by Aly Eleanor (@purityolympics)
Naima Bock’s second record came to life in a shed. The London songwriter started threading together the initial songs that would end up forming Below a Massive Dark Land while living with her grandmother, singing loudly and learning the violin. Despite making music for over a decade, this was an adventure in autonomy, an exploration of creation’s newness. She brought focus and rigor to the sprint-like recording sessions with her core collaborators and a choir of horns, strings, and voices. The restless loneliness of her words is matched by the power and warmth of the arrangements. The sound has gotten bigger but only stayed truer; she’s traveled farther but gotten closer to home. Within the contradictions, there lies something close to an answer.
Post-Trash connected with Bock over Zoom last month to talk about archaeology, Mount Eerie, being a conduit, letting yourself be seen, and Below a Massive Dark Land.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
photo credit: El Hardwick
Aly Eleanor: To start, I wanted to ask about the periods between different projects, finding your legs as a solo artist, and continuing to grow in that space. These interstitial moments seem to have influenced how you've approached making music and you've done a lot of different things in between albums — you started a gardening business and studied archaeology, in addition to music.
Naima Bock: Before Goat Girl, I was just a child because it started when I was 15; that was me being a baby. I think I was 21 when I left and then I wrote the [first] record when I was 23. Then with [Below a Massive Dark Land], I'm 27 now. That's weird, two years. It's so funny how long it takes.
AE: You finish something and then wait for it to be released. There's an additional gap, which is even more like an odd limbo.
NB: Because before, you're working towards something, and once you've recorded the thing and mastered and done all the extras, then you are in a bit of a limbo. I'm not very good at being in limbo, so I always end up doing something else. After Goat Girl… it sounds a little bit shallow, but part of me wanted to make some money. I was tired of being skint all the time, which is funny to say because I'm still really skint. I thought, “Oh, if I do gardening and start my own business then I'll have a bit of money because living in London is so expensive.” It's an unromantic reason to start gardening. Maybe I liked the idea of gardening more than actually gardening. I did it for two years, which was a pretty good stint. I made some really good friends. I liked the people that I gardened for. They were all pretty old, in their 70s or 80s, and it was nice to hang out with them. I still stay in contact with a few of them now, I make sure they're doing alright.
AE: Have they listened to any of your music?
NB: One guy listens to the music and he's got his opinions about it. He's not scared to talk about what is bad, which is fair. You realize everyone has such different ways of listening to music. I forget that, being in a little indie circle of people who listen to loads of records. It's funny to have him listening to my music, thinking about it, and giving me an opinion.
I [gardened] for a couple of years, and then I decided to start the undergrad degree in archaeology. I recorded [Giant Palm] two weeks before I started the first term. I did a year and a half of the degree before the album got released, and then things started gaining traction. So I took two years deferral from archaeology. I was pretty much just touring. In January of this year, I've gone back. I’m excited to finish the degree, it’ll have taken me five years by the time I graduate.
AE: Having been immersed in music for so long, has that played a part in how you approach other things, in academia or other creative ventures? How does it intersect with the rest of your life?
NB: Music and studying do not intersect. (laughs) I feel like they're battling against each other. Understandably, people at the university think it's silly that I do music. The wonderful people that I work with in music are happy for me to do the degree, but I can imagine they must think it’s so unrelated, wishing I could come up with an abstract, subconscious correlation between the two. They both address desires of mine. Being able to explore, there's an adventurous element to them. With archaeology, you get to do a lot of traveling and go on digs. I've only ever done excavations in the UK, but I've enjoyed being in one place for two weeks, camping and getting to be in nature in quite a lovely way. I prefer that aspect of archaeology over touring. You get to be in different cities, which is cool, but it's not the same.
AE: You're stopping in one place, playing your show, and then moving on, versus setting down roots for a couple weeks and staying in that landscape.
NB: Yeah, I like setting down roots. Touring is also really fun. You get the cozy feeling of being in the van and have all these little troubadour missions. I like the certainty and the routine. You know exactly where you’re going to be for the next three weeks and what has to happen; you have a mission to accomplish.
AE: How did you experience the genesis of the new record, when these songs started tumbling out? Did it quickly cohere into an album or take time before you noticed a throughline in a collection of songs?
