Karen Peris' Personal Best
The Innocence Mission return this month with new album Midwinter Swimmers, another stirringly poetic collection that carries a gentle, heart-tugging weight. Karen Peris talks to Alan Pedder about a lifetime of songs that capture small moments and turn them into tender revelations.
Eternal anomalies in the inconstant business of music, The Innocence Mission are that rare type of band able to faithfully occupy their own niche without ever coming close to feeling stale.
Each of their albums is like a world in miniature, where even the smallest of tonal shifts is enough to create a sense of evolution and renewal. When it hits perfectly it’s nothing short of a superpower – a modest one – amped up on demureness and poetic observation.
The sense of wonder inherent to Karen Peris’ luminous voice deserves much of the credit for that, earthed as it is by dewy and spacious arrangements that bloom in unhurried and quietly elegant ways: Karen’s flowing piano chords meeting the exceptional guitar work of high school sweetheart turned husband Don and the sympathetic basslines of Mike Bitts, a core member of the band since they formed in ‘86.
Midwinter Swimmers, the trio’s 13th studio album, is one of their most spectacularly beautiful, deserving of mention in the same breath as the classic Befriended (2003) and reminiscent, too, of the earlier Small Planes (2001). Arriving almost five years on from their last album See You Tomorrow, which found them judiciously indulging in a slightly grander sound, Midwinter Swimmers finds them mostly deviating back to the mean, luxuriating in familiar sonic spaces made new with greater insight and deepened affection.
Birthed partly during the intense early years of the pandemic, with their two children home from college, Peris says she was obliged to write the songs for Midwinter Swimmers in unusual places so as not to interrupt their Zoom classes: in the garage, in the attic and, in the case of “John Williams”, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom like she was a teenager again. “I was just trying to be quiet, but it did make the experience of writing those songs memorable in a new way,” she says. “Just being in a different physical space than usual was interesting.”
2024 marks 35 years since the release of their self-titled debut album – the first of two LPs to be produced by Larry Klein, aka Mr. Joni Mitchell at the time – and 25 years since their fourth and perhaps best-known album Birds of My Neighborhood, which is where Peris picks up when asked to choose the five songs she’s most proud of. Listen any earlier than that and she starts to get a little self-conscious about the naivety of the songs. “I’m really touched and grateful if people have felt a connection with those earlier songs, but I do wish that I’d been able to write better at the time,” she says softly. “Especially for our first album. I was barely out of my teens when I wrote a lot of that, and I do wish I had done a better job.”
The Innocence Mission first hit their stride with 1995’s third album Glow, with the soaring single “Bright As Yellow” bringing them as close to a mainstream moment as the band have ever come, but it was their shift to home recording for Birds of My Neighborhood that came to define the trio’s unmistakably intimate sound. “I’m not good at pinpointing exactly why, but for whatever reason I have felt closer to our songs since then,” says Peris, and, from reading around, it’s clear that Don feels the same.
While "Bright As Yellow" didn't make Peris' cut here, the five songs that did are all important milestones in her journey as a songwriter, each one digging into the marrow of important themes of community and friendship, connection and hope, making the minor feel major and charged with meaning.
"The Lakes of Canada" by The Innocence Mission (1999)
BEST FIT: I’m completely on board with Sufjan Stevens’ opinion that this is a perfect song, so I’m glad to see it made the list. What makes “The Lakes of Canada” so special for you?
KAREN PERIS: I think this was the first song that I wrote for the Birds of My Neighborhood album. We were still on tour at the time, for our previous album Glow, and the last part of that tour was going around Canada opening for Emmylou Harris. I had read that there are so many beautiful lakes in Canada, but we didn’t get to see any of them because we always had to keep moving on to the next place. So I was imagining these lakes and seeing them in my mind’s eye, and that’s why I ended up writing them into the landscape of this song. Then, as I was writing it, I felt like the song took on a sort of lakeside atmosphere, in a way, feeling like I was surrounded by woods and the glimmering water.
In the second verse of the song there’s a part that goes “Walking in the circle of a flashlight / Someone starts to sing, to join in,” and it’s kind of like that has come true for me since a lot of people over the years have sent us their own versions of “The Lakes of Canada” – maybe because they heard Sufjan’s version or saw the little film he made where he was up on a rooftop playing and singing that song – and that’s been really nice, to feel like those people are singing with me.
I’m interested to know what your mindset was at the time, when you started to write the song, coming after the success of Glow and touring with someone like Emmylou. What are your memories of that time?
