An Interview With Eagle Winged Palace

AN INTERVIEW WITH EAGLE WINGED PALACE

What is folk?
Cashew: Story-telling. By the people for the people in an uncluttered, uncomplicated way. Its complete opposite would be classical, which was written for kings and queens, very high-minded. Folk has always been, like back in the day of the troubadour or traveling minstrel, telling the news of the day. Today if you say it to the modern pop or rock listener, folk is Americana, it’s country, bluegrass, acoustic. It’s not totally about story-telling.
Meegan: It doesn’t have to be the content. It’s the vibe. Folk music is for the people so it’s accessible. It involves some acoustic element. Maybe it’s a banjo. Or voice. Who is incapable of sitting around and singing harmonies with someone about what they know? Maybe it’s story-telling, writing something relatable and accessible. Rock and roll is adored and beautiful because it’s inaccessible. People think of rock musicians as gods with loud fancy instruments. Folk is supposed to be for the normal person, either ‘directed to’ or ‘can be played by.’
Cashew: Chord progressions passed from generation to generation.
Michelle: Human voices are important to it as well, when you bring harmonies into it. Storytelling, accessibility. The folks, anything relatable to or reflects the people around you can be folk.
Michelle: It’s interesting to focus on the L.A. folk movement happening right now. It’s interesting how the people of LA are interpreting it. It’s a city, not some mountaintop.
Meegan: This is an important connecting thread. Folk music usually has some reference or connection with nature. If you listen to it, it’s a vibe, it doesn’t sound like it was born of a concrete jungle even though folk is being made in the big cities. People in urban cities are lacking nature and longing for this lost pastoral. There is a connection to the earth even if it doesn’t mention nature. It goes hand in hand with all the trends. Why have dudes been growing beards the last six years? They want to go to their country home. Even if they are in the city, they have a fantasy of this other life. People are interested in that. We want to access the feeling without going to Joshua Tree everyday.
Michelle: That’s part of us. We can go to Joshua Tree, Yosemite, Malibu, Big Sur. All of us are California natives. A lot of our music in our songs are about California history and folklore.

Have you witnessed a variety of sounds in your experience of folk?
Michelle: That’s something I wanted to bring up. Folk, people associate it with finger-picking and banjos. That’s the whole boundary Linda Perhacs was trying to cross. Folk has always been about folks, the people, reflecting what’s going on in the times, story-telling, things that might pass on to folklore, things that might be occurring in this day and age. Folk is about telling the story of what’s going on with the people around you. Whatever medium that happens to be. We’re in 2010. People want to play banjo, they can. But there’s all sorts of electronica, there’s technology available that can still fall under folk if it has the spirit of folk.
Meegan: I don’t think the notable thing about the L.A. folk boom is that it was strongest four years ago. The notable part is that there was boom and because it was so huge, it allows all the other folk music to go on and not be a novelty. There’s a lot of people playing that music and instead of being pigeon-holed into a passing fad, it’s accepted as a normal genre again.

What is the comfort people get from pretty harmonies? Why are you drawn to using voices the way you do?
Michelle: People feel really disconnected. When you bring back vocal elements and harmonies, it’s a unification of our humanity. This has a lot to do with folk music.
Meegan: The first songs we had were chanty sing-alongs and we all realized that we could do more with harmonies and breaking up what we could sing.
Cashew: At first we wanted to do some kind of loose sing-along Hand Of Doomy. Michelle: Each one of us has such distinct voices, it came natural.
Meegan: its a blessing and curse that we’re all so different.

Can you describe the feeling of harmony when you all connect?
Cashew: Acoustically we feel it often. When we have microphones and monitors and under some sound guy it’s hard to gauge. You’re struggling to connect to the bits and pieces coming through.
Meegan: But when we can hear each other and feel together, it’s like tuning a guitar by harmonics. It’s a path that veers off and gets corrected but it’s a weird vibration that you can hear. We’re humans, not machines, so when we cross and for a minute we hit a space where we’re in the right place, you can feel the physical vibration. That’s when people say they get chills. Those little wavelengths cross for just a moment.
Michelle: Those are the moments we strive for. The voice is a vibration. When you look at it as science and sine waves, ultimately there’s a point when all the waves coincide and make this huge powerful wave and that’s a really intense energy.
Meegan: I think it’s hilarious that we’re trying to explain this really scientific thing and it makes us sound even more like hippies.

—Daiana Feuer