Larkin Grimm Answers Twenty Questions For PopMatters.

A fun Larkin Grimm interview regurgitated from the PopMatters site:

Larkin Grimm
20 Questions original post
[23 February 2009]
The eclectic and restless Larkin Grimm, a folk singer with a burgeoning career, talks to PopMatters 20 Questions about her inspiration, chainsaw art, and sex outdoors. by PopMatters Staff

In reviewing Larkin Grimm’s latest release, Parplar, last year, Matthew Fiander wrote that “it’s probably easiest to call Larkin Grimm a folk singer, but doing that fails to capture just how difficult she is to pin down. She can play the solitary, sad ballad like any good folk singer. But once she lets out that sadness, she seems to cut free of it, and the rest of Parplar is a fiery and energetic challenge to the listener.”

1. The latest book or movie that made you cry?
I’ve only cried for two movies: Winnie the Pooh and Dancer in the Dark. The last book that made me cry was written by my record producer, Michael Gira. It’s called The Consumer and is about apocalyptic sexual fantasy.

2. The fictional character most like you?
Probably Grushenka from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky or maybe The Cat in the Hat from Dr. Seuss. When I was a kid, I wanted to be Huckleberry Finn.

3. The greatest album, ever?
Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger.

4. Star Trek or Star Wars?
Star Wars was more about Zen, while Star Trek was based on a cheesier New Age spirituality. I was completely in love with Princess Leia as a child. She’s still my ideal woman. And my father looks like Luke Skywalker. But he watches Star Trek. I prefer real life. It’s much weirder than the movies.

5. Your ideal brain food?
When I’m on the road I eat nothing but organic beef jerky, nuts, and berries.

6. You’re proud of this accomplishment, but why?
A camp-out noise festival I organized in the forest during the summer of 2004. It was called Future Friends. I invited all of the musicians I admired most, and they remain some of my best friends today. So I gave it the right title, and it was my first magic spell that totally worked.

7. You want to be remembered for...?
Helping the music community to be a healthier and more magical place.

8. Of those who’ve come before, the most inspirational are?
Martin Luther King Jr., Hildegard Von Bingen, Madonna, Geronimo. 9. The creative masterpiece you wish bore your signature?
Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, or the Velvet Underground’s Loaded.

10. Your hidden talents...?
I can make woodcarvings with a chainsaw, I practice Thai massage, and I am a Reiki Master. I am also very good at origami, and can paint with both hands at once and write with a pen held between my toes. I am also a pretty good matchmaker, and can find a needle in a haystack.

11. The best piece of advice you actually followed?
Do what you love.

12. The best thing you ever bought, stole, or borrowed?
My 12” Mac laptop, which has enabled me to record songs while camping in the mountains, riding in canoes, and sleeping on friends’ couches. It is the only material possession I have ever been truly attached to, and I’ve had the same one for six years. I bought it used. I am writing on it right now. It’s a beautiful silver color that reminds me of moonlight and allows me to communicate in countless ways with beings all around the universe. Not all technology is bad.

13. You feel best in Armani or Levis or...?
My favorite clothes are the ones I’ve sewn, silkscreened, or dyed myself. But I have a thing for Austrian lingerie.

14. Your dinner guest at the Ritz would be?
The homeless guy from the street outside the building.

15. Time travel: where, when and why? I’d go back and find Joan of Arc, slap her in the face, and tell her it’s not worth it. I’d teach her how to use her psychic abilities to change things from the inside out, invisibly, and tell her to enjoy her life. I’d nip the whole sexy martyr victim thing in the bud, right there.

16. Stress management: hit man, spa vacation or Prozac?
Sex outdoors, under a tree, can work wonders. But I am trying to eliminate all stress, not manage it. Maybe… realizing that nothing is real. That might work. This is slightly embarrassing, but I actually use crystals. I keep them in my pockets all the time, with a stone that contains natural lithium salts. I talk to rocks.

17. Essential to life: coffee, vodka, cigarettes, chocolate, or...?
Clean water from the spring, never bottled. Clean air. Clean food. Love, and shelter.

18. Environ of choice: city or country, and where on the map?
Wherever I am right now, that’s the best possible place.

19. What do you want to say to the leader of your country?
Don’t let it go to your head.

20. Last but certainly not least, what are you working on, now?
I am trying to be good to my friends, and to be generous especially during hard times. I am focusing a lot on laughter and gentleness.

