"There's no use in putting crappy work out into the world."

Many would agree, but Mirah is one of few who actually follow through with the idea of producing only quality music for the world to hear. An American singer-songwriter, she went on a short European tour during the summer when Lee of KSDT met up with her in London to talk about many issues, about which she had much to say. A staple of the indie pop scene, Mirah was playing sets at a couple different locations of Ladyfest, a worldwide festival of female musicians, workshops for various women's issues, and all things feminist. Her most recent album, Advisory Committee, has been getting major play on KSDT, and Mirah stopped by to play live in the station last April. If you haven't heard her beautiful voice yet, be sure to check out any song on the album, because, as she strives to make true, every track is a masterpiece.

Interview conducted by Lee Meredith on August 2, 2002

My name is Mirah. Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn is my whole name. I am a musician on the K Records label. I've been putting out albums since '97, although, in my opinion, I work very slowly, so I only really have two full-length albums that I've made for the world. And I spend a lot of time wandering around places that I've never been, and getting slightly lost, but meeting lots of people, and looking around, like I'm doing here.

KSDT: How long have you been touring, and where have you gone, on this tour?
Mirah: Oh this tour is really short, and there's not shows every night cause I'm visiting friends partly. I flew into Amsterdam on the morning of the 28th, and played shows 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st in Amsterdam, Hanau and Damstadt Germany, and Paris, and now here. Then I have kind of a break. I'm gonna go visit some friends in Norway, and then we're driving to southern Sweden where I'm playing at two different festivals. So really there's only six shows in a three week trip, which is not that many. Usually, myself and the people that I know and tour with play every night.

KSDT: How is it touring in Europe versus the States?
Mirah: Well this is the first time I've ever done it; it's really interesting, really different. I went to Japan in April, and for touring in Japan we had a rail pass and just took the trains. It was really different to have to carry everything all the time. Touring the US, an incredibly automobile-centric country, you just live out of your car, and everything is made really convenient for that to be your mode of transport. It's really easy to get comfortable with that, just having your mobile unit pack animal with you all the time. In Japan we were kind of our own pack animals. It was great though. Here in Europe, traveling with the Haggard, we have a rental car, and in a certain way there are similarities to touring in North America, just by virtue of having the car, though driving on the left side of the road is kind of crazy. It's like that in Japan too, it's hard for me to try to re-train myself. When I cross the street as a pedestrian, I don't even know which way to look and I feel like I'm about to die.

KSDT: Could you talk about your first album (You Think It's Like This But Really It's Like This) versus your most recent album (Advisory Committee)?
Mirah: You mean in terms of their sound?
KSDT: Yeah, the new one sounds a lot different, it sounds like you've progressed.
Mirah: Well, I was going through an intense time personally and this made the subject matter more intense. I think that came across in the sound of the album, which is good. I did have this one-sided 12 inch that I put out on Yo Yo in '97. At that time, didn't really know what it was like to record music at all. I also didn't know what it was like to make something and have a thousand copies made of it, and then have a whole bunch of totally random people in the world have it, listening to you even though they don't even know you. I was still learning how to make a piece of work that was personal, and presentable, and that I could stand behind for a long time, because it's never gonna go away. There's no use in putting crappy work out into the world and I've always been very conscious of use and waste. I don't want to put out an album that has filler on it. I don't even like to make choruses for the songs half the time because I just want to say what I have to say, and say it once. That's not a total rule, I have songs with choruses. Anyways, I feel like through the process of making those three albums - Storageland, and the first K album, and then the most recent K album - I've been getting more focused about how I would like to present my work.

KSDT: How do you write your songs? Cause you have a lot of different styles.
Mirah: Usually it just comes out to be what it is. I listened to a lot of different music styles in my life. Even when I wrote Cold Cold Water I wasn't like, "I really want this to be just like an Italian Spaghetti Western epic movie soundtrack," I had never even seen one, I still haven't. But the songs themselves sometimes have a flavor of a certain style or genre, and sometimes that gets applied during the recording process. With Cold Cold Water, Phil and I could hear that that would be the obvious direction to go in recording. Sometimes I write while I'm playing the guitar, and sometimes I just sing something while taking a walk and then it's a song.

KSDT: Where are you from?
Mirah: I grew up right outside Philadelphia. When I was seventeen I moved to Olympia, Washington and then last November I moved away from Olympia. I've mostly been traveling since, but I aim to settle again in Philadelphia.

KSDT: Are you working on a new album right now?
Mirah: I've done a little bit of recording off and on. I don't have a whole album's worth of material that I'm in the process of recording. I haven't been writing very much because I've been traveling too much to write. That's a result of traveling for me; not enough personal space to get that done.