That tour was such a wonderful experience. Emmylou is so lovely. She even kindly offered to sing with us, so she would come out during our performance and join in on our song “Keeping Awake” [from Glow]. Then, at the end of the show, we would do a version of the Simon & Garfunkel song “Homeward Bound” where she would sing the Art Garfunkel part. We really loved getting to hear her singing every night.
The big thing on my mind during that time was that I was longing to be transformed into the mother of a child. At that point, we were already years into our sadness about not having been able to have children. That longing is more implicit in some of the other songs on Birds of My Neighborhood than in “The Lakes of Canada”, but I guess that’s a part of it when I am singing about change. I’d say it’s more about wanting to be better at talking and communicating, and the line “I feel that I could change” probably has more in common with other songs that explore that idea, including songs from Midwinter Swimmers – like “A Different Day”, “Orange of the Westering Sun” and even underlying the buoyancy of the song “John Williams” – which have more to do with ideas of trusting, of striving against fearfulness and not letting anxiety get in the way of acting on good intentions. Songs about not being afraid of conversation, and things like that.
I don’t want to impose too much on this song the longing for children, but I can say that the word “change” has itself changed so much for me over the years. When our kids finally were able to be born and then they started to get to school age, and then middle-school age, change became the enemy. I just wanted for everything to stay the same and to be able to hold the present moment, and I find it interesting how some words can change so much in their meaning.
Reading around, it was interesting to me that some people have interpreted this idea of “rowing on the lakes of Canada” as some kind of spiritual journey, maybe because the lyrics also speak of a mysterious laughing man who’s trying to hold the protagonist back in some way. What are your thoughts on that?
I never want to disagree with how someone else hears a song because I feel like the listener is a really important part of any song, and that how someone completes it in their mind is the right way for it to be for them.
I guess all of life is a spiritual journey, anyway, in one form or another.
That’s true. I would add that the image in the song of feeling a sudden joy at spotting a fish moving through the water is very real to me, and I think it must be common to many people to perceive the gift of a sudden, stronger-than-usual joy that is momentary but sustaining and helpful.
Was “The Lakes of Canada” a song that you had to work on a lot to get right? Or did it come to you more fully formed?
I did have to work on it a lot. I didn’t have the refrain for a long time, only the verses. I don’t remember exactly what transpired to allow me to put those parts together, but I know that it took quite a while. I think there were 5 years between Glow and when Birds of My Neighborhood finally came out…
There was a lot going on, not least because your drummer left the band to go and become a chef. I imagine it would have taken some adjusting to figure out how to be a trio instead of a four-person band.
Yeah, a little bit, and then our son was born in ‘98 so that was a pretty big deal and brought a lot of changes, as you can imagine.
You also changed record labels in that time, and changed the way you recorded quite significantly, vacating your old studio downtown and starting to record at home. What are your memories of that transition? How did it change things for you personally?
That’s true, yeah. I definitely remember recording “The Lakes of Canada” up in our attic with a small studio setup, before Don and my dad built a studio space downstairs in the basement of our house, that we still use now. I think that being able to work on music at home was really good for us and really gave us a sense of exploration in what we were doing. It was such a gift just to be able to take our time and try to get things sounding in a way that seemed right. Even with singing. Being able to just sing by myself in a room with no one else around, I think probably led to a more personal kind of singing.
"Tomorrow on the Runway" by The Innocence Mission (2003)
BEST FIT: This is the opening track from Befriended, which was the first album of yours that I heard in full and it became an instant favourite. What is it that makes this song so important to you?
KAREN PERIS: Well, I wrote it for my mum after she died. My mum was like sunlight, like a gentle sunlight, so even in her death it was natural to think of her as being like a beacon, like the image in the song of someone waving around lights on an airport runway signalling a place to land.
My mum had always been a nurse, and in the last 10 years of her life, before she herself got sick with cancer, she worked in a hospice and in people’s homes, caring for them and talking with their families. She always talked to me how it was such a privilege for her to be with people in the last weeks of their lives, and that she’d get a real sense of someone crossing a threshold when they were passing away. She’d talk about there being such a peace about them, and the beauty on their faces, so all of that was helpful to me in my being without her. There was a comfort in thinking about all of that, and that’s where this song comes from and why it’s an important one for me.
I remember the first time I listened to “Tomorrow on the Runway” I was really caught by the line in the song about not wanting to sing in the midst of your grief. I’ve spoken to a quite a few artists who’ve found that when someone important to them passes it takes them much longer than they expected to be able to write about that loss. Was that the case for you?