UPCOMING GRIMM SHOWS:
02/27 Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge
02/28 Boise, ID @ Neurolux
03/03 Portland, OR @ Doug Fir Lounge (w/ Michael Gira)
03/04 Seattle, WA @ Wall Of Sound (In-store 6:00 PM)
03/04 Seattle, WA @ Tractor Tavern (w/ Michael Gira)
03/06 San Francisco, CA @ Swedish American Cultural Hall (w/ Michael Gira)
03/07 Santa Cruz, CA @ Crepe Place
03/08 Los Angeles, CA @ Echo (w/ Michael Gira)
03/11 San Diego, CA @ Bar Pink
03/12 Phoenix, AZ @ Modified
03/13 Tucson, AZ @ Plush
03/14 Albuquerque, NM @ Atomic Cantina
03/18 Austin, TX @ Emo’s Inside (SXSW Leafy Green showcase 9:00 PM)
03/22 Orlando, FL @ Back Booth (w/ Vetiver)
03/23 St Augustine Beach, FL @ Cafe Eleven (w/ Vetiver)
03/24 Athens, GA @ 40 Watt Club (w/ Vetiver)
03/25 Asheville, NC @ Grey Eagle Tavern & Music Hall (w/ Vetiver)
03/29 Brooklyn, NY @ Union Pool (w/ Akron Family)

Lakin Grimm In Time Out New York.

Time Out New York / Issue 688 : Dec 4–10, 2008
By Jay Ruttenberg
Photo: Ports Bishop
GRIMM TIDINGS Singer-songwriter Larkin Grimm chronicles a berserk American experience on her new album, Parplar.

The itinerant folksinger Larkin Grimm has come downtown from her current home in Spanish Harlem—length of residence: one week—to grab breakfast on her way out of town. Rain tumbles down with a ferocity generally seen in movies about shipwrecks, yet she dines outside, beneath the restaurant’s modest canopy, remaining miraculously dry as the city soaks. To the musician’s right sits a drunk, welcomed to Grimm’s table after he drifted by requesting money. “Arggh!” he mumbles. “No mucho English.” The aromatic stranger drifts in and out of consciousness, missing the fantastic, at times unbelievable life story that the singer recounts with a monologuist’s poise.

Grimm is 27, the colorful tattoos of her generation splayed across her arms. Her riveting new album, Parplar, is her third full-length, yet the first to feature nonimprovised material and gain wider distribution, courtesy of Young God Records. Her songs are at once witchy, funny and intensely sexual—as befits an album that she claims to be “about Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and the battle between male and female energies in the world.”

Like many eccentric young artists, Grimm is a child of hippies. “There are a lot of us making psychedelic folk music, and we’re not freaky or fakes,” she contends. “We’re just our parents’ children—this is our culture.” Parplar was recorded earlier this year, but its roots lie in the late ’60s, when Grimm’s mother dropped acid on a family sailing trip, “realized that everything was messed up” and ran away from home. The future Mother Grimm hitchhiked to Haight-Ashbury, where she minded children of the Grateful Dead and enlisted in the Holy Order of MANS, a religious commune into which Larkin was born.

The singer’s parents left the Order when she was six. “In the ’80s, the utopian communities that thrived in the ’60s started transforming into the weird cults that we have now,” explains Grimm, who continues to dabble in various factions “because they remind me of home.” The family moved to the Appalachian Mountains so that her fiddler father could immerse himself in hillbilly music. The young singer, accustomed to socializing with pacifists, reacted to the rednecks she suddenly encountered in predictable fashion: When her parents found Grimm throwing knives, they enrolled her in a liberal boarding school. “No longer was I the delinquent bad kid,” she says. “Now, I was class president.”And so, a decade after leaving the Holy Order of MANS, Grimm matriculated at Yale, where she soon befriended the scion of a far more demented American sect: presidential daughter Barbara Bush. “She was interesting,” Grimm claims. “Her best friend was a black gay guy—the gayest man on campus. She was in love with a radical environmentalist, who broke up with her because he didn’t want the Secret Service snooping around. She drank a lot and had problems with boys. There was this very mean plan to get her pregnant and then follow her when she got her abortion. Guys were trying to sleep with her and they were planning to poke a hole in the condom.”

