Yohuna
Photography by Drew Reynolds. Interview by Heather Hawke.
Yohuna is a documentation of Johanne Swanson’s past and present. With this project you can peer into her upbringing between churches and the woods in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin as well as years spent traveling through New Mexico, the Midwest, and stints in Boston and Berlin and now with living in Brooklyn. Her first album, 2016’s Patientness, was chronicle of all that movement and transition, while her new album Mirroring, released this past June, is about the steadiness and stability she’s felt about making a home for herself in Brooklyn.
Whereas Patientness was more synth-centered, Mirroring was mostly written on guitar. Though not her primary instrument, Johanne found the physicality of writing the songs on guitar to be really cathartic. She spent six months working on these tracks before her roommate, producer Eric Littmann (Julie Byrne, Vagabon, Phantom Posse) who co-produced, engineered, mixed the record, and co-wrote “Find a Quiet Place,” approached her about collaborating. The two recorded in their apartment and ran a cable from one room to another when tracking the vocals, as Johanne felt more comfortable singing in her room. For Mirroring, Johanne also worked with longtime collaborators like Adelyn Strei (guitar, flute), Warren Hildebrand (guitar), plus several more friends.
I want to start from the beginning as your stage name Yohuna is both a documentation of your roots and evolution. What was your childhood like growing up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin? Was creativity a part of your childhood? Did creativity play a big part of your childhood?
I spent the school year with my mom and brother in a small Midwestern town of 14,000 and summers with my dad in the country 20 miles north. My upbringing was pretty religious and I went to Catholic school for 13 years. My parents are both musicians and put me in piano lessons and choir early on. I loved making up stories, reading fiction, singing, spending time in the woods. My mom especially encouraged me to explore my creativity, driving me most nights to a nearby college town called Eau Claire so I could be in a better community theatre group and chorus.
Tell me about your musical upbringing. When did you first become aware that music was going to be a part of your life? What was your formal / not formal music education like growing up?
My mom was also pretty strict and only allowed me to hang out with friends on the weekends. So, I joined a band in high school to hang out with my friends after school. I could sight read classical music, but had no idea how to play in a band. I didn’t realize those were different skills. I labored through writing simple counter melodies on keyboard, but what I really loved and came quickly was harmonizing with my friend Alyssa who wrote most of our songs. She didn’t have formal music training and songs seemed to come to her like magic. I loved writing and she helped me put some of my lyrics to chords. We were lucky to have a small music scene in Eau Claire, and I went to college there so we could keep playing and writing together. Being a part of a music community became just as important to me as actually playing music, and it just sort of became my whole life. We booked our first tour between our junior and senior year of high school, and it was a week of dates around Wisconsin and Minnesota. We played a Starbucks in Green Bay.
Let’s talk about your formative years. What was the very first concert you attended? Did you play any sports / go to summer camps? What music were you and your friends listening to in middle school / high school? Were there posers on your wall when you were growing up?
I hear a lot of church music influencing the melodies I write now. Old hymns are just ingrained. The first real concert I attended was Mark Kozelek, which is kind of a bummer now, but Songs For A Blue Guitar was hugely influential. Our music scene was very folk and polished, and our hometown hero Justin Vernon started blowing up. I was 16 in 2007, I loved indie music like Beach House and St. Vincent. By 2009 I started getting really into music blogs and made a lot of friends online. I loved anything fuzzy and lo-fi, had a what.cd account and a tumblr. I found out about Grouper and spent my whole first year of college just being held by Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill. When I heard the early Best Coast recordings, I was like, “I could do this.” That was my sophomore year of college, I was living away from home for the first time through a domestic exchange program at UNM in Albuquerque, and just started trying to write simple pop songs and recording them on a Casio through the internal speaker on my laptop.
Describe your path to becoming involved with music. What’s your very first earliest musical memory? When was the first time you felt super inspired by music?
My earliest musical memories are at church or other religious youth gatherings. There were other powerful forces besides music at work, like religion and community, and I felt connected to something so big. It’s been a weird loss to reconcile as an adult, losing my faith, and then feeling burned by a lot of communities I poured myself into in my early 20’s. Music has stayed though, I think it always will.
When did you start writing songs? Do you remember the first song / piece of music you wrote?
I can still hum that first song Alyssa and I wrote. I was 15, and we wrote it while hanging out on her trampoline. I didn’t start exploring writing on my own until I was 20, and those are the songs on the Revery EP.
Does it feel like writing music is something you’ve always had to do or is this something that you discovered along the way at some point?
It feels like it’s always been there. At this point, it’s pretty embedded in my processing.
What’s the biggest hardship that’s helped inspire your writing?
I am not sure about hardship that’s inspired my writing, but my mind immediately goes to navigating the local music scene in Eau Claire as one of the few women trying to play shows and get involved. That prevented me from writing for a long time, really until I moved away. It seems more common in smaller music scenes that there will be a few longtime gatekeepers that get to decide who is in or who is out.
Are you ever intentional when you sit down to write? Is there ever a “I’m going to write a song now” moment or is it more ephemeral, like you’ve been kicking something around in your head for days, weeks, months, and then suddenly it comes spilling out?
