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Holland remains one of a kind

Trying to pin down the sound of American singer-songwriter Jolie Holland, is, in the words of an older singer-songwriter, like trying to catch the wind.

Holland, who performs in Wellington next week, has a smoky, emotive voice which fleetingly reminds listeners of Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Rickie Lee Jones and Cowboy Junkies' singer Margo Timmins. The music is even harder to categorise. There are touches of country, Americana, folk, Holiday-style jazz and Joplin-style blues and rock – which one critic aptly described as sounding as if it could have been created at any time from 1930 to today.

But really Holland is one of a kind. She doesn't really sound like anyone else, she only sounds like herself – which is why she gets noticed.

Critics love her third album Springtime Can Kill You, released this year, and no one less than Hollywood star Johnny Depp and Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski sought her out to sing on their concept album Rogue's Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys. Holland shares the album with the likes of U2's Bono, Lou Reed, Sting, Bryan Ferry, Loudon and Rufus Wainwright, Jarvis Cocker and other big names.

Holland says one of the best things people say about her music is that it's hard to pigeonhole. "I'm glad. I don't have a sense of what the music is supposed to be like anyway. I definitely want it to stay open. If I did (sound like anyone else) I wouldn't be interested in doing it. I just don't think there needs to be copies of different performers out there. A lot of people seem to think that's okay. But I just don't. I'm really offended by that."

She always has a clear idea of each song before she steps into a recording studio with a band. "Every song has a really specific vision, but they are all pretty different, you know. Like, if I just had one genre I was working with I'd be really bored. I'm not interested in one particular thing at all."

Listen closely and several songs with titles Moonshiner, Mehitabel's Blues and Mexican Blue could almost pass as Raymond Carver short stories. But Holland says they all relate back to her. "They're all really stories from my life. Singing the songs reminds me of different phases of my life and different things I was worrying about or trying to figure out. I really appreciate them all being real and concrete because I don't think I could be so interested in performing them every night if they weren't based in reality."

Holland has also learned that, for her, the best way to write songs is not to try to force them out. "I really don't try to `write songs'. I might have tried to do that a few times in the beginning as a younger songwriter, but I just don't like what comes out when you try to write. So I really make the songs beat the door down."

And she has a preferred place to write them. "I like to write in a car," she says.

"I just sort of write, in my head mostly, when I'm moving. I'll also write when I'm walking down the street. I finished writing Springtime Can Kill You when I was driving."

HOLLAND is from Texas. She grew up in Houston, was playing guitar at 14 and performing original songs and Woody Guthrie covers on stage by age 16. After learning how to play a few tunes by the late Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd, in 1994 she hit the road as another aspiring musician instead of going to university. She spent most her of time between the large and diverse Austin and New Orleans music scenes, before going on to Vancouver and San Francisco in 1996.

Her first instrument was a miniature piano. "I started when I was tiny. I started writing songs when I was like six and the only other human being that I'd heard of that was doing stuff like that was Mozart. I thought `Oh no, I have to play classical music!' That just seemed like the only avenue that was right. I started playing the violin and I thought I was headed in that direction, but I wasn't that interested in classical music or anything else in particular. I just wrote music by myself and it didn't have any words.

"Then I started hearing, while I was a teenager, all this British pop music and stuff. I was really into The Cure and The Smiths and Siouxsie and the Banshees and Depeche Mode and all that stuff. But I still didn't see myself playing pop music," she says.

"And then I heard this this guy David Garza, who at the time had a band called Twang Twang Shaka Boom. They were amazing. They sounded like a Texan version of the Violent Femmes with this Buddy Holly pop sound, but also together with this really sophisticated rhythm section. There was this super jazzy but very forward, punchy bass player and one of the most incredible drummers I have ever heard in my entire life. There were are these beautiful Mexican polyrhythms in there, but it was just pop music. That band totally blew my mind. David Garza's songs are just like a light. They're just incredible."

So now, not surprisingly, Holland's diverse and occasionally obscure influences are peppered through her music. She cites one part on Mehitabel's Blues, which she calls a tribute to the Georgia Sea Island Singers, who perform a unique style of gospel created by African Americans on St Simons Island off Georgia.

"There's people that I love and I hope I'm doing (this) as a tribute to, but there are so many different influences for every song or even every piece of a song. Springtime Can Kill You has got some of my love for Nina Simone and I could tell you about some obscure Texas bands that you'd never have heard of."

Jolie Holland, San Francisco Bathhouse, next Tuesday.

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