Little Mazarn is Lindsey Verrill and Jeff Johnston, an electric banjo and singing saw duo from Austin, TX. Inspired by the 1960s primitive folk revival and early “high lonesome” Appalachian sound, as well as modern minimalism and ambient music, they combine imaginative songwriting with dreamy and innovative use of traditional instruments and textures. Since 2016 they’ve been performing live in rock clubs, folk listening rooms and unconventional spaces such as dry riverbeds, abandoned buildings, galleries, theaters, and churches in the United States and Canada.
Their first record, a collection of original songs and reinterpreted traditional ballads, was released in December 2017. In May 2019 they will be releasing their second album titled Io recorded in August at Ramble Creek Studios.
Verrill and Johnston are also known individually for their work with Bill Callahan, Dana Falconberry, Okkervil River, Thor and Friends, and many others.
(Photo Credit: Mike Manewitz)
Lindsey Verrill is an Austin-based artist who leads the experimental folk band Little Mazarn; Hannah Read is an Austin-based singer-songwriter who performs as Lomelda. The new Little Mazarn record, Mustang Island, is set to come out June 20 on Dear Life Records, so to celebrate, the two old friends got on the phone to catch up about it.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Lindsey Verrill: I have been thinking of you. They asked specifically for me to reach out to you to do this, and I was like, “Duh.” [Laughs.]
Hannah Read: That is so sweet.
Lindsey: “Why, yes, that’s a great idea.” And I just was thinking about you and how I’ve gotten to have this really special relationship with you, kind of watching you grow up in a way. Just seeing you kind of go from your very beginning — not your very, very beginning, because I know you had a creative life with Tommy [Read, Hannah’s sibling and collaborator] before I met you.
Hannah: Like, as a child.
Lindsey: Yes, I didn’t know you as a child.
Hannah: But you knew me as a teenager!
Lindsey: Yeah, and I think that’s really cool. And having become a collaborator and friend — and really old friend — it’s very special to me. I’m always so proud of you, and looking to you to be like, What is possible?
Hannah: “What is possible?” [Laughs.]
Lindsey: Because you always seem to have one eye on a very cool horizon. So I’m watching you. [Laughs.]
Hannah: Wow. Well, that means a lot to me, Lindsey. I feel like from early on, meeting you and experiencing the way that you participated in having a creative life and sharing it with people and putting on shows and playing in a lot of different projects, all of that has been like a lighthouse for me. Like, OK, that’s the way that I want my life to be. I want to have collaborative projects and I want to be part of something that brings people together. And I feel like I’ve had so many conversations with people where I’m trying to figure out, “How do I want to be a musician in this world? How do I participate in this world?” And I find myself talking about you.
Lindsey: Oh, same.
Hannah: Like, “I wanna be like Lindsey!” So it’s been really cool to actually be part of some projects with you.
Lindsey: I was thinking of two specific moments: One of them was the day that you came to our show at Orb of Peace. I don’t know if you remember this, but it was a show that we played at Earth Commons — it was like a SX showcase attempt.
Hannah: Oh, yeah.
Lindsey: And it was amazing. The host of the show made a tea to go with every band. She listened to albums from every band and she concocted a healing herbal tea with colors that represented [them]… I was so blown away by this depth of feeling and of the day. And the set that we played was outside and there was lots of noise.
Hannah: I remember this so vividly.
Lindsey: There was a trash can factory next door, and the trash cans were in these stacks, and the wind was blowing through the stacks of trash cans and it was making this really cool sound. And we were basically tuning the music to this sound and allowing the sound to be in the music. You recorded it, and you sent me a recording. We had maybe a brief conversation about it, and I was just like, “Oh, man, that was one of my top musical moments, the trash cans.”
Years later, I saw you play at Scholz Garten, and you said to the crowd, “Are you guys listening?” And you weren’t asking them if they were listening to you. You were asking them if they were listening to the environment.
Hannah: There was a lot going on!
Lindsey: But it put me in this deep listening state. You requested that the crowd spend a certain amount of time listening to the environment.
Hannah: I remember that.
Lindsey: Then the music after that touched me so deeply. I felt like your invitation to settle the music in my ear to where I was in space was such a powerful invitation. And I still, when I perform, think about it.
