Sylvaine interview (Kathrine Shepard)

Interview by Davide Sciaky

Puoi leggere l’intervista in italiano qui.

First of all, welcome to TrueMetal. 

Thank you. 

How are you doing and how is your first Italian mini tour going? 

It’s absolutely amazing. The promoters, the people we’re working with over here are absolutely amazing. And our support band, Die Sünde, is super nice. The crowds that we’ve been meeting so far, I mean the two shows we’ve played so far, have been absolutely very supportive, very sweet. It has actually blown all of our expectations way out of the water [laughs]. So it’s been super great. Now we just want to only play in Italy [laughs]. 

Great to hear! Starting from the very beginning, I know that you are classically trained, and you even have a degree in musicology. So, can you tell me a bit about how you first started to get into music in general? What kind of bands did you start with? 

Absolutely. Yeah, so I should say first and foremost that I grew up in a musical family. So my dad was a professional drummer for like 30 years. He still plays drums every day now even though he’s like almost 80 [laughs]. And my mom, she worked on the business side of music. So it’s something I grew up with. So it wasn’t kind of surprising that I also followed those footsteps. So, but it was maybe when I was like 14, 15 or so that I discovered that this is something that I really want to do seriously. Up until that point, I’d been singing a lot. I’ve been playing piano. I’ve been playing drums. But not very seriously. It’s just kind of something that I like to do. But at that moment, I was like, I need to do something with this. It’s an expression I need in my life to feel like myself. And therefore, I just really need to make something of this. So I started by choosing a music high school, because in Norway you can choose the direction you want to go for high school. So I started with that when I was about 16. And then from there on out, I did several different music schools. And that’s where I became, I got my classical training for the vocals. I had piano lessons. I had drum lessons. And I also at some point started to learn, later on, I started to learn guitar. I learned bass also on my own. So yeah, I would say that that was basically how it started. And in terms of what kind of bands and music I was listening to, like when I first got into more kind of rock format, it was classic rock, melodic rock style. My favourite band was Aerosmith for a long time. And then from there, it just got gradually harder and darker, I guess [laughs]. And then the band that’s probably influenced me really a lot has been Type O Negative. This very cool goth band from the New York scene. But then equally as much, I would say in classical music, the minimalist movement has influenced me a lot also as a composer. So yeah, it’s been a long and interesting ride with a lot of different impulses from different places. But I think it started around, yeah, 14, 15 or something like that. 

As you mentioned, your parents were both working in the music business. Was there any pressure from them to follow their footsteps in any capacity into the music business? 

No, actually they’ve been super nice and supportive. I mean, they at some point, they did, I remember a couple of serious talks we had where they sat me down and were like, “Okay, if you want to do something in music, you have to push more”. Because I’ve always been really bad at pushing myself in the sense of trying to, not sell myself, but you know, pushing myself to the forefront and be like, “Hey, look, this is my music, look at me”, that kind of thing. I’m really uncomfortable doing this. But I knew that I needed to, I needed to do that or at least work with people that would do that for me. So yeah, my parents, they sat me down sometimes and were like, “You know, it’s not the talent that’s lacking here. It’s like, you have to just push yourself, move, move a bit, you have to be a bit more proactive”. So they definitely didn’t pressure me to do music at all. But they also weren’t like, “Oh yeah, everything you do is wonderful”. No, my dad is a pretty hard critique sometimes. And my mom, yeah, was definitely like, “Yeah, no, you have to move your ass” [laughs], “You have to do something about this. If you want to do this for your life, you have to do something” [laughs]. So they were pushing me in a different way, but not like, you know, in a kind of toxic way, like you have to follow in her footsteps or else, you know, it’s the family business kind of thing. 

And I guess it’s very useful to have the kind of insights that people coming from two different sides of the music business can give you, right?

Exactly. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Because my mom was on the business side, she could tell me a little bit more about how the business worked, the mechanisms between the different things in the label. She worked in the labels, she worked as a booking, or as a promoter for festivals. She worked on a lot of different things. She got me a job with what was, back in the day, called something different, but that is now the Live Nation Norway when I was 16, because I wanted to actually see how things work on the inside of the music business. And of course, my dad being a musician, he didn’t tour as much, because he did like nightclub shows, so it was more like stationary for a while in one place, and then to the next place, and then to the next. So it’s a different life than what I do. But still, it’s really nice to be able to connect to both of them with what means the most to me in my life. So that means that we’re really close as a family because of this. 

Did you play in any other band or project before Sylvaine, or is this the first time you’re doing something like this?

