Melanie Scott spends an afternoon with Veda Hille
MEETING HILLEVancouver singer and composer Veda Hille greets me in the doorway of her Commercial Drive walk-up with a warm smile and a horror story. Earlier that afternoon, her husband of seven years, Justin Kellam, a musician and carpenter, hit himself in the forehead with a hammer while working at a construction site. He’s due home from the hospital, stitched and bandaged, at any moment.
Hille’s calm but distracted as she brews a pot of lemon tea and introduces me to her oblivious ginger feline, New Cat. It’s quiet; her teenage stepdaughter is out. The living room is filled with sunshine, with artwork that appears to float off of the walls and colourful comic books that belong to her husband displayed in vintage wire racks. On the surface, it’s a bright, ordinary day.
“It fascinates me,” she says, straightening her vintage-inspired blouse, “how we’re able to keep going and often have a really good time in spite of the fact that any second you could hit yourself on the head with a hammer.”
As we wait, the underlying tension triggers my memory of Hille’s Yukon Suite song cycle, composed upon a trip to the Arctic and found on her 2001 album, Field Study . Both modernist and romantic, the songs conjure up distortions of Group of Seven paintings and throw the emotional resonance under a microscope. Each one is ringed with red—life doesn’t exist without consequence.
Those songs, she agrees, are all about the presence of death. But to focus solely on death without acknowledging reverence is to miss the point. They’re also, she says, about “teeming life, like the lichen and the plankton and the things growing in these unlikely situations.”
Hille toured them at a grand piano, dwarfed by a background video of Northern footage commissioned from media artist Shawn Chappelle. That sense of diminution in relation to the land might just reflect a hazardous experience during her Yukon journey, when a storm stranded her and 11 other Canadian performing artists while rafting the Alsek River.
“The helicopter couldn’t come and get us and we were running out of food and had no fuel because there aren’t any trees. We weren’t close to death, ”she says, “but it was a little hint of how desperate things can get up there.”
To call the trip life-affirming would be almost trite. “I like the word ecstatic,” she says, referencing another theme that runs through most of her music. “It’s about gratitude.”
As if on cue, her husband walks through the door with no sign of a concussion and a spotless dressing covering his wound. They exchange a relieved hug and share a private joke that makes them both laugh. Hille asks, with gentle teasing, to see the wound. He also obliges her when she asks to photograph it, as if to catalogue another near miss.
THE BACK STORYAt 39, Hille no longer lets the Muse dictate her schedule. As one of Vancouver’s best-known singer-songwriters and collaborators, her time is in heavy demand. With a 12th album, the Andy Partridge-produced This Riot Life , due out in early 2008, plus ongoing side projects with other artists as well as theatre, choral and film commissions, Hille instead finds joy in meeting deadlines. And most of those are met in her garage.
It’s not temperature-controlled and sits unadorned, with just enough room for a woman and her piano. These days, Hille keeps to a regular work week—eight-hour days, five days a week. “It’s kind of normal,” she says, then pauses. “I’m not sure. I also don’t really stop at night in my head.”
If a project requires a deeper level of inspiration or concentration, she leaves her backyard and supportive family and goes elsewhere. Sometimes it’s to a cabin, or to Banff, or to the Caravan Farm, an 80-acre property northwest of Armstrong, BC, that’s home to an outdoor theatre company.
Wherever Hille may be, it’s a long way from Vancouver Community College, where she attended the jazz and contemporary music program for just half a year in the late ‘80s. Having trained in classical piano since age six and then played “other people’s pop music” for friends, Hille quickly realized the thrill of invention. Directed by her teachers—the late jazz and world-music composer Kathy Kidd and BC Entertainment Hall of Fame inductee Bill Sample—she switched from reading music to something more improvisational.
Today’s Hille, who thrives on layering lyrics, sounds, textures, and even feelings in unanticipated, often whimsical ways, seems far removed from her young student self. “With classical music,” she says, “all the music goes through your eyes, and you do hear it and feel it. But it was very different for me to use my ears and my hands to make the music and not have my sight involved.”