I can’t remember if it was a year or two years after she died that I wrote the song, but I think any time that I could think about her and talk about her was comforting, and still, even now, I like to be able to talk about her. I should say that those particular words from that song are actually borrowed from the author E.M. Forster, either from an essay he wrote or a talk that he gave where he said, “When my heart is sinking, I do not want my voice to go out into the air.”
If you look at the lyrics in a physical copy of the record, that part should be in quotation marks and his name in the credits. I felt like I understood what he was saying, or at least I really liked those lines.
It works perfectly, and I can’t believe I didn’t know that! We’re big fans of E.M. Forster in my house. There’s even a framed photo of him hanging on our kitchen wall.
That’s so nice! I love all his books. He was an amazing writer.
It struck me earlier today while listening to “On Your Side” [from 2020’s See You Tomorrow] that there’s a really beautiful connection between that song and this one. In that song you’re imagining your mum in a Parisian dream and she says to you, “the light is bright around you now,” and I don’t think I’d really realised the weight of that in terms of what your singing in this song, about her leaving the darkness without you.
That’s so nice of you to hear that. I’m glad. I think about her and miss her every day, and my dad too, so it feels good to keep writing about her. I’m sure I always will.
Do you ever get to go to Paris together?
Not together, but my mum got to go. She and my dad really enjoyed travelling there. I’ve actually never been to Paris myself. I’ve never been to mainland Europe. That’s still a daydream for me, and for all of us in the band. We were in London one time for work and tried to walk around as much as possible because it was just so beautiful.
That’s interesting, because so many of your songs use travel as some kind of framing to explore connections and the nature of connectedness. What would you say has been your most inspiring trip, or one that you look back on with a particular fondness?
Oh, wow, hmmm. As a family I think we all have loved Maine so much, which is at the very top of the northeast of our country. We’ve had some really memorable trips up there together. We’d often go to Boston on the way, which I also think is a very beautiful city. The Boston Public Library is really amazing. The artist John Singer Sargent painted all these murals on the walls there, and then when you go into the huge children’s book room, which has these enormous windows, everything is decorated with paintings of Curious George, because I think the creators Margret and H.A. Rey were from Massachusetts or had some other connection with Boston.
We haven’t travelled a great deal other than touring but it's been such a privilege to get to travel around the country and meet a lot of wonderful people, and to get to experience a real sense of community through music. That’s one of the most affecting things we’ve ever experienced and we are so, so grateful for it.
Do you think you’d like to tour again at some point?
I really would. We all would. I just have to figure out how to be able to do it again, in terms of singing for that long a time. I sing all the time around the house, just working on songs, but that’s really different from singing in a concert.
I’ve taken a really long break from touring to be able to stay home with our kids, and I didn’t realise that being able to sing for a long time was something that I probably needed to stay in practice about, in order to have the kind of rhythm of breathing that goes along with that. Maybe if we’re able to start with shorter shows, that could be a part of the answer. It’s something we’re working on and still trying to figure out. I hope that, over time, I could build back up, but right now it’s a bit of a mystery. I do miss the community of the mind people we met.
"The Brothers Williams Said" by The Innocence Mission (2020)
BEST FIT: Speaking of See You Tomorrow, your third pick is this great track, which is probably the most full-sounding song among your five. What makes this song a standout for you?
KAREN PERIS: I knew I wanted to choose a song from this album, and “The Brothers Williams Said” is one that do feel really close to. Even though it’s just from four years ago, I actually started writing it about 10 years before that. It was originally written for guitar, but I could never get further with the lyrics than the first few lines or so. I kept hold of the melody over the years, and then something – I don’t remember what – prompted me to start playing it on piano instead, with these long, low chords, and that opened up something in the song for me and then the rest of it unfolded pretty quickly.
I was glad when the words were able to resolve in a hopeful way. Before that I didn’t have those parts like “See you tomorrow / Maybe tomorrow, I’ll see you tomorrow,” and I think there’s a suggested hopefulness to those lines, about there being a better understanding between people in the situation that the song is describing. I felt like the piano chords left a lot of space around the melody and the words, and that seemed to make sense to me because the song itself is about quietness. It’s about the experience of shyness and of introversion that so many people have, and it’s especially about the concern that shyness can be misunderstood for unfriendliness.
Even if maybe half the world would maybe consider themselves to be introverted, I think there can still be this misperception that shyness is the opposite of friendliness. I’ve heard someone say that even recently. So it felt good to me, and it felt worthwhile, to be talking about that misperception in this song. Because it’s really not true. People who have a quiet nature might feel very warmly towards other people, they just maybe take a longer time before having the courage to express it, or maybe their voices are sometimes drowned out by the noise around them.
