Little Scream stands on her own by Diana Prelevic on August 11th, 2009
by Aurora Prelevic
Laurel Sprengelmeyer, musical alias Little Scream, knows what she’s doing, and why she’s doing it. The former is clear to anyone lucky enough to have seen her perform, but if you ever get the chance to talk to her about her music, the latter comes up just as strongly. In the space of a year, Little Scream has become one of Montreal’s most eagerly talked-about-in-hushed-tones artists. People are muttering in anticipation over the rumored-forthcoming album, and since none of her music is available online, that means the buzz is spreading entirely from privileged peeks at performances. I got the delightful chance to speak with Little Scream recently about recording, performing, painting, impersonating instruments, frontiers of fear, urgency, great old Blues names and gun-toting Mexican priests, among other things. If we can’t have it in song form yet, here are some scraps in words I humbly provide to satiate us ‘til then. As for the anxious anticipation, I’ve only just joined the club…
***
“I’m so compelled to express musically,” she told me, “I always have music in my mind, it’s just a really natural form of expression for me. But because I’m so shy on a certain level, it forces me to exist in this real moment, you know, like a real kind of terrifying moment when I perform, that’s just, kind of, incomparable, in a lot of ways.” I’m not the only one intrigued, I know, because the reviews echo a similar note:
“Her vocals are mesmerizing and raw, performed with an intimacy that is almost embarrassing, as though you were eavesdropping on someone else’s deeply personal conversation. Her sound is complex and difficult to pigeonhole, though it has shades of both classic rock and something more melancholic,” was posted by Olivier on midnightpoutine.ca after her February 4, 2009 performance opening for The Dears at St. James Church in Montreal.
So how has this shy songstress risen from her self-imposed artistic seclusion to leave such a strong impression in such a short time span? “I’m a naturally shy person and a naturally musical person, which is a weird combination in music because it actually physically and literally expresses this frontier of fear for me. The fear of exposure, of having myself be in public.” Judging on the public’s reception of her performances, it is on this precipice that she expresses—and connects—best.
***
Little Scream has been playing music all her life, but she is also a trained visual artist, and has been painting as her primary artistic vehicle for almost a decade in Montreal. Though the two forms of expression seem diverse, in Little Scream’s experience, they are indelibly linked, and not only in terms of content:
“That’s part of why I got into painting, because you can just hide behind it, entirely. You have your creative process and it’s very private, and then you can display it, but you don’t even have to be there, it can exist entirely without you. Doing music publicly, for me, is, like… there’s this kind of real transformation. It’s like climbing a mountain or something. It’s terrifying, and that’s part of where the expression and the beauty of it comes out, for me. Because I feel that it’s quite imperfect… I like to explore the beauty in imperfection.”
If the imperfection-cum-beauty of performance is what she’s seeking, the results are coming out mirrored to her approach. Though to Little Scream, it has taken her years to concentrate primarily on making music, in the music world of scenes and stages, she is moving up remarkably quickly. She’d only done a handful of performances on her own when she launched into performing as an opening act for such well established locals as Land of Talk this Winter, and Bell Orchestre, more recently.
“It’s been rough, too, because I started opening right away for some really good shows.” Rough? We gawk, did she really just say that? But she defends her stance well: “it’s been, in my opinion, sort of rough because I still feel like I’m in the process of really honing it [the live show] and shaping what I want it to sound like, what I want the experience to be like.”
Figuring this stuff out as she plays, Little Scream is throwing herself right at that frontier of fear music incites in her. She’s put her self-professed shy self right into the most dreaded position of learning publicly what she wants her music to sound like. As an emotive performer, what comes out lives changes based on what she’s feeling so much that it exacerbates that uncertainty. It also, incidentally, increases that very beauty in imperfection Little Scream seeks to strum out.
“When it is just you there’s nothing to hide behind, and no one to hide behind. If you have weak moments that has to be part of it. I guess I’ve tried to turn that into an aesthetic as much as possible.”
