Mirah thinks outside the exoskeleton

PRETTY SWEET METAMORPHOSIS Mirah waxes philosophical about bugs while admirers remix her songs to mainstream appeal.

Insects have fascinated literary types, especially French ones, for centuries.  Jean Henri Fabre, the 19th century entomologist whose works inspire Mirah’s newest album, Share This Place, decided that writing about insects in a biographical style was more entertaining, readable, and informative. French novelist André Gide devotes many pages in his autobiography to his boyhood obsession with insect-gathering, detailing methods of specimen collection and his mildly homoerotic entomological expeditions. Insect metaphors are just about everywhere you turn in the naturalist movement of French realism. Writing about insects is fun—you get to use words like “metamorphosis” and “proboscis” without it sounding too forced. However, until now, it just hasn’t quite worked out in a popular music format.

So how does Mirah pull it off so well? For one thing, Mirah seems rather literary herself (Frenchness or lack thereof is irrelevant). Share This Place is a complex web of micro-narratives, told from the perspective of various insects, each song featuring some fascinating lyrical twist. Her songwriting has matured a great deal from her K Records debut You Think It’s Like This But It’s Really Like This and even from 2004’s C’mon Miracle (necessarily, considering the conceptual material) but her sweet, affected vocal delivery has remained consistent.

“For me it was a totally new landscape of lyrical inspiration,” Mirah says. “I have only ever asked myself questions and then written based on that. I’ve never used source material. I’ve never written songs as if they were research projects before, and that’s what this was. It was a research project, and I learned a lot!”

Also novel to the project was the compositional process. Mirah worked at a distance with Spectratone International, which includes former members of the Black Cat Orchestra, a Seattle ensemble that appeared on a previous recording. “They all live in Seattle and I live in Portland,” Mirah says, “so we see each other on occasion, but we did a lot of communication just over the phone and the computer… I didn’t touch my guitar for that project.”

However, being the first person to successfully use “proboscis” in a pop song (come to think of it, Robyn Hitchcock has probably done it somewhere) isn’t the only thing Mirah has been up to these days. She recently reached that coveted moment in a songwriter’s career where everyone starts wanting to remix your songs, and she has let them. The result is Joyride: Remixes, a much less cohesive affair than Share This Place, but just as fun, even if only for the opportunity to hear the princess of indie mixed like a mainstream pop diva.

“That was kind of a shocking realization,” Mirah says. “During the remixing process, when [the remixers] started sending the tracks back, I could listen to my own voice, listen to myself as it had been reformulated and hear this other possibility, another contextual possibility. I was kind of like, ‘Whoa, this is so weird,’ because I’d never place myself there. But a couple of them, I said to myself, ‘Oh my god, this sounds like it could be on the radio! I would never make a song that sounds like it could be on that radio station.’  It was weird. It was eye opening.”

The only problem with remixes and unconventional instrumentation, of course, is the transition to a live setting. “That’s also one of the reasons why playing shows after the release of Share This Place, I have to specify whether this is a ‘Mirah’ show or a ‘Mirah with Spectratone International show,’” Mirah says, stressing that her Santa Cruz performance will be the former, featuring a few songs from Share This Place but mostly older material. “I can’t play those songs without that group of four people. It’s cello, accordion, oud, and hand percussion, and it’s not even all charted out. It’s not like I could just hand some new group of cello, accordion, oud and hand percussion players some charts. It’s very specific.”

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