Miranda Soileau-Pratt - The Spatulas Interview
From Bob Dylan to the Velvet Underground and everything else, Portland/Massachusetts-based musician Miranda Soileau has carefully crafted songs for over a decade. With early entries like The Blimp, Soileau established The Spatulas during the Pandemic and hasn't looked back. Bridging the endless gap between punk and songwriting sedation, Soileau quickly set roots with a newfound sound with her most recent solo effort in collaboration with Nowhere Flower entitled "Around And About You." Speaking on her influences, creative process, family, and melodic meditations of life and death, the songwriter's drive is epic and exciting to see unfold.
Are you originally from Portland, OR? When did you first begin to get into music and was this relevant to your household growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences during your formative years, and how quickly did the gap from learning to play to wanting to perform and record music happen for you? Branching off The Blimp, how did The Spatulas initially come about? Tell me about the early days of the group while navigating the Pandemic and everything that would follow.
I was born a couple hours south of Portland, in Eugene, OR, a college town my single mom thought was hip in the early 80s. She was an eccentric, hippie Midwestern boomer who moved out West, originally from Rockford, Illinois. We were a wacky family— just my mom, older brother, and I, singing and dancing to “Pump Up The Jam” on the radio, joining drum circles, and chanting kirtan, since we were into Self Realization Fellowship. I also inherited my dad’s Takamine acoustic guitar from the Soileau family after he was lost at sea as a commercial fisherman when I was 5. I learned how to play cowboy chords when I was 14 and played covers for years: Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Canned Heat, the Beatles, Sheryl Crow, and a little later Cat Power, Mirah, Kimya Dawson, Mazzy Star, Flying Burrito Brothers, Townes Van Zandt, Velvet Underground, and the Vaselines. It wasn’t until I was 20 that I got super into collecting records and learning more about bands, mostly through boyfriends, but especially Luc Gunn (from The Blimp/Lavender Flu). I was inspired by Vashti Bunyan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, the Shaggs, the Ikettes, Shangri-Las, Phil Seymour, and also the Mirrors, Rocket From the Tombs, New York Dolls and Stooges, Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators. I always wanted to move to Portland, but except for 8 years in Hawaii as a kid and 2 years in L.A. as an adult, I lived in Eugene. I moved back from L.A. because I was the only family who could care for my mom, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2015.
Photo: Dave Brushback
“We were a wacky family— just my mom, older brother, and I, singing and dancing to “Pump Up The Jam” on the radio, joining drum circles, and chanting kirtan, since we were into Self Realization Fellowship. ”
After she died in 2019 and the Pandemic, I moved to Portland, where my music finally seemed to take shape, and I played out and recorded “March Chant” and “Beehive Mind.” I had never written my songs before I started writing about my mom’s illness. Now I’ve discovered a light switch has been turned on, and songwriting helps soothe grief and makes sense of this scary world we all live in. I developed a strong work ethic from learning fun, complicated Blimp songs from Luc on the keyboard. Even though I can still get stage fright, I’m a better musician from that experience, from being on stage in a supportive role and practicing all those scales! After the Blimp and the romantic side of that relationship ended, I’d jam with different people— a weekly excuse to party, often playing covers, keeping it loose. Eventually, I met Elijah Bodish (from the band Mordecai). The Pandemic solidified my need for artistic expression. Eli, his brother Holt, Holt’s future wife Masha, and I would use a storage unit out in West Eugene to go and pound away on our instruments and let off steam. The period after my mom’s death and during quarantine, when I didn’t have a day job, was an awakening for me. I didn’t sense any judgment, I just felt fully myself, creative, and free. I’d begun writing a LOT. I played the keyboard and would sing along from my journal, a stream-of-consciousness poetry I’d been writing, and the seeds of songs started to emerge.
Jumping ahead to the band’s back-to-back LPs “Beehive Mind,” and “Around And About You” that was just released early last month. Incredible efforts that completely captured the eager ears of its listeners, what was the overall process of writing and recording these albums? I’d love to know some of the backstories to tracks such as “Maya,” “Mother Brother,” “Art Dance Movement Pt. 1 & 2,” and “Oaks Park.” “Maya” was first incarnated when I sang it as the Trogg’s song “I Want You.”