We actually recorded this song – at the least the piano and the timpani parts – in the band room of our old high school, which is the same room where I first met Don all those years ago. It was so nice to be able to play their grand piano, because I just have a smaller upright piano at home and this song just seemed to want to have a deeper and richer sound. They just let me come in and use it, and Don played the timpani, which I think really adding something lovely to the song.
As a quiet person myself, and especially because I live in a country where I’m not completely fluent in the language, I really appreciate the juxtaposition of the song being about this person who makes these small gestures that get lost on others and then it having this tremendous sound, as if suggesting that the internal life of that person is so much bigger.
I’m really glad that you could feel that because that’s kind of what I was hoping that the song could convey. I bet it can be hard to be in your situation, but I am sure that your kindness really comes through to the people around you. So much can be conveyed just through a person’s face, in their smile and their eyes, and that’s what I was hoping to say in this song as well.
It’s a lovely little quirk of your songs that a lot of these names and characters recur in different songs, like you have “John Williams” on the new album and “John As Well” on See You Tomorrow. I like that, even if these characters aren’t necessarily meant to be the same person, there’s a continuation and a through line that gets inferred.
I do really like to sing the name William, I think it’s a wonderful name to sing. And so is John. I don’t really have a good answer as to why. I don’t even really know many people named William. I think it’s more about the sound of the word and the feeling of it when it becomes joined together with a melody. It can be hard to separate them, but it’s a nice thing that just keeps happening. I haven’t quite figured it out.
"To the Library" by Karen Peris (2021)
BEST FIT: This track comes from your second solo album, A Song is Way Above the Lawn, which sort of started life as a children’s album and picture book, but ultimately stands on its own as a Karen Peris album like any other. What’s your reason for choosing “The Library” here?
KAREN PERIS: I wasn’t sure which song to pick from A Song is Way Above the Lawn, so I just picked the first song that I wrote for it because I think all the other songs that followed really did come out of this one. This song showed me that I seemed to want to be writing from the perspective of childhood, and that’s such a vast expanse to be travelling.
It was actually very freeing for me, because there’s an endless amount of wonder that’s felt in everyday moments and in the life of the imagination. Even the thought of entering a library can feel like entering a world of doorways to other places. But in this song, the main idea is the idea of friendships, and especially the friendships found in books. I think I needed to give myself permission to keep working on songs from these countries of childhood, maybe because I was worried that it would seem strange to someone else.
I felt like calling it a children’s album would maybe make sense of it to other people, but in the end it was received as just a regular album that anyone could enjoy, and I’m glad about that. People didn’t seem to think it was strange. I liked that it could be a way to extend the childhood of our own children, and even for me to be in conversation with my childhood self, which I think it probably always a good thing. It took around 5 years altogether, to finish the album, but I really enjoyed it.
Did you spend a lot of time in the library growing up?
I did. We didn’t have a lot of books at home. We had a set of World Book encyclopedias that one of my brothers had won in a contest, and a set of child craft encyclopedias that went along with that. I remember there were some really interesting stories and poems in those, and some of the story fragments had been illustrated by Maurice Sendak [author of Where the Wild Things Are]. We didn’t have many books other than those, but my parents would often take us to the library. When I was in high school, I would take the bus downtown after activities were done and just sit there doing my homework until my dad was done with his work. He worked just down the street from the library and we’d ride the bus home together, so I have really nice memories of that.
When our kids were born, we would go to the library downtown every week – the same library – and it looked identical to the way it did when I was little. It became a really special place for us. All those hours spent reading with my kids… I will probably always think of that as the highlight of my life. I loved that we could feel like we were on all these adventures together and still be completely safe at the library or at home. It was really my ideal kind of activity. And they loved it, too. They really liked to be read to up until they were in middle school, around 12 or 13 years old, and we still read together sometimes just because we enjoy it.
We meet a lot of different animals that pop up on A Song is Way Above the Lawn. Who is, or what inspired, the gentle lion in the sun that features in “To the Library”?
Partly I was just thinking of all these big lion statues that are outside of some of our really stately libraries, like the New York City Public Library and the Boston Public Library, and I liked the feeling of these lions being really gentle characters, like someone you could talk to as a friend in childhood.
