Mia Doi Todd

The first song I ever wrote was based on a novella by Italo Calvino. I don't remember how to play it or the other songs I wrote then, teaching myself how to play guitar, finding my voice, my own rhythm. Indie rock was in full swing; everybody was doing it themselves, so I joined in. There was an all-ages club in LA called Jabberjaw.? My friends and I would go there, see the new bands from all over the country.

I moved to New Haven, Connecticut in 1993 to attend Yale University. Being from Los Angeles, I was accustomed to mild winters, long summers, palm trees and freeways for miles.? New England was a surprise.? I wrote songs about nature, first loves, heartbreaks and discovered my role as a bard, a folksinger, in the traditions of William Blake, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Nico, Caetano Veloso, Sinead O'Connor.

My first album, The Ewe and The Eye, was recorded at the Spaceshed, the recording studio/garage belonging to the LA band Further.? It came out on their label, Xmas Records, in the spring of 1997, as I was graduating from college. I moved to New York City and started playing in clubs. Elliot Smith and the Palace Brothers were big influences at the time. That fall, I recorded my second album, come out of your mine, which was released on The Communion Label in 1999.

Another great love of mine is dance, in particular Ankoku Butoh, an avant-garde performance art movement which started in Tokyo in the 1960?s.? I lived in Japan for most of 1998, studying first with Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno and at Asbestos-kan, and then with Min Tanaka at Body Weather Farm. Life in Tokyo is fast-paced and futuristic. I speak rudimentary Japanese, but my means of outward expression was greatly diminished that year. English became very precious to me, and I started to write longer songs, more intricate and complex. Back at home in LA, I recorded these and other songs myself on a Mac G4 and started City Zen Records to release my third album, zeroone, in 2001.

My first three albums are solo acoustic recordings, intimate and unadorned. That is the way I write songs?with my guitar or at the piano, finding a pattern I like, how it changes and then staring at the wall until the melody and the lyrics appear. When the song reaches (or best approximates) its Platonic ideal, I congratulate it and let it be.

Over the years, I have performed so many times with just my guitar, sometimes a keyboard. I like to play in between loud bands, be the calm after the storm, before the hurricane. But the existence of a solo performer implies its opposite, fantasia in soundscape, and I started to play with a band. They had been called Los Cincos and were renamed Syncopation. Sadly, we never recorded much.

I signed a contract with Sony/Columbia, home to some of my idols (or at least their masters), and we recorded ?The Golden State,? culling songs from my previous albums. Mitchell Froom and Yves Beauvais helped me produce it. We recorded at the Sunset Sound Factory, a beautiful old studio, all analog. Many people played on it, including my friends Kraig Grady and the guitar-virtuoso Nels Cline. The Golden State came out in the fall of 2002 and was generally well received, though one writer did call me "jaw-droppingly pretentious". For a year, I toured the US and Europe, on my own and then with Alaska! and Lou Barlow's Folk Implosion. Alas, Sony chose not to renew my contract. But it was time to write songs again. I looked inside myself, drank lots of water. Out came the buds; some turned to flowers.

Manzanita. That is my new album. It is also the name the Spanish gave to a round-leaved bush with smooth, red bark and tiny, bell-shaped blossoms, that grows all over California and the Pacific Coast; they looked to them like little apple trees. My dear friend Brent Rademaker (Further, Beachwood Sparks, Frausdots), who recorded and released my first album, listened to my demos and helped me produce the new songs. We recorded up in Lake Hollywood with Rob Campanella. Many of the songs are still just voice and guitar or piano but others are totally rockin. Brent played bass as well as some guitar and piano. On drums and percussion were Hunter Crowley, Rick Menck, and Nelson Bragg. Members of Dead Meadow and Beachwood Sparks made cameo appearances, and the entire band Future Pigeon backed me up rocksteady on track 6.? Rob engineered all the while, came up with great ideas, and played electric guitar, piano, dulcimer and mandolin.

Manzanita is coming out February 2005 on Plug Research Records. How time flies! I'll be on tour next year, maybe in your town. In the meantime, I'm always playing shows here and there.