Back in early 2020, before the lockdown and quarantine and all that jazz, we had the pleasure of speaking to Nara Avakian about their creative process as an instrumentalist, their journey as a musician, and all of the potential ideas in store for the future. One of those ideas came to fruition with the recent release of Pigeons, an LP embodying Nara’s first time singing along to their carefully-mastered instrumentals!

The album, while serving as a genuine continuation of the musician’s prior body of work, also offers a wholly new sound, providing for a refreshing dynamic of consistency and innovation. The songwriter’s prowess on the guitar continues to take center-stage, but their vocals also vye for the listener’s attention – not through shouts, but through subtle declarations and musings.

We wanted to catch up with Nara to get the latest on the new release and pick up where we last left off (before the world experienced the weirdest year ever). Read on to learn more about how Nara’s Room created Pigeons and the process of transitioning from an instrumentalist to a singer-songwriter.

Congrats on Pigeons! When we last spoke, you said that you had a lot of lyrics that needed a voice. It seems that with Pigeons, that voice finally emerged! How was that process of transitioning from an instrumentalist to a singer?

Thank you so, so much! Your support always means a lot. The transition was really fun. I kept a lot of songs private for a really long time, collecting dust in journals and notebooks, only letting them out within the confines of my room. I think the hardest part was letting myself be vulnerable as a vocalist. It's easy to hide behind an instrument, it's harder to hide behind your own voice. I never had a problem with expressing myself with music, but vulnerability is hard. A lot of it was setting aside my pride and letting myself release these songs that felt very personal to me, but also acknowledging that the music isn't about me once it's received by the listener, if that makes sense.

Why the change to Nara's Room? What does Nara's Room encapsulate for you?

I've had the idea for a while! I'd call my bedroom my studio for fun for a while, and eventually I wrote "Nara's Room" on my door as a joke, and it kinda stuck. It turned into jamming with my friends in my living room or in my bedroom, and we'd record voice memos. I guess Nara's Room has evolved into something more loose and experimental. Something that's more fun and not as predictable. My pipe dream is to have different friends of mine jam on future projects, you know, like have a different backing band for each project. Kind of like what Built to Spill does.

That would be incredible! I love Built to Spill. What did the writing process look like for you? Was it drastically different from what you were used to as you incorporated lyrics, words, and intonations to your instrumentals?

Whew! The writing process was... something. It was definitely much, much different than anything I've released before, not even because of its shift in genre and style, but also because I ultimately wasn't attached to an outcome of any sort. I let the music takeover. All of the songs sort of came to me at once and I guess I just had a lot to say. A lot of the songs are about and inspired by everything and nothing. For example, "Fountainhead" can be about anything; I myself can't even say what it's about. What I do know about the song is seeing Edward Hopper's painting of his wife, "A Woman in the Sun" at The Whitney Museum, sent words flooding into my head. Much of it was out of my control, and I found myself almost getting annoyed, because I had all this material but didn't know what to do with it. But it was all about reminding myself to not be attached to the outcome. Much of the time it would be the music first, and then I'll realize the lyrics much later, and most of the time the lyrics come out of nowhere. Most of the writing process in the beginning was me recording words into a voice memo while waiting in traffic. I think what set my writing process this time around apart from other projects is I surrendered to the music, so to speak.

Although your voice is this grand new thing that stands out, your guitar playing has also taken on a new level – the song structures seem even more potent when delivering a narrative, and tracks like "Foggy" and "I'm scared" to me especially exemplify this delicate yet powerful song and dance of your lyricism and guitar skills. Where do you feel that Pigeons took your guitar playing and music production in terms of growth and development?

Wow! I'm so honored you said that. I am touched! It's so interesting you say that about my guitar-playing. I am so used to layering as a means of constructing a narrative, so to force myself to strip down and let my voice and my guitar tell a story was new to me. I've been writing instrumental ditties similar to some of the lines in Pigeons since I first started playing music, but they always stayed buried in my room for my ears only. I think adding lyrics to the songs was particularly difficult for me, because I think my words don't carry as much emotional weight as my music does. I care a lot about emotional effect, so I think that was a huge development for me. Additionally, recording on a Tascam 4-track tape recorder definitely forced me to really get my songs to where I wanted them. We only had about three tapes, and we could only use Side A of them all because we couldn't figure out how to record on Side B of the tapes without overriding Side A. So having to practice for and then record the album with such limited takes and time definitely took my music production and playing to a totally different level (and one of those levels, arguably, is a temporal level, as I had the opportunity to mess around with analog, anachronistic recording technology).