NB: I was talking to my dad about how difficult it is to write songs and make an album cohesive. I never really thought about it, I just wrote loads of songs. Then some of them seem to stick together, right? Which I guess is how a lot of people go about it. The skeleton beginnings of these songs were overlapping slightly. Right when I finished recording the first record, me and the guy who I recorded it with had just broken up. So that was not fun at all. (laughs) A lot of the writing came from that really rubbish six months. Maybe three or four songs on the album. As time went by, I lived in a couple of different places, one of them was at my grandma's. I didn't have to worry too much about sound and I could sing loudly; I picked up the violin. That was nice for writing songs. Heartbreak is good, fertile ground for that as well. Studying was also really helpful because songwriting became the thing that I could procrastinate with. It was a distraction from university stuff.
I would write a bunch of songs, then I would have a few months without writing and just work on them. That would be the motion until last year when me and [caroline’s] Oliver Hamilton decided to get our shit together and get the songs that we wanted to do. Then we found Jack [Ogborne] and Joe [Jones]. It's been pretty nice, even if the origin for a lot of it was quite painful. I mean, I'll always find a reason to be slightly unhappy. The songs can come from sadness. Being happy is good, but it doesn't lessen the value of songs that are sad. I'm only criticizing this because I find myself doing it. I can be happy and write songs but maybe it's fine that I also like writing songs when I'm sad. It’s therapeutic.
AE: People often make it seem like art that comes out of a happy period is something to strive for. You're making art regardless of how you're feeling and it reflects that, explicitly or not. Maybe I'm biased toward sad songs.
NB: Same. I mean, I love Mount Eerie. Those are almost all sad songs.
AE: Even the “happy” songs have such an air of sadness.
NB: There's a melancholy and peace in a lot of that music. Peace and a lack of resistance against oneself. There's this underlying comfort and element of feeling, a sort of meditative quality to it. I've also just recently become a bit opposed to the whole thing of constant self-betterment. There's just too much trying to be better. It hurts my head. I don't really know what a [“happy period”] is like. I have days where I feel more neutral, but emotions run in so many different ways throughout just one day. It's so much more complex.
AE: The way you described Phil’s music, with the removal of boundaries and letting yourself exist within a feeling or moment during a creatively fertile time, really resonates. Do you have a similar sense when you’re writing? When you're going back, fleshing out and tweaking songs, are you approaching from a different kind of angle? How do you stay true to the emotions that sparked the song?
NB: There’s that spark at the beginning and it feels a little bit god-given. So much of getting that, which I always forget time and time again, is just giving it the time and sitting down with it. I would be doing whatever else for months and wonder why I hadn’t written a song. At no point during that time was I allowing myself to sing or play guitar freely. I wasn’t going to be there to receive whatever song I might have wanted to write. I feel a little bit emotionally constipated when I do that for too long. That was the most obvious and basic thing with making this record.
AE: You’re not making yourself available as a conduit to songwriting, whatever that process looks like.
NB: That's the best I can do in terms of beginning to write songs and adding parts. As long as nothing detracts from that feeling of initial emotionality or rawness, I'll keep adding until I'm like, “Okay, too much.” I’ll stop and subtract things. I've had to trick myself out of the mindset of thinking that less is more, which means I’ll just end up wanting to do songs with acoustic guitar and vocals and nothing else. But there's so much that people add, especially my violin player Oliver, and it would be a shame to remove all these other elements of a song. They need to be absolutely necessary.
With “Kaley,” I wanted to write a happy song, something that's not super solemn and sulky. I sort of forced a round peg into a square hole. I don't hate it, but I realized now, a year since recording, that it wasn't the right place for it to exist. That's okay, because luckily I'm pretty happy with the other songs, but it was still a good learning thing. The additional parts were maybe unnecessary, and also maybe I willingly let it out of my control too much and into the hands of other people, and so understandably they would do what they wanted with it. But it ended up as me. That's where my lack of perfectionism comes in; I'm pretty rigid with the songwriting and the lyrics. But sometimes, I'll just throw it together. A little bit of that can be good when it comes to finishing things. It's been good in terms of allowing the songs to breathe sometimes and letting other people add things. I have become better at saying “no,” which is also good.
AE: “Kaley” feels pretty different from the rest of the record, even musically. It’s almost this glam rock kind of song.
NB: I was probably thinking of T. Rex.
AE: Overall, the record feels grounded by voice and guitar, where it starts with just those elements before a varying degree of other things are added. As you were in that process of arranging, adding horns and choirs and all this character, how did you grow in your confidence of knowing when to put your foot down and be assertive in the decision-making process around your own art? Below a Massive Dark Land feels more honed down while still being exploratory.