Mirah: People drive crazy here! That's what I notice a lot, going to different places. The roads here are all insane, they're all super curvy. In the car yesterday, when we were driving on all these loopy streets and it was two in the morning and we had been driving for twelve hours, except we had a break on the ferry, and we just wanted to go sleep and the girl who was giving directions, sitting in the front seat, was from here, or she's from France, but she lives here, and she was not very good at giving directions, and it was really late and frustrating and we were all tired, I was thinking about how the Japanese written language has these thousands of congee, these Chinese character letters, and then two alphabets and it has a reputaion for being a really cumbersome written language and how I'd read, maybe in an airplane magazine or something, that people in the US- english speakers, or romance language speakers or something- had this opinion about the difficult nature of the Japanese written language being something that would set Japanese people back from being able to operate in the world market on a competitive level because translating was really hard. But now the opinion is if you are a little kid and you grow up in Japan, and you are memorizing all these really intricate letters, all these congee and you've mastered that, then couldn't you then do anything? Don't you possess superpowers at that point? Even though London wasn't planned but just grew out over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, I might think, "who would make a city like this, with streets that you cannot possibly ever hope to be able to navigate with confidence?" But then I think about how the other way to look at is; if you are from London or you have lived here for a long time, and you do have an ability to just sort of wrap your brain around the whole mess of the city and make sense of it to yourself, then everywhere else in the world must seem accessible to you and possible for you to understand. Having a lack of confidence in your ability to master any subject or any activity is the greatest detriment to your being able to do that activity. It's not your skill level, it's not what you can and can't do, it's whether you think you can or can't do it. I was thinking about how it's great that New York City's a grid and anyone can figure it out, cause it's just numbered streets and avenues and it's mostly simple right angles, but if that's all you know how to do, if all you know how to do is figure things out the simplest way, then it can work against you. It can make you less keen.

KSDT: Could you talk a bit about Ladyfest?
Mirah: Interestingly, I was not involved in Ladyfest Olympia pretty much at all, even though I did live there at the time. There were a lot of different reasons for that. I actually did want to play, but it didn't work. Honestly, I never really liked the name but now that it's become more of a worldwide event and word usage, it holds less of the stigma of my own dislike. As a concept it's great, it's really great, and it's kind of exciting that it has this networking effect. We played at Ladyfest Amsterdam and one of the people who was a main organizer at that one was talking about how there's this whole network, all these Ladyfests happening in Europe. The one in Amsterdam was pretty small in scale compared to the one in Olympia where it was at the 700 person capacity Capital Theater and most shows sold out, but the energy in Amsterdam was so positive! I felt aligned with the politics of it. I don't even really know, I wasn't a part of that festival at all, I just really liked the people who were putting it on, so that gives me the feeling that I could be aligned with all of the politics of it. Ladyfests are a good thing because of how they tend to be really diy. It's true that the Ladyfest in Olympia did have some corporate funding of some kind, and there were some of us, including myself, who were like, "umm, eh, not my style,". But at the Amsterdam one, it was really just people who had a desire to do a thing and did the thing all by themselves. Girls, women, lady kinda people. And the Ladyfest San Francisco, where I played last week was really great. I appreciated that on all of their flyers and information posters they were very clear about it being a women and tranny organized event. Comparitively, it seemed that the community of people who were putting on ladyfest Amsterdam weren't really part of a trans-oriented community, so their gender discussion workshop was more about, "what are the problems between men and women?" To me that sounds really kind of '70s consciousness raising group - issues between men and women, and gender, still totally valid things to talk about, but it's just a language, and culture, and community difference. I've been living in the Northwest for basically my whole adult life so far, and if I was going to a gender workshop I would expect it to address trans issues and how you interpret your own gender, rather than "what are the problems between men and women?" It's one of the great things about traveling, to just see where other people are at, and learn things from them, and have them learn things from you. It's funny that I didn't play at Ladyfest Olympia although I lived there, but subsequently I've played at Ladyfest San Francisco and Ladyfest Amsterdam, and I'm about to play at Ladyfest London.

KSDT: Could you talk about your views of independent music today?
Mirah: I was thinking recently about my relationship to the independent music scene, which in this way feels really incidental. I didn't know I was gonna move to Olympia, I didn't even play guitar when I moved there, I didn't know anything about the music scene. I didn't grow up around any cool kids who wrote zines, and I didn't do neat things like organize events or have a radio show on my local radio station. Those things weren't a part of my world growing up but I feel that I've grown into my appreciation of diy scene and independent music after being a part of it. It wasn't like I went to all the workshops at the diy conference and then I was like, "I'm gonna make my own zine!" and then I was like, "I'm gonna play guitar!" and then I was like, "this riot girl thing is cool!" I was never in riot girl and I've never written a zine. There's a lot of things that seem very basic as part of the whole independent music scene that I still feel like I don't really know very much about, but that i've come to appreciate as a result of sort of incidentally putting out these records and then feeling really supported by this network of people. I am supported, I mean financially supported, and emotionally supported, by this huge network of people. Every time I've ever gone on tour, if I'm looking for a show somewhere I'll post a thing on the internet that says "I'm looking for a show in Kalamazoo, can anyone help me?" And people start writing. I think it's incredible. I think it's really incredible to feel like the world is a little bit smaller, and a little bit safer than it would be without networks of people who are fiercely independent and absolutely supportive.

website: www.krecs.com