Trixie Whitley according to the spirit of the letter

(© Renata Raksha)

Trixie Whitley has given birth twice in one year: in January, to her first child, and in October to her second album. Time for a double celebration at the Ancienne Belgique, with two concerts. “There’s no manual.”

I had decided not to talk about my daughter,” the voluble Trixie Whitley recalls in the office of her Ghent record company. She now lives full-time in Brooklyn, but Ghent, where she spent much of her childhood with her mother, Hélène Gevaert, and her often absent father (the blues musician Chris Whitley, who died, far too young, in 2005), is still a big part of her, betrayed by a strong local accent.

She tucks both feet under her slim torso and a finger twirls a curl in her straight hair. Her face lights up with a smile, displaying a young mother’s pride that, despite her intentions, soon has her talking about Phoenix, her daughter. Phoenix is now ten months old and Whitley knows well it won’t be easy to be both a travelling musician and a parent. Sometimes she is petrified with fear by the thought of combining the two. “There is no manual for life, nor for parenthood,” she observes. “But confidence is essential.”

(Self)-confidence is something that comes up again and again throughout our conversation. In the run-up to her new album, Porta Bohemica, Whitley wrote a letter to her entourage, in which she reviewed her own strengths and weaknesses, as a starting point for an introspective odyssey that has resulted in a fine album and a rebirth. “Sometimes I talk fairly abstractly and people find it hard to understand me,” she chuckles. “So I wanted to put my thoughts down clearly on paper. First and foremost for the musicians with whom I was going to record my album in Tennessee, in March last year. I wanted to produce Porta Bohemica myself – a terrifying prospect! [Laughs] But also a challenge I was really up for. Anyway, the letter was not meant as a blueprint for a sure outcome, but rather an invitation to a journey we would take together.”

And an ideal opportunity for some reflection about yourself.
Trixie Whitley: Turned out to be, yeah. I soon became immersed in my own thoughts and that really taught me a lot. For example, that I didn’t dare to believe nearly enough in my own potential, and that I tried far too much to live up to other people’s expectations, looking for recognition from outside.
We are all vulnerable creatures: everyone has strengths and weaknesses. You shouldn’t take advantage of them. I can be very unsure of myself, but I do know well what I want. I have a strong sense of self; I don’t compromise. As a teenager, for example, I was a real rebel. I gave up school in the fourth year of secondary. When I started out as a musician, I was with a major label, but I felt straight away that I didn’t fit in there. Because I was a young girl, it was assumed that I could be moulded and would be easy to package.

How hard is it to believe in your own ability?
Whitley: You have to be self-assured, in the first place, no matter how clichéd that sounds. When my daughter had just been born and I looked at her, I realised: everything is there already. Her complete potential. Society influences you and your parents can be guides, but self-development starts with you. With ups and down, of course.
My philosophy of life is that I look for durability in everything, from eating and clothes to music and art. Genuineness. Quality. Authenticity. Sincerity. Where can you still find that today? I have the feeling that my instincts are well developed for recognising that. I think it is the power of intuition. That, even at times when you are at your wits’ end and the ground under your feet turns into a gaping hole that threatens to swallow you up, you can trust in your gut feeling.
That intuition is there somewhere between our intellectual and emotional capacities and is one of the most valuable forms of our psyche. That realisation is there now: that’s where I want to be. Not thinking in a purely intellectual way, but not purely emotional either. For a long time, that was a major conflict: I wanted to be galvanised by that intuition, but I didn’t let myself trust it.

Did you absorb a lot at home?
Whitley: I had a very unconventional upbringing. By my mother, mainly. My father was away a lot, and my mother’s parents died young – she didn’t have much support. But that was fortunate for me too. My mother was sometimes over-protective, but she did give me a lot of confidence. Just as I am confident that my daughter is an intelligent being that can learn to think things out for herself.

Don’t you think we think too much?
Whitley: [Laughs] Sure. So many of the thoughts we have are completely superfluous. You have to learn to recognise that. There is an infinite amount of information available, but just having all that information doesn’t make you any wiser. It’s about trimming the fat: you have to be able to see what is important and what is noise.
Shortly before I wrote that letter to my entourage, I was sitting in the tour bus reading some old interviews with the modern dance pioneer Martha Graham and the surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp. I found ideas there that confirmed my own thinking. Duchamp talked about breaking free of what you know, about the power of unlearning, about sending your influences packing, so you can create in a completely open way. Surrealism did show that the most valuable creative work doesn’t have its origins in the ratio.
Martha Graham on the other hand, was giving advice to one of her students who was constantly undermining herself. She thought she would never be as good as she wanted to be. But Graham answered that it wasn’t her job to judge whether her work was good or bad. An artist’s greatest task, for her, was to open up all your sensors so that the creativity kept flowing. Otherwise, you silt up. I found that extraordinarily familiar. I don’t need to be my own harshest critic.

