04/24/09
Text: Max Read
If all goes according to plan, this May Ramona Gonzalez will be doing something Barack Obama never did: receive a diploma from Occidental College. Of course, when our president was attending the Los Angeles liberal arts school in the early 80s, he was just a shiftless young pizza-loving pothead named Barry, and not a singer, songwriter, and multimedia artist. Gonzalez is: her album Good Evening, recorded under the moniker Nite Jewel, was just released on CD by Human Ear Music, following a 12” put out in November by Italians Do It Better, and she’s been touring the country in support of it.
Good Evening's aesthetic exists somewhere in the space between the lo-fi avant-pop of Human Ear and IDIB’s codeine disco, almost like a bedroom studio take on Sa-Fire and Lisa Lisa, and like her labelmates (both at Human Ear and at Italians), Gonzalez isn’t afraid of flirting with melancholy. The easy metaphorical place to go is memory (the songs, recorded on Gonzalez’s 8-track with analog synths, have the dusty, cobwebby quality of your older cousin’s 12” collection) but I think the lo-fi haze signifies more than an easy nostalgia—to me, it resonates with a certain kind of L.A. gloom, ringed in smog, which seems to echo throughout the entire album, and ultimately ground it in the present.
That kind of hushed, evocative sound can be difficult to reproduce in a live setting—it’s almost made for headphones—but when Gonzalez and her bandmate Emily Jane, opening for Glass Candy at Le Poisson Rouge two weeks ago, recreated the album over the club’s booming speakers it sounded warm and bittersweet, and never small or tinny. A few days later, Gonzalez, doing another thing Obama has never done, sat down with us in Brooklyn to answer a few questions and talk a little about her musical education, the mafia-like qualities of Italians Do It Better, her favorite Mexican restaurant in New York, and her soon-to-be-submitted senior thesis.
Tell me a little bit about where you were born and where you grew up.
I was born in Oakland, California, and I lived there for a while, and then I moved to Berkeley. So I've just grown up in the East Bay. And my parents were sort of, like, student revolutionaries, hippies, but they had jobs and stuff—my dad was a Chicano revolutionary guy, and my mom was into the free speech movement and stuff. And her parents were communists, and my dad's parents were Mexican Quakers, so the whole family is really weird. And so they listened to a lot of folk music, political folk music, and world music, and also soul and funk—my mom's really into Marvin Gaye and stuff. Music was just really important to people, living in Berkeley at that time, and often things were couched with political messages—so I just grew up going to music festivals as a kid, folk music conferences and world music conferences, learning piano at a really young age. Berkeley's a really big jazz community, too, so I was always doing, learning jazz—learning classical music through a jazz purview; it wasn't like—I never did competitions or anything; it was all just, like, expressive playing. You play Mozart, you totally mess up the song, interpret it completely differently, and the teacher's like "Great! You're expressing yourself!"
So you were playing music from a very young age?
I was always playing music. I come from a very, very musical household. And most of the people in my family, in my extended family, are really bad musicians. And I was the only decent musician in my family. And they would put you under a lot of pressure to perform for them. So I had a lot of opportunities to write my own songs, when I was a kid, and perform them for people. It was the type of family where activities are, like, "Do a dance for me! Just do a dance! Write a song! Make up a play!" It's very vertical. But I'm not like a history of music snob, like some people. I mean I do listen to a lot of stuff, mainly because of who my best friends are—they have such crazy record collections and stuff, and my husband is really obsessed with archives, so I get—I mean, I can't take credit for that, my friends are—they give me so much incredible music. Ever since I entered college, certain people have come into my life that have just handed all this stuff to me.
And when did you start writing songs?
Probably as a kid, you know—I remember I moved into my house in Berkeley, I must have been six or seven, and I got a handheld tape recorder—my mom had it to record her folk music practices or whatever—and I would record with it in my bedroom at night and do songs. They were horrible, I'm sure. And, you know, I'd try to write songs. And then I got less confident in high school and just started singing other peoples' songs. And then in college I started being in bands, writing songs with Cole [M. Grief-Neill, of Haunted Graffiti], my husband, and we would form a band around the songs we wrote together. So we had several different kinds of bands, shoegaze bands, garage rock—trying to find ourselves, really young and immature and just trying to write songs that sounded something like music. And they ended up sounding like—they were always somewhat catchy. So that was kind of what I was doing. When I got an 8-track as a present from my friend, when I first moved to LA in 2005, I was recording little ambient pieces and making installation art, like, with the songs—like trying to cover up the songs, because I was afraid to display them. Like I did this art show at my friend's gallery Tiny Creatures and everyone was like "Why don't you just put your music on display? Why did you do this ugly sculpture" And I was—"I don't know... I thought it would be cool." I was obviously trying to cover up something.
It seems like there’s a “Nite Jewel” sound—
Is there? I don't know.
I think so—dusty, lo-fi—
Well, lo-fi is just because I'm using an 8-track.
So you weren’t making a conscious decision to go for that sound?
It wasn't a conscious decision! I mean, my friend bought me an 8-track as a present. And I never felt like I could record my music, because when I was recording with my bands with Cole we were recording with Pro Tools in the studio, and I'm like, "I'll never be able to learn this. I'm digitally impaired; never gonna figure this out." So my friend got me an 8-track and Cole was like, "This is really easy to use—here's the buttons, you stick the RCA back here, 1/4" into the mixer, turn it up, here's the input mixer, here's the output mixer." I'm like, "God, this is really easy! I can really figure this out." Then I'm like, "OK, I'm just going to record these things." And it was easy—like the 8-track is just so easy to use. And it makes sense to me—I'm like, "OK, all the equipment is in front of me; I can see it." With the computer I'm just like, "What is this?" It's like a picture. It's like a photograph of a recording studio. And then I was just recording on that 8-track because I'm not very good with computers. And of course certain friends of mine, who were making music at the time, surrounding me, like Julia Holter, Gary War, blah blah blah; they were also using 8-tracks. So I was like, "Oh, well these kids are using 8-tracks; I can use one too. Hey! Let's all use this equipment." And everybody uses 4-tracks. They just don't release that music. Like every musician's house who I go over to has a 4-track at their house. So it's really not, like, a big deal. It's just that I chose to produce my record myself, and I'm not a producer. And so it turned out kind of amateurish.
