Little Village spoke with singer-songwriter and visual artist Deb Talan about the inspiration behind her recently released solo album, I Thought I Saw You, what she loves about creating art in her chosen home of Iowa City, and the joy she’s found in collaborating with her fellow Iowa-based artists. Talan’s May 2 album release show at the Englert will feature several of her musical collaborators and friends, doubling as a celebration of Iowa City’s vibrant music scene.
You described I Thought I Saw You as “11 songs about moving into a new life with all the hope, heartbreak, grief and celebration entailed.” What inspired this album?
Life. I think many writers work this way, and I certainly do, where I take the most inspiration from the sort of nitty gritty of the emotional content of my own life. And sometimes I’ll take some storytelling liberties, but usually it’s pretty in there. But then with the language that I want to use around it and the language that comes through, my goal is that it’s broad enough that other people can feel and see their own experiences inside of it. So some combination of detail and broadness of emotional accessibility.
Five years ago, I got divorced and it was not only a divorce, but this was from my [The Weepies] musical partner, bandmate of 17 years. So it was both a dissolution of my marriage and family with our children, but also the place where I’d had my heart as a creative songwriter for a really long time. So it was a big deal. And like any of those life experiences, there’s so much heartbreak and grief and mourning. There’s also this sense of possibility that opens up that’s quite amazing. I feel like I’m still figuring out what’s there for me.
Many of the songs are reflections that come directly from that experience. I’d say “I Walked Away” is pretty straightforward. “A Glimmer in the Grass,” the first song on the album, feels like the most heart-open and compassionate song I’ve written about that experience. Like, no blame, no shame, just here it is. It was time to move on and it’s difficult, but there’s this sense of expansion. I hope the song has that feeling inside it.
And then just deepening my connection to this place, to place. I’d been in this touring band with my ex-husband and our kids, and we’d had this bubble life. Like we lived in Iowa City — I’ve been here for 13 years now — but I’d say the first six years I was here, but not really here. Like we would come home and land at home, but we were still this little insular team. There was something very beautiful about that, especially when the kids were little. I think that for both my ex and I, there was something very soothing and healing about being able to create a really safe environment for our kids that both of us didn’t have in our own ways.
So for me, post-divorce and actually a little bit pre-, I feel like I started leaning into friendships that I had and just being here more, being inspired by this place and the people who are being creative here. There are so many creative people who are so talented here. I lived in Boston. I lived in New York for a little while, lived in L.A. I’ve been in those hive places of artistry and there’s a way that they’re sort of, by themselves, held up as a certain measure of excellence. I’ve found the same level of excellence here. People are just quieter about it, which I love.
With the collection of songs you’ve been developing between 2017 and now, how did you decide, “this makes it on the album, this doesn’t”? How did you sift through being in such a generative phase of your life here?
Yeah, it has been very generative. Well, I have another album that’s basically done. I’m going to be actually probably closing it out within the next month or so, but I have a couple of studio dates this week. Some of the ones that didn’t make it on this, that honestly, I was not ready to feel into them. I have a small handful of songs that were right from the pain-point of recognizing that divorce was where my marriage was headed. There’s a richness to them. Many people can relate to what happens inside that experience, right? So I do want to put them out, but I wasn’t ready to live inside them in the studio. So I tucked them away. Some of them are on this second album, and some of them will be on the one coming after that.
I did have some intentionality about songs that I felt hung together well. For me, oftentimes an album is just that. It’s a snapshot of a time of life. For the most part, that is what this was. Many of them are just chronologically what I ended up writing. Many songs fall away, and I don’t really understand how that happens, because sometimes I’ll go back and listen. I don’t know why, it just doesn’t have the grip on me or the grip musically. So particularly from like 2019 to the release of this album this year, I would say, I’m probably one for five in terms of the ones that actually survive. Then it’s a question of, do I want to bring them to the studio?
There’s one song on the album called “Refugee from the Garden” that I actually wrote many years ago. We never got it up and running as a Weepies song, and I re-found it and it really spoke to the experience I was having. Central theme of it is having been in this idyllic part of your life and then growing out of it and then needing to step through to another place and looking back and being like, “I’m really raw right now.” Like, I feel like I’ve just been kicked out of the garden, in sort of a biblical and life way. I revisited that one, rewrote a chorus and it just felt like it fit very nicely in. It also feels like a real thread from Weepies songs.
