Portland musician Jenny Conlee has a new solo album out called “Tides: Pieces for Accordion and Piano,” inspired by her time on the southern Washington coast.
Courtesy Jealous Butcher
If you’ve seen live music in Portland over the last couple of decades there’s a decent chance you’ve seen Jenny Conlee on the accordion or keyboard. She may be best known for her work with The Decemberists, with whom she’s played for the last 23 years. She has also played with Casey Neill and the Norway Rats, Jerry Joseph, Little Sue, The Minus Five, Stephanie Schneidermanor Ashley Flynn. Conlee has a new solo album out called “Tides: Pieces for Accordion and Piano.” Some of the original songs were inspired by her time on the southern Washington coast. Conlee joins us in the studio to tell us more about “Tides” and play a few songs on accordion.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. If you’ve seen live music in Portland over the last couple of decades, there is a decent chance you’ve seen Jenny Conlee. The accordion and keyboard player may be best known for her work with the Decemberists, with whom she’s played for more than 20 years. She’s also played with Black Prairie, The Minus Five, Casey Neill and the Norway Rats, Stephanie Schneidermanor and Ashley Flynn, among many others. Conlee has just released a new solo album on Portland’s Jealous Butcher Label. It’s called “Tides: Pieces for Accordion and Piano.” Many of the original songs were inspired by her time at an artist’s retreat on Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula. Jenny Conlee joins us now, accordion in hand. Welcome to Think Out Loud.
Jenny Conlee: Thank you so much for having me.
Miller: If it’s alright with you, can we just start in with a song? Can you play us the first track on the new album? It’s called “Hawk”.
Conlee: Yes. I imagined when I was out there at the coast looking around, I would take inspiration from my surroundings. So the hawk was in the tree and then it takes off to go hunting. So that’s what this one is.
Miller: So you were just standing there on the beach and you saw a hawk and it took off, and then this song was born.
Conlee: Yes. And all the songs on the album have some kind of association with something that I saw out there. So, ok, let’s do it.
[Accordion music playing]
Miller: Thank you.
Conlee: You’re welcome.
Miller: A waltz called “Hawk” from my guest, Jenny Conlee’s new album called “Tides: Music for Accordion and Piano.” What was your original plan? When you were deciding you would do this artistic retreat on the Long Beach Peninsula?
Conlee: Well, I wanted to do it and it was COVID and I was teaching so much online, I really wasn’t making time to be creative. So I was like, “this is a great opportunity,” and they have you submit a proposal. So I was like, OK, first of all, I need a lot of parameters to compose. Because otherwise I feel like there’s too many choices and I just can’t do anything.
Miller: So rules give you like a sandbox to play in, because there’s like a boundary, you have to do something.
Conlee: Right. My boundary was to make these pieces in the Greek modes, which I’ve always wanted to write a set of pieces in the modes since I’m a music teacher. It’s so hard to find music that’s written in the modes in our time. And so I thought it’d be a fun project. So I was like, “Well, I’ll do it here, at the coast,” and I didn’t really know that I was going . . . not ‘til I got there did I realize I wanted to use the environment as my inspiration. But I do some soundtrack work, and I really enjoy visualizing things in my head when I’m making music. So that was kind of a really wonderful thing to grasp onto because I was like, “I made it so much easier.”
Miller: So did you actually carry your accordion out to the beach, and just you on… I’m imagining like just sort of a spitting weather day, cold and drizzly, with you and an accordion.
Conlee: Well, that would be really cool. But no, I would go out in the morning with my coffee and spend the morning looking at things and contemplating what I was gonna do that day. But it was the middle of March, horrible weather, just the way you’d expect.
Miller: Is that bad for an accordion?
Conlee: Yes. I mean, accordions have lots of openings as you see, water can get in there. There’s metal parts and things that can rust. So actually, humidity is not so good, but then I’d go back to my trailer and then I would mess around and then I started scoring things out on my computer. And then I tried to get a song a day done. And so I ended up getting it by the skin of my chinny chin chin. But I got them all done by the performance, on the Sunday before we left.
Miller: The whole idea of a retreat like this is to carve out time from… as you were saying, you didn’t have creative time that was a part of your life too much at that point, because you were teaching and doing other things. But I imagine it also puts a kind of pressure on you. I mean, you have to be creative in this “set aside” time, because you won this thing and you’re here, and you have to make the songs. Can inspiration come on command?
Conlee: I guess. I’ve sort of learned that if you make the time, it will happen. And I do write little song seeds and put them on my phone or like write them down on my computer or my sketchbook. So I did have little bits, especially because they were a modal and I’ve been trying to make this more like piano pieces. But anyway, I was like, “Oh, I’ll try to see if that melody would work with this mode or with this vibe.”
Miller: So I think it’s inescapable now, we have to actually have some music theory as part of this conversation. Because you used the word “modal” a couple of times. So, maybe we can start the basics. What is a “mode”?
