of the road. For me, love of music didn’t win. Like any relationship that isn’t working, music and I had to break up. Turns out we needed a complete divorce. Much later – ten years later – it was like we saw each other again and fell back in love. I was just as surprised as anyone else who has experienced that sort of thing.
Tell us more about why you drove a vegetable oil-fueled vehicle across Texas to Abilene, Odessa, and Austin as part of a performance itinerary from Boston to Atlanta, to Nashville and the Southwest.
When my third album came out, I had been living in Boston for a long time. In support of the album, I headed out on tour with a bass player and drummer. Our tour dates took us to acoustic folk and rock venues down the eastern seaboard, across the lower states into Texas, out to the west coast, and then back to the east coast via the middle and upper routes. We played many cool rooms and met many awesome people who welcomed us into their homes for a good meal and comfortable sleep.
Our van was an 11-passenger cargo diesel van. We needed most of the space for gear, but before we left Boston, both to be more eco-friendly and to save on fuel expenses, I converted the fuel line to run off recycled vegetable oil and installed a 65-gallon drum behind the last row of seats for the veggie oil tank. One of the songs on that album is a spoken word jam that captures how I was feeling about the oil war politics.
Meanwhile, across the US, recycled vegetable oil had a cool underground community championing its use for fuel. On the road, restaurants frequently gave us their discarded oil, which we’d filter and recycle for our fuel tank. On many tour dates, like in Atlanta, Dallas, and Santa Fe, fans heard about our van and would come to our gigs with 5-gallon jugs of already-filtered oil for our tank. Over the course of the tour, the van needed a new windshield and a new set of tires, but we barely paid anything for fuel.
During your time away from being an artist, you taught yoga philosophy, and worked behind the scenes in the music industry. Why did you choose that particular work in the music industry? What types of work did you do? What did you learn from those experiences?
I moved to Los Angeles soon after I stopped touring, and a year or two later I stopped performing entirely. After a stint working in celebrity endorsements at one of the premiere talent agencies, I wanted to be closer to the making of music and found my way into post-production working at a recording studio/label that makes music specifically for film and television. With my nights and weekends suddenly free — since I was no longer performing – I started practicing a lot of yoga.
Getting into yoga was possibly the best decision I ever made. I originally came to it looking for an exercise outlet, but after I “broke up with music,” I became increasingly intrigued to understand the philosophy underlying the practice. Eventually, I earned my teaching credentials, and I’ve now been teaching and leading retreats for about 11 years. I could get completely nerdy about yoga philosophy, so I’ll just leave it at that.
Referencing the previous question, you also wrote and published essays and poems and were nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. How long have you been writing? What did you write about in your essays and poems? How did you feel about the nomination?
I refer to the decade when I wasn’t performing as a singer/songwriter as “the quiet years.” During that time, in addition to practicing and studying yoga, I began writing down some of my stories from the touring days. I went back to school for my MFA in Creative Writing and have since published a number of essays and poems, and have been at work on a deeply personal memoir about relationships between mothers, daughters, and stepmothers. My literary writing and songwriting both tend to explore existential questions and personal relationships. I find myself always trying to capture a larger understanding of the world by examining micro-moments in time.
How does your talent for writing essays and poetry translate into being a consummate storyteller as a songwriter? What elements of poetry and essays carries over to writing songs?
I’ve always loved songs with a story – that is, songs with characters, a setting, and some kind of relationship between two ideas or two people. What does the protagonist have? What do they want? That carries across genres. Songwriting demands a strong economy of words – we don’t have a lot of space to say something – which forces succinctness. In songwriting, you need to capture what you are trying to say with limited syllabus, rhythm, and rhyme.
Why did constructing your own “she shed” in your backyard and being surrounded by 47 volumes of your journals, rekindle your love of music and dedication to write one song a week?
I knew instinctively that I needed “a room of my own,” though I didn’t actually know why that need was so strong. I decided to go with my gut, build it, and see what would come – maybe I’d work on my book, or start a podcast. However, as soon as it was erected the desire to play music returned to me wholeheartedly.
The decision to write a song a week was simply a way to circumvent doubt, to get my songwriting chops back up, and to hold myself accountable. I allowed myself to write crap – the self-assignment was not “to write a GOOD song every week,” simply to write a song.
