(Credit: Matt Wignall)
My Brightest Diamond returns this summer with its second album, “A Thousand Shark’s Teeth,” a record which Worden actually started work on before the release of MBD’s acclaimed 2006 debut, “Bring Me the Workhorse.” While in Austin, Texas to promote “Shark’s Teeth” at the South by Southwest Music Conference, Worden sat down with us to talk about her early days performing in Sufjan Stevens’ cheerleading group (the Illinoisemakers), the complex metaphor behind her album’s title, and how she caused a stir at a nunnery.
Which is more challenging—singing opera or doing cheerleader routines?
[Laughs] I have to say the opera. But I never really got my back-flips. If I really had devoted myself to the gymnastic routine, maybe I would say that the gymnastics were more difficult.
How long have you been working on “A Thousand Shark’s Teeth”?
We made three days of recordings a week before I went to record “Bring Me the Workhorse.” So it’s all been happening simultaneously. The songs, I think, are six years’ [worth] of tunes. So now it’s a really funny experience for me, because I’m at a clean slate—there’s no backlog of catalog anymore.
Is there a story or meaning behind the title?
It’s a lyric in one of the tunes. I started to feel like that lyric represented a kind of theme over the album, which is examining relationships—either the distance or the closeness that we have, with each other, with ourselves, with the earth. One of the things I was thinking is that when you’re in love, you have the power of knowing that other person’s weakness—so you have the capacity to really, really destroy someone, and you also have the capacity to really be generous and loving with someone’s weaknesses. In our most intimate relationships, that’s the case. And the balance between the earth and the sun is the same—so if we have an improper relationship with the sun, it’s like the sun prickling us like a thousand shark’s teeth. It’s multi-layered. [Laughs] I still haven’t gotten my story down to a two-second [sound] bite. I’m sorry.
Well, that’s a pretty elaborate metaphor.
[Laughs] And that was the shortened version! By next week, I’ll be like, “Yeah, you know, it’s like, there’s the shark, and you have to have a proper relationship with the shark…”
You can just tell people you came up with it while you were watching “Shark Week” on the Discovery Channel.
OK, dude, I’m totally using that! [Laughs]
Who would win in a fight between a shark and a workhorse?
Well, the shark is the lion—the lion of the sea. But the horse would definitely out-speed it. So I think the horse might win by escape—not a direct fight.
Most of your top friends on MySpace are visual artists. Are these people that you’ve met and you know personally, or are you just a fan of their work?
Some of them I know personally, but a whole bunch of them, I was just really, really interested in what they do. One of the things that I have as a value is that I want everything I do to have a sense of beauty and an aesthetic quality that’s about—just nurturing beauty, at every level. [Laughs] MySpace is not the most graphically gorgeous layout, but…
Speaking of beautiful imagery: how much fun was it to be a dragonfly in one of your videos?
Oh, it was awesome. It was so much fun. But I have to tell you—it was February, I think, when we made it, and it was so cold. And we couldn’t find anywhere in New York that had a place for us to drive in order to get that [flying] effect, so we drove upstate and found a nunnery, this Catholic convent that had a really long driveway. And it was on a Sunday, so all these people were coming to church—and I’m out the top of the car, in a dragonfly outfit. [Laughs] We got some strange looks that day.
I bet. Did any of the nuns come out to watch?
Yeah. We had to get their permission.
Does that make it harder or more fun to have an audience for something like that?
It took a little of that punk rock spirit, like, “Well, we’re really giving them something to look at today.”