Hannah: Well, I feel like I learned that from you.
Lindsey: [Laughs.] I don’t know which of those happened first, but whichever one did gets the credit.
Hannah: I would love to hear about what it feels like for you to be on stage. For me, it feels oftentimes out-of-body, inhuman almost. Which sometimes leads to these incredible things. It leads to some magic where I try things that I’ve never tried before, and it works because somehow I’m strengthened by the situation. But then other times it can feel like I need to feel the floor, I need to ground myself. And just standing there and listening, and asking everyone to listen with me, instead of making noise over the noise, is one of my go-tos when I’m like, I can’t feel the floor. Let’s pause for a second. What do you feel when you’re on stage?
Lindsey: Well, I’ve been thinking about this recently, about what draws me to that feeling when… You know when you need to see whoever it is — like, you get the memo that so-and-so is coming through and you buy tickets? I’m like, What is that for me? I’ve been thinking a lot about how to enjoy listening to music and what feels expansive to me about discovering and exploring the music that I like. And I’m like, I just want an invitation to be present for whatever is happening and for the performers to be present and responsive to each other, and to whatever delights await. We’re talking about improvisation, y’all! I want that. I need that to be into seeing someone live, and I need that to be a part of my performance, my experience as a performer. I need space for the songs to be never the same, or to be in the key that makes sense or to have the melody that we all decide together. I mean, that’s a really courageous place to go.
Hannah: Totally.
Lindsey: But to witness that courage, that’s all I want.
Hannah: Yes. I remember seeing you play at my house, and you invited people to play with you on the spot.
Lindsey: [Laughs.] That was a wild night.
Hannah: Talk about courage! That was beautiful.
Lindsey: Yeah. You know, I was trying to write — I’ve been making this attempt at doing Substack. I’m always looking for solutions to, how do I get the word out about my stuff? I don’t know. But I was trying to write about this topic. I wrote the heading “Improvisation” and I was typing away, just sort of free thinking about it, and I ended up going down this rabbit hole online about how improvisation is the one thing that humans can easily overcome AI at. AI can’t improvise in any way. It can’t assess an environment and respond with a spontaneous idea that fits what’s happening.
Hannah: Interesting.
Lindsey: And one of the reasons for that is AI has no empathy. You have to have empathy to improvise. When you’re choosing to do a performance that’s kind of wild and free like that, you’re giving the audience a more vulnerable and tender access.
Hannah: Yeah, totally. Humans are so capable of chaos. We can see each other and recognize something in common. We have this pattern detection that allows us to live in something chaotic and feel things, and feel things together. Is that sort of what you’re talking about? We can thrive in these moments where there’s so much unknown, because we see each other across across it.
Lindsey: It’s real, man.
Hannah: [Laughs.] It’s real, man. I feel so drawn to improvisation, too, and wanting things to be in response to the moment all the time. And I feel like that’s sometimes hard for collaborators. Do you ever run into that?
Lindsey: Yes. I feel really fortunate — I have two, of course, very special collaborators. I think it is about how we see each other really fully and we make a very specific space for one another, all of us in our musical world. And I think that helps. And that’s a deep relationship with really special people. I really like how you seem to really intentionally seek these daring creative collaborations with different people, and strive to create a similar container. I have always admired that about you, that [as] Lomelda, the definition of your work has been so wide.
Hannah: That’s true. And you’ve seen so many forms.
Lindsey: Yeah. And I really like how you have these eras, almost, that are how maybe I would think of as an album cycle. I’ve seen you create this era of collaboration where it’s like, “These are the songs and these are the players and it’s this new landscape.” It’s so cool.
Hannah: Yeah. Tell me about who you worked with on this new record!
Lindsey: It’s the same old people, y’all. It’s Jeff [Johnston].
Hannah: Yes.
Lindsey: It’s Carolina [Chauffe].
Hannah: Yes.
Lindsey: Britton [Beisenherz], our secret fourth member. We also have the wonderful Mari Maurice on strings. There’s also one of my deepest collaborators, the Casiotone CT-350. It’s a keyboard. It makes lots of appearances on the new record, and it has a mind of its own, in its glitchy glory.
Hannah: It’s like a player, not an instrument.
Lindsey: It’s a player, yes.