***
Little Scream didn’t intend to be a solo performer. She was originally playing accompanied by a friend, but when that friend split town, she decided to try it out. “I did a couple shows just with me playing things and there was something really neat and intimate about it. So what I’ve done with my live set is worked it so that I can pull it off completely on own. There’s something that sort of works about the tone of the music and the vulnerability of just being a single performer.” This commentary begs the bafflement that many feel watching her play: how can one woman produce such a complex, emotive, full, and entirely difficult-to-pin-down sound?
“Because in my mind I had always imagined these other instruments playing with me,” she explains, “so what I started to do was try to approximate those instruments, sometimes with my voice. I’d be, like, singing a part, but then I would sing over it right after the part that in my mind was keyboard, or second guitar, or whatever. I started stomping my foot a lot, or just like, trying to play on guitar both the bass and the rhythm part. If I had any way to do it, I just started trying to play those other sounds, which ultimately just became this whole other aesthetic. Because people don’t hear outside of my head like ‘oh that’s supposed to be a keyboard part,’ you just see this person making this sound with their voice, which is kind of cool.”
Although it wasn’t her original intention, it’s become a goal for Little Scream: “It’s just so liberating to know that I can do it on my own.” As a part of the one-woman-show schema, she recently got an old boom box on which she tape records her own backup vocals and drum bits taken from the studio. She then brings it on stage and just presses play when she’s in need of company. “I call it the world’s smallest band, and I just, like, mic it.”
This creative band-aid mechanism is just one piece in the puzzle; Little Scream is building a veritable live effect out of her greatest challenge. “I’m only intimidated by myself and by performing,” she says humbly, honestly. That challenge she is facing, embracing. She’s not surmounting it, but playing with it. And out of that tension—between shyness and performance, between a tendency towards introversion and an impulse to just open-your-mouth-up-and-sing—Little Scream is creating a true, and a beautiful thing. It is felt in the raw, open lilt of her voice, transferred to her simultaneous multi-instrumental groping, and kept apace by the pulsing spontaneous rhythm of her foot-stomping frenetic need to express.
***
Is that where the Little Scream moniker comes from? I couldn’t help but ask. She laughs. “It just kind of came up. Like I didn’t struggle with the name or anything, I just kind of thought of it like ‘oh, Little Scream, yeah, that’s who I am… it just sort of seemed like the right descriptor of what I was trying to do in some ways. I didn’t over-think it or anything, it just kind of seemed to make sense.”
Ok, so there’s a bit of a back-story to this one, and it’s too sweet not to spill. “My little sister and I—she lives in the Midwest [of the U.S.] still, and so we don’t get to see each other that often—but whenever we get together, we always create a band for a couple days.” Oh, the two sisters from Iowa reunited and spinning songs together—it’s too good to be true! But it gets better. “Historically, all of our bands names were, like, Big Unit, or Little Leaf—all ‘big’ and ‘little’ stuff. So I think when I was thinking of a name, I was just thinking ‘big’ and ‘little’ stuff.”
“And I was listening to a lot of the old Blues guys,” she continues, “you know, Lightning Hopkins, and, like, Howling Wolf—they always have great names. And I was like ‘Little Scream,’ it just kind of seemed to fit in that whole genre of titles, you know?” How could I have been so shortsighted? Naturally, I should have made the Blues moniker connection…
***
What’s a gal to do, then, without her sister? “As an artist, I’m a painter and that’s such a solitary kind of thing, you know, like you just create in your own space, and I know that I tend to approach music a little bit from that perspective, too. It’s just sort of natural for me in some ways to like have it come out of that solitary instinct.” Aside from building her sound through live performance, however, she is also (yes, I can hear your sighs of relief) working on a full studio album. And in the studio, “it’s all among friends,” she says.
Richard Reed Parry is her partner in recording crime: he is producing the album in his home studio, where they’re working with sound engineer Marcus Paquin. Richy is also sitting in on drums on several tracks, with Mike Feuerstack, aka Snailhouse, playing black steel guitar when need be, and her dear friend Jess Robertson playing the bass flute from time to time. “It makes the most gorgeous melancholy sound,” she gushes over this uncommon instrument. Having Robertson, Parry and others in her recording space has created a familial comfort zone, allowing her multi-layered music to resonate.
