Shannon Wright embraces honesty
The Atlanta-based guitarist talks about finding audiences overseas and the importance of experience.
Photo credit: Christophe Levet
Ask any music lover about their first concert, and instead of describing a great performance, they’ll likely recount a formative life experience. Singer and guitarist Shannon Wright remembers that moment in exquisite detail. She was 13 years old, a self-described punk rock girl in Jacksonville, Florida, experiencing the unhinged self-exposure of staple DIY bands Sonic Youth and Firehose. She saw herself reflected in the musicians onstage, and that emotional vulnerability still defines her songwriting. “What I grew up loving was being completely slayed by a show where, for 45 minutes, I experienced this special moment in my life that I’ll always have a memory of,” Wright says.
Her forthcoming album Division, due out in February 2017, harnesses the same vulnerability, but in a stripped-down context. The album came about when renowned French pianist Katia Labéque approached her after a show, offering her studio and access to an old Steinway piano. Division represents a crucial arc for Wright’s career, where the rawness she witnessed at the all-ages club in Jacksonville still underscores her music, even when she’s a continent away.
After releasing her debut album, 1999’s Flightsafety, Wright took up the nomadic existence of a touring musician. She lived in New York City and Chapel Hill, North Carolina before settling down in Atlanta.
Since 2000, Atlanta has been Wright’s home base between extensive tours and recording sessions. She sees herself as an outlier in Atlanta’s music scene, despite living here for 16 years and performing alongside bands such as Deerhunter and the Coathangers in the 2007 Burn to Shine documentary film. “It’s a strange thing, I’ve never felt a part of Atlanta’s scene at all; I’ve always felt like an outsider,” she says. “I do better in other places so I focus on those places more, like Europe because I do really well there.”
Since her U.S. label Touch & Go Records stopped releasing new music in 2008, Wright has doubled down on her presence in Europe, mainly distributing through an independent record label in France called Vicious Circle.
Wright feels that European audiences respond well to her music because they possess an attitude better suited to her emotionally gripping performances. On stage, she magnifies the most intense parts of her recorded material, amping up her guitar’s distorted swells and stretching her vocal bellows to their breaking point. “When I first started performing, people didn’t really understand where I was coming from emotionally,” she says. “It’s kind of a demanding music to see, but I think if you go in with an open mind then you can leave with something.”
She points to a cultural difference in the way European countries such as France treat their musicians, where fans attend concerts to soak in the music instead of treating shows like parties or social events. “In Europe, their biggest love is to actually feel something for a show, getting moved and touched by it rather than hanging out with pals and having a beer,” she says. “Which is great but you need to have an experience with music because it’s a beautiful thing.”
The hardcore bands she watched growing up shared that focus on emotional honesty, which explains why influences from punk progenitors, such as collaborator Steve Albini, wedge themselves into her music. With songs such as “Mire,” from her 2013 release In Film Sound, Wright pairs hushed, confessional lyrics with ascending howls of noise. After whispering “Misery comes in harmony” over a delicate bed of guitar strums, she launches into a deafening crescendo where fragile chords morph into a scuzzy climax of distortion.
“DIY Punk music was something you could identify with so you wouldn’t feel alone,” she says. “For me, people were so honest, and through their honesty seemed to heal a little bit, which allowed me to express myself as I saw fit instead of trying to be the coolest band around.”
[/atlanta/shannon-wright-jaye-jayle-thousandaire/Event?oid=17524020|Shannon Wright plays The Earl on Sat., August 6. $10. 9 p.m. W/ Jaye Jayle and Thousandaire. 488 Flat Shoals Ave. S.E. 404-522-3950. www.badearl.com.]