Hannah: Wow. That’s cool. Do you use it to write?
Lindsey: Yes I do.
Hannah: Tell me everything!
Lindsey: One of my roommates left it here at the house when he moved out, and he was like, “You can have this.” And it still has a $17 sticker on the back of it from Goodwill. [Laughs.] It has a pretty small selection of beats, but the beats are really syncopated. I just put them on and I freestyle over them.
Hannah: Beautiful.
Lindsey: That’s my process these days. It’s fun.
Hannah: I love that.
Lindsey: And then on this album, we took the beats and we kind of chopped and screwed them. We slowed them down, we took them apart and put them back together. On some of the tracks, we combined them with drums — there’s lots of drums. A lot from the Casio and also from our friend Roberto Sanchez. He was just around the studio at the time, and he’s an amazing drummer, so he was like, “Let me add a snare into this,” or “I’m going to take this beat and emphasize the bass drum with real bass drum,” and kind of created this texture pallet out of these really dinky, square, 8-bit sounding sounds. And we were sort of exploring that on our last two albums, but this one is a full Casio-worship odyssey.
Hannah: Yes. Amazing.
Lindsey: Which is really fun. And I think really true to — Jeff likes to play stylophone, and he plays this instrument on the album called a taishōgoto, which he borrowed from his friend. It’s like this weird little banjo that has keys that hold down the strings instead of holding them down with your fingers. It’s one of those instruments that is so inefficient, it makes no sense. It’s just a diatonic stringed instrument, but it has, like, 30 strings to tune. But it just sounds so freaking cool. So I guess all this to say: it’s just about getting in one’s own way with playfulness and clunkiness, and just trying not to be too serious.
Hannah: Yeah, it’s like an obstacle course.
Lindsey: Yes. I feel a heaviness of being, like, a Texas songwriter. I don’t know if you identify that way or what, but I feel like there’s this big history of people from Texas that write songs are very serious. They’re serious about songs. And that’s a lot of pressure.
Hannah: Totally.
Linsdey: And I just wanted to try to write from the most unpressured, free flowing [state]. I don’t know, I feel like I’m always trying to live up to some kind of Townes Van Zandt worship or something. And I’m like, No, that is not required.
Hannah: It’s not required. You know, it’s all lore, and life feels like life regardless of how serious people take you or not. I’m such a Townes fan, and at the same time, I feel like the seriousness of the audience doesn’t even totally match the thing. I feel like there’s such playfulness in all the great stuff, you know?
Lindsey: Totally. I was thinking about it the other day. We were listening to a Charles Mingus live recording — I think it’s called Mingus at Antibes or something like that. It’s so good. But I have a degree in jazz bass, and that experience taught me that there were these great, towering geniuses and we have to learn. We have to take apart their licks and learn them up and down, and learn how they created all these harmonies, and we have to improvise, but do it just like them. And I was listening to this Charles Mingus album and I was like, These people are just like a friend group. Like Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, whoever else on this recording, were just friends that lived close to each other. They were jamming and they came up with this music, and it’s awesome. And same with Townes — Townes was part of a friend group that was expressing the same thing, but they were just staying up all night, every night, writing songs, and they were one-upping each other, and they were playing gigs every weekend, making their living, traveling all over. And the currency of that was songs. You know?
Hannah: Yeah.
Lindsey: And I am not here to imitate that. I don’t need to imitate a cool friend group that happened upon the flow state in a certain way. We’re improvising. We’re creating these things that people in the future are going to be like, “Gotta transcribe the Lomelda album.” [Laughs.]
Hannah: That lived experience versus the lore of the thing is just always so different.
Lindsey: Yeah. And then finding for yourself what you’re tapping into when you play — and not just play music, but you really play around — what are you tapping into? And then can you make that sugar for the honeybees of your spirit to be like, “Let’s go and play around there.” [Laughs.] I don’t know if that makes sense.
Hannah: [Laughs.] It makes perfect sense. I couldn’t agree more.
Lindsey: I might be at the point in the conversation where I’m losing the thread. But music is awesome. Music is life. That’s my main message.
Hannah: Yeah. Gotta live to make music.
Lindsey: Gotta make music to live.
(Photo Credit: left, Jake Dapper)