I had several little projects, bands, or sometimes it was like vocal ensembles or singer-songwriter kind of stuff but nothing… I was about to say nothing worth mentioning, that’s not what I meant, I mean it was nothing that was going anywhere, it’s not something that people would have heard before. But, yes, 

I did several bands, or vocal groups, choirs, stuff like that before I had Sylvaine. But Sylvaine is the first project where I felt comfortable basically putting my most personal emotions into the music without having to try to explain to others, this is why we’re doing this, you know, like we’re trying to compromise with others to make my music fit with their emotions. So yeah, it was the first project that was as serious and important to me, I guess. 

You’ve just released your new single which is the first preview for your new EP, so can you tell me what it will sound like? 

Yes, this EP is, I can’t say it’s a concept EP, but it kind of is at the same time because for many, many years I’ve been wanting to kind of explore my musical cultural heritage with the Norwegian folk music because it’s a very rich tradition and something that I’ve actually liked for a big part of my life. And a lot of my life I’ve heard people tell me, “Oh, your voice would be really good for folk music”. But I was always like, “Nah, I don’t know, it’s not totally my thing, but it’s kind of interesting, maybe one day”. And as I’ve been getting older, I’ve been more and more fascinated by it. And I’ve always wanted to try to do something with it myself. So this EP is basically my version of folk music. I have three traditional pieces that are, I mean, they’re just kind of folk art that’s existed for like a long time. Nobody knows exactly who wrote them or where they came from. And then I have three pieces that I wrote that were inspired by that. So it’s really opening a new door for me with Sylvaine. It’s a style that I’ve kind of had like little moments of it in my music from before, but never explored fully. And it was really inspiring. It’s the thing that I’ve made that has come together the fastest of everything. From the moment that I had the idea to the moment that everything was done, it was like just a few months and it’s very unusual for me. So it was really, really cool. And the sound will be very different, very stripped down and minimalistic for being me. But it’s hopefully something that’s still related enough to my usual music that people can still appreciate it. Even though it’s in weird Norwegian dialects [laughs]. 

The EP title, “Eg Er Framand”, means “I am foreign”, is that a reference to your heritage being half-American and half-Norwegian?

Oh yeah, that could have been a cool thing [laughs] No, this is one of the traditional pieces. So, it’s not a… It’s not the title that I wrote myself or chose. I rewrote the lyrics because all of the pieces that I chose, they’re all religious, actually. So, yeah, it’s not a lyric that I wrote myself, but it’s something that comes from, again, a Norwegian traditional folk art. But I rewrote the lyrics because the three pieces I chose are all Christian, or religious, because I discovered that the folk pieces that speak to me the most are actually the religious ones. But I’m not a religious person. I’m a very spiritual person, but I’m not connected to any organised religion. So I rewrote the lyrics a bit out of respect for people that do believe in this religion to not step on any toes and also because it feels more like me, more true to me. It’s really cool because this song is the reason why I did this EP. Like, I met this song a few years ago and I was instantly blown away by it. And basically, the meaning of the title is also in the song. Basically it says, I don’t belong to this place, this earth. This is not where I’m from. I need to go back home. I need to go back to the place of lights where I come from. And even though they speak about, you know, kind of like heaven, [going] into God’s arms and stuff like that, it’s exactly the same thing I’m talking about in Sylvaine, actually, which is why this song hits me so hard. The melodies are beautiful, they spoke to me right away. But also the lyrics are very similar to what I’m writing with Sylvaine, actually, usually. So it’s, I’m a foreigner in the sense of I don’t belong to this earth. I’m from somewhere else. 

Are you planning on going on a tour focusing on this more Folk-centred part of your sound?

Absolutely. I’m going out on a tour in October with an artist called Eivør and that’s gonna be on my own. I’m gonna be solo on stage and this is going to be dedicated more to the kind of stripped down version of Sylvaine and I’m going to be playing a mixture of stuff from the EP and stuff from my previous releases, but it’s definitely going to have a more intimate and more like personal touch, in a way, moving a bit more maybe towards the folky side of this project. 

Can you tell me in general what your lyrics are about, if there’s a common theme to them? 

Yeah, so on the EP, it’s funny, because I actually only wrote like, I think I wrote four lines of lyrics for this EP, and the rest is just stuff that’s already written in the traditional pieces, but I rewrote them a bit. So the theme of the EP is basically, it’s a sense of birth, it’s a sense of having a guiding light that guides you through life, that’s kind of your support system while you’re here. And so it’s about liberation, again, this kind of rebirth, the end of an era and then something new begins. Because “Nova” – my fourth album that was released a few years ago – for me it represented the death of an era, like a loss and a grieving process, and then out of the ashes you see something new coming, and then this EP actually focuses on the sense of liberation, and being liberated even within the human form, like finding ways to liberate yourself. Even if in general in my lyrics I speak about being trapped as a, let’s say, a being of light stuck inside a human body that’s connected to this place, but we’re not from here, so we feel, some of us can feel disconnected from life here because it’s not our original origin basically. So yes, it’s an EP about that guiding light that can be inside of you, it can be something that you can think of as more, like ethereal, something above, I don’t know, and that liberation found here in this place, and also the liberation of leaving this place. So it’s a little bit of everything.

