Dramatic Compostions, a conversation between siblings: George Lewis Jr and Ligia Lewis

Ligia Manuela Lewis: Hello, hello. Okay. I think we're recording. All right.. So let’s just pick up from where we were last time. Recording on. I’ll skip the framing because I think you got it?

George Lewis Jr.: Yeah girl, I get it.

LM: Cool. Particularly because you said you hate repeating yourself,  I want to continue where we left off, leaving what was said to the ether and trusting that we’ll find our way again. 

I do want to jump back into this idea of the dramatic, something that’s come up for both of us and sidestep dramaturgy for a second ‘cause I think we will get there. I want to get at what I think resonates with both of us:  I think you have an innate sensibility for the DRAMAtic. For example, your beautifully-performed voiceover in, A Plot / A Scandal,as well as the richly textured soundscape you and Wynne developed for the piece. I also think you love the dramatic as much as I do, maybe just for the sake of drama itself, its seduction, or maybe something deeper, like how it can be suggestive of what lies beneath the everyday.  What’s your take on drama and how do you work with it in your music?

GLJ: Yeah, I’m dramatic. Our whole family is. Life is. I think the thing about the dramatic is, it is pure invention of the thing that is not immediately in front of you. It’s creation. I’m not into authenticity or honesty or whatever. I heard this before, but I’ll paraphrase: playing many selves is the closest way to be yourself. That’s why I’m not genre-specific. I love sound, the sound of different things, and I like to pull out dramatic qualities from otherwise boring notes or melodies. 

LML: Right. So the dramatic is a texture you surrender to in order to create, which makes sense, particularly if you want to avoid being reduced to one genre or one narrative, which is not always easy.

GLJ: Exactly. What I’ve been struggling with my whole career — not getting trapped in one thing. I keep exploring. And I allow the moment to determine where I’m going. That very much speaks to how I do things. Also when you are not just yourself, and then you are part of everything, in concert with everything. 

LML: Right. I like that. To be in concert with everything might very well be the ideal outcome of any artistic output. In some ways, I feel like the specificity of gesture also provides this possibility for a kind of polyphonic vibration, maybe getting underneath genre, and more into how people feel stuff. 

GLJ: I am a big feeler. I am completely intuitive. You know that. I go in and try to listen to what is needed. What’s the sound in the room or what’s the sound that is missing. 

LML: When you’re creating your albums, does the dramatic composition matter to you? In what ways are you busy with the feel of the album, and how it flows? 

Forget was your premier album and you’ve released a number of albums since. I know Forget was very personal, though this upcoming album, Georgie, promises to be just as intimate.  But how do you let all yourselves loose to play in a room and then meet the ear of your audience?

GLJ: My perspective on what I do has changed, but the method of putting it together has stayed the same. I have a lot of control over my work and I'm quite isolated when I make something. I call myself a blue-collar artist because I have to touch everything, I have to work on every aspect from instrumentation to production. I do all the composition including all the lyrics and for the most part, I do it all alone. Wynne (producer and keyboardist) has been a collaborating partner for many years, but I’ve been consistent with my approach to composition, trusting my ears and mood to determine what the song is going to be. I am so controlling that I've realized that the dramaturgy, or the storytelling and general flow as a whole, arrives through a deeply intuitive process. Because of the control I have in the process, I allow chaos to enter to surprise myself. So really, the album goes through this weird process of chance at the very end because I think a lot of records actually suffer from people trying to create an arc with their music.  But for me, I’ve allowed chaos to determine the dramaturgy. For example: I’ll give the album to somebody and say, “put this in an order that you like.”. So, with Forget for instance, I gave it to this guy Ethan who had a label with Chris Taylor. I didn't give it to Chris Taylor because Chris was like me — precious and hard-working — and I knew he would think about it in a too precious way. Ethan was very funny, very casual, and a sort of press-and-go type of person. I trusted he would use his instincts, primarily. So, I gave him the record, he put it in order, and then I sat and listened to it. Wherever it bumped or bugged me, I noted it and then I would just move a song around.   And I remember being in my apartment and just playing it while walking room to room, cleaning and cooking, going about my day and I really let my body say — “Oh that doesn't feel right.” So I put trust in that process, like give it to somebody, anybody, to put it together and then test it. Leave it to God. You can only be a listener of your music once, then it’s just… well, you know.

LML: Oh, that's really interesting. I feel you on that tip of not killing the magic of creation with too much analysis… let the work speak and breathe through its own rhythm. 

Listening to what you’re describing with your process and thinking about intention and trusting the composition and the eventual flow of the album, it's refreshing to know that you give the work up in a way, to God, to Chance, to Play, before the album leaves your hands. We are similar in this way of being very controlling, but also trusting in a process. And yes, to the invitation for a little chaos. I definitely see that and feel that, also because we really want to make complex work.

GLJ: Yeah, we're not minimalists at all.

LML: The contrary (laughter). That is why dramaturgy, for me, goes beyond composition. And listening to you now, feels more like the process in which you unleash your particular ways of finding flow. Funny that flow keeps appearing here, I think our mom’s voice is ringing in my ear.

