The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.
Juliana Daugherty is a writer. Though it can be, that isn’t always the hallmark of an emerging musician, but in Daugherty’s case her skillful, glistening lyrics are almost as arresting as the carefully contemplated, quietly finger-picked melodies that accompany the words on her debut album, Light. Contrary to what a listener often expects, Daugherty says she writes her lyrics second, to accompany a melody that is already in place. Perhaps this is why they immediately stand out, they are precisely carved to dovetail with the music instead of vice versa.
After moving to Charlottesville, Virginia to pursue an MFA program in poetry, Daugherty also got involved with the thriving local music scene and began to parse her role as a writer in more mediums than one. Before pursuing a solo project, she played in and with other bands in the area, following a natural inclination, as music was always in her blood. Raised by a trumpeter father and a violist mother, Daugherty spent some time in a classical conservatory as a teenager but ultimately found that exhaustive approach didn’t work for her. Picking up the more casual relationship that a band offers, eventually, she also began listening to some of her favorite singers — Sharon Van Etten is one — and striving to emulate her favorite inflections.
All these elements come together on Light to create a debut that’s quite extraordinary in tone and structure. Influenced by vocalists with burnished and flitting vocals like Van Etten, her tone her evokes other contemporaries like Angel Olsen, or even Mitski. But Daugherty’s voice retains its own precious, pearly quality, like something that could only grow with special care, hidden away from the world. Her lyrics, on the other hand, possess a quiet and unflickering fierceness, they are sharp without any bite, stoic without apathy.
The feel of the record hews closest to folk, staying within the realm of soft strings, patient harmonies, and the occasional percussive flourish, but it burns beyond the bounds of that ancient genre, surfacing as one of the most surprising, gorgeous pieces of personal commentary I’ve heard this year. Recently, I corresponded with Daugherty over email about her background and how her debut album came to be. Read our conversation below.
You initially moved to Charlottesville, Virginia to pursue an MFA in poetry, yet ended up focusing on music there as well. How do you balance those two aspects as far as academic work, your poetry and your songwriting?
This is something I’m still trying to figure out. It feels important that I do work in both genres, but I’ve found that I’m not able to hold both of them in my brain at once — poetry tends to distract me from songwriting, and songwriting tends to distract me from poetry. When I was writing songs for the record, I made a conscious decision to put all other creative pursuits on hold for at least full year. Only after I put poetry completely out of my mind was I able to focus my creative energy and attention on music. It’s hard to remove that barricade, though — as of now, it’s been more like three years, and I feel like I’m only just remembering how to write poems again.
Tell me a little bit about your background prior to Charlottesville, you grew up in a very musical family, was it always a given that you’d be musical too? Can you tell me a little bit about your time at the conservatory at what prompted you to leave?
I think everyone would have been wildly surprised if I’d ended up with no musical inclination at all. My parents are both professional musicians, so we all took lessons from an early age. I was always quick to pick a new instrument up (literally — I played a lot of instruments, each for a very short time), but wasn’t at all invested in practicing until midway through high school, when I suddenly and inexplicably started practicing the flute for hours every day.
I was accepted into the conservatory on the basis of potential, not skill — I had been playing seriously for a couple of years, when most of my classmates had been playing for eight years, or ten, or twelve. I don’t think I was prepared for the level of commitment that would be expected of me there (our professor wanted us all practicing eight hours a day) and I didn’t have the skills to cope with the physical and emotional burnout I very quickly came up against. I think a lot of the reason it fell apart was just circumstance — I might have thrived if I’d had a different teacher, or if I’d been 19 instead of 17, or if I’d been just a little more well-adjusted. I did have plenty of wonderful, weird, talented friends there, and it was pretty magical to be surrounded with people who were obsessed with the same things I was obsessed with. But it just wasn’t working.
Was singing always a part of your relationship to music? Your voice is one of my favorite parts of your music, but the info shared about your experience focused more on instruments and classical music, while your vocals have a very contemporary feel.
I think I always liked to sing, but I was painfully self-conscious about it and mostly refused to sing in public. I sang along to everything, in private. I never studied voice or sang in a choir. When I first started singing in a band, which wasn’t until I was in my early twenties, I was very good at singing in tune, and that was about it — I didn’t really have any control over the aesthetics of my voice. But being a “singer” made me start listening to other singers intentionally for really the first time — to listen to the voice as an instrument. I was very much obsessed with Sharon van Etten at the time, and I remember listening to her sing and thinking “how can I make my voice do what hers is doing?” I would go on these aimless late-night drives all the time just so that I could practice in my car, mostly by trying to emulate singers I loved.
When did you begin writing poetry, and how did the decision to pursue that on a graduate level unfold?
I’ve written poetry since I was a kid in Montessori school, but I hadn’t really engaged with it in a “serious” way until I was in college, when I decided to take an introductory poetry writing course on a whim. I think it did something to my brain. Writing a poem felt like casting a spell, and I needed that feeling. I think graduate school would have happened either way, but it happened when it did largely by coincidence: My graduation from college happened to coincide with the economic recession, and I couldn’t find a decent job or figure out what to do with myself. I was living in an unfinished basement in Asheville, North Carolina, working part-time at an after-school program for minimum wage. So I decided to apply to graduate programs. Poetry was the only thing I could think of that I knew how to do.