Conlee: Well, a mode is a scale, and a scale… if you like Latin, scale means “ladder”. So it’s a series of notes, our music is a set of 12 notes. So it’s like one, to the next octave. So here would be your 12 notes…
[Accordion scale notes playing]
But like, C to the next C, which scientifically is like, half of the sound wave measurement. Like, 440 then the next set A, and then the next A above that is 220 or maybe it’s 880… maybe it was the opposite way. That’s the science part, don’t ask me about that.
Miller: Ok. Skip the science!
Conlee: Skip the science. So a scale is usually seven notes, like a major scale which we all learn, probably in school, sounds like this….
[Accordion scale notes playing]
And hundreds of years ago, that was called the Ionian mode. And now, because there’s seven notes in this major scale, I guess we could talk about it that way, and we could start that on a different note, say D, and then play those the same.
Miller: So it’s the same notes, but you’re starting a couple notes up and playing them in the same order…
Conlee: Mhm.
Miller: OK So let’s… so can you play the standard one first, again?
Conlee: Right.
[Scale plays up, then down]
Miller: Ok.
Conlee: We think of that as like a “happy sound”. [It’s] why we call it the major scale. If that was minor scale, it would sound like this:
[Minor scale plays up, then down]
And that is called the Aeolian mode or the “natural minor scale”, which we also use a lot in our Western music. But it’s the other ones that are less used, so like here’s the Dorian mode, it sounds like this.
[Scale plays up, then down]
So they named the modes after different areas in the Greek Kingdom, I guess, or empire. And the Dorian, they said, “this was a strong sound.” So this was what they would consider to be strong. I think of it as sad, it sounds minor but then it sounds happy at the end. Then the third mode, the Phrygian mode, sounds exotic to our ears because it has… it sounds a little bit Eastern European.
Miller: Yeah, that sounds a little bit like Klezmer to me too.
Conlee: Right. It’s this interval…
[Accordion scale notes playing]
And Plato, I just read, he would have the soldiers listen to music in the Phrygian mode to get them up for battle. The other modes, the Dorian mode, Mixolydian mode, would make them soft so they wouldn’t, he wouldn’t want to have...
Miller: They weren’t good soldiers if they were listening to music that made them soft.
Conlee: Right. Exactly. Right. So this is the Mixolydian mode, let’s see if it makes you feel soft. Well, it’s kind of like questioning, I guess. I don’t know.
[Accordion scale notes playing]
Miller: So to go back to your plan, it was that there are all these different modes that have Greek names from thousands of years ago, and you gave yourself a task of writing a song in each of these modes.
Conlee: Mhm.
Miller: So for the “Hawk” one that you played us first . . . so you saw the hawk and a particular way of playing a scale, spoke to you?
Conlee: Well, maybe it’s that the Dorian mode has this sort of like lightness to it. Like it has this seriousness. So like this.
[Accordion plays]
But then, when I got to the…
[Accordion plays]
It sounds light and airy, I guess there’s something about [it].
Miller: You can imagine a gust of wind pushing the bird higher up in the air.
Conlee: Yes! Something like that, because the topography is like… there’s the beach, and then there’s like, gosh, I don’t know, a half mile or so of dunes with grass and lots of little critters in there, that’s very tasty for the birdies.
Miller: Can we hear another song? And you should probably tell us the origin of this one too. So, “Sand” is another one. Do you remember the seed of this melody?
Conlee: Yes. Actually, this is the one that inspired me to write the songs about the landscape, because I was there sitting with the… you know, like when sand blows over other sand it’s almost like little rivulets, like a little rivers, but dry. And, I don’t know, it sort of seemed lonely. And maybe I was lonely. I don’t know, but I felt like the sand was so lonely out there. And this accordion, I have four sets of reeds in it. [Which is] kind of unusual. It has this piccolo reed, which is very high, which you will hear me use in this tune. It might make you feel a little bit like you’re at the beach. So, should I just go ahead…
Miller: Please do.
Conlee: Ok. All right. Let’s go.
[Accordion playing]
Miller: Why do you think it is that accordions are so good at evoking melancholy, even when there’s sort of a happy overall song or sound to me. At least there’s almost always the potential undercurrent of sadness.
Conlee: I don’t know if that’s historically based in our understanding of accordion music, from places that have had sad things happen to them. I think of the Polish, a lot of difficulties in their country. But man, the accordion creates a real party atmosphere for them or, I don’t know, there’s that. I think, in general, French music tends to have a little melancholy sound and that they use a lot of modes, too, in those cultures. Also the way that the accordion works, the bellows are like a breath…
Miller: …moving in, to suck the air in and then pushing, squeezing back together to squeeze the air out.
