ArtiFact #18: All About Eva | Eva Schubert, Alex Sheremet

ArtiFact: Books, Art, Culture

Eva Schubert is a singer-songwriter, poet, and historian from Canada with several full-length albums, plus an upcoming record that was finished just weeks ago. In this conversation, Alex and Eva discuss growing up and growing into poetry, concepts of self-identity, the fears and imperatives surrounding human creativity, art as competition and communication, Eva’s thoughts as she writes her lyrics, how to avoid musical and writerly clichés, and an analysis of two albums: 2017’s outstanding “Borderless Sky” and 2019’s “Hot Damn Romance”. At the end of the discussion, we touch on our shared interests of fitness, deadlifting, nutrition, and injuries/injury prevention as they relate to middle age and beyond.
Time did not permit us to get to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, as planned, but we will make it up to the audience with another ArtiFact on this and other subjects down the road.
You can also watch this discussion on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCUorJjTv2c
Eva Schubert’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/evasajoo
Buy “Borderless Sky”: https://www.amazon.com/Borderless-Sky-Eva-Schubert/dp/B077BQY1X2
Buy “Hot Damn Romance”: https://www.amazon.com/Hot-Damn-Romance-Eva-Schubert/dp/B07WNZTNTQ/
Timestamps:
0:24 – Eva Schubert’s origin story: Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, T.S. Eliot, rhythm, music, and oatmeal
14:18 – Eva on self-limitations, and how her experience as an airplane pilot expanded her own self-definition
20:30 – The “fears” surrounding art, creation, and other pursuits at odds with financial + outward societal success
31:04 – Object-oriented art: why art is almost wholly about competition and communication
37:34 – Eva’s music: discussing her second album, “Borderless Sky” (2017) – why does Eva Schubert work mostly in the love-song/jazz tradition?
44:05 – The track “Backcountry Blues”: how the composition subverts the lyrics, and how the lyrics gradually re-inform the composition; how this can be extrapolated to other works of art; Elliott Smith’s “Waltz #2 (XO)” + Phosophorescent’s “Song for Zula”
57:34 – The track “Traces of You”: how to establish a Cole Porter vibe; the function of the A-B-A-A-B rhyme scheme; how to prime listeners for lyrical cleverness before the lyrics even begin
01:06:14 – The track “Ribbons and Bows”: dual male/female expectations in song traditions + in life; do women “really” know what men want?; the irony + tragedy of romantic closeness & mitigations of distance; the epidemic of cosmetic surgery and the faux-style feminism that downplays it; the overcorrection of the Slut Walk & the sexual pathologies + shame these things are trying (yet failing) to correct
01:27:40 – The tracks “They Say” & “Saying Goodbye”; inverting POVs & turning love into what other characters in a song perceive; how to write about love and death while avoiding the most obvious pitfalls- for example, clichés like “everything will die but our love will endure”
01:34:42 – Eva’s third album, “Hot Damn Romance” (2019): the track “Water”: how does Eva understand artistic improvement, and what does that even mean; how might Eva respond to charges of writerly cliché; inverting clichés by making them literal statements; Eva’s experience working alongside many artists with visions that might compete with or otherwise conflict with her own
01:52:48 – Exercise, nutrition, & fitness; how Eva got interested in weight training; injuries and injury prevention; the deadlift; Alex on getting over his childhood obesity; Stuart McGill, back health, the Big 3; what if the deadlift cannot (or should not) be performed at a certain age; the Turkish Get Up; physical therapy is still in the Stone Age of human knowledge
Read the latest from the automachination universe: https://automachination.com

Read Alex’s (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com/

Thumbnail photo © Joel Parrish: https://poeticimport.com

Tags: #ArtiFact, #EvaSchubert, #writing, #songwriting, #lyrics