But you surely need to be able to critical of yourself too?
Whitley: Absolutely, but it mustn’t get in the way of pure, uninhibited creativity. Just look at what happens when you adopt the openness of a child: you can do fantastic things. We are all born with a kind of wisdom, the wisdom of naivety. The older we get, the more fearful we become, the more questions we ask ourselves, and the more we try to explain everything. When you break free from that, you create a kind of freedom. I want to be completely free. It’s not easy, of course.
After my performance at the Pukkelpop festival, last August, everyone was talking about my dive into the crowd. That was a good example of my new confidence in not knowing: getting away from the internal conversations, away from the angel and the devil on my shoulder. It wasn’t planned at all, either: I did it without stopping to think. During “Breath”, moreover, which is practically a ballad! Instinctively, I felt that the crowd wouldn’t let me fall.

Do you set yourself goals?
Whitley: Gosh. I think I can say that nothing in my life is part of a plan. DJ-ing as a teenager, dancing with Les Ballets C de la B, making music with Daniel Lanois in Black Dub, the solo adventure: it all just happened. I see it as cycling without steering: you have to keep your balance well to avoid falling. That has to do with confidence again. However unsure I may be about my own talents, I have complete confidence that life put me on the path I need to be on.

And that path has taken you all the way to Brooklyn.
Whitley: Yes. I used to commute between New York and Ghent, but now my mother has moved here too. I live just beside the East River between Brooklyn and Manhattan, close to the water. I’m a bad swimmer, I don’t like to be in water, but it feeds me deeply. Without water, there would be no life, and that’s the way I look at myself and at my music too. The ebb and flow, the vast stillness of the oceans, but also the violence of the waves. I don’t just seek out the big waves, but also the still waters, and everything in between.

How does that translate into music? I don’t hear so much “blues” on Porta Bohemica.
Whitley: I think this is a good stepping stone towards defining my own sound. That perception will keep changing all the time. I hope so, anyway. Otherwise, it would get really boring. I want to get more dynamism into my voice. The song “Salt” is a good example of what I mean. I never worry about genres, anyway – I never based my thinking strictly on the blues.

When you got to put the playlist together for a radio programme on Studio Brussels, your choices included Tinariwen, PJ Harvey, Bootsy Collins...and Aphex Twin. Surprising.
Whitley: [Laughs] I was a break-core fanatic. Aphex Twin was what you might call the pop star of that world. My record collection still includes a lot of underground electronica. Making music is an exercise in letting those influences filter in, without people hearing them. Otherwise, I would get stuck and the creativity would no longer flow in an authentic way.

And we get to hear the drops from that condensation in the new songs.
Whitley: Sure. The album is about that journey, the course I have taken and am still taking. I am 28 now: I wrote that letter when I was 26. That’s an age when, they say, you redefine yourself and ask yourself: who am I? That metamorphosis is very much reflected in Porta Bohemica. That’s good, I reckon, as I don’t want to pin down any final destination. I actually made two albums, by the way: I put the first one to one side and then started all over again.
Funnily enough, in the end I worked with different musicians from the ones I had sent that letter to. I wanted to carry over the live sound of my band at the end of the Fourth Corner tour into the studio, but that didn’t work. Right at the end of the recording sessions, I came across Gus Seyffert and Joey Waronker, two seasoned musicians who work with Beck and also collaborate with the Black Keys and Atoms for Peace. Then the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. My live band for the next tour will be a completely different one again. And the puzzle will have to be put together again then.
That evolution is essential: I always want to seek out new directions. Porta Bohemica certainly wasn’t an easy album to make: it was a really epic undertaking. But I found that was the best way of doing things. I’m proud, obviously, of the end result, but I won’t come back to it often. I want to start working already on the next album. Every creative venture offers the possibility of digging deeper. That constant quest is beautiful. I couldn’t do without it: I would feel really dead inside.

How did your entourage react to what you wrote to them?
Whitley: They all wrote back. Most of the guys I play with are much older than me. They fully understood me and said that they wished that they could have expressed it that way when they were that age. That they might have made a lot more progress if they had. The letter was a stimulus, for me, but also for them.

Would you write a different letter today?
Whitley: Probably. And I feel like starting it now!

TRIXIE WHITLEY
30/11 & 1/12, 20.00, Ancienne Belgique, www.abconcerts.be