Jenn Wasner is back as Flock of Dimes — only this time, it's really her.
Unusually, Wasner has sidestepped the de facto press release with a letter explaining why this record sounds the way it does, tackles the subjects it does, and why there's likely more to say beyond the 12 songs on "The Life You Save."
Wasner spoke with WUNC's Eric Hodge ahead of her performance Wednesday night at Haw River Ballroom.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Is it fair to say this record is about the realization that you don't have all the answers? Not only for yourself, but also for people you care about and cherish.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, this record — the shorthand way of saying it is — this record is about codependency. But the long version is that I thought I was making a record about other people's problems and other people's addictions and cycles of addiction and dependency and struggles with mental health.
The record was very difficult to finish. And I think that the key that unlocked the meaning was that towards the end of it, I realized that I was actually making a record about myself, my own codependency, my own addiction to attempting to manage people I loved, attempting to sort of protect them from the consequences of their behavior, which actually wasn't as helpful as I maybe had led myself to believe. There's a song on the record called "Close to Home," so, I mean, you can take that however you wanna take it.
And that one has the line about following footsteps in the snow —
Which is — that metaphor is, it's very representative of what the process of untangling your own sort of relationship to these cycles can feel like when you're in the middle of it.
And it's really difficult to separate the understanding of love and care and genuine care and care that is helpful and care that is meaningful — from controlling and manipulation, which is not helpful.
Is "Afraid" a declaration of intent for the whole collection?
In some ways — I think I've been kind of waiting to talk about and make this record my whole life. But I've been scared to do it because I don't wanna hurt people I care about. It's not particularly light or fun to get into. It's a delicate thing to do it in a public way.
But I wrote that song and I was like, it's happening, right? Like, I would love to be able to say that there's another record I can make now, but this is what's happening.
Well, you write in that letter you sent out that you were afraid. You were worried, you kept thinking, well, maybe there'll be a delay here and I don't really have to do this to do it. But it feels like you were just prop compelled to.
I kept looking for an out. I think part of the reason why it took so long, in addition to the fact that I was still figuring out untangling some of these thorny psychological knots in the process of making, it was also I kind of didn't wanna do it. I mean, I still kind of don't want to do it. It's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable, it's heavy.
The chorus of "Keep Me in the Dark" strikes me as being about dishonesty, or at least hiding the truth. Is it about the stories we tell ourselves and then, then we repeat that to other people as if that will help reflect a back at us?
In a way, yes. I think that song is the closest thing to like a traditional love song that exists on this record. And a lot of the times with these sort of patterns that we learn when we're young, they expand and sort of trickle down into all of our relationships. They're just like a dance that we do in relationship with others.
There is the part of like secrecy or trying to sort of hide certain parts of yourself or spin the narrative in a certain way. The song still kind of gets me, which is a lot of these songs do, but this one in particular, which is the line, "You see it in me now. I see it in myself again," and in the times when we lose ourselves or we forget who we are or who we're trying to be, we need that mirror of the other person.
And it's not like they're mirroring back to us that we're perfect and don't ever change. It's like, you're flawed. And also I love you, you know? And it's like, that's the feeling. That's the thing where the healing comes.
"Defeat" opens with a celestial choir of Jenns, maybe?
That's me. Yeah, it's all me.
I love that. I like the juxtaposition of how, whether things are bad or feeling easy, it can be hard to face the day either way.
Well, they're both hard, That is the thing too, that's so tricky, right? It's like, especially when you are accustomed to a certain level of intensity, which can often come from like conflict or drama or whatever you wanna call it. It's like you can get addicted to that level of emotional intensity. So that's hard. But then ... twist, if you've somehow managed to get to a place where you're not sitting in that level of emotional intensity all the time, that's hard in a completely different way.
It's hard to stay with something that feels peaceful and not experience that as boring when your brain and nervous system is calibrated for a different kind of thing. And so it's there. It's the back and forth.
When you wrote, "I think I'm God," did you go, this is how I end the record?
Yeah, a hundred percent. I knew immediately.
I wrote that song in the most incongruous location imaginable, but I was on tour with Bon Iver. We were in St. Louis and we were staying in a hotel. It directly overlooked the baseball stadium, the Cardinals' baseball stadium. There's a baseball game going. And it was like, you know, it was just a kind of a chaotic sports bro energy everywhere. I would've never expected for that to arise from that location.
It was just a weird thing, but I did know, I mean, at that point I was deep enough in the record that I kind of knew what I was doing and I tend to have an instinct for first and last tracks. They have an energy to them. I knew that "Afraid" would be the first track when I wrote it, and I knew that "I Think I'm God" would be the last one.