Very cool. The lyrics are strongly poetic and purposeful, but also shape themselves around the music in a way that seems like they're trailing behind the notes, reiterating and translating the vibrations into words. Your music reminds me of Brenda Kahn. Are there singer-songwriters you specifically looked towards for crafting your first album with lyrics?

I am touched! You have it spot on. The music almost serves as the emotion at its core, while the lyrics tell a story behind the feelings I'm trying to convey. I'm so touched to have been compared to Brenda Kahn. It was much of that era of music that inspired me, especially Tim Buckley. His guitar-playing and poetic lyricism are incredibly inspiring. It was his playing of his twelve-string guitar song "Buzzin' Fly" that led me to buying my very own, and I ended up recording much of the songs off of Pigeons with it. I also got really into Beat Happening at the time I was writing these songs, and their primitive recording style. I just love a good loop. Stop what you're doing now and listen to their tune "Godsend." No better four-bar loop to listen to for ten minutes straight. I mean it!

One thing about my relationship with music is I get inspired by its experiential nature. With the pandemic, it was a huge bummer that shows were put on hold, so I dove deep into local musicians' demos on Bandcamp, and then it transformed into listening to music just recorded in people's rooms on tape, the most well-known of these being Daniel Johnston. I got really into him during the early days of the pandemic, and he has resonated a lot with me since then. I think music like his, being that raw and imperfect, recorded on such an imperfect medium, carries the experiential aspects of live music. I love hearing the cassette tape hiss, the footsteps, the shifts in volume, off-key vocals, out-of-tune and out-of-time guitars, all of it! I think it holds the same weight as live concert albums, except it's meant to be permanent and imperfect because live renditions are never the same.

I also just love the white noise of cassette tape hiss. I'm all for texture.

Which was the funnest song to write and master on this album? Which was the most challenging?

"Elevator" was a really fun one to write. It is quite literally about an outdoor elevator someone attached to their house in Silver Lake. I remember driving past it before I moved to New York and thinking, "I wish I was so rich that I could afford a house and attach an outdoor elevator to it." And then the lyrics came to me as I was on the freeway heading back home. That was probably the most fun song to write. All of the other songs are too sad in nature to be fun. "Rothko" was also a fun one. It tells the story of me meeting the sweetest Greyhound pooch in the park in Bushwick.

But I'd say it was recording the songs that were the most fun. It was just me and my producer, August Simon, who also makes music (stream "House of Certainty”!), recording on a Tascam 4-track tape recorder. We both didn't know what we were doing, but learning how to operate the gear was a blast. The most fun song to record was "I'm Scared." For some reason I was stuck on the idea that this track should have two different guitars –– a twelve-string for the majority of the song, and a six-string for its instrumental outro. I really wanted to experiment with texture, so in the song you can hear an abrupt break between guitars. In that pause, what you can hear but don't see, is me signaling to August to take my twelve-string guitar out of my lap and hand me my six-string so I could play the outro. If you listen carefully, you can hear their footsteps and the sound of the guitars being transferred. It was deliberate, for sure. I wanted to make it as obvious as possible that there was a shift in the song, not just physically and sonically via the switch in guitars. I wanted to stay true to the rawness of something recorded in one take. We rehearsed the hand-off a few times before doing the recorded take, and it was super silly and fun.

We later had the tapes digitized by August’s friend Dawson Goodrich from the band Bushies. The whole thing was so synchronicitous because I had listened to Bushies a few years back, and I’d met August unknowingly at our local grocery store, not knowing they had any connection whatsoever. Dawson knows their stuff, and I’m happy to have worked with them.

“If anything, I just really miss shows – not just playing them, but going to them. I think before I do anything else I want to go to a show again first. A show where my feet get stepped on and I spill beer onto other people’s pants. You know, shows where the band spits on their audience members and the alleyway smells like piss. I miss that shit. ”

— Nara Avakian

Where will you go from here?

What's next... oh, boy! It's hard to say. If you had asked me this a year ago (which you did right before the pandemic...!) I'd tell you of a million flies buzzing around in my head. But I think these days everything is uncertain, as much as anything is possible. So who knows! For now I'm just doing whatever and having fun with it. I bought a melodica from a pal of mine recently. I'm not even taking it seriously, though I do genuinely love and respect the melodica – but that's the fun of it. The entire process of Pigeons, from start-to-finish, reminded me of how fun it all is.

If anything, I just really miss shows – not just playing them, but going to them. I think before I do anything else I want to go to a show again first. A show where my feet get stepped on and I spill beer onto other people's pants. You know, shows where the band spits on their audience members and the alleyway smells like piss. I miss that shit.

We miss it too, Nara! Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us again, and we encourage all of our readers to give Pigeons a listen. Be sure to find Nara’s Room on Spotify, Bandcamp, and Instagram, and hopefully catch Nara at a future show.