Though we’re all antsy about it—when will we get to hear some of these recordings? –Little Scream’s keeping calm. “It’s kind of nice to have the time to let it come together naturally, to give things space. Ultimately, I just want something that I’m going to be, like, happy with ten years from now. So if it takes a couple months longer—even like a year longer than I thought it would—it’s totally worth it.”
***
So the wait is due to even parts shyness, allowing things to organically come about and, you know, her producer’s a bit busy—whatever. But the more she performs, the more we want to hear! No matter: Little Scream is patient, if we can’t be. She thinks it’s funny when I probe her on the lack of a myspace—or anything else!—online for us to peruse in the interim. Clearly, I am not the first to pose the question. No, she assured me, she’s not purposely being mysterious by not making any of her music available online.
“It sort of, like, inadvertently has become kind of a thing where people are like, ‘oh, it’s purposely obscure’ or whatever. It’s partly ‘cause I started doing public shows when I was just starting out and I just didn’t have anything ready. Now I’m just kind of, like, I just want things to be in order, you know. People can wait,” and Little Scream lets out a little laugh. She continues to answer the question in all seriousness, however, because this aspect of making music, too, is considered and ingrained in her creative process:
“It’s mainly because I wanted this to be more about doing rather than talking. As soon as I have recordings that I want people to hear publicly, that I’m ready to share with people, then I’m going to make that all available. But until that point, it’s music that I’m doing, and it should be just about the music. For me, it’s all about the creative process, and giving it the time and space to all come together.”
***
For all her calm and patience in the studio, there is a definite sense of urgency to Little Scream’s music. This is felt in the foot stomping and haunting, layered vocal distortions, but it’s in her personal impetus to create, too. “It’s just something that I always expected I would do,” she says, addressing the ‘why music now?’ question.
“I got to a point where I was like ‘wow I can’t believe I haven’t, like, picked this up again or done this yet.’ I’ve always been kind of waiting for the right moment and I realized that if I didn’t just start doing it then it would never be the right moment.”
As a result, a lot of her songs come from pieces collected over the years. “I have notebooks and notebooks of years of song fragments and ideas and lyrics and all these things kind of all over, and I was like ‘ok, time to collect all of these and, you know, just do stuff with it, like, move with it.’ I had this real sense of urgency about it, and that’s how I started. Which was great, because that urgency just kind of, like, really, really made me work hard to put all the pieces together, to be where I am now.”
***
Oh but it’s all too much to bear the anticipation! Won’t you share just a snippet, I begged, like, perhaps, what are your songs about? Can I ask such a dry, uninteresting question? I worry. Only when there’s never a dry, uninteresting answer, of course.
“It’s a combination of things,” she begins, as I sigh a sigh of relief, “like some of them are very experience-based, like about facing the depths of my own fear or sadness. About having hopefulness despite feeling like the world has left you behind. I’m thinking of one song in particular, called ‘The Heron and The Fox.’ That’s one that’s quite literal, but then there’s a larger, emotional theme that transcends the literal things that are referenced in it.” Oh my. But there’s more!
“Then there’s also something like a song called ‘Guyegaros’ which is inspired by this story that I heard about this this Catholic priest in Mexico who wears snakeskin boots and plays guitar and carries pistols because he’s in this really, really tough area. So he’s kind of like this bandolero or something, but he’s a priest. And the people in the area just love him because he helped them build bridges and takes care of them, but he also, like, totes pistols, and plays guitar to them. I read this quote that this woman said about him, she was like ‘When I hurt my foot, he came over and he helped me and he built our roads and our bridges and [in Little Scream’s best Mexican accent] he’s such a good singer.’”
She laughs, again, and adds, in genuine wonderment: “It’s just so great that they would just like add that in with all of the other stuff. In my mind, it was just this very cinematic, Quentin Tarantino-style, film kind of thing. So I just, sort of, wrote a song about that character of this priest.”
***
And with these fragments, I leave you to wait like the impatient children that we all are.
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Magnifique!
Posted by Aaron Kopff on on August 12, 2009
Oui! Oui!
Posted by Agi Gutkowska on on August 13, 2009