by Ari Roth
Sarah Jaffe’s career thus far has felt like a long unveiling. She emerged initially as an acoustic singer-songwriter in 2008, and since then each release and project has felt like another piece of the puzzle. Following her first full-length album, 2010’s Suburban Nature, she began slowly enlivening her arrangements with electronics, as well as acknowledging a hip hop influence. The former was fully realized on 2012’s The Body Wins, a long, complex and fully-fledged synthpop record, and the latter emerged in the form of a collaboration with hip hop producer S1. Now, with the release of Don’t Disconnect, it feels like we’re finally getting a complete picture of Sarah Jaffe as an artist. The album seamlessly merges synthesizers, lush and detailed live instrumentation, and a collection of some of Jaffe’s finest songs yet. Just a few days before the album’s official release, I spoke with Jaffe to discuss her music in depth. She’s a pleasure to interview, as we traded new musical favorites (she’s a fan of Little Dragon and Alt-J, she brightens when I mentioned Kelela), and talked through the themes and ideas behind her excellent new record.
We began by talking about the new album’s genesis. In the Aftermath of The Body Wins, Jaffe “had done a lot of touring, I had built up some momentum on the road, and then things slowed down. I went from being really busy to just being at home a lot, which was great, but after a few months I found that I was in a creative rut. Being home, for me, is just a different thing now. When I’m home I just rest and relax, and I found that I wasn’t working a whole lot, so I had to get out.”
From there, Jaffe began her collaboration with S1, AKA Symbolyc One, which she regards as a breakthrough moment. “A lightbulb turned on for writing, and I stopped thinking so much,” she says. Although Jaffe has “always harbored a deep love for 90s hip hop especially,” this was the first time that she had worked on a hip hop project.
Jaffe and S1, whose real name is Larry D. Griffin, Jr., initially met over the internet: “S1 messaged me on Twitter, which I thought was awesome, and said, ‘hey, would you be interested in writing some hip hop hooks for me?’ I had previously met him through this band that he’s in called the Cannabinoids, which is Erykah Badu’s band. They had done a remix for me, so I kinda knew him, but I knew of his work most definitely. So, when he messaged me, I immediately replied, and said, ‘absolutely!’ It was this really great thing, because here was this guy who didn’t know that I loved hip hop, and he was just taking a random chance on one girl.”
From there, the duo immediately began working together (Jaffe recalls having to sit in her driveway to work because she was in the process of moving at the time), sending tracks back and forth and trading ideas until they had developed a significant amount of material. This rapid, immediate dynamic inspired Jaffe. S1 “sent me the first track, which ended up being ‘Bad Guy’ [by Eminem], and I sent it back to him, and he said ‘that was great,’ and sent me a couple more. From the get-go we had this amazing pingpong work ethic, where he would send me something and I would send it right back. We hit it off like that, there was chemistry.”
Up to this point, the two of them were recording music for use by other rappers (most notably the aforementioned Eminem track), but, as Jaffe tells me, “we both had this ‘a-ha’ moment where we said, ‘why aren’t we doing our own stuff?’ We had built this pretty decent-sized archive for other artists, and so we started writing music for ourselves and came up with this side project called The Dividends.” Although S1’s hectic work schedule got in the way of more extended collaboration for the time being, Jaffe transferred the immediacy and lively spark of their work together to the material she was developing for her next solo album.
“Working with him while trying to write for my own record was kind of a push that I needed because it allowed me to start writing while not thinking,” she says. “I found that mindset leaked over into my record, where I said, ‘this can be fun!’”
From there, Jaffe travelled to the desert city of Marfa, Texas, to begin work on the new material. The process was difficult and somewhat frustrating, and by the time she arrived at the studio to work with producer Mckenzie Smith, she had some incomplete sketches of material. She regards this period as “a long process, the same story as The Body Wins, where I was trying to figure out how to battle writer’s block. Every time, writing is more of a battle than it was before, but every time I’ve gone into the studio, it’s been this release. I just require going into the studio now, as opposed to me just writing outside of it.”
Rather than simply using the recording studio as a means of documenting pre-existing songs, Jaffe worked intensively with Smith to develop the material from the ground up. Jaffe is effusive about the effect this creative partnership has had on her work. Working from rough sketches developed in Marfa, the two of them “approached every single song in a collaborative effort. That was a huge thing for me. I had so much fun, because I wasn’t locked in my own head. It was liberating.” While the initial writing process served as a guide for the later studio developments, oftentimes the songs would take on an entirely different character when rearranged in the studio.
“I would go to him with an all-acoustic demo,” Jaffe recalls, “but I would say, ‘I don’t hear any acoustic,’ or ‘I don’t hear any guitar on this, I hear all synth,’ or ‘I hear a lot of vocal layers.’ We would approach it like that, and build a shell of the song, and then fill it in with lyrics, and vocal tracks, and loops, and all that kind of good stuff.”
In retrospect, while Jaffe is hesitant to frame the album in terms of a grand sweeping concept, there is an undeniable cohesion to the songs on the record. “I don’t necessarily think that there was intention with a theme,” she muses, “but I think overall I can see how there’s a single thread that ties all of the songs together. ‘Ride It Out’ specifically is a good summation of all of the songs, where you think you’re this great thing, and you’re not, really. You’re just one in a million, trying to make it. I think that I need those reminders.”