Explain how your return to music is for the right reasons — you were performing when you were younger, and now you’re connecting.
When I was younger, my ego and identity were wrapped up in “performing,” which is about the performer, not the song and not the listener.
At this point in my life, I am more interested in feeling a connection with another person. Like, “This is something that makes both our hearts ache. Let’s see what we can do to help each other heal.” A song can be a bridge from one person’s experience to another. It can facilitate some kind of conversation.
Now that you’re back to music, has the ‘sense of being present’ lasted? If so, why do you think it has, since it was having the break that helped you not to focus on the future?
Like everyone, I make future plans. This COVID19 time is strange, because on a collective level, suddenly everything has stopped. All performances, of course, were cancelled or postponed to some unknown date. Everyone is reassessing their plans for the foreseeable 2020 future. I think a lot of people are reassessing their values, too. A lot of people are wondering if they really want to go back to the life they were living before.
But my relationship with the future – which, by definition, does not yet exist – is different now than it was when I was younger. Back then I was ambitious and focused on the future so much that I didn’t feel much appreciation for what was actually happening at any given moment. I was always making plans, rarely enjoying the sensory and emotional experience of here and now. Very likely, my focus on the future was because I didn’t fully know how to deal with whatever was right in front of me. So mentally, I leap-frogged over the present to avoid whatever was happening. I was using ambition to absent myself from the present.
The development of my ability to both make future plans and enjoy the present moment has nothing to do with music and everything to do with yoga. Through yoga I learned to be still, to take in the sensations of a particular moment, to experience discomfort, to observe and thoughtfully respond rather than spontaneously react. And through that, I came back to loving music – which, as a temporal art form, can only truly be experienced at the precise moment of the sound.
What does it mean to you personally to be an indie music woman artist?
Indie music is community-based, perhaps oddly niche, but where the songwriter and the song listener can connect directly. Being independent means that I can make decisions based on the values that I hold as important, be the visionary who drives my own career.
As for being a woman and being an artist: Both refer to the lens through which I see the world and the lens through which the world sees me. Both women and artists are frequently forgotten or stereotyped in our culture, and because of that, I believe my job is, in part, to teach about creativity, and to write stories and sing songs reflective of women’s experiences.
How do you think women artists can be better supported in the indie music industry?
In 2010, an organization in the literary world called VIDA: Women in Literary Arts tallied up articles published, and books reviewed, by notable literary magazines like The New York Review of Books. The VIDA Count found industry-wide major gender disparity, in favor of men. Since then, many publications have responded by making a conscious effort to remedy this disparity, and their efforts reflect positively in the more recent VIDA Counts. In addition, when the magazine editors were asked why they publish more men than women, they said that, simply, it was because more men submit their work. From that comment arose an organization called Women Who Submit, whose mission is to empower, educate, and encourage women writers to submit their work for publication.
The music industry has come under similar criticism, and I believe that women artists and in the music industry need what women literary writers need: For the gatekeepers in the industry to make conscious efforts to remedy the disparity.
Additionally, we need community groups, like Women Who Submit, to support womxn (note my shift in terms to more inclusivity) and non-binary artists by sharing information, clarifying how to navigate a career in music, and encouraging them (us) to work in all corners of the industry.
What other projects are you working on? How has the Covid-19 pandemic affected your projects?
I’ve been live streaming concerts every Friday evening from my Arielle Silver Music Facebook page, working on new music, and staying connected with my mailing list. I’m teaching yoga and writing, both via Zoom. The biggest challenge as an independent artist is, of course, the constant pivoting. I’m always looking for ways to integrate my love of music, writing, and yoga.
Prior to the pandemic, I was working on yoga and creative vision retreats for this summer in California and Costa Rica, as well as booking music shows on the west and east coasts. Now, I’m clearing space on my hard drives and setting up a little studio so I can record the new songs. I don’t mind it – and maybe this goes back to your question about being present. The tragedy of a global economic and health crisis has changed my assumed trajectory for this year, but my sadness is about the bigger global issues and concern for the safety of my communities, not the blip in my plans.
You can connect with Arielle on her Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube |Spotify Artist Profile | Website
Listen to Arielle’s latest single, “Headlights” here: