Eartheater is Out of Body and Hyper-Human

She’d start a song and start it over, pausing to burp or commenting on how beautiful the call and response she coordinated was. Everyone was transfixed and charmed with her candor. But there was an underlying feeling that where she was going in song was so deep that she couldn’t fully bring us there without cracking open.

The acoustic work is a return to her roots. Between Paris Fashion Week appearances and tours, Drewchin spent the fall doing a residency with FUGA in Zaragoza, Spain. She spent the time writing her next album, contemplating volcanoes and the formation of stone and mountains; and how those elements of nature reflect her inner world. 

She slept in a room with a view of the Pyrenees mountains, dusty yellow wildflowers and dogs running around off-leash. “I thought about feelings like magma pushing up through the crust of the earth,” she told office. "I had never been so alone and still as I was during this period. I had never had time to work and write so uninterrupted –– until now in quarantine, of course," she said. "For the first month, I hardly interacted with anyone."

Her new single, "Below the Clavicle," out today, is the first track that came to fruition in that dreamlike environment. The song embodies the restless feeling of letting a complex situation unfold without intervening prematurely. "It’s about waiting to understand more before talking about it — when the meaning is still below the clavicle and hasn’t made it up to the head yet," she said. "It’s about taking the time to let the understanding forge underground."

In its meaning and isolated conception, the song, which she teased at that early March show, happens to feel like an appropriate mascot for lockdown. As the Earth demands time for its own healing, forcing us to decelerate, we are individually and collectively feeling a moment of pregnant pause. Drewchin’s effortless cosmic attunement to the moment doesn’t feel out of character for her body of work. It’s obvious she’s of another world –– not off in space or far away. More like some interstitial place so visceral you intuitively understand it but can’t fully comprehend its access.

How are you spending lockdown?

I got back from Paris Fashion Week on March 2nd and almost immediately left for my mum's house in the countryside. My plan was to stay with my fam for a week or so — little did I know... A couple days later the world screeched to a halt and I had an eerie headache and body pains. I was horizontal for a week, exhausting Netflix. I would have massive pangs of unsettling anxiety. My mind would scramble to attach the anxiousness to some source or reason, but whatever it grasped to didn’t seem important enough to be giving me such sickening discomfort.

I recognized the feeling though. It’s something that happens to me after every big tour unless I quickly swoop my energy into other projects and distractions. It almost feels like when traveling and performing every day, I’m running on heavy doses of adrenaline and cortisol and then when I stop cold turkey my brain still excretes these chemicals on habit which clash with the stillness. It’s like my mental energy is careening down a highway looping in my mind with nothing to redirect the inertia. It took me a week to ween myself off my own hyper state and to also realize that I had corona. 

I had a lovely birthday with my family, sick with corona, high on ketamine, taking baths and watching the Paul Stamets documentary.

Where does that post-tour anxiety you recognized come from?

I’m such an ambitious person that my ambition would deflate and it’d be a bit of an identity crisis. And then I'd examine what that was and realize I don’t have to be producing and working all the time. I’m used to living on very little. I’ve been extremely hand to mouth my whole life, so it’s not about money. It’s never been about money. It’s just momentum. Feeling like I need to keep the inertia flowing because it just might be hard to get the vehicle back to speed if I jump off at any point. But there’s so much that happens creatively when I don’t feel the need to push it. The week after not doing anything I stayed up all night and wrote lyrics in my journal.

Have you had vivid dreams lately?

A horse stepped on my foot a few years ago –– I’ve actually had multiple injuries to the same foot which sucks. So it’s kind of disgusting, but I had a dream that I had teeny, teeny, teeny white bats flying out of my foot. I also had a dream that Slow Thai asked me for a blowjob but my mom was sleeping next to me so I couldn’t. I feel like before quarantine I wasn’t having any dreams.

How has this interruption to our regularly scheduled programming affected your work life?

I feel really grateful because, what if this happened in the middle of my insane productivity rat race, producing the album and being in the studio? For the last few months I’ve been in the studio every single day. And if not in the studio then on tour. This would’ve been a massive interruption, and I know that’s happening to a lot of people. I can’t help but empathize with that. Basically I just finished everything and that’s a massive blessing. I can just chill and plan on how to release this amongst this insane, passive revolution or whatever. It’s clearly going to have a massive effect on people.

What do you think that effect will be as it pertains to art?

My gut feeling and my hopeful feeling is that when people slow down they have more of a capacity to digest more complex content, music, sounds –– maybe more of a diverse topography of sound. Because the hamster wheel of productivity taught you that electronic grid-based music is more useful. I really respect that, I don’t have any bias one way or the other as far as expression, I’m really not a music snob.

But I think a silver lining to everyone slowing down is that they may have more interest in listening to more experimental sound. And exploring more obtuse artwork. For instance, in the trenches of American capitalism there’s been less infrastructure, whether it’s underground or mid-ground or above ground to support weirder music, but in Europe for instance where people are functioning at a slower pace, you can see there’s much more of an infrastructure, less candy popcorn, and more complex experimental work. So I’m interested to see if people have more of an ability and more patience to listen to different kinds of music.

What’s the forthcoming album like in comparison to "Trinity"?

Like I said I’m unbiased either way but it does excite me, people having the curiosity to go into more strange work. "Trinity" was a time for me to make an album to bring people together. In the past my work was, I’m going to quote my friend Fin, she always says Tender psycho seeks same. I really resonate with that. In the past my work has been like a smoke signal, like, "Hey I’m over here if anyone else is dealing with feeling like a lone ranger or feeling out of place a lot of the time," I was reaching for a community around that. And I found that. And that’s been a huge, beautiful thing in my life: collecting underground tender psychos. 

And with "Trinity," I felt this need to not necessarily do that anymore. To just make something that really felt like water, just purely quenching for as many people as possible. I had had a particularly serene summer. I had this summer where there was a lot of romance, a lot of love, a lot of super gushy lust. And a super fun summer that involved friends and lovers. And I just needed to make an album about that.

But this album is very different. It’s unlike anything I’ve done before and you’ll see glimmers of everything I’ve done within it. It’s very fantasy, it’s very lush. There’s a lot of strings, lucious, rich cinema sort of sounding, cinematic strings. A lot of chamber arrangements. And really delicate harp-like guitar. It’s very classical and emotional, stripped down. It’s not really electronic at all, there’s a lot of guitar and voice.

It’s a really good album at this time where people are moving at a slower pace, and have the patience to listen to something that is very detailed. Weirdly it feels sort of perfect for what’s happening. And there is this uplifting, encouraging undertone to all of it. I think it’s perfect for now.