Jaffe is keenly aware of the tenuousness and transience of her position as an artist who makes a living with her own work, maintaining a lifestyle that, given the nature of the industry, is no longer possible for many others in the same field. She continues, “the truth is that I’m a middle class working musician, and the way that I live is fine, I love doing what I’m doing, but on a logical level, at any moment, it could all be swept out from underneath me. It’s just the way the business is, it can be unstable at times. I think that in, in order for you not to be an asshole, you have to remind yourself that this is why you love doing this thing. You get to tour, you get to write music, you get to make records, these are all blessings. But, really, you’re not special! You’re just lucky.”
There’s a hint of harsh reality to this worldview, but it’s also imbued with a tinge of self-reflexive humor. Upon first hearing to the new album, I immediately gravitated to the second track, “Fatalist.” An elliptical song based around a propulsive motorik pulse, I struggled to crack its meaning on the first few listens, so I ask Jaffe about it. I was happy to hear that the song carries a special significance to her, too. Her explanation also conveys something of the blend of harshness and wry humor that characterizes much of the album. She elaborated that “the song follows the title: it’s pretty cynical, but I’m trying to be humorous about it. I was talking about – I hate sounding like I’m philosophical or smart in the least, because I’m quite ignorant at times – how, as a whole, as a people, we are so indulgent and self-involved, because we just absorb so much information, and stick our heads in a computer all day. I’m not saying that I’m not guilty – I’m saying that I am that person that just gets lost in another world. We’re going to get so numb, we have no conscience. We don’t even know right from wrong sometimes, because our vision is so blurry. I’m just being cynical, but there’s also a dark humor.”
I was also curious about her working method for recording and arranging the album, a process which was clearly so integral to the composition of the record. Don’t Disconnect encompasses Jaffe’s greatest dynamic extremes, epitomized by two songs, “Either Way” and the title track, at the heart of the record. The former is lush, brimming with grandeur and brimming with layers of strings, synth, guitar, drums, and voice. Despite its epic scale, Jaffe reveals that it started with the simplest of foundations: a loop, a technique that she first began using when working on The Body Wins with superproducer John Congleton.
Jaffe became fascinating by the kind of aural illusion created by loops and repetition, “the idea of one singular loop being the thread of a song, and how it’s the first thing you hear when you play the song, and it becomes part of the background. I really liked that idea of how your ears can get so used to this thing that you’re hearing that it becomes orchestral by the end, and you don’t even know that it’s there.”
This loop originated during Jaffe’s time writing in Marfa, and she brought that to Smith in the studio, where they “let that be the floor of the song.” From there, they brought in musicians to expand on this loop and create an ornate, almost cinematic arrangement, featuring contributions from string arranger Daniel Hart, guitarist Joey McClellan of the band Midlake (of whom Smith is also a member), and many more.
In stark contrast, Jaffe immediately follows up this huge, swirling arrangement with by far the sparest song she’s ever recorded, “Don’t Disconnect.” The track leaves her voice strikingly naked and unadorned, a feat which is, in many ways, even more challenging and impressive than the huge arrangement on the previous song. It speaks to a degree of bravery and artistic confidence that Jaffe was willing to create a song like this, but she also admits that the experience of stripping back and confronting her voice head-on was difficult: “during that song, while we were all listening back, I kept saying, ‘we should add some strings!’ And McKenzie said, ‘no! No, no, no. Don’t touch it!’ And I said, ‘oh, come on, it’s so uncomfortable!’ But McKenzie said, ‘no, leave this,’ and I think he was dead on. I like that in sets and in records, when you have all of this noise. It brings a much-needed dynamic to the full spectrum, where you have nothing, and then all of a sudden the next song seems a little bit bigger, because the song previous was so stripped down. It builds this emotion into the record, which I really like.”
Don’t Disconnect is a new artistic high water mark for Jaffe in part because it deals with this wide range of new textures and sounds while still maintaining coherence, and without sacrificing any of the brilliant songwriting for which she has become known. Her albums can now encompass acoustic sounds and electronic timbres, span lushness and minimalism, and involve extensive collaboration, all while retaining her unique and unmistakable stamp.
I asked Jaffe about whether, after expanding her sound so rapidly in the past few years, she has any vision of what the future might hold for her music. Although she has previously mentioned that she never intended to stick solely to an acoustic sound, she is hesitant to make any concrete statements about the future, instead preferring to stay in the present.
“When I’m in the studio,” Jaffe explains, “I have a pretty honed-in idea of what I want a record to be. At the same time, I’m kind of not conscious of the bigger picture. As much as I said that this is the sound that I always wanted, I retract that statement a little bit, because I don’t know what that means, really. What I meant to say was that I always wanted to progress, and to grow as a musician. From the get-go, I knew what I did well: my voice is my main instrument, I can play the guitar, but I wanted to learn other things, and the fact that I was able to was huge for me.”
She treasures the studio as a space for experimentation and unexpected developments, and only consolidates these new styles when it is time to bring them on the road. She thinks of herself as “an artist who just focuses on what I’m doing at the moment, because if I think about the next thing, I feel like my head will implode!”
With that in mind, what Jaffe is doing at the moment is certainly exciting. With the new album released and widely available, it’s time to tour and bring her new music to the people. Live, she plays with a four member group: guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Robert Gomez, keyboardist Scott Danbom, drummer Rob Sanchez, and Jaffe herself. On the road, Jaffe trades the infinite possibilities of the studio for “a little four-piece rolling around in a 15 passenger van,” condensing the songs to their essences while still showing off some of the advances she’s made on the new record. Naturally, she’ll be coming to Philly too on September 14th, her 4th time playing in the city. The show will take place at The Barbary, alongside indie hip hop oddball Astronautalis, with tickets now on sale here.