“Hech hech!” the homeless man murmurs. “Acapulco mucho bueno.”

“You can’t blame people for who their parents are,” Grimm adds.

The singer had her own plans for the President’s daughter: She hoped to involve Bush in a performance-art piece, “turning her into a fabulous Paris Hilton character.” Before this could unfold, however, an unpleasant drug experience caused Grimm to cease talking for months and flee to Alaska, where she fasted on a mountaintop. She was discovered there by a kindhearted shaman—named Jezebel Crowe!—who taught her the ways of the medicine woman…and encouraged her to return to Yale. (These days, even witches harbor Ivy League ambitions.)

Returning to school, Grimm broke her silence. She began playing music both as a member of the Dirty Projectors—a band she has since left—and solo. “I realized that when you’re singing, all your emotional truth comes through,” she says. It’s these voices from Grimm’s life that aggregate on her broad, bizarre, uniquely American record, with its collegiate folk and Appalachian howls, ’60s spirituality and contemporary pop culture, chaste hymns and sexual deviance.Her story drawn to the present, the singer rises from the table, gives a piece of corn bread to the homeless man and walks alongside Tompkins Square Park. The rain has cleared, casting the city in a luminous glow. “That Mexican guy totally just felt me up,” she says. “I’m probably the only woman he’s touched in ten years, which is so sad. I’m okay giving him a little bit of sexual healing.”

Larkin Grimm plays the Charleston Fri 5, the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine Sat 6 and Housing Works Bookstore Café Wed 10.

Larkin Grimm New York Times Review Yesterday (Sunday 11/30/08).

Larkin Grimm
Original Post

Combing through the singer-songwriter Larkin Grimm’s strange and deeply original new record, “Parplar” (Young God), you keep picking up rude shocks, some of them sung in a pleasant, cooing voice, over original and hypnotic combinations of different kinds of folk music. “Oh Mama, I’m a bad spirit, be my host,” she sings. And: “My hooks are sharp, my heart is cold.” And: “Damn the man in you.” And: “Who told you you’re going to be all right? Well, they were wrong.”

A lot of her lyrical images (and the arrangement ideas, like mariachi brass with fingerpicked guitar and synthesizer) seem to come from dreams. But her dreams aren’t utopian; they’re as complicated as real life.

Upcoming Grimm shows:
12/10 New York @ NY Housing Works Bookstore Café (w/ Michael Gira)
12/12 Richmond, VA @ Thanky Space
12/13 Greensboro, NC @ Green Bean
12/14 Greenville, SC @ Reverb
12/15 Athens, GA @ Tasty World
12/16 Atlanta, GA @ E.A.R.L.

Larkin Grimm Reviewed By Wearsthetrousers.com.

Wearsthetrouser.com, a UK online magazine dedicated to women in music serves up an excellent Larken Grimm review.

Larkin Grimm
Parplar
Oct 30 / 08
By "nomad"
Original Review

Inspired by “the imaginational galaxy where orgasms come from, formed out of dreams of leggy, surgically enhanced blondes,” the new album from fiercely talented radical environmentalist Larkin Grimm is, even by her own standards, a pretty stellar collection of atmospheric, magical songs that consolidates the promising noise experiments of her previous albums. No fears of jumping the shark here, Parplar is the best thing Larkin’s done to date. It’s also “a bit of a lesbian feminist album” that explores various themes of violence, sex and spirituality and takes some of its inspiration from the likes of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse. “Becoming one with the human race is difficult,” writes Larkin on her blog, “but fortunately I’ve been inspired by the struggles of a lot of other women from my generation.”

Parplar is the 26 year old itinerant’s first release on Michael Gira’s hallowed Young God Records – home of Wears The Trousers heroine Lisa Germano – and was trimmed down from a potential 50 songs written during “a near-manic tidal wave of creative energy”. ‘Dominican Rum’ is a disturbing portrait of a beautiful, wrathful woman literally coming apart in “the ugly world of men”. Over a frenzied piano, tambourine and banjo rhythm Larkin delivers a bizarre tirade of potent, incredible poetry – sample lyric: ”The microcosmic spiralled eggs inside my uterus are sparkling and bursting with the greenest yellow pus / the milk that feeds my baby from my breast is flowing black / it looks like oil and smells like death and I can’t hold it back.” Highly recommended.

