Composer, singer/songwriter and multiinstrumentalist DYAN has just unleashed her latest single "Steady Hand". The song is off her upcoming album Midwest which details the artist's journey of leaving Los Angeles for Ohio where she and her partner are raising their son.
With "Steady Head", DYAN writes a powerful and emotive song filled with melancholy rich acoustic guitars, folk-laced warm vocals, and stunning layered melodies. Slow-burned fuzzy guitars and unique woodwinds add to the dreamy lush soundscapes making for an intoxicating listen. DYAN is the musical project of Canada born and bred Alexis Dyan Marsh. The artist has made a name for herself as a composer writing and scouring for the hit TNT drama Animal Kingdom and feature films The Unknown Country and NextGen. With a knack for writing compelling narratives and honest storytelling, DYAN is an important voice in the indie folk landscape. We chat with the songwriter all about her creative process, upcoming full length album and move to middle America.
Hi DYAN, congrats on your new single "Steady Hand". Can you tell our readers what the song is about thematically?
"Steady Hand" is about loving someone without recognition – either wholly or of what you're losing or putting on hold to support their happiness. In a way you're happy to make that choice, but sometimes you sort of wake up and wonder if you actually want to continue with that dynamic or if you can risk losing that love by asking for more out of the relationship or maybe outside of the relationship.
With "Steady Hand" I hear so many different musical genres and influences. What inspired the sound on this track?
Looking for Knives relied heavily on production and synths to make the songs come alive, but I found the songs hard to reproduce live. For this next album, Midwest, I wanted the songs to start with a guitar part I could play on my own, without a lot of editing or processing. From there, I started listening for other tracks that had a similar guitar sound that I was after – the polyrhythmic strums on The Flaming Lip's Do You Realize? or George Harrison's My Sweet Lord. I heard Lykke Li's I Never Learn toward the end of tracking the guitars and loved the energy of the strumming so inserted something similar for the outro when I wanted to bring in a sense of release, of diving into that pool.
You are a well known composer for film and TV. How is this creative process different from writing a song?
Writing to picture fills in a lot of information that you have to conjure and decide on alone. The emotion or the intention is there in the performance or the editing or the cinematography, and my job is to support that. With a song, that information is made up or inspired by an image or a situation I come across in life – I use the lyrics to tell the story and the instruments and production to make the world that story lives in. I love working with the team on film and television, but there's a time for stepping back and making your own private little movie.
If you could collaborate with any artist alive or dead, who would that be and why?
I would write a woodwind piece for an Agnes Martin installation.
"Steady Hand" is off of your upcoming highly anticipated album Midwest. What can listeners expect with the new full length?
Midwest is the answer to Looking For Knives – what happened after I jumped out of one life and into another – the tension of living in the middle of America after believing for so long that the coasts were the best places to make music, but the opportunity to give my son a more stable childhood in a city where we could, like, afford, to put money away for his schooling or sign him up for pottery classes; the challenge of staying with a partner when you're at odds with each other, learning to communicate what you need, learning to accept your differences, finding a way forward when you can't see straight; being a mother in a place that seems to deify motherhood on paper and condemn it in reality, the rage; being an irreligious person in a religious society and making friends with folks you once assumed were antagonists, wanting to question that culture without hurting people you've come to care about.
How does this album differ from your debut album?
The main difference is how each song is rooted in my guitar playing. I learned to play relatively late, I think, around 33-35 years old. The score for the tv show I was working on, Animal Kingdom, was centered in distorted guitar so I had to learn how to write for that orchestration, but because there was so much music to write and record without a lot of time (each episode was scored within a week), I had to record the parts too. That combined with a deep discomfort with playing DYAN songs live led me to spend a year or so just practicing guitar and learning songs. I still love incorporating synths and weird fx to create sonic textures, but I wanted my playing to be at the core of the album.
You mentioned that you recently moved from Los Angeles to Ohio. How has this move and scenery change affected your writing process?
Ohio, at the time I moved, was so much cheaper to live in than LA that part of the reason I left was so that if/when Animal Kingdom finished, I could take a break from that work to write and produce the next DYAN album. When I lived in LA, there was only ever time to find the next gig. I found it hard to think about much else. Living in Ohio has given me more time to write, practice, and experiment with recording, which I think has given me more confidence to work independently without relying on a label, producer, mixer to validate what I'm trying to do.
Finally, what do you hope our readers will take away from listening to your new music?
It took a long time for me to see Looking For Knives as a legit album – I had some notion that albums were put out by labels, produced by men. It took years of people sending encouraging notes for me to understand how the music went out and found homes with people who used it in short films or art projects or however they listened to it. I hope this album is enjoyed in the same way – I hope they drive away from something with it on.
Connect with DYAN: INSTAGRAM
