“I read this perfect Tom Waits quote the other night, ‘As a songwriter, the only thing I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people’s minds.’ I’m a songwriter and a jewelry designer so reading this line somehow connected these perpetually disparate parts of my identity into perfect balance.”
“As a maker of these physical and ephemeral things, songs and jewels, I have an obvious reverence for vinyl—the epitome of the tangible and ineffable. Like jewelry, records are passed down, they are complete, they hold stories, and come alive when you hold them and ‘wear’ them. But, it’s strange, I didn’t have my own record player until last Christmas. Tim Carr, who produced most of the songs on the “Tiny Ocean” EP, gave it to me as a gift. He also gave me my first record, ever, Ladies of the Canyon.
Though I lacked the vinyl experience as a kid, music was a huge part of my childhood and I experienced it mostly through chanting and driving around in the car with my dad. I was born in a Hindu ashram and the first house we moved into after that wasn’t filled with many things, like furniture. We hosted chanting and meditation nights. That ancient music was countered by wonderfully awful 1980s pop on the radio and Oldies 103.3, which I loved and still do. Lately, I’ve been recording a bunch of covers of The Turtles, The Mindbenders, The Drifters, and they all remind me of being a little kid, driving around in the backseat of our beat-up navy blue Mercedes.
As I grew up, there was more of a folk influence, most notably from James Taylor (I’m from Massachusetts and we spent summers at the cape and he is a staple of that time and place). I remember being fourteen and playing Blue for my mom as we drove through Cambridge one day, as though I had discovered it. She burst into tears because it was clearly a rite of passage. Later, I turned our sunroom into my bedroom and holed up in there listening to a mix of Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez’s Diamonds and Rust, a live recording of Robert Plant singing “Tangerine” on repeat, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn compilations. Singing along to that music was a big part of my love for it and those artists gave me a foundation.
I started to train as an opera singer when I moved to New York at eighteen. Verdi and bel canto operas were bizarrely familiar to me. I always felt like I knew where the music was going but I didn’t know why. Recently, my mom told me this story about my great-grandmother, Fanny, who was a self-taught pianist and opera lover. She lost her hearing later in life and would press herself up against their 1950s floor to ceiling speakers just to feel reverberation of Callas, Caruso, and Sutherland. Sometimes I wonder if her love was passed down to me somehow.
My influences have expanded way beyond this list from my childhood, but my record collection is still mostly representative of classical and folk, from Lucinda Williams to Rubenstein playing Dvorak to Ravi Shankar ragas, and there are some more contemporary things like Bat For Lashes’ Fur and Gold and Joanna Newsom’s Ys.
After Tim gave me the record player, I spent months trying to find the perfect piece of furniture for it. I would look at all of these posts on craigslist and call someone up about their cabinet; there was always a story that went along with it—indicative of the records themselves. In the music I write, I’ve begun to realize that, no matter what my intention, I’m ultimately always writing about what remains, the residue of memory and the things we hold onto. When I sing old standards or arias, it is with that same desire to re-experience the fragments that are left behind. The records I collect are the ones that hold the memories that need to be played over and over again, to remember.”
—Dia
Dia’s brand new EP, “Tiny Ocean” is available now.
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