Track by Track: White Hinterland on Baby

It’s been a quiet decade thus far for Casey Dienel, better known as White Hinterland. We’re chuffed to be streaming her new record, and first release since 2010, Baby - and to celebrate its imminent release, Dienel talked to us about the stories, situations and inspirations behind her stunning, left-field take on abstract, atmospheric pop.

Stream the record for yourself below, and read about how everything from death to doves steered its immense affective potential and unique sound.

“Wait Until Dark”

Deep down somewhere, I have a sixth sense for songs that bookend an album. From the beginning this felt like a prologue. This song beginning a-capella was deliberate – no trickery, no nothing. Just the voice. It takes its title from one of my favourite Audrey Hepburn films. In it Alan Arkin plays a psychopath who carries a knife named Geraldine. The knife has an ivory handle with a woman carved into it. I collect old knives because I find them very pretty, and I rather like the tradition in literature and film of villains naming their weapons. I would not be able to write about a character like the one in the song if it wasn’t somehow something I relate to. There’s a lack of trust in others, a kind of defensiveness that comes from being wounded elsewhere in life. It’s trendy to discus how the internet makes us more visible, but I believe all the digital noise in some way makes it easier for people to disappear. If you aren’t linked in to it, in a way it’s like you do not exist. I’m interested in people flying under the radar by choice or for cover. The horns at the end are meant to evoke the opening sequence from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. There’s something about all that fog in that sequence that gives me chills.

“Dry Mind”

This beat was kicking around for awhile – four on the floor with a slap in the snare, but it wasn’t until one night last summer, pretty soon after the studio was first set up that this gelled. I was feeling a little like a fuck-up from a Seth Rogen movie, but I stayed up all night playing around. I was “on one” as I say and decided to go watch the sun come up on the beach and had the idea for the vocal hook. Some teens were going at it below the seawall and it was interesting – an oddly cinematic moment for me. I liked the hook because it felt like a celebration of that feeling rather than a pity party. Some of the lines reference this Polanski film Knife Under Water. I wanted it to feel tense in that way. The phrase “Dry Mind” comes from an Anne Carson essay in The Beauty of The Husband. She is my favorite writer. It’s a way of describing the difference between male and female temperament in Ancient Greece. Greacian philosophy was often based in dichotomy. I am probably butchering it, but the idea being that men were perceived as sensible, solid and of “dry mind” and women the opposite. Women were thought to be porous, mutable, even “leaky.” Sometimes I wonder if we have really graduated beyond this school of thought, with the way that women’s work is often characterised as emotional or even confessional (confessionalism often being pejorative for sentimentalism or unable to set emotions aside to be more “imaginative”). In art, it is not uncommon for both men and women to write with emotional sensitivity, so I see no need for a double standard.

“Ring The Bell”

First, I should go out and say it: isn’t anyone else sick of seeing women being produced by the same 10 guys? Wouldn’t it be amazing to see more ladies at the helm? What would that sound like? I want to be a fly on the wall in THAT room. I’ve been lucky to work in a number of professional studios and not once have I seen a female engineer. It was important me to try to push forward my vision on the production front because I’d like to see more women get into this pool with me. I see lots of great signs (hello Grimes!) and that makes me hopeful. I’d much rather hear about women supporting each other over the typical “versus” scenarios we typically see. Girl shit is boring. I wanted this song to have an almost overwhelming amount of emotional information. It’s also a song of happy accidents. While editing I was playing around with reversing things and reversed one of the trumpet clips, which ended up being the hook of the song. I wanted the lead in “ohs” in the vocal to bubble up like champagne. The stereopanning of the drums came from something Matt LeMay and I were playing around with. Neal Morgan’s breakdown on this is an album highlight for me. He really is one of my favourite drummers. I know the lyrics might seem a bit simple, but with everything else going I didn’t want to overcomplicate it with cleverness. You know, the exuberance central to this song is something I wish I saw more of nowadays. It’s one thing I really like about Vampire Weekend or Haim. Their songs have a kind of youthful bounce without losing elegance in the arrangement. I looked up a lot to Ariel Rechtshaid’s work when I was getting into production. I think he is really great at elevating the texture of a song without losing “in the moment” performances. Even if I’m singing about intense shit I still would like to have a good time doing it.

“David”

This is probably the heart and soul of the entire thing for me. We joke about making WH tissues for merch. Even though it seems like a simple song, it was the trickiest to record. I tracked the vocals and piano at the same time, and if you saw the set up I used you’d probably raise an eyebrow. But that’s part of the fun of engineering – you CAN make up the rules as you go. Show me an engineer who thinks something can only be done one way and I’ll flip open to any issue of Tape Op and find someone who says the opposite. As with most things in music, the finer points of production are predicated on personal taste. My bread and butter are 1970s era piano ballads, like Donny Hathaway or Brill building stuff. The song on the record I hit repeat is usually not a banger (see: Fiona Apple’s “I Know”). There’s something really incredible about that space in the arrangement. I spent a few years away from recording on live piano, and this song felt like a homecoming for me. I was really happy to reunited with my oldest friend. Matt LeMay even treated it like a Motown classic in mixing. I don’t feel this is a love song. Personally I do not put much stock in fate or destiny, and I always find it odd when people don’t take credit for their own lives. No better example to me than in our relationships. Regardless of how it turned out, at the very least we ought to take some pride in having gone for it in the first place, right? I think the song also explores the uneasy balance of enjoying beauty and happiness in a world where so many people are denied these things on an every day basis.