Your commentary about the way mental illness intersects with your music has been to negate the beauty in depression, yet the music you’ve made is quite beautiful. How does that tension play out for you, artistically?
The products of suffering can be beautiful, certainly, but I want to challenge the idea that the suffering is what makes the beauty, or that the beautiful product somehow justifies the suffering or makes it meaningful. If art about suffering is beautiful, it’s because people are driven to make beautiful things — people are driven to make meaning. But suffering itself has no beauty or meaning. There’s a line about this in a Randall Jarrell poem [90 North] that has stayed in my head since the first time I read it: “…Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom. It is pain.”
Do you think mental illness in music and other creative forms has been fetishized in a negative way?
Absolutely. I think the “tortured artist” trope is destructive for many reasons. It trivializes mental illness by romanticizing it. It discourages artists who are struggling from getting treatment, because of the fear of that their creative output will be affected somehow. It’s connected to the way we devalue art that isn’t “heavy” or “serious” enough, which is connected to the way we devalue women’s art (though that’s a whole conversation of its own).
It’s also important to remember that the people writing about mental illness aren’t typically writing from inside it. One of the things that has always characterized my own depressive episodes is a complete lack of energy, which translates into an inability to make work. A (very problematic) metaphor that comes to mind here is of drawing water from a well — you might someday pull something illuminating up from the well of suffering, but you can’t pull from the well if you are in the well. You have to get out of the well first.
Before your solo release, you’d previously played in other bands. How did that experience inform making this record?
Without the experience of playing in other bands, I don’t think it would have ever occurred to me that I might be able to write my own songs. I had a toe in the water for a long time before I gave it a shot. All bands seem to have some quality of outward drift — everyone is always veering off to take up their own side projects, and then sometimes veering back, and then veering off again. I think I thought I was somehow unqualified to write my own songs, but then I realized that the drummer had his own project, and the guitarist had a project, and the bassist had one — why did I not have a project?
I’m infinitely grateful to all the people in those bands, and I still get to play with most of them, which is great. I’ve also loved getting to collaborate with them in new ways. Recently I’ve been working on an EP of traditionals with my friend Guion Pratt, whom I play with in a band called Nettles, which is putting some of my weirder folky tendencies to good use.
Can you tell me a little bit about the recording process for the record? It has a hushed intimacy that is immediately palpable.
Almost everything on the record was recorded at the home of my producer and dear friend Colin Killalea. This was mostly a financial decision (studios are expensive!), but it wound up affecting the whole process really significantly. We worked pretty slowly, over a long period of time, which I think wound up being important in that we were able to try a lot of different things. The songs were super rough demos—mostly recorded late at night, in my bedroom, while my housemates were sleeping—and it took a while to figure out what some of them needed. I had only shared these demos with Colin and a small handful of other friends—they felt like secret songs. We were also in a small room, with minimal equipment, and it was mostly just us. It makes sense that the intimacy of that setting would be reflected in the music.
Were these songs written together over a succinct period of time, or are they drawn from many different eras of your life?
All the songs on the record were written within a period of about a year and a half. These were really the first songs I’d ever written, so I didn’t have much in the way of older material to draw from. We just chose the ten that seemed to work best out of the bunch.
The artwork for your record is so arresting, I wanted to ask about the artist behind it if it wasn’t you, and why you were drawn to this imagery for the album?
The artwork was created specifically for this record. It’s by Tracy Maurice, a visual artist based in Montreal, who happens to be a friend of my producer. When I reached out to Tracy, I had some very general ideas about what I wanted the record to look like — naturalistic imagery, neutral colors, but with some element of starkness or strangeness. I also wanted a kind of visual reflection of the themes of light and darkness that are everywhere in the music. Tracy came up with the idea of photographing a mineral sphere — the one on the cover is jasper — and manipulating it through several variations. I think the finished product works resonates really beautifully with the sonic landscape of the record. In many ways it’s very organic and naturalistic, but it also has an element of the unfamiliar and the otherworldly. Tracy is good at what she does.
Do you have a personal favorite song on the album that stands out to you? If so, which one and why?
I’m a big fan of “Sweetheart,” partly because it almost didn’t make it onto the record (I couldn’t figure out where to go with the melody at the end), and partly because of how desolate and lonely and perfect the synths sound, which is all thanks to our friend Daniel Clarke. But “California” is probably my favorite track — it sounds the most like itself, to me. It’s not particularly showy or polished, but it feels like its own little world.
Anything else you want to add, that you want people to know/feel about your music that I didn’t ask or touch on?
Music comes before lyrics for me, in my own writing and in listening to other people’s. I think people tend to assume because of my background that I’m a lyrics-first kind of writer, which would be logical, but in fact the music drives the lyrics for me, and not the other way around.