Talking about lyrics, I know that different musicians give different importance to them, how important are lyrics for you?

Really important. I have appreciated poetry since I was a very young kid, actually, and especially in my teenage years I was really reading a lot of like the romantic old gothic poets like Lord Byron, or like Percy Bysshe Shelley, or like Edgar Allan Poe, or William Wordsworth, William Blake, you know, like all of these really cool iconic… Charles Baudelaire, oh my god, or Paul Verlaine, which my band name is taken from. All of these have been really really inspirational. So, the written word is something that I connect with a lot and it’s something that I find quite important in my music, but it’s also the biggest pain in the ass of the whole process [laughs] because it’s really hard, you make music to not put words… I mean, to express things that you find really difficult to express in words, or when you put words in it it feels trivial, or feels weird, or maybe people might receive it the wrong way. So to write music about stuff like that and then having to kind of write lyrics about it afterwards it’s like you’re trapping yourself [laughs] but it’s definitely something that I value, and I appreciate lyrics a lot. So I try my best to write stuff that is worthy, basically, but it’s not easy. It’s the hardest part of the process for me personally. 

We talked about lyrics, how does the process of songwriting happen for you, when it comes to the music?

Usually it starts with just me and my unplugged electric guitar and jamming with myself or, you know, maybe there’s a melody that I have in mind that I try to find, or something like that. But it’s usually just me and my guitar, and I kind of just try to let that stream of consciousness come through me and see what comes out. Some days it’s not there, sometimes you have to force it a bit more. Some days you have things that come, like you dream a melody or something, and you try to figure it out when you wake up. So usually that’s how it starts. And then because I’m doing everything on my own, I record it in software, and usually it’s the main guitar first, and then comes the guitar melodies, the arpeggios, the voice, the bass, the drums, the synths, everything like that. So it’s a layer by layer process, but usually it starts with just guitar and voice. 

I’m very curious about your collaboration with Neige from Alcest, because I read that you met him after a show in 2012. 

Yes, yeah. 

And then you moved to Paris to work on your second album with him, and he was on it, and he was also on the third one, so it was quite a huge collaboration. At the time he was already pretty well known and successful, how did this whole thing happen? 

Yeah, it’s basically, it’s called having a connection with someone [laughs]. It’s like when you meet someone and you just have a lot in common, and you just like, musically you find some kind of common ground. And I was lucky because – I’m just gonna call him Stefan, because that’s how I know him – Stefan was looking for projects to play drums in actually, because he’d been playing with his guitar player for a while, but they didn’t do a lot of live shows, so he was kind of looking to get back into playing drums a bit. And I was looking for someone to play drums, because on my first record it was my dad that did it, which was great, but he’s not exactly in the, let’s say, Metal style, not that my music is super Metal anyways, but there were some things that I could just tell that, okay, this may not be the best fit. So I just asked him, basically, I was like, would you be up to try? And he went, yeah, sure. And then he ended up playing drums on my record, I ended up singing on his record, and then he played drums also on my third record, and then I sang again on his, like, fifth or sixth record. So yeah, we just kind of ended up collaborating back and forth, you know… like I said, sometimes you meet people that you just want to create with, and you’re just like, it’s the right time at the right place. 

I know that Sylvaine is a solo project rather than a band, and as such I guess that you take the lead on every aspect of the band. Is it easy for you to do that, are you a natural-born leader, or was it a challenge for you to adjust to this role?

That’s a really good question. I think a little bit of both, actually, because I’ve never really considered myself as a leader type. But if I look back in time and just look, you know, at school or look at situations through my life, I definitely have that in me, there’s no doubt. But at the same time I was a bit freaked out about the fact of it being a solo project and having all of the weights on my shoulders, but I never really questioned that aspect of it because I wanted to keep it as personal as possible and the best way to do that is to be able to do everything on my own, to make the decisions not to compromise, basically. It does mean that it’s a lot of work, so it is very hard. I spend a lot of time doing stuff that’s not creative, because I need to administrate the projects and make sure that everything is working as it’s supposed to. And also the fact that it’s like, in periods when I have a hard time, because I think everyone… everyone in general, but especially when you have a sensitive character to begin with, you will have bouts of depression, you will have hard times. If you need to stop for a while, everything stops. And it’s like, it puts that pressure on you, if you wanna keep the project running, you always have to be there, always. So it’s a lot, but it’s something that for now, I’m fine with, because it lets me not compromise my art. And that in the end is the most important thing. And if I need to take a step back, I will, but for now it’s working. So it’s hard, but it’s also very rewarding. And to see the project grow little by little, it’s pretty incredible. 