I wanted to convey that finding a sense of friendship, at any age, is a lessening of loneliness. Even inside of books, because of the characters we might meet there and feel something kindred with. The world of the imagination is extended in all directions to encompass the people and the landscapes you meet in books. I like the mystery of how even the weather in a book or a poem can override the actual weather where you are. Jane Eyre is a vivid example of that for me.
It’s also a lessening of loneliness to feel some kind of understanding with an author, or an extended idea of friendship with other people who have liked the same book. When I was younger, there would be a card in a pocket in the back of every library book where you would sign your name and the librarian would stamp the date. You could see the names of all the people who had read the same book, in their own handwriting, which in itself could feel like a sort of community.
The other part of my answer is that our kids just always loved animals. Our son is really allergic to dogs and cats, so we weren’t able to have a pet at home, but the kids liked any story or picture book that had to do with animals. We were drawing animals together all the time. So that’s really why I put them in these songs, because I liked the idea of the songs extending our memories of all those animal stories we’d read together.
"This Thread is a Green Street" by The Innocence Mission (2024)
BEST FIT: Your final pick is “This Thread is a Green Street”, which was the first single from Midwinter Swimmers and also the opening track. What makes this song stand out for you personally?
KAREN PERIS: I think I choose it mostly because it was a real comfort to work on because I was missing our kids so much when they were away at university. It’s a song about how love can transcend distance. I was trying to map out pictures of connectedness and thinking about all these different kinds of lines that run through the world, like phone lines, lines of music, subway lines and street maps, and even my wonky way of mending a green cardigan that I was trying to do at the time. It had a lot of holes, and I was trying to criss-cross them all with some green thread. It kind of looked like a street map when it was finished. I don’t think it was supposed to, but that’s how it looked. I remember thinking about how all these different kinds of lines are really just visible and audible signals of our deeper connections with each other.
Also, I really like to go for long walks, and I’m often walking the same blocks that I walked with our kids when they were little so it can feel sometimes like the landscape is full of doorways to those memories, and like doorways to possibility and just the joy of being alive. I also think that the way a certain kind of weather looks can be a portal in the mind’s eye. I guess I just went down all these different side streets of thoughts and they all sort of merged together in this song, which is trying to get at something having to do with crossing over the distance to someone that I really missed.
It comes across beautifully, and ties in nicely with what you were saying earlier about libraries and being able to access all these doorways into other worlds.
Oh, yeah, maybe I am kind of a broken record about that [laughs]. But I have always loved the idea of doorways in landscapes and other places. When I was little, I loved finding trees that looked like they could have doors in them, trees with knots in the bark that seemed like they could open. I’d imagine different animals visiting each other in the trees and a whole storybook world would appear. Then, as I’ve grown older, I still like the idea of these portals but that’s taken on a different kind of meaning. I think of them now in regards to memories and ways to hold on to these really dear people that I’m missing.
Speaking of memories, you talk a bit in the press release about the kind of magic that you were trying to capture with this song, and about trying to recall your own childhood singalongs from the ‘70s. Can you expand a bit on how you and Don found your way to that sound?
We really enjoy recording. It’s always feels kind of elusive, in a good way, in that there can be a lot of trying of different ways and at different times to find the sound that it seems like a song wants to have. We’re always searching for the right ingredients for a song to be able to have an atmosphere that one could enter into.
It took us a little while to arrive at the right version of “This Thread is a Green Street”. The song seemed to want to have a little bit more of singing in unison than we’ve tried before, so I tried singing to my own voice a couple of times, just recording to GarageBand. It gave the song an atmosphere that seemed to fit what we’d been thinking of, so we just kept going forward with that until it was done.
When I listen to other people’s music and when I think about all the different albums I hold in my head of things that I’ve loved, it can feel really mysterious how someone has arrived at the sounds that they’ve used. For us, it’s really a case of just trying to go forward and to listen and pay attention to what might be affecting us as we’re recording, because often that can be the right thing to go with.
Lastly, I have to thank you for introducing me to the Ivan Lalic poem “Places We Love”, which I wasn’t aware of before reading about it in the press materials for Midwinter Swimmers. I especially love the lines “Is this room really a room or an embrace?” and “What is beneath the window: a street or years?”, and the poem’s influence feels especially strong on “This Thread is a Green Street”.
I don’t know many of Ivan Lalic’s poems, but I found that one in an anthology and I really loved it right away. It’s so striking that I feel like I was responding just to that one line – is it a street or years? – on a couple of the songs from the new album [like “The Camera Divides the State of Maine”], and all that question was communicating to me. I still think about it all the time.
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