I’ve written pretty similarly for a long time. I don’t feel like there’s anything I’m doing now that’s dramatically different. In some ways, I reached back and grabbed [pre-Weepies solo artist Deb Talan’s] hand and pulled her forward. That voice. Again, it’s not like entirely different than what I was doing in the Weepies, and I hope it can be felt, but I feel a deepening of my own writing process. It just feels, I don’t know, earthier. Maybe that sense of place making its way in there? Some metaphysical way. I don’t know. So many gardening metaphors [in I Thought I Saw You].
Dan Padley and my friend Bryan Vanderpool from the Well Pennies, who runs a studio in Des Moines called Golden Bear Studios — the three of us were a real team in co-creating this album and the production aspect of it. And it was such a blast. It was so much fun. And finding that kismet with them was just like, oh, I could cry. It was so fortunate. I feel so fortunate to have met both of them. But Dan was like, “Oh, it’s like this is sort of your garden cycle album.” It is. There’s a lot of aspects of seeds that have been planted and growing up unexpectedly and leaving other things behind and turning the soil over.
When did your collaborators come into the process and how did that change what the pieces ended up being?
I met Dan Padley first and we just pre-COVID started to play together a little bit. He learned my songs and created his own parts for them. That was a really cool back and forth. I ended up seeing and hearing the songs a little differently. So structurally, I definitely did some moving stuff around when I felt what it was like to play through them with him. Then when we got with Bryan [Vanderpool] — Bryan has a really wonderful production sense. It just matched so, so well. And we have very similar instincts about what something needs.
Particularly Bryan facilitates this “yes” atmosphere of, whatever somebody’s hearing or thinking we might need, we try it. And there’s no knowing — I mean, there’s knowing after — that didn’t quite work or it’s great musically. This was my line, not frequently, but every once in a while: sounds great musically, but we lost something of the heart that I had in there. This particular way that I want it to emotionally be communicated.
We would scrap and reinvent pretty frequently, which is a great freedom. That speaks to the kind of trust that we got for one another very quickly out of a mutual respect. Also this environment of “let’s play, let’s try anything.” So, yeah, it’s been joyful making this album and the next one.
Speaking of the joy, obviously some of the songs and the thematic content, there’s some weightiness to it. And even still, there’s all this hope and light and love. That’s something you seem to find balance with across your writing. How do you find that balance?
I think it comes really naturally as I’m writing because of the way that I experience things. It’s very rare that there’s a real singular emotional lane that I’m in. It’s like I just feel the breadth. Just musically and lyrically, I love the tension. I think it creates a vitality to the songs for me so that I want to keep coming back to them. If it’s kind of monotone, I get bored. So those types of songs fall away very quickly. I have written them, but they never make it to an album from my perspective.
You have your album release show coming up at the Englert on May 2 — your hometown show. What can people expect?
Full band show. I’ve brought in lots of people who I respect and love musically in town. So the core of the band will be myself and Dan [Padley] and Bryan [Vanderpool], who sings and plays drums and percussion. And then Dave Helmer, who’s also going to open the show with a pared down version of his band. And my friend Gia [Margaret], who’s a wonderful songwriter in Chicago. She’s going to play a little bit too at the front end. They’re going to kind of take turns. Drew Morton on bass. That’s kind of our central core band. And then Sam Drella from Crystal City with Dave [Helmer]. And Nicole Upchurch, who’s from the Feralings and Awful Purdies. So they’re going to be kind of like my main backing vocal women. Blake Shaw is on upright bass on a couple tunes. Shanti Sellz is going to play banjo on a tune and sing. Creighton [Gaynor] is a wonderful percussionist in town. He plays djembe and bongos and percussion. So he’s going to be on a handful of songs, too.
For one song, I have what I’ve called my wild women in the forest chorus. It’s for this one song called “Raven at Your Front Door,” which is actually on the next album. There’s this kind of contrapuntal tight harmony. On a couple of Kate Bush’s albums, Hounds of Love specifically, she has these women singing with her who are, I think, three Bulgarian women. They do this kind of singing, there’s a dissonance to it, but it also sounds really delicious, and so I wanted something like that. I created these on the recording. I did it all myself, but I thought it would be so much fun to bring a bunch of wonderful women from town [for the show]. So Katie Roche and Abby Sawyer and Kathy [Ruestow] and Sarah Driscoll.
I think it will feel like a real celebration, like a kind of party. I want it to feel vital and full of energy.
