On the occasion of the release of her recent single “The Laugh Is In The Eyes”, we reached Julia Holter to talk to her about the links between this new song and “Something in the Room She Moves”, one of the records we appreciated most in the last year. In “The Laugh Is In The Eyes” the voice of the American singer-songwriter dances between floral flutes, explosions of colors and delicate soundscapes and thus choreographs a splendid art-pop composition. As in the LP, also in this song the physical, bodily sensations are enhanced with synesthetic games, giving perfumes to words, colors to music, sounds to smells. Julia Holter's new creations are a completely visionary, all-encompassing experience, without being psychedelic or hallucinatory, which cuts across what surrounds us, showing a continuum in cosmic matter starting from a fluid making and unmaking of human and non-human bodies. It seems a bit Ovid, a bit Epicurus and a bit posthuman philosophy, but also a sound world deeply anchored to the bodily and personal experiences lived by its author. We talked about all this with Julia Holter in the following interview, reported in full below.
Hi Julia! Congratulations on your latest album! It was one of our favorite records of 2024. I also really liked the single you recently released and I think we could start this interview by talking about this song. “The Laugh Is In The Eyes” seemed to me to be a metaphorical celebration of the human imagination and its transformative power.
Thank you so much for the support! Yes, I also have this feeling when I listen to “The Laugh Is In The Eyes”. In general, a good part of “Something In The Room She Moves” investigates precisely how sensations change during transformations of states, in the most basic sense of the term, for example when we are at home and feel blocked, then we go out and smell the flowers ; wants to musically evoke precisely such experiences of change.
The title of the new single is extrapolated from the lyrics of the song “Spinning” (which by the way is wonderful). Why and how are these two songs connected?
I wrote “The Laugh Is In The Eyes” over the last few months, and it was born from a Logic file I created while working on “SITRSM”. So it's not actually an old song, it's completely new, but having developed from that file, it's connected to the record. But also the interest in sensations and colors seems similar to what I did with “SITRSM”.
In “Spinning”, after a sudden moment of blindness (“Some cologne leaving me blind/ The laugh is in the eyes/ The joke is mine”), a multisensory and synaesthetic vision manifests itself. Could the new song be the result of this fiery epiphany? Even in “The Laugh Is In The Eyes” the atmosphere is nocturnal and mysterious.
Yes, I think it's all of that, but there's also some daylight. It seems to me that it has a kind of combination of day and night; if “Sun Girl” expresses a sort of desire to escape from the sun and “Evening Mood” and “Spinning” dwell in the mysterious night, the new single finds mystery in brightness, color and day.
I was very intrigued by the fact that “Something In The Room She Moves” opens with a mantra that acts as an invocation to the sun. It reminded me a lot of a literary topos common in classical but also medieval poetry (in Italian Dante's “Paradise”), that of the invocation to the muses and Apollo (god of the sun, but also god of music and poetry). “Sun Girl” seems to play ironically with this lyrical tradition. In this sense, I would say that your latest work could be read as a modern reinvention of Ovid's “Metamorphoses”, given that bodily transformations and love are also central themes in your songs. Are they models that you intentionally refer to?
I wasn't looking at any literary tradition, but maybe you've hit on something very interesting! We certainly always look to natural sources for poetic inspiration: it is a way to try to explore a feeling and share it with other people, because the sun touches us all, we need it, we feel warmed and calmed by it, we feel overwhelmed by its intensity, etc. The same goes for the ocean, or the trees, and so on.
In “Materia” you sing: “Can you fool a mystery sea?/ On the rough womb/ Summer bathing on a stretch of/ Memory mistaken for what's here right now”. It seems that every possible (re)birth and material transformation passes through this aquatic womb. Why does water play such a central role in the sequence of bodily metamorphoses of “SITRSM”?
I don't know, I was channeling this mystery, this darkness (like in Helene Cixous's text “Writing Blind”, which I referenced elsewhere when talking about “Spinning”) and then the underwater dimension was added. While I was writing these songs, I was pregnant or had recently given birth, and in this experience the physical body was central, and a large part of the body is made up of water and fluids. So that was probably the starting point, but it wasn't a deliberate choice to focus on water: it just happened.
What inspired the visual aspects for this album? The video clip for “Spinning” seems to me to be linked to the painting of your friend that you chose as the album cover.
Yes, sisters Nicola and Juliana Giraffe made the video for “Spinning” and were inspired by Christina Quarles' painting (“Wrestlin'”), which is on the album cover. But it is by pure coincidence that the parachute they used matches the painting very well. It was crazy! Overall, I chose the Quarles painting, because I love the complexity of body movement in that work – it just seemed like the right image for “SITRSM”.
Are you already working on something new? Can you tell us something about it?
Yes, but I can never really explain what I'm working on while I'm doing it. I myself am still trying to understand what it is!
(Interview published January 1, 2025)
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