“Baby”

This one feels like the culmination to date of everything I was exploring production wise: the sinewy beat, the sawed off organ sound, the multi-tracked gang vocals. It was a gut-first song, especially lyrically. I wrote and recorded the whole thing in about two days towards the end of the Baby sessions. I wanted a chorus that sounded like the sky opening up, so I did a little addition by subtraction – throwing my voice into around 20 tracks and removing most of the arrangement. The synth lines in particular were very fun to play. I think there is an assumption out there that shyness is a disease and not a choice or even a mask. I’m not by nature introverted, but for so many of us the exterior betrays the interior. Maybe that is what growing up is? Learning to make the outside reflect what’s going on within. I think sometimes people assume I am shy based on appearance. Big mistake. Not talking over others is not “shyness.”

“White Noise”

It’s impossible to discuss this song without discussing the person in it that I lost about a year ago. He was an incredible person and one of my best friends and P.I.C., but he also had terrible problems. He was the one who introduced me to Queer culture when I was a moody teenager who hated herself, and that stuff saved me more than once. He took me under his wing. I still miss him very much. I was in New York at a birthday party the day he died, and the hour I got the phone call he passed one of my friends was hanging out the window of the bedroom and a big gust of wind flung the windows shut. It seemed really fitting somehow. But it was still so awful. I can recognise a lot of similar compulsions he exhibited in my own life. I think that is really what this song is getting at, and part of why its arrangement is so frenetic. In spite of what it is discussing, it was important the song sound as alive as possible. He would really have hated to have had a ballad dedicated to him. He was not that kind of man. Is it more difficult to watch someone’s life spin out of control when you relate to them somehow? Addiction is a disease, and I wish people would not criminalise those who are sick with it. It’s also wild to me the varying degrees of “acceptable” predilection. It’s a grey, blurry line. I feel a great deal of empathy and compassion for people suffering and in need of an escape, and at times I’ve acted out in similar ways. I wish our government and healthcare system would do more to expand treatment options to these people, so it didn’t put such a high tax on their lives and the lives of their loved ones.

“Metronome”

I had the most fun on this one and you can hear it in the vocal. Like “Baby”, I play everything on this track. It’s the most extroverted of all the tracks. I had enormous fun with the beat and synth arrangements, and the crazy bits at the end are a good example of why I like producing myself. I based the bass off some early Nine Inch Nails sounds, and the hook in the keyboard I wanted to bounce like a Stevie Wonder track. I wanted a song that felt like a pep talk I could dance to.

“No Devotion”

This song took a long time to come together and has undergone a number of renovations. The distorted Wurlitzer is what tied it into focus. I wanted the piano outro at the end to sound like a flock of doves being released from their cage all at once. For this I wanted to play with the sub frequencies during the choruses, and the vocal harmonies are meant to sound like wailing. I think the lyrics describe the impotence depression causes, the feeling that you are without the necessary tools to get through it. And yes, my father really did say “that’s why we don’t have nice things” growing up.

“Sickle No Sword”

Cole Kamen-Green’s arrangements, not only for this song but for the whole record, are a big highlight of the process. I love what he did here. We met at New England Conservatory ten years ago, but fell out of touch for a few years. I was listening to the horns on Beyonce’s “Party” one day and thought “THAT’S what Baby needs!” I looked in the credits and saw his name in there with the Super Power Horns and emailed him out of the blue. I really did not expect him to say yes, but luckily he did. When we sat down to discuss the horn arrangements I was really struck by the way he took into consideration my writing. The arrangements feel very complimentary and not shoehorned into the landscape. It reminds me a lot of the classic 1970s R&B that I love so much, and I think Cole and I share a similar shorthand. We tracked the horns for a lot of songs, but only half made the final cut. 8 years ago I was assaulted on my way home by a taxi driver, and I think it’s a common side effect for victims of assault to fantasise what they might have done differently, how they might have defended themselves. The most awful thing about sexual assault is that you probably know someone who has experienced it. It’s so frighteningly quotidian that half the time no one reports it to the police. I called the police and was informed without a badge number there was nothing to be done. I did not have a knife on me then, but I did have some really strong pepper spray. I was inspired by watching this movie Kuroneko, where women under far more drastic circumstances return from the dead as evil cats to exact their revenge. I don’t condone violence by any means but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. This song feels like a Japanese slasher film to me.

“Live With You”

This song was written and recorded in the same day, and I always knew it would be the final song. It’s a bit brutal, but that’s life. I wanted the horns to sound warm, but I wanted the vocals and piano to sound dark. I toyed around with other arrangements, but subtraction is as much a part of production as addition. Any time I put down a bass line or drum bit it sounded fussy and wrong. Simple was better. Recent emphasis on how the internet is changing our social behaviour is kinda bullshit. Are we really more concerned with keeping up appearances than we were in the 1950s? Were the “good old days” really that good? In spite of my sound preferences, I’m not nostalgic for the past or interested in looking too far behind me. I think this song attaches to the idea that all that you can count on is what you see in front of you, what pertains to your relationships. Judge the tree by its fruit. I am constantly fighting to stay in the moment.

Baby is released on March 31 via Dead Oceans.