NB: It's all dependent on collaboration. The best example of how much influence or what kind of part others play would be to have the demos all done by the one songwriter, then seeing how the album ends up, who does what and where, how things change along the way. I haven't listened to this record maybe since December last year when we mastered it. Then, last week I listened to it and a couple of the demos that I did. The differences between the demos and the songs that we ended up with for the first record were very different, like worlds apart. With this one, they weren’t so different. In that respect, I was able to maintain the integrity of the songs so that it was still a conversation. It doesn't mean that I don't love working with people, just that the conversation is still somewhat direct, rather than having too many different voices.
There's no way for people to have the same intention or emotional insight behind the song if it's not their lyrics and not their song. People can care a lot. Oliver is someone I would say is my collaborator and friend and arranger, he's the first person I'll send the music to. I won't feel embarrassed to workshop a song with him because he's so positive about it. He's a very talented musician and violin player and singer and songwriter, but his enthusiasm is the thing that really means the world to me. I don't even know if I would want to keep going if I didn't. You need to have at least one person in your corner. I'm lucky to have a lot of people in my corner. If songwriting was its own little corner, then I would say Oliver was in that one. I also believe that he would tell me if something was shite.
AE: There can be too many cooks in the kitchen and you need to pare it down a bit for the integrity of everything, for everyone's emotional sanity.
NB: Everyone feels like they’re contributing rather than just adding a pinch. With that, I feel like a lot of the musicians that I listen to and love the most, there are fewer people involved, not because they hate community or people, but because there's this directness. Maybe just one or two people are there supporting the music, which I think is cool. This is ironic because both my records have loads of people on them, and I'm grateful for them. I'm not slagging them.
AE: There’s a difference between having core collaborators that are brought into the process early on and bringing in people to play the horn arrangements, to add harmonies and intersecting vocals. One of my favorite things about the record musically is how dynamic the vocal stylings are. We're not slagging that in the slightest.
NB: Yeah, I love that. Doing that stuff is so fun, recording big choir vocals is really fun. It was really lovely to have everyone there. We had to know exactly what everyone needed to do, otherwise it would be chaos if people were trying to come up with their own parts. It would be
AE: What was the recording process like, putting everything together in the studio, especially compared to writing the songs in solitary environments?
NB: The songwriting part can maybe be called spiritual. Writing parts can sort of be the middle ground. Actually getting those parts onto a recording is very practical. But you have to toe the line. You have to know that when you're in the room with players and you've given them something they will bring their own thing to the part as well. It's difficult because something can logically make sense but it won’t click. It's not about being played well or not. There is an emotional aspect, the way that they played it, and you don't even realize it until you hear it. I remember having that a few times on the record, where I was like, “Oh yeah, that's the thing, that's the bit.” Before, I would listen to it and the notes are right, the tone is good, and it’s fine. That's the key where producers come into the recording process in a really big way. I like that music has to be practical sometimes. I find that every time I play a gig, there's this practical element. You’re loading in and have to plug in your pedals and equipment, it's long and it's annoying and it hurts your back, but you have a physical reality of what you need before you can proceed to express yourself.
AE: Travel, movement, and space turn up a lot on the record, in addition to songs coming together all over the place. It feels like the idea of the self being consistent while going through all these experiences is being reckoned with. You’re exploring both sides of contradictions and dichotomies, “you” and “I,” self versus outside, and so on.
NB: It's funny that you mention the inside-outside element of what you heard in the lyrics. Whenever I'm doing university work, I let myself write for half an hour, just thoughts, the worst, the best, whatever — and one of the things I wrote today was about this internal, emotional world that is running through all of us. I guess I felt like being reflective on the last ten years or so of my life. We bring that side of our lives from the inside to the outside. For me, that entails cyclical patterns of thought, these sore points that I can maybe get stuck on. There’s a life that's written down and there's this other life where you just do the things that you do almost in spite of thinking all the time and being and living in an emotional way. Everything is informed by that. Sometimes you need to put it to the side and get on with practical stuff, with the gigs. I was really aware of that today in particular, with that distinction between my internal life and external life. Not so much of the world that's going on around me, but more the stuff I end up doing without ever making a conscious decision. It wasn't so much a plan but it was something I ended up doing.
AE: It’s more of an instinctive reaction than a choice.
NB: I was having a conversation with my dad about how we all have confidence and insecurities. They're two sides of the same coin, where you can either feel good or bad about yourself. My favorite place is to feel completely indifferent about myself.