UPCOMING LARKIN GRIMM LIVE DATES:
11/07 New York, NY @ Mercury Lounge (w/ Holly GoLightly)
11/08 Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg (w/ Mountain Goats)
11/22 Peterborough, NH @ Broke Arts Fat at Toadstool Bookshop
12/12 Charlottesville, VA @ Tea Bazaar
12/13 Greensboro, NC @ Green Bean
12/14 Greenville, SC @ Reverb
12/15 Athens, GA @ Tasty World
12/16 Atlanta, GA @ E.A.R.L

Larkin Grimm On Sterogum.

October 10, 2008
New Larkin Grimm - "Ride That Cyclone"
Original post

Larkin Grimm was raised in Memphis in The Holy Order Of MANS until the cult disbanded and her parents relocated with her to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Georgia. We're told she's itinerant these days, spending the warmer months living outdoors in the woods, but she hunkered down in NYC earlier this summer (at least for the time being). I mention her travels, because the propulsive, galloping "Ride That Cyclone" comes off like the march of restless body. Somehow, it also ushers in a fall breeze. (It feels like Grimm wrote and recorded the new record in the most autumnal conditions possible -- changing leaves, colder breezes, early-season wood fires). "Ride That Cyclone"'s the second track on Parplar, her first album for Michael Gira's Young God (he co-produced the collection with Grimm, too, and encouraged her and her work early on). She has a powerfully assured voice, which she compliments with acoustic guitar, banjo, dulcimer, Chinese harp, an old keyboard.

This is clearly the work of more than one person. She's also backed by labelmates Fire On Fire, who add double bass, accordion, banjo, percussion, guitars, and background vocals, among others on trumpet, viola, trombone etc. It's a whirl of sound. Grimm was an early member of Dirty Projectors (she met/had a close relationship with Dave Longstreth while at Yale on a full scholarship to study art) and clearly enjoys collaboration, but despite the large backing cast, this collection is clearly her own. Grimm's earlier self-recorded albums aren't as densely composed. They're worth tracking down. You can find Harpoon and The Last Tree via Secret Eye. You'll also hear more at her MySpace. Where you can read her thoughts, like this post titled "Patti Smith, Horses":

Horses is the sexiest record I have ever heard. I was getting really deep into the monastic lifestyle ... I was a born again virgin. I was giving it up to Jesus. I had repented for my sins. I hadn't brought myself to orgasm since the beginning of August. But I put on this record as I was going to sleep a couple of days ago, and I couldn't help myself.

One problem with the underground music scene now is that a lot of the more radical kids are afraid to be sexy, because sex has become such a nightmarish tool of capitalism. We know that John McCain is staring at Sarah Palin's ass while she is making speeches and he is thinking about Pamela Anderson, or thinking about a billboard he saw with Gisele Bundchen on it as his limo was driving him into the city high on codeine. And the whole universe is contained in this moment, and we can see it all. We know how we have been manipulated, but are not sure what to do about it.

Then we have Obama, a eunuch for President. I greatly prefer Jesse Jackson's crazy rainbow fist.

There is an idea in magick that sex is the most powerful energy you can use to make a spell work. You get a million men masturbating for your cause, and there you have some real power being generated. You have to watch where your energy is going, and who is taking it. Because this is real, we are nothing but energy. Out of all the things I have learned in my life, that's the most important and true knowledge, having an awareness of the energy flow in the universe, and within my own body, and that it is all the same, but I can will it to move.

This economy crash, which happened on my birthday, that was the best birthday present ever. I have been waiting for this moment, you know. It is a great moment.

Happy birthday. Parplar is out 10/28 via Young God. Posted at 12:02 PM by brandon

Upcoming Larkin Grimm shows:
10/15 Frankfurt, DEU @ Clubkeller
10/16 Stuttgart, DEU @ FFUS
10/22 Ceské Budejovic, CHE @ Velbloud
11/06 Philadelphia, PA @ First Unitarian Church (w/ Meg Baird)
11/07 New York, NY @ Mercury Lounge (w/ Holly GoLightly)
11/08 Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg (w/ Mountain Goats)