In 1992, Hille produced her first album, Songs about people and buildings , which she feels incorporated some of these new, adventurous qualities. But she’s also quick to dismiss it as “very cute.” Every 14 months since that date, give or take, she has released an album , either on her own or in collaboration with other artists. Those early albums, made in her 20s, were all about spontaneous inspiration.
“Words were flying at me all the time. These days, I have to work a little harder, partially because I have songs I’ve written before that I now have to be different from, to a certain extent.”
By the release of Spine, in 1996, Hille was writing confessional lyrics in a style similar to many female singer-songwriters at that time, and her sound was frequently compared in the media with that of indie stars such as Liz Phair, PJ Harvey, and Tori Amos. Hille had already gained exposure as the opening act for Alanis Morrisette (then known as her cheesier pop incarnation, Alanis) at BC Place. So she did what was expected: She flirted with major labels, feeling in line with mainstream culture.
But very soon, she opted for a different shade of limelight. She went her own way. “When you have to sell millions of records, everything becomes money-oriented. Not only am I not interested, I would s-s-suck,” she says. “I’ve always been free to do what I want and write the music that comes to me instead of having to meet anyone’s standards or expectations, be it a label or an audience.”
Does freedom still have parameters? Hille shrugs when asked if any of her commissioned works are more constrained than when she’s left to her own devices. “It puts a deadline on it,” she says, of working for others, “but I don’t know if it’s any different than the ones that are truly driven by my own feelings.”
THOUGHTS ON A LOGGING TOWNHille spent her childhood in rural areas outside the city, where she examined the natural world with one eye peering through a junior microscope—an interest in science that continues to influence her outlook and music. She later moved back to Vancouver with her family, to the affluent West Side, near the University of BC. At 19, she sampled the downtown lifestyle before finding a more conscious idea of home in the neighbourhood surrounding Commercial Drive.
“I like the village feel,” Hille says, citing a well-worn statistic that The Drive, as it’s nicknamed, features the longest strip of privately owned businesses in Vancouver. It also claims an eclectic assortment of ethnicities and inhabitants, many of them cultural workers such as artists, musicians, and performers. A perfect spot, in other words, for a young singer-songwriter in search of a voice.
Years later, her chosen community inspired the East Van song cycle on her 2005 album Return of the Kildeer . One of them, “Liza Jane” (based on the old folk tune of the same name), addresses the “unspeakably sad” case of the Downtown Eastside’s missing and murdered women. Hille isn’t usually one to stand on a soapbox, but in this case the politics of the situation called for a personal response.
She believes that the East Side’s harsher aspects go hand in hand with resilience, and a strong sense of character that’s unmatched elsewhere in the city. For her, The Drive is a place that remains true to itself. She extends her yearning for that kind of authenticity to the city at large. “I like all the things that remind us we’re a logging town,” she says. “That’s where we come from. And now I’m sad that we’re become something different. I have to watch that I’m not in mourning for the things we tear down.”
Hille’s conflicted relationship with Vancouver has much to do with its penchant for constant redevelopment, to make new and eradicate the past—in effect, perform acts of urban refinement that scrub away the rougher edges.
“I’m really, really missing the bike route between Science World and Granville Island that’s going to become the Millennium Water [Vancouver Olympic Village],” she says. “I’m sure there’ll still be a bike route, but it’ll be a slick sea wall.”
She admits that while she can’t imagine living anywhere else—gentrification be damned—the idea once crossed her mind. Instead of the East Side, why not the East Coast? She considered a move to Halifax, which she’d visited several times while on tour. It afforded, she felt, a better quality of life. Even with money less abundant, it retained a pact with the past, its “levels of history more apparent.” But Vancouver, love it or leave it, is where she remains.
What makes Hille feel at home are not only enduring friendships, growing work opportunities, and a lot of personal history. It’s also the weather. She likes it.
