Noe Venable was a college student focusing her creative energies on playwriting and things theatrical when she was laid low by mononucleosis in 1995. Resting at home and recuperating, she found that the illness opened the door on a new direction in her life. “I was so hazy from the mono, I couldn’t write anything longer than three minutes,” she says. “So I picked up a guitar and started plunking around on it.” The next thing she knew she was writing songs. By the end of the week, she had finished ten, and more importantly, she realized she’d found her true medium. Soon she was venturing out to perform her songs at open mics, recording some of them in musician/engineer Tom Meshishnek’s basement studio, and releasing the sessions as her 1997 debut CD You Talkin’ to Me? In the eight years since that first burst of creative downtime, Venable has composed hundreds of songs and recorded five albums, including her latest, The World Is Bound by Secret Knots (Petridish, www.noevenable.com).
The new collection of songs sounds as if it could have been inspired by a fever dream as well. Venable, 27, says this record is her most personal collection of songs to date, but her work isn’t that of your typical confessional folksinger. For one thing, it’s not really folk music. Though she does often play open chords strummed on acoustic guitar, it’s where the words and ideas take the songs that makes them distinctive. Venable’s unique point of view emerges in lyrics that can sometimes come across more like allegories than first-person stories. Even when she’s tackling personal or familial issues, as in “Juniper” and “In the Dark,” the metaphors she chooses and the way she twists language remove the subject matter a few steps from personal experience. In addition, the eerie guitar effects and hypnotic loops that haunt the corners of songs such as “Feral” distance Venable even further from the conventional singer-songwriter genre, giving her more in common with Tom Waits and Radiohead than with Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan.
Sonic experimentation has been central to Venable’s approach since she recorded her second CD, 1998’s No Curses Here (Intuition Music and Media), with jazz producer Lee Townsend and an eclectic cast of musicians that included violinist Alan Lin, bassist Viktor Krauss, keyboardist Rob Burger, and drummer Scott Amendola. After putting together a band with Lin, Amendola, bassist Todd Sickafoose, and guitarist Morris Acevedo and recording a demo as the Ruiners, Venable stripped down her band to a trio with Sickafoose and Lin and recorded a live CD, Down Easy, at Mo’s Melody Mansion, Meshishnek’s basement house-concert venue. Some of those songs made their way into the independent film Cherish, and after making her next record, Boots, in 2002, Venable got an even bigger break: touring as an opening act for Ani DiFranco.
Riding the momentum of the DiFranco tour, Venable recorded and released The World Is Bound by Secret Knots, her most accessible and compelling album to date. The title comes from a quote by 17th-century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. “The phrase refers to Kircher’s theory that the planets and stars are held together by magnetic forces,” explains Venable. “The magnetic forces are the secret knots. OK, we know now that the planets aren’t really held together by magnets, but the sentence really stuck with me.” Hoping to use it as the title for her new record, Venable started looking for an image that could connect it to the songs. One day she noticed a spiderweb stretched between the redwood trees in her yard. “Suddenly, the whole thing came into focus,” she says, “the incredible grace and fragility of it. It has these warring characteristics. It’s so delicate but at the same time so strong, it can catch much larger, heavier insects than the spider itself. It was this image of fragility and strength.”
Strong mythical and mystical currents run through Venable’s songs. At times they sound like gothic children’s stories set to music; “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” for instance, includes references to characters created by C.S. Lewis and Hans Christian Andersen: “Aslan and the Silver Queen couldn’t stop time / Although they tried / Now just look at me / 17 and 70 / Turn it around / Follow me down / Midsummer night’s dream / What kind of creature shall I be?” “I’ve always responded to the idea of the mono myth,” Venable says, “These figures and images that recur again and again, even in ancient cultures that are separated by oceans and have never spoken to each other. There’s this cohesion that makes it like some kind of collective dream, a dream world that we can tap into. But how we tap into it is incredibly personal.”
Recently, Venable began working on a new project that might incorporate her theater background—a post-rock song cycle inspired by the Brothers Grimm. “I’ve always liked hearing one story explored in depth, rather than many different stories,” she explains. “But I hope the final form will be a recorded CD, something that you can put in your pocket and take with you. I like portability. I like that you can listen to it on a hillside under the stars.”
—Drew Pearce
What They Play
Noe Venable plays two acoustic guitars onstage: a 2001 Bourgeois Luthier Series OM and a 1957 Martin 00-18. Both guitars are strung with D’Addario lights and fitted with undersaddle Fishman pickups, and her preamp/DI of choice is an L.R. Baggs Para Acoustic DI. In concert, she and bandmates Alan Lin and Todd Sickafoose experiment with Line 6 delay pedals for looping effects. “It’s fun,” Venable says. “A little dangerous, though. The gear can take over everything if you’re not careful. When we get to the point where there are more pedals onstage than people in the audience, we have maybe gone too far.” Venable keeps a few other guitars at home, including a small-body 1916 Gibson archtop with a round soundhole and a 1969 Fender Telecaster with Gibson PAF pickups and a Bigsby whammy bar—“kind of a rockabilly guitar,” she says.
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