I am almost always writing or working on something, just passively, but I do have to be intentional to sit down to record. I guess that’s my “I’m going to write a song now” moment. Once I get going, things come pretty naturally. I try to write with “first idea best idea” in mind and not judge anything too harshly the first time around.
I know Patientness was mostly a document of the years you spent traveling all over, including stints in Boston and Berlin, and Mirroring was more settled when you moved to Brooklyn. How has it been living in Brooklyn? What has it felt like to fully build out and form this place to call home?
It’s been full of growing pains, but I love living in Brooklyn. I’m sure some of my aimlessness in Berlin was just being young and foreign. My life is slower and more stable than before. Stability isn’t exactly fun, because you lose the high highs with the low lows, but it’s sustainable. Something else I’ve come to realize is that the people you were close to during those ups and downs might not support you when you grow. They might feel dejected. I have messed up horribly in New York in the same ways I have before, but I’ve also found support in folks that call me in and ask me to be better. Growing starts with love and support.
Mirroringwas roughly 3 years in the making. How much did you, and the album, evolve in that time? Were there any parts of the songs off of Mirroringthat date back to your first album Patientness or perhaps before that?
Mirroring was done for about a year before I released it, so I’d like to say I had moved through a lot of the feelings it’s processing by the time it came out– but that’s not true. It will take a long time for me to move through the loss that album describes, and I’m trying to surrender to that. It’s a breakup album. I experienced a big love, and I credit so much of my growth to the support and care in that relationship. The first and the last song on Mirroring both surround this idea of being so overwhelmed by loss but grateful you were able to know your heart so full. The songs were written very quickly though, in a heightened state of that relationship’s turmoil.
What’s the writing process like for Mirroring? I know you wrote / recorded in your bedroom in Brooklyn, but where were you at mentally when you wrote them? Was there an event or a specific timeframe where a large chunk of the lyricism came out?
I was fielding a lot of ups and downs– confused, trying to accept the things I couldn’t control, defensive and in protection mode. I was working on containing my emotions– not controlling them, but making friends with them. That involved a lot of withholding things I wanted to say out of defense. I put those ideas somewhere though, and that’s what a lot of these songs ended up being.
I know that unlike Patientness, that was previous synth-centered based, Mirroringwas written entirely on guitar, which wasn’t your primary instrument, but you liked the “physicality of it”. Did you have a certain set of rules/ limitations you felt needed to be maintained / discarded for the making of this? Did the writing process also change since the last time you sat down to write for a recording? Is that process something that’s shifted for you over time?
There weren’t any rules, it was just that I was writing so much at once and there was an acoustic guitar that I could reach from my bed. I started loving that instrument too, that I strummed while I wrote and my whole body moved along rhythmically. I recently read The Body Keeps the Score, which has to do with how trauma is stored in the body even when the conscious mind has blocked it out. It made me curious about that small physical gesture of playing guitar creating such a different kind of release in me. That physicality opened a lot of doors.
When and how did the album title Mirroring come about in the album creation process?
I wrote the song “Mirroring” pretty late in the game, and then realized it described the theme of the body of work I had written. The album unfolded in a way that turned out to be much more narrative and complete than I expected.
For some writers, writing is an extremely difficult and painful process. How is it for you?
It is painful. But I feel mostly lucky to have songwriting as a tool to understand the world and go deeper with myself and my greater community.
What was your favorite part about the writing / album creation process for Mirroring?
I think collaborating with other musicians on this material was some of my favorite part of the process. Eric Littmann co-produced Mirroring with me, and he really asked me to defend my choices and challenged me. One of my oldest friends and collaborators Adelyn Strei– she actually joined a later arrangement of that early band with Alyssa when I was 19– played guitar all over this album and Patientness. Adelyn brought in a cellist named Hilary who made so many of these songs come to life.
With your artwork, how did you interact with the artist/designer? Did you contribute ideas or remain hands-off? Was there a revision process?
I worked with Brian Vu for both the Patientness artwork and Mirroring. He is a brilliant artist and friend. I had ideas for both of those artworks; I described them to him and he took them to places I couldn’t have imagined. I was inspired by surrealism during the more confusing moments of Mirroring and showed Brian a Magritte painting, which he interpreted in a photo collage for the cover.
How important is it to you for the art that accompanies your music to represent the sound and the lyrics? Do you aim for a conversation between the two, or are you more interested in an aesthetically cool package?
It is important to me that the two are connected, but it hasn’t ever felt forced. I like to see where things go and see how they end up in conversation.
What is your perspective on how you want to be represented throughout your band’s visuals (press photos, music videos, album artwork)?
This is hard, especially as a woman. From the time I started making music up to Patientness, it was important to me that I be taken seriously and have an image that reflected that. My face was obscured or turned away in a lot of the press photos I used. I wanted to be photographed with my instrument, so that people knew I was the one that was playing it. I’ve let go of that a bit.
Have you had any mentors along the way?
I would call Emily Reo a mentor. She was one of the only other women I knew making music with keyboards when I first started, and I really look up to her. We worked closely organizing festivals and collaborating around 2011 – 2014, and I’m really amazed by everything she’s done this year with Only You Can See It. It’s a wonderful album.
