Nataly Dawn is best known as half of the viral internet sensation Pomplamoose – the musical duo who attracted tens of millions YouTube views with their VideoSong covers of pop songs, developed a large loyal following for their original music and even landed in a Hyundai commercial.
More recently, Nataly Dawn released her solo album How I Knew Her which not only highlights Nataly’s quirky vocals, but also a complex writing taste that employs unique rhythms, clever melodies and weighty lyrical topics. The album also provided Nataly the chance to play with a full band of crack musicians as opposed to the overdub-heavy process of Pomplamoose.
The solo effort proves interesting in that despite the DIY internet explosion of Pomplamoose, Dawn opted to work with a label on the solo project, because even with all the notoriety from Pomplamoose the fickle world of internet attention spans has still made it challenging to attract the same level of attention for the solo career. It’s not quite back to the drawing board, but the solo translation has proved a bit trickier than expected.
Nataly Dawn and the Pomplamoose story will one day be among the case studies for looking at the surreal world of the modern music business, so we were excited to chat with Nataly about some of these topics as well as the making of the new album.
Hidden Track: One thing I found interesting on your new solo material is that in the past a lot of people came to know you from popular covers, but the new album is more sophisticated and more musically demanding than people might have expected. I was curious what degree of music training you’ve had and how you approach writing songs in that sense?
Nataly Dawn: Well, Pomplamoose definitely has a very different style, you’re right about that and we have done way more pop oriented stuff, but at the same time we’ve done pop infused with quite a bit of sophistication even though people don’t realize it. The chords are still sophisticated.
The main difference is really that lyrically they are less involved. We don’t really take on difficult topics in our topics. We stay pretty light, intentionally. I think that is one of the main differences between Pomplamoose and my stuff is the lyrics. Also, when you get into obviously how it was recorded, Pomplamoose overdubs every part of the song like drums, Wurlitzer, bass, and everything is recorded separately. On my album, I really wanted to get some great musicians together in the room and I wanted to feel like everybody was playing together in a room.
As far as my musical background goes, I started off learning piano at a very young age. I had pretty unwilling lessons. I was not a fan as a kid. After about eight years of piano lessons, my parents finally gave up on me actually ever taking it seriously. Then after that, all the other instruments I play have been self taught. Guitar was self-taught, bass was self-taught. So, that’s where the theory knowledge comes from. Honestly, my theory knowledge is really shitty at this point, I really don’t know that much. Thankfully I have a really good ear thanks to my mom, who was also a musician. She was the music director and the choir director at church, so from a very young age I was exposed to just tons and tons of music, harmonies, pentatonic scales and everything all the time.
So, a lot of what I write comes from that childhood. That is something that comes out far more in my solo material than with Pomplamoose is just my natural upbringing and attachment and knowledge of certain styles and scales and things.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWauE5Y0oSE[/youtube]
HT: On the note of the live band, I’m a big fan of your drummer Matt Chamberlain, so I was kind of curious how your experience was with him and the rest of the band. It must have been fun having such good players and orchestra members and a big space as opposed to being huddled around a computer in your own studio and doing tons of overdubs?
ND: Absolutely, it was a completely different experience with an entirely different set of joys and tribulations attached to it. Just playing with musicians like Matt Chamberlain is such an experience. Not only in that they took time to play on your album, but that you get to watch them and observe their process. Matt’s process is really incredible and it seems so innate and effortless, the way he just walks into a room, listens to the demo a couple times, sits down at the drums, and says “Well, we could do this, or we could do this?” By then, he’s already got the entire structure of the song down in his head. So, we’re sort of like, “Yeah, let’s try your ideas. Fuck whatever we were going to do, because your ideas are better.” [laughs] It was crazy, especially on songs like Araceli. Our jaws dropped to the floor as soon as he started playing the beat.
I also want to say that the other drummer on my record, Louis Cole, is not as well-known of a drummer, but he is a phenomenal drummer, and when we were listening back on the tracks and when I was editing the footage, I would call up Jack and be like, “I can’t tell if this is Matt or Louis. Who played drums on that track?” So, I gotta give Louis Cole some mega-credit for being awesome as well.
HT: I’ve really enjoyed reading some of the insights from both you and Jack with respect to your approach to music and the internet and I know you get a lot of questions about that, but one interview I read from Jack [Jack Conte of Pomplamoose] was among the best I’ve ever read about modern music on The Hypebot website. He talked about when people say, “How can young bands break in,” and he made the point that somebody else probably couldn’t repeat what happened to you guys so much as to say he can’t even recreate it for his own solo career. Are you finding a similar experience? I guess it goes with the question of why you’re using a label now and how are you trying to approach the solo career and where to go from here?