Thank you so much! It makes me happy to know people are connecting to the tunes... I finally moved to Portland in 2022, though a year later, I decided to move to the East Coast to be with Elijah while he finishes a postdoc in Cambridge, MA. During that year in Portland, I met up with Kyle Raquipiso, Lila Jarzombek, and Jon Grothman, some great new friends and musicians who, luckily, wanted to play my new songs! I switched back to rhythm guitar. To make it easier to play along, I usually drew up a chord map for each song, and the band would contribute their instruments however they saw fit. (This method worked well for my current Boston lineup, too. It’s exciting how everyone’s style influences the music.) I was also inspired during that time by Magic Luscious Spirit Sounds, the collaborative cross-abilities music collective, and helping out with “Lily Mullen Is Here” (LP on Mississippi Records). After a year of playing shows locally in Portland and practicing once a week, we went into Red Lantern Studios and recorded 20 songs in two days! I peddled the best of them around, along with my home-recorded solo song, “March Chant In April,” and Dean Spunt from Post Present Medium kindly offered to put out the EP cassette and the other songs on a full-length LP, “Beehive Mind.” The first few months after moving to Cambridge, MA, my Portland guitarist Lila, aka Nowhere Flower, and I collaborated on long-distance recordings that became the cassette Post Present Medium just put out, “Around and About You.” We both missed playing together and found the Garageband hack of trading tracks back and forth, layering instruments loosely, that was satisfying! Side B captures some improvised live moments from when I came back to Oregon to visit. We’re happy and proud of how these recordings came out. It’s empowering to self-record this lo-fi bedroom pop weirdness and to know I can collaborate with friends even long distance and find the full Spatulas band in each city we live in.
“I was also inspired during that time by Magic Luscious Spirit Sounds, the collaborative cross-abilities music collective, and helping out with “Lily Mullen Is Here” (LP on Mississippi Records). After a year of playing shows locally in Portland and practicing once a week, we went into Red Lantern Studios and recorded 20 songs in two days! ”
While listening to a podcast called The Fall of Civilizations, I wrote down an ancient Mayan incantation by a shaman that had been recorded in hieroglyphics on a stone called the Ritual Of The Bacabs. The shaman H-Menoob used these chants to communicate with the spirits that cause sickness and death. Later, in the storage unit with Elijah and Holt, instead of singing the words to “I Want You,” I started reciting some of these lines from the Ritual Of The Bacabs instead. I blended them with words about my mother dying of dementia. This is the original incantation: “Kanajaw, they say, is the creator. Kanajaw, they say, is the darkness coming from the fifth level of the sky, the head of the dragonfly, the head covering its worms. It bit the hand of the unfettered creator, the unfettered darkness. It licked the blood in the sweat bath; it licked the blood in the stone hut. Throw it to the demented creator, to the demented darkness.” “Mother Brother” was another born in the W. 11th storage unit. Those words are again me processing grief and balancing my resentment with acceptance that my brother could not come to the Mainland to help me out with M’ocean. I love that the song sounds fun and sweet, influenced by playing with the Mordecai brothers and their easy-going approach to music when the subject is again so heavy! “Art, Dance, Movement Pt. 1” was a live jam with me playing keys and Lila on guitar and loop pedal. I later recited my mom’s yoga monologue over the top of it. I have a VHS tape of my mom teaching Hatha yoga in 1985, where she’s wearing a great leotard/tights combo and telling us her reasons for doing yoga. I’ve taken her words to heart! I also do yoga; “to be in a healthy state so I can do what I am meant to do in the world— whatever that may be!” “Art, Dance, Movement Pt. 2” is the first part of our live jam. I sing my own words over it, the lyrics starting to echo the beginning part of the album, the title song, “Around & About You.” “Oaks Park” is essentially Lila’s guitar riff sent to me remotely, returned to her with my words and melody and more guitar, then traded back to me with her flute keys and drum machine. It could be about everybody and nobody in particular. The magical, fun-loving people you want to know and be close to find elusive and end up needing to accept on ambiguous terms that both challenge and bless you throughout the day!
Is there anything else you would like to share further with the readers?
I’m going back to Portland to play a show as Miranda Spatula with Nowhere Flower at the end of April! I’ll also be playing a couple of solo shows in France and England this July, while Eli attends a math conference and we celebrate our engagement. We’re on the move again to West Lafayette, Indiana for 3 years, a postdoc at Purdue University. We’ll be closer to Eli’s family in Illinois which will be nice. He and I also recorded an album with my New England Spatulas last month in Philadelphia with Emily Robb at Suddenly Studios... Stay tuned! It’s a marathon, not a sprint! I may be STREAKING but if I get tired I’ll walk part of the way! I’m grateful to have found the kind of music that seems to help, physically and mentally, and creates a network for the rest of the world.
