Before her performance at Savannah Stopover, Nashville singer/songwriter Tristen sat down with SCAD Radio Content Director Ian Dziura to discuss her music and the festival.
Can you give us insight into what to expect from your upcoming gig at Stopover?
Tristen- It’s a four-piece rock and roll band, and, uh, yeah!
(laughs)
Let’s talk about your single, “Dream Within a Dream,” which is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe.
It’s not even inspired by an Edgar Allan Poe poem, it is a poem and there’s a couple lyrical changes that happened. I found that poem and thought it’d make a great song. I approached the band and started doing a blues jam and the song came out of it… I have this thing where sometimes I find a connection with a poem and I feel like I could write music to it. On my second album C A V E S, I chose this poem called “Winter Night” by Boris Pasternak. The tone is simple, but it felt like you were in a room with a candle lit. That’s an interesting thing, to be able to put a person in a location. I wanna do [Dylan Thomas’s] “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” these classic poems you feel forced to read in high school but then you turn 30 and you’re like “Oh, this is amazing!” Everybody kind of knows it, but to put it to music is cool because you can make it more memorable that way.
When you’re reading a poem, how do you know that this one is worthy of being made into a song?
I like when poems nail something universal, but also they find a unique way to do it. Joni Mitchell’s really good at bringing you to a location when you listen to her songs. In “A Case of You,” you feel like you’re the lonely girl at the bar who just got broken up with. The cool thing about “Dream Within a Dream” is that it’s an existential topic: this reality we create. It nails things you have to learn in life, no matter when you’re born. That’s what you feel when you read any great poetry… What makes it able to be a song, I guess you just have to be inspired to put it to song. “Dream Within a Dream” has something all of us have in common: that we’re all going to die. A lot of people are driven by fear, and what about the biggest fear of all? Everything is temporary, and I’m in this culture of capitalism and consumerism and status. None of it really makes me happy, even if you achieve it in some way. Trying to be somebody and realizing you’re nobody.
I get how these stories all tap into the human condition. In class this week, we were talking about Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.” It was pretty morbid, classic Poe, of course.
Right, he’s got that gothic style that becomes a movement. No matter where you go today, you can find a goth. It’s a style that’s really fun. We have an Edgar Allan Poe holiday every October 31st… I’ve read a bunch of his short stories, I think he’s one of the greats.
Let’s switch gears a little. You’re pretty active in displaying opinions on social media…
(laughs)
…If you could make one change to the music industry and how it operates, what would it be?
I would tell every single working artist and songwriter to see if they’re eligible for food stamps and free healthcare. I’d like streaming services to create a business model similar to video, like Netflix’s model, where you have access to certain movies at certain times but you don’t have access to an artist’s entire catalog… I feel that these companies take things like “content providers,” and one of the strategies for dehumanizing workers is declassifying them as workers. Instead of saying the artists and songwriters are “content providers,” they remove the label around the creation of that stuff that they’re selling. I’m going back to telling all artists to apply for benefits because the government is allowing these large companies not to pay any taxes and not to pay people minimum wage. Why don’t we just create a system where we’re getting free healthcare while we work for free?
For more on Tristen, click here. For more info on her performance at Savannah Stopover, click here. Be sure to check out SCAD Radio’s Stopover preview, too.