ND: I can absolutely relate to what he is talking about in that interview, and I’ve said it myself several times plagiarizing him. It’s just so much harder to get noticed online these days.It’s virtually impossible, no pun intended. The internet is just so freaking saturated. When we we first caught the wave. It was not saturated. It was very rare to see musicians in the studio recording and that was quite novel. Now, there really isn’t any novelty to it. People know what a guitar sounds like and they are not as interested in seeing you play a guitar in the studio anymore. I agree. I’m not as interested anymore either in seeing people play instruments in the studio.
The question then becomes “what can you do in the place of that?” We have this great following, both Pomplamoose and Jack and myself individually, especially on YouTube. Still, we get a very small amount of views compared to what we used to get. So, we’ve been sort of exploring making more typical music videos, not VideoSongs, but music videos. Yet, those take a lot of time and money, so it kind of defeats the purpose a little bit. We’re still trying to figure out what to do about video, because we know that our YouTube audience is our most important audience, because of how we developed online.
The funny thing is, when I started the recording process for this album, I intended to release it independently. I set aside a part of my budget specifically for a film crew that would be coming to film the experience, so that I could then edit together videos for every song on the album. I’m really glad I have that footage, but I was definitely wrong about how much attention my videos would get once I put them out there. I thought that it would just be my way of advertising for the album and it would be enough, just like in the past how it had been for Pomplamoose, but that certainly was not the case. I’m very fortunate in retrospect that there was a really wonderful label, and in particular the president of Nonesuch Bob Hurwitz, was so invested in the album from the moment he heard the demos and he just wanted to help in whatever way he could.
He was such an amazing asset for the album and anytime I needed to contact someone, he was the man [laughs]. He started helping me even before I was signed to Nonesuch and introducing me to people. I could just kind of tell that he was really interested in the music just from observing other artists that were on Nonesuch. Talking with Brad Meldhau, talking with Ben Folds, I came to the conclusion that Nonesuch was just not your typical label. They aren’t the typical major label that sounds a bunch of artists and sees which one takes off and then drops all the other little investments and then only invests in the one that takes off. They aren’t speculating in a bunch of artists. They are interested in signing somewhat established artists who they believe will stay with them for a long time, and that is something that I can totally get on board with.
There are two other things that I would say. The first is that the deal that you get when you come to a label and you are a somewhat established artist is a complexly different deal than if you’re coming at it from Adam and don’t actually have a fan base and need the money to make the album. I came at it with the album already funded and with a finished product for them. So that is a much different scenario than most other artists.
The other thing that I would say it is possible still for an artist to make a living without a label, but I think it’s harder if you are a solo artist. If you can’t play all the instruments yourself and you aren’t in the studio, and you need musicians and a producer and somebody to mix, those things are all going to cost you money. At that point, I really understand why it’s important to have a label. I’m not Pomplamoose. It’s not to say Pomplamoose will never sign in the future, I have no idea what the future holds, but I just know that it’s far easier for Pomplamoose to make a record solo and to have it sound really good than it would be for me to make an album sound really good all by myself.
HT: I read in some the notes that a lot of the album is quite autobiographical, so I wondered what some of the themes were? I know you mentioned your mother and some of the ideas from your childhood, but any of the main points in the back story would be interesting.
ND: Yeah, I’ve kind of come to hate the word autobiographical, not because there aren’t autobiographical elements in the songs, but it’s such a common thing for singer-songwriters to write from their lives. There’s nothing really that special about that. I guess it’s special in that a Pomplamoose song is certainly not autobiographical. Maybe biographical would be a better word.
It’s about relationships and people in my life who surround me and who influence me, specifically the women in my life, mothers, grandmothers, cousins, best friends. Those people and their stories and how through the investigation of these relationships, it helped me figure out what I was thinking. I just found myself thinking a lot about what matters to the women in my life, like matters of space and trust and things like that. So yeah, it’s autobiographical but through the lens of the women in my life.
HT: One last quick one. I thought your Barry Manilow collaboration was just too funny. What was that experience like?
ND: [laughs] Barry was really really cool to record with and it was wonderful meeting him and working with him. When I was called up to do the solo thing with him, it was a very surreal sort of phone call, but I agreed to it, because I thought “how often is Barry Manilow going to ask me to sing on his album?” That certainly doesn’t happen too often. It was his first album of all originals in ten years. So I flew down to LA and went into his studio.
It was really interesting. He ended up coaching me on every line of the song. So much so that it was like I was playing a part in an already written piece as opposed to singing. He didn’t call me for my personal take, it was about me playing a part… a really fucking weird part [laughs]. I played the role of the psychotic fan who was obsessed with Barry Manilow. So, I ended up singing in a very dramatic way, just as Barry sings in a very dramatic way. It was a really fun and a really interesting experience, but I probably wouldn’t direct people there if they are like, “What does Nataly Dawn sound like?” I probably wouldn’t say, “Put on that Barry Manilow song to find out.” [laughs].
