Talahomi Way: A Chat with Sean O'Hagan of the High Llamas

(photo by John Knights)

Sean O'Hagan's High Llamas have spent the last twenty years discovering a place in sound that relates brilliant, memorable melodies and lyrics with sharp arrangements and a sense of history rooted in music from all over the world. On an album like Gideon Gaye or 2007's Can Cladders, the Llamas provide such a sense of brightness and craft, it is nearly impossible to not feel enlightened upon listening. This month, the band will release their first album in four years, Talahomi Way.

I am grateful to have interviewed Sean O'Hagan about all of this and more, which you can check out after the jump.

In the creation of your recordings, how much do you find yourself using the studio as a tool? Do you rehearse with the group and then go in to record the songs, or do you create the recorded version of the song through overdubs and the like in a studio?

I write over a period of about a year, and increasingly lately I demo  in the  studio, very roughly, but enough to give me the cinematic picture that in turn invites arrangement colour and choices. I will write strings and brass at this early stage and score it pretty early as well. I like to use the studio as an electronic  tool, using  resonators and filters to bring an oddness to an otherwise organic process.

We always enjoyed that as a band but feared the cliche that electronica got tangled with a few years ago. Recently, we can  gently re-introduce those electronic ideas in a subtler way and they do work.

This being said, I am always enamored by the string sections in your music, which always add a new dimension to the melody, making the track anew, rather than the showy cello gangs some groups tend to use. What drew you to make this a part of your sound?

I was drawn to strings by 50's arrangements in film and ballad writing, and then through working with strings I started to love quartet writing. The arrangers like David Whittacker and Francois Du Roubaix and of course Van Dyke Parks, taught me a lot and as you said, the thrill of  moving  strings and an emphasis on highlighting  harmonic oddity was a  blast.

No... no one was doing it. Incredible. It had to be brought back into pop music, and not in a stuffy pseudo-classical way. No, this is odd pop writing, as Gainsbourg would have got it  from Vannier. Also Brazilian strings from Rogeria Duprat, Villa Lobos. Terrific stuff. Since Gideon Gaye, it all opened up and we learned the lexicon of language in arranging from Impressionism through to TV scoring.

Did you have a very musical childhood? In your songs, I hear strains of Van Dyke Parks, tropicalia, Shuggie Otis... Have these artists stayed with you from an early age or was this a sound you grew to love?

As I child, I had music in my head but no training. I was given a guitar as a 12 year old and taught myself to play. I spent my childhood with songs in my head and experienced the solitude of music.

Shuggie, Van Dyke, tropicalia, yes, it's all there. I love Shuggie Otis. The texture of Inspiration Information is unparalleled. I even made reference to Shuggie in the song "Shuggie Todd" ten years ago.

Lyrically, the songs of the High Llamas tread around character studies, specifically of people and places. What draws you to this? How do you find your characters?

I do not  consider myself a lyricist and admire truly great word people like Will Oldham and Cathal Coughlan. I can not write about the personal, so I write about the general, buildings, and place... and try to tell the story of a road, an intersection, a building... and in that, fictitious characters (and some real characters taking on new identities) make appearances. The attempt is to create a unique world, odd images and visual therapy fronting  harmonic playfulness and new arrangement.

One of my favorite songs ever is "Track Goes By" off of Gideon Gaye. Can you tell me a bit about how this song came together? How would you describe the story within the song? How did the extended instrumental part come to be?

"Track Goes By" is a very old song  was written when I was still writing with a traditional song structure in mind. I was listening to a lot of John Cale but also Pharoah Sanders which is why I finished the song with a completely uncompromising extened freeform flute exploration. The player rarely plays within the chord, which I'm sure you noticed... that was the ground rule. It's a total improvisation with one rule and a strict mesmeric chord roll. 

The story is about a trade union negotiator in Sweden, a woman, and her early morning journey to the plant where she needs to settle a dispute. Half real, half imagined by me.

 

What can we expect from your new record, Talahomi Way?

Talahomi Way is a colourful record that has a spring feel at the start and an early spring evening feel at the end. There is reference to the pink evening sky.

The brass returns, soft and and hopefully haunting and we intend for the strings to twist and surprise. There is the smell of the ocean in a seaside song and you will notice a return of experimental in-between tracks which our fans so loved over the years.

Comments

[Jeremy]

Thanks for the interview. I am looking forward to getting the new album. It is in the mail as I type this!

[chris]

Love the album! Listening now, in fact...really great.

[Paul]

thanks for this interview. such a wonderful album - must have listened to it 50 times or more since its release. so warm.