Eleanor Friedberger just released Rebound, a new synth-fueled odyssey of emotional rumination. The musician’s toasty warm vocals married with '80s-era instrumentation easily evokes Stevie Nicks in all her retro charm. Friedberger proves an engaging songwriter set on reinventing a past aesthetic.

I had the pleasure to speak with the NYC-based artist over the phone, where she discussed her time spent in Greece as an inspiration for her new album, and the twists and turns of honing her songwriting.

Indie Shuffle: Could you tell me about the title of the new album? Where did it come from?

Eleanor Friedberger: Rebound is a name of a nightclub in Athens, where I spent a lot of time last year. I had a very informative experience there, an inspiring experience. It was a very memorable place. I try to have all my albums have double meanings. So 'rebound,' it means a lot to a lot of different people. The first thing that obviously comes to mind is, "Oh, she’s on the rebound." Another thing might be love or a relationship, which is not the case for me right now, or what I meant for the album, but I like that it can mean a lot of different things—including playing basketball. (laughs) It was mostly about coming out of the end of 2016—I felt like it would be irresponsible to not try to make something without evoking some sort of feeling about our situation. I just feel like everyone who’s making stuff will have to react to what’s happened in our country in the last year.

My mother’s Greek-American. I’ve spent a lot of time in Greece over the past twenty years. But I hadn’t spent a lot of time in the city of Athens, and I had always wanted to. So I spent a couple months there. It was interesting to come out of this country and feel like things have gone so wrong, and then to go to this place where things are so deeply, deeply, deeply wrong and so troubled—with the economic crisis there, it’s so much worse in so many ways. But it’s also so much more optimistic. I have this romantic idea of New York City, and what it was like in the '70s and '80s. And I never got to experience that. But then you go to a place like Athens where it’s almost still like that. There’s still smoking everywhere. There’s still a lot of DIY venues. It just feels a lot more lawless, including going to this after-hours club called Rebound on Saturday nights, which’s only open starting at 2 A.M. I don’t go to places like that in my normal life, so it was inspiring. The exoticism of it all. The gritty exoticism. The Parthenon is in sight from most places. So there’s this bizarre mix of decadence and destruction. It’s an interesting place.

I read you got together with Clemens Knieper for the creation of the the album. Did the two of you sit down and do it all at once? What was that like?

I actually made demos by myself first. That was kind of a lengthy process—lengthier than I had done in the past. I almost made it so that was the album. I sat on it for a few months, and then shared those demos with him. And then we set about deciding what things we needed to rerecord, which things we were going to keep. But we used all those demos as the templates for all the songs. So in some ways, it made it easier, in some ways it made it more difficult. It was a combination of stuff I recorded myself on my computer, and stuff I recorded at this studio.

How did you decide to transition into such heavy electronic instrumentation? For instance, the pulsating synth that starts off “Make Me a Song” is just brilliant.

I actually recorded my previous album with Clemens too, and that was because he has this converted barn that’s a studio. It’s the quintessential upstate New York setting—that '60s sound. Think analog tape machine. I recorded that last album with my touring band, and it was as organic and natural as possible. So working in reaction to that, I wanted to do the polar opposite. I wanted to have the most unnatural, artificial sounds. There were hardly any amps used. It was mostly digital. That was because I was wanting to do something different, but it was also because it best reflected how I was feeling and what I wanted the songs to feel like—to really create a sense of alienation and disappointment.

I’m not an '80s music lover. In terms of that sound of synths and drum machines—that’s never been my thing. So it’s interesting to work with those restrictions. It’s a challenge. I bought a Casio keyboard in December of 2016. I had already started writing some songs, but I had been writing songs the way I always had. You know—some lyric ideas first, then I’d pick up the guitar, and I’d set the words to some sort of chord progression. But then I started writing songs on keyboard without any lyrics in mind. Just trying to write melodies that I really liked, and set up whole pieces with the drum, the bass, and everything. And then I wrote the lyrics afterwards. It was the complete opposite way of working. But it definitely gave the songs this kind of moodiness.

Who are some of your influences?

I’ve listened to Stereolab recently, which is a band I hadn’t listened to in a long time. I’m not saying the album sounds like Stereolab, but definitely in terms of those rudimentary keyboard parts. I was introduced to this '80s electronic Greek artist named Lena Platonos, who was one of the first minimalist electronic musician in Greece. She definitely was an influences. Suicide—and their sort of sound is pretty ubiquitous now—but I got to spend some time with Martin Rev from Suicide a couple years ago, and he made a big impression on me.

I’d like to talk about “Make Me a Song” for a moment because the music video is so captivating. The narrative of a woman finding ways to be at peace with herself through self-care is particularly of interest.

Scott Jacobson, who directed the video, is someone I’ve worked with a bunch in the past. He’s a comedy writer primarily, and I trust him. I didn’t give him any sort of guidance—we talked about the song very briefly. So that video is completely his own interpretation. I think he did a great job. It’s a great interpretation of that song. For someone like me who doesn’t have large video budgets—or no video budgets—the way I’ve always worked is: if someone wants to make something, the song is just like a tool for them to make something. And I’m usually happy to have it be anything. So I wouldn’t read too much into music videos, I think they often are that way.

In terms of the song itself, I had started writing it a long time ago, and I knew I wanted that refrain. I knew what the chorus was, but I was still searching for more. I wanted it to be a long song and have a lot of lyrics. It wasn’t until I had this strange encounter with somebody when I was in Athens that took a real left turn—this guy was suddenly like, "I love jesus, and I write songs for jesus." He started proselytizing, and I was completely taken aback. The song came out of that encounter with this person. I’m not a religious person, so it was interesting for me to take that experience and try to make a song that could appeal to everybody, that everybody could relate to. As corny as it might sound, I wanted to write a song about writing a song, and how music is the one thing that can bring us all together. It was written in a time where I felt like I was meeting a lot of people who were going against my expectations. It was also a reaction to the political climate here—trying to think of ways that people could come together and agree on something.

Image Credit: Chris Eckert