Conlee: Right. Through the reeds, and I think that breath feels like a singing voice kind of because you can control the volume, so it can swell, and then it can recede, so it can be very human. I don’t know if that’s part of it. I think there’s a lot of association. I think it’s used in film, usually in a very melancholy way, I guess.
Miller: You started as a piano player and then a keyboard player and then became an accordion player, I was going to say, not necessarily later in life, you were in your twenties...
Conlee: Exactly.
Miller: How old were you when you started?
Conlee: I think it was like in the early 2000s, maybe late 1990s. I just wanted to have an instrument that I could play outside with my friends.
Miller: Not in the rain, but…
Conlee: Yeah, not in the rain, but, yeah, outside, camping, whatever, and then I just fell in love with it.
Miller: Do you remember? Was it, was it love at first play?
Conlee: No. It’s quite cumbersome to play. I tried to teach myself. I eventually took lessons from my friend Courtney Von Drehle, and he gave me some pointers on how to wield the thing. But at first I was like, “This is very cumbersome.” But I did get to love it. And now I really don’t prefer it to the piano, but I love them both the same.
Miller: The right hand you’re playing what looks essentially like a piano keyboard with about three dozen keys. But the left hand is working with something totally different. Are there like about 80 little white buttons?
Conlee: Yeah, there’s probably 80 on this one. A full size accordion would have 120.
Miller: So I imagine there was a learning curve to figure out different ways to play chords. Very different ways to play chords.
Conlee: Yeah. It’s set up more like a chord organ. I don’t know if you remember those. Growing up, did your grandma have one where you pressed the buttons on the left side and the chords came out? Well, my grandma did.
Miller: I remember an autoharp from my fourth grade music teacher.
Conlee: It can be like that. It probably tuned in the same way. So music theory nerds: it’s tuned in the circle of fifths, meaning like each button is 1/5 above the other. So C, and then above that is G, and above that, it’s D, and A, and E, and up the circle of fifths or down the circle of fourths, which is F, B-flat. So what’s cool about that is that the one-four-five chords are the chords we play mostly together. So, you can play one-four-five and you can play almost every folk song in the world.
Miller: And almost every rock song.
Conlee: And every rock song.
Miller: Yeah.
Conlee: To “Louie Louie” and then you have...
Miller: And you can do that with just three buttons.
Conlee: Yeah.
Miller: But there’s seventy-seven other buttons there.
Conlee: Oh, right. So we have major chords, minor chords, dominant seventh chords, and a diminished chord.
Miller: So you could play “Louie Louie” in any key you want?
Conlee: And you can play it diminished. Not so cool. Then there’s a counter base to help you do baselines. So there’s [this thing], it’s called the Stradella bass. It’s really not at all like the piano. That was my hardest thing to get to know.
Miller: Has playing the accordion and becoming an accomplished accordion player who now composes music for the accordion, changed the way you think about piano?
Conlee: Yes. It makes me feel that I love the piano, that you can move in different ways easier. I think that’s the easiest thing is, to move from one note to the very next note on the piano, like C to C#. And on an accordion, that’s the furthest away you can get. So you definitely compose differently on those two instruments. So I think they both influence each other, for sure.
Miller: I noted that, and we’ve been focusing on the accordion because you brought it in. But on the album, the first half is accordion, the second half is solo piano. Let’s listen to part of the last track of this album, it’s called “Shore Pine.” What should we be listening for here?
Conlee: These weren’t necessarily modal or… I just loved the scene, the shore pines and I thought the sound, the song sounded like a shore pine sitting there against the wind. I just wanted to make beautiful music and I’ve been trying this… I like to write piano tunes and these seem like they were a good fit. Oh, and all these tunes have ostinato basslines, which are like repetitive bass lines. Let’s take a listen.
[Piano music playing]
Miller: You noted that you got in just under the wire, you finished all the songs you wanted to do for your time and then there was a performance for the other artists who were there.
Conlee: Yes. So most of the artists are visual artists. There were probably four musicians there. There’s like, probably thirty-five people there. And so there’s a gallery show in your trailers. Sometimes you go to the people’s trailers and see their art or they had… it’s just a fabulous, they’d just had Arts Week a couple weeks ago, they do it every year and I really recommend people going out there for the performance days, which is Saturday and Sunday, and see everyone’s wacky, cool stuff. So that was really fun.
Miller: Would you mind taking us out with one more piece, dealer’s choice? But if you don’t mind just first telling us what we’re going to hear and anything we should know about it?
Conlee: Well, let me do “Sunset.” This is really not in a mode but, it’s in the major scale, but this is the last piece, the music gets a little tense because some of the modes are pretty dark. But this one is very light and cheery and it’s a song about the sunset.
Miller: All right. Jenny Conlee, thanks very much.
Conlee: Thank you so much for having me.
[Accordion music playing]
Miller: Jenny Conlee is a Portland musician and a long-time member of the Decemberists. Her new solo album is called “Tides: Music for Accordion and Piano.”
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