But a “ Leave it to God,” or a play with chance as an organizational method, trusting that all the parts are there and trusting your audience will feel that, makes so much sense in consideration of the intensity of control in your work. Yeah, so being obsessive works because I imagine you find moments of release and play. I know I suffer from the need to be in control, so it’s cool to hear how you make breaks for yourself.

GLJ: The last thing you need, Ligia, is to be more obsessive (laughter). But yeah, if there's an exit on the highway of obsessiveness then you gotta get off . Because you know that you would stay in it until the bitter end.

LML: Right. Being really present and having faith it will do its thing. And that moment of listening, for the first and maybe last time as you describe it, is so precious. After that, you don't have the pleasure of “not knowing,” which, for me, is the pleasure of creation.  

GLJ: Well, that's where you and I, or our careers diverge. Mm-hmm. You can keep refining your stuff through touring, but once an album is done it’s done. 

LML: Yeah. I like to stretch the finish line. With me, I think I really love being in process so I like to try to delay the end, even when I know a piece is done.

GLJ: Yeah, you can't just let go. Once the genie’s out, you can't put it back in with an album. But yeah, you can modify the experience when you play live. Whereas once music’s out, an album is released and then this is it

LML: Sometimes I feel like I can't see the work until other people are witnessing it. Then I'm like, “alright this still needs to happen,” or, “yeah let’s keep doing this.” I think I get closer to why after a work is “finished,” though for me, all my work feels like a collection of run-on sentences.

GLJ: Yeah, if marketing in the music industry wasn't such a business, built almost entirely on capital, then we would be able to constantly change our things, or be in that long process. But personally, I like having one thing in my life where there's an end, and then just waiting for the consequences. I like having a feeling of finality and suffering the consequences of my artistic choices because that’s more motivating for me than continuing on the same thread. I'm not a perfectionist, but like you, I'm obsessive (laughter).

LML: Right. If you get it wrong here, you’ll just get it on the next one?

GLJ: Right. I'll just make another track. However, I do try to make sure to not repeat myself and not to do the things that make me cringe, even though at one point it might become something that's very rewarding. But I wouldn't have that type of perspective if I would have to sit there and suffer through my own critique or worry about the response to my work that's still sitting there on the platform, right? There's something about performance I think that's always growing, always morphing, always doing that thing, but there's something about music, recorded time, the documentation of time that I think is sort of what makes music such a good tool for a mood or for nostalgia or for anything having to do with memory. That's why music is so potent in a way. It's something that is about recorded time…

LML: Totally. I also like to think about how a choreographic composition is just an intense organization of time. An evening-length work might be kind of how you think about an album. How much can I say or squeeze in? And also, maybe, how can I say it in all these different ways?

GLJ: When I listen to Forget, you could say on paper that there's cohesion on that record, but it's more of a technicality, maybe even a coincidence, because at that time, I had those synthesizers around me. I was playing those, but if you really listen to the record almost every song is in a different genre. They are an amalgamation of genres. The songs are not trying to sound like each other or trying to express similar ideas. They are all a combination of really impulsive moments where I heard something and I followed it until I couldn't follow it anymore. Kind of like a dream, I guess. You know I like the fact that my intentions are not all cohesive, but the series of impulses feels very intentional and so it sounds complete.

LML: I like what you’re describing: these intensely intentional improvisational moments that feel, and are, in many, ways hyper-composed, but by way of their intentionality, rather than commitment to a stuffy form of composition. 

You said something when we first spoke about this that really struck me, and what I think speaks more broadly to your dramatic approach to composition, different from what you describe as the limits of dramaturgy — being so vigilant with intention allows you to actually harness control by way of completely losing it or giving it up.

GLJ: Yeah. The only way to finish something is to give up that control completely. Like, I need that true chaotic moment to sort of bless it. 

LML: Right. For me, dramaturgy has this kind of play within it, offering a kind of intentionality to how one organizes time, and not limited to the performance alone. Like how one spends time in the process of creation. And for me, the eyes and ears I want to have in the room as I create, are important. 

GLJ: I like for the dramaturgy to be at the limits in my music. But the fact that I participate in the music industry, I survive by creating a record. This creates a kind of dramaturgy because it creates the deadline and a format for which eleven songs is a standard album and my intentions are forced into that frame. Then what happens is life itself creates the need for a pattern of things and the form that the compositions sit inside of, rubbing up against a format in the industry. So it's gonna get pressed up against that wall.  My thing is to give it up to the world to sort of tell me when it's time to be done and how to do it and then listen back to it. And I say this is the best it can be based on the fact that it has to come out, you know? 

I hope I'm expressing that clearly. But yeah, in some ways I don't think of the listener directly, but I'm always so happy that they exist because they are the reason to make music. I have to deal in part with what the industry is telling me, you know, I think you have that too, right? There's so much that we’re up against. I think that that stuff has more to do with dramaturgy. The thing that my brain puts together is art. Yeah, and I think that when you finish a work, the worst place you could be is in a place where you think that you now understand. My entire artistic practice is based on this — when I grab an instrument, I have no idea what to do with it and therefore I can do anything with it. Same with dramaturgy.