AE: The coin is perfectly balanced, still spinning, and it hasn't fallen to either side yet.
NB: To have a little bit of both, but preferably just indifferent. This was something that hit me when I listened to the record. I don't know whether I can say better, but it’s a representation of a person — that person happens to be me. What I've made is a more accurate depiction of myself than what I think I am, which was a weird realization. It's lucky that I made something with a reflection where there is something that people like, and I can't quite understand why. But when I listened, I could see that maybe I would want to involve myself in a world with that person. This is very meta to talk about. It's funny that you bring that up because it was something that's been happening to me mentally a year after I recorded it. That's the nice thing about making albums and art and music in general. It's in retrospect that you're like, “Oh, that was what that was about.”
AE: It takes a year or so to settle in.
NB: It's nice, but it's also kind of scary because it's a bit prophetic. Like, how did I know? I guess this is expression before intellect or rationalization. The rationalization comes way after. In that sense, there are elements that aren’t quite divided but live adhesively among each other. Sometimes how we perceive ourselves is obviously quite different from how others perceive us, in a really nice, sweet way. People can see me better than I see myself, even though that's not that popular, because everyone says you should love yourself. That saying has kind of eluded me for some reason.
AE: When someone else perceives the things that you're worried about, it shows that it’s a genuine thing that other people can witness. It can be scary because you don't know what they're going to say or think or if they're going to perceive it the same way as you feel, if you're even aware of it. But sometimes it can be incredibly validating to find that the self that I poured into this record is perceivable and other people are hearing it in some way. That adds nuance and depth to it.
NB: I feel like validation gets a bad rap. Musicians of all people love validation. I appreciate someone going, “This is good. You can keep going.” I don't need loads of it, but just every now and then, it does help, you know. There's a really nice José González song about that called “Hints.” I think he said that he went through a long period where no one said that any of his songs were good, so he naturally became less confident. He saw that as a weakness. The song is sweet because it affirms that we'll help each other and that we're allowed to need, you know.
AE: It's easy to get sucked into that cycle — no one else thinks this is as good as I hoped, is there any value? You go down the drain until hopefully you can pull yourself out or someone reaches down to help…
NB: And hold you up. Which is allowed!
AE: What's something you feel like you wouldn't have otherwise learned from the process of making Below a Massive Dark Land? What is something that you can take away as a creative, a person, and a songwriter?
NB: Hmmmmm… (sounds of thinking) I need to think about that one for a second. It sounds a bit practical, but when it comes to making music, I learned to trust the feeling that something is right rather than thinking I need to rush through it. This record really taught me that. Also, how to be more open and less worried about exposure, like exposing my own personal narrative. I think I was scared to do that before. Sometimes I also worry about what my family will think. Maybe this record has been one step in loads of other steps of me slowly trying to do that more and more, because at the end of the day, hopefully, it will matter to some people. It matters more if you do it rather than just hiding in the fear that, like, my grandma won't like it. Those are probably the two things, but I think there's also just loads of stuff. Loads of stuff. The record’s quite a sad one, but I think that it means a lot. It'll be cool to listen back to it when I'm an old lady.
AE: It's one thing to listen after a year, but 10, 15, 20, 40, after however many years… you almost can't conceive of that. It's terrifying, but maybe kind of freeing to think about.
NB: It’d be super cool. Imagine having a grandma who used to make music.
AE: She gives you all the old LPs, like, hey, this is my solo album.
NB: Maybe I won't do that. Maybe I'll try to be really mysterious. I won't say anything and then when I die…
AE: I have a final question that I like asking everyone I get to interview. What is something that you love about your own art and creative approach?
NB: I'm so grateful that this is what I get to do. Not so much “I get to do this job,” because I'm slightly cynical when it comes to that. I'm just waiting to not do it as a job. Yeah. I'm so happy that I enjoy something this much. I just love that it exists and that I get to do it. It's just such a cool thing. Music is so cool and there's endless exploration. Because when you run out of songs, you can just make ambient music.
AE: Or you do it the other way around. Start with the ambient music and then add lyrics.
NB: All of it is just so fruitful. There's a lot of hard things in this world and I'm just so happy that I love this more than anything. If I've got a guitar, then it'll be there. It's important to hang onto those feelings. If one loses that as an artist or a creative, it's important to get back in touch with it.
Below a Massive Dark Land is out now via Sub Pop.