13. August 2019 By Walter Price 0

In Her Own Words: GLASS HEART STRING CHOIR’s Katie Mosehauer on Leonard Cohen’s Popular Problems

Glass Heart String Choir [Katie Mosehauer & Ian Williams] – ‘Light’ is available @ Bandcamp.

“There are some artists that I will consume whole, imbibing one album after another until I’ve exhausted their collection. That’s the way I experienced Bob Dylan. Leonard Cohen, on the other hand, has been a careful rationing of albums over the years. I listen slowly, with purpose, pirouetting in each story until I know it’s whole.

“Popular Problems was released while I was apprenticing to be a recording engineer, and it was hard not to gobble it up immediately. Songs like Did I Ever Love You unfold like a novel, with each theme carefully introduced and eventually woven together to great effect at the end of the song. I listened to it on repeat trying to decipher how they’d made the vocals meld together so magically and somehow become more than the sum of their parts. I loved waiting for the final chorus when the vocal round enters to take up space you never imagined existing until just that moment. I drew heavily on both of these sound experiences in producing Wildfires. I created the strings to blend like the voices of the background vocalists and for the orchestra to similarly swell at the seams of the sound field. One of these days I’m going to track down Patrick Leonard (this album’s producer) to see if he’ll share the finer points of his alchemy with me.” – Katie Mosehauer