“I know that’s an unpopular opinion,” she says, “but I’m completely entranced by the weather and the plants.” She seems unconvinced that Vancouver broke a record this past January, with 29 days of straight rain—something not witnessed since recordkeeping began in 1937. “I just don’t find we have that much rain,” she says, growing quiet. “There’s always a break.”
LIVE-MUSIC RENEGADEThe Railway Club is over capacity, or it at least feels that way. Hille’s on stage with vocalists Patsy Klein and Ida Nilsen, from Great Aunt Ida, and has given each of them a role in a song about alien abduction. Klein plays a couple about to be taken. Nilsen plays a doe.
The late-summer gig is a tribute to Nilsen, an indie-music favourite and former co-operator of the now-defunct Sugar Refinery. Musicians and fans alike have come to pay their respects before Nilsen moves to Ontario. Hille plays a strong set, her style unmistakably playful and forceful. She sings about love, the rain, the aliens, and, in slightly ironic twists of praise, about Jesus.
“I never know where she’s taking us,” I overhear someone say. I feel the same way, but , like many of her fans, I’m willing to be tossed around on the journey.
Devoted supporters showed their mettle recently, when the Canada Council didn’t provide enough to cover the cost of 12 musicians needed for her new album. To make up the shortfall, Hille sold special packages containing music and memorabilia, titled Life Support System , on her website for $100 each. The success of the scheme proved how fond her listeners, both here and abroad, are of her oddities—particularly in Germany. “The audience has to dodge and weave with me so much, the ones who are interested are the ones who do that.”
The convivial Railway show confirmed Hille’s description of the current local arts climate as “phenomenal,” especially for theatre and live music. Why Vancouver hasn’t received the same attention as Montreal when it comes to its booming music scene, she can’t guess. She cites favourite bands such as Black Mountain, They Don’t Shoot Horses, and P:ano (“My husband’s band, but it’s still brilliant,” she laughs) as having a sound that’s progressive—or, as she put it, “pushy.”
What’s lacking, Hille believes, is a network of artist-friendly venues that encourages such music. Civic legislation is frequently at cross-purposes with the indie scene, making it difficult to start a smaller venue and obtain a liquor license. Hille calls the closure of the Sugar Refinery in 2003 a major blow. It played live music six or seven times a week with only a modest cover charge, and nothing comparable has taken its place. The Vancouver East Cultural Centre and Railway Club are good stalwarts, but Hille can’t shake the feeling that musicians like herself, and possibly all cultural workers, are being driven further and further from the city core.
Addressing this, she sounds every ounce a renegade. “Maybe music should be against the government,” she states, with more than a hint of defiance.
HYMNS FOR SURVIVAL“The moments when we feel our edges dissolving are terrifying and fantastic,” Hille says, talking about her choice to experiment with the language and structure of Christian hymns on the forthcoming This Riot Life. The riot, she explains, is about chaos, about losing control or being out of control. It’s also about having one foot over the edge—just enough of yourself to recognize the inherent wisdom and beauty of close calls.
Hammer accidents and Yukon storms aside, close calls are something Hille is intimately familiar with. She’s reticent about divulging a recent experience, save that she endured a personal tragedy. “I’m still deciding how much I want to talk about that with people,” she says. “It was interesting when I did have death really close to home, and illness. The songs that I’ve written [since that time] are the most ecstatic.”
That word again—ecstatic. About gratitude. Similar themes had already emerged in the Yukon Suite song cycle; in the Tuktoyaktuk Hymn , for example, we hear entreaties for comfort or salvation in dark hours. In This Riot Life, Hille furthers her exploration of religious language by finding parallels between the early hymns’ sense of religious ecstasy and the sexual ecstasy experienced by those in the secular world.
“I’m writing differently,” she explains. “There are a million ways to say something, and they all mean something slightly different. Writing lyrics, even with existing text, which is a crutch, is about trying to get it right, whether it’s a description of a feeling or an event. Or a rock.”