Have you ever had moments when you felt, “Maybe I want to bring something else into this”?

No, no, not yet. Too much of a control freak. [Laughs] Nope, nope, stay away. [Laughs]

I’d say, especially for Nova, which is where I started to follow you more closely, I read a lot of positive reviews, and a lot of enthusiasm around your record, but I guess with the internet, where everyone can say anything about anything, often there’s a lot of negativity, and people just say hurtful things, because they’re hiding behind their computer. 

Exactly. 

Is that something that you ever worry about? Has that ever affected you in any way? 

I think everyone that has some sort of, let’s call it a public figure of some sort, everyone cares about what people say. I mean, it’s in our human nature to care what others think about us. It’s in our human nature to want to, especially when you share something that’s so personal, you want people to feel something, and to feel something with you, instead of being like, I don’t like this, or something like that. So I try not to let it affect me too much, because at the end of the day, the most important thing is for me to be honest about what I’m trying to communicate to my audience, or the people that want to listen, and to be proud of the fact that I can do this, actually. Because for so many years, I didn’t believe that I could, and that’s when my mom sat me down and went, “You have to start doing something”, because I was quite passive, because I was afraid, for so long, and I had such low self-esteem in music. So yes, of course it has affected me sometimes, but I try to think that everyone’s entitled to their opinion, and at least if someone writes a bad review, they’re feeling something. If someone just goes, “Meh”, that’s the worst thing ever, someone’s just like, you know, I take it or leave it, “That’s terrible”. I’d rather have someone hate this with passion, than to be like, “I guess it’s okay” [laughs]. So yeah, you just have to think of it like, take it with a grain of salt, and also like a perspective. Just like you don’t like things, other people are entitled to that, and sometimes you can’t please everyone anyway. So most important is to please yourself first, and then hope that that speaks to others. At least that’s authentic, I think. 

I remember that when Myrkur, an artist that reminds me of you in many ways, first appeared on the scene she found some opposition from, let’s call them elitist, who decided that for whatever reasons she couldn’t be a good Metal musician. Has anything like that happened to you?

Luckily, no. I’ve been very lucky with that. I think it’s also because I’ve never tried to label my projects. Like I’ve always kind of said, you know, I’ll leave that up to other people to decide what kind of music this is. It happened to appeal to the Metal genre, because of certain tools, I guess, in my music that appeals to that kind of crowd. What might have happened with her is that I think that she, from day one, like her/her record label was pushing it like, “She is the new face of Black Metal”, and it might have been a bit aggressive, and the scene is now, I think, even more open than when we first started, because I was releasing my first album around the same time that she started with her first like EP’s and stuff like that. I think, if I’m not wrong. And the scene has changed a lot in those 10 years than it’s been since then. And I think it’s more open now, thank God, again. But yeah, I never labelled my thing as anything, and also I had like, I had a specific imagery and stuff that was like really not connected to this. So I think maybe people were a bit more accepting of it, because I didn’t say that I’m the new face of Black Metal, look at me. So that’s worked for me, at least. 

I’d say it’s not the case for you, but a lot of bands are labelled as “female-fronted bands”, even though that says nothing about the band’s sound. How do you feel about that phenomenon? Do you feel it’s actually a good thing, it’s something that actually helps women musicians? 

I do not think it’s good for women in music. No, not at all. I think I’ve spoken to so many other people in my situation that are either identifying as, or born as, women. And we all say the same thing, that we cannot wait until the day where female-fronted whatever is a thing of the past. And it’s just because, for me personally, my issue with that is that we’re in a world now where I know we need to speak about gender. Because there isn’t gender equality. And this is something that breaks my heart so much. And I think it breaks a lot of people’s hearts that we still have to talk about that in 2024. But the fact of the matter is, for me, I don’t care about gender when it comes to art. Gender shouldn’t be a defining factor when we speak about art. Art is emotion. That’s genderless. Even if society wants us to believe that emotion belongs especially to the female gender, which is just complete nonsense. But my main problem is that we gender it. And just based on… It doesn’t say… Like you said, it says nothing about the music. It just says that, okay, there’s a person singing that identifies as female. Why is that interesting? That means nothing. It’s like, okay, it doesn’t say anything about anything. And you will never, ever, ever find the “male-fronted” label, which is just like, once again, just creating a big difference between the genders and a big gap there that we’re luckily closing slowly but surely, but it’s taking a lot of time. So yes, I’m not a big fan of this. But I mean, again, when you make such deep tracks in society, it takes many, many, many years to kind of smooth those over. And it’s not just in music. It’s in general society that the gender gap is still there and it’s still a problem. So I just, I see that it’s changing a little bit. Just hope that it keeps changing. And that again, one day there’ll be a beautiful day when we never hear female-fronted metal [laughs], or male-fronted metal, for that case. Because gender is not the defining factor in art for me personally.