Hille also acknowledges the long-time influence of writer Annie Dillard, a philosophical naturalist who converted to Catholicism after years of self-described “spiritual promiscuity.” Ideas about religion inform Dillard’s work, just as hymns are yet another game of reference in Hille’s music. They provide a secure jumping-off point in her attempt to understand her own tragedy, that line between being alive and not.
VESSELSAsked to name milestones in her work, Hille answers with the names of two women: West Coast artist Emily Carr and Cree folk musician Buffy Sainte-Marie. In both cases, she had a transcendent experience while working with their material; she stepped far enough out of herself to let the music become something other—maybe even something ecstatic.
The Carr project followed a period when Hille had been writing more personal, I-centered lyrics, so she enjoyed the leap into someone else’s bones, especially someone that iconic. She drew on the painter’s writings to produce 1998’s Here is a picture (Songs of E Carr), which fuelled her ongoing interest in found text. (Having attended the The Emily Carr School of Art and Design to study, among other things, performance art and film, she had a knack for integration.) Carr’s work adapted easily to Hille’s music, since they share similar precepts about getting to the heart of the matter as simply and directly as possible.
This past April, Hille had a similar, though more serious, revelation while performing at the Chan Centre in the CBC Orchestra’s Great Canadian Songbook concert. Vancouver New Music artistic director Giorgio Magnanensi arranged Sainte-Marie songs for Hille and created dissonant and challenging orchestrations that perplexed more than a few concertgoers. Yet, even with the 800-seat count, Hille says she felt very connected to the audience. For that evening, Hille describes her role—transformative as it was—only as “the deliverer.”
“It was the first time I performed that had nothing to do with me, my personal life, or my ego—that’s what I have to strive for now. It really should always just be about the music, and I don’t think it should have anything to do with the performer.”
To tackle these new insights, Hille is changing her melodic habits so as not to repeat herself or get too comfortable. She practices arts songs by one of her favourite composers, Paul Hindemith, with their complex, contrapuntal arrangements, or writes melodies on the piano and then adapts them to her voice instead of the other way around. These exercises ensure that Hille is at the centre and yet removed, out of body and in the house at the same time.
PARAGRAPHS TO WORDSThe next few years will be busy ones. Hille swears she gets nine hours of sleep a night, but maybe that number doesn’t know what’s coming.
Before the release of This Riot Life and a tour, Hille will have appeared in Ottawa in late September as part the 75th-anniversary celebrations honouring composer Glenn Gould’s birth. Her CBC-sponsored commission focuses on Gould’s Idea of North, and has driven Hille back to her classical roots. (She calls his Bach recordings “the highest emotional music of my early years.”) Plus, the opportunity to live a little in Gould’s skin is a fitting tribute to his impact on her own music.
Hille is also the in-house composer with Theatre Replacement, a Vancouver troupe that specializes in experimental one-and two-person performances. While tackling subjects as varied as aliens and Japanese bathhouses, this work, again, plays into her newfound concept of egolessness.
“I’ve often thought that the songs I write [for these shows] are lesser than my personal songs, but it’s really not true in terms of what people are interested in. People really love some of these songs. It has to do with removing my ego from the equation.”
To blow off steam, Hille and long-time friend and vocalist Patsy Klein turn to their duo, The Fits. They perform covers of favourite songs from vaudeville, The Muppet Show, ‘70s rock—all medleys and mash-ups. Hille, relieved that she doesn’t take herself as seriously as she used to, is especially partial to this side project; it satisfies her love for reference by being nothing but.
Upcoming plans include working with a choir in Winnipeg, more performances with Magnanensi, and a substantial but top-secret project that Hille would love to talk about, but can’t, due to a contractual agreement. With so many irons in so many fires, does she ever stop to consider what kind of musician she is? Hille can’t be bothered.
“I prefer a paragraph to a word every time,” she says, with a mischievous smile. “What I do is difficult, but I think it should always be difficult to pigeonhole.” With that, she finds contentment in fulfilling her assignments, the ones from others and any she gives herself.
Copyright © Melanie Scott, 2007