INTERVIEW: The Sound of Aja
The Sound of Aja
Interview by: Emily May, Photo credit: Travis Shinn
The Sound of Aja, a collaborative project between married couple Aja and Hugo, was created to celebrate music from the past century. Their upcoming album, 100 Years of Song, was recorded at their apartment in New York and features collaborations with friends from all over the world. What started out as them covering a couple of song requests from friends morphed into such an enjoyable process for them that they decided to expand their list of covers into an album, which explores and interprets 10 classic songs from the past 10 decades. “This is a dream concept for me,” says Aja. “I get to indulge my passion for music and art across what has possibly been the most fascinating century of human culture and development. And I can do it with my family, loved ones, and dear friends, far and near, thanks to today’s tech. I feel ridiculously fortunate and eternally grateful - the project absolutely has gotten me through these dark times.” The 100 Years of Song album features an eclectic array of covers of songs from the likes of Nat King Cole, John Martyn, and Nik Kershaw, going all the way back to a spiritual first recorded in the 1920s. Collaborators across the record include Ben Christophers (Bat for Lashes), Gary Clark (“Sing Street,” Danny Wilson), Hugo Dunn-Vereker (Michael Brook, Wrenne), Christopher Given Harrison (Sonos/Arora), and Gregor Philp (Deacon Blue). The Sound of Aja has released their first single from the album, the Kern/Harbach 1993 classic “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”, in January and in April, released “Bang Bang”, a reinvention of the Cher hit from 1966. Most recently, The Sound of Aja released their single “Old Cape Cod”, a 1950’s summer song originally by singer Patti Page, honoring the original while taking it into a Bossanova-inspired, electronic and cinematic direction. With plans to release an album of original music in the new year, they have given their listeners plenty to look forward to! You can connect with The Sound of Aja via the following links.
WEBSITE | FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM | TWITTER | SPOTIFY | ITUNES/APPLE MUSIC | YOUTUBE | DEEZER
Did you both grow up in a creative household? What inspired your interest in pursuing a career in the arts?
Aja- I’m very close to my parents and we spent a good deal of time in my childhood absorbing and relating through film, television, books, and music. My mother managed a bookstore when I was very young and I spent the first 8 years of my life or so in the bookstore just consumed by inspiration. You could find my content in a stack of new discoveries at the end of each day.
Hugo- No. But I was obsessed with music from the age of 3, causing grief until my long-suffering parents would buy me the latest single I was obsessed with. Went to a British boarding school aged 8, and I believe my first ‘band’ performance was aged 9 or 10 at school. It’s all been downhill since then.😃
While living in LA, Aja wrote and created a sitcom, and you have both separately developed tv and film projects as producers. What can you tell me about that aspect of your career and in what ways do you feel that tv and film tie into music? Do you still write for tv?
Aja- I tend to think about creativity in terms of creating and inhabiting other worlds. Exploring these mediums helped me to learn skills that I still infuse into all of my work. We come at this project from a world-building point of view. I can see the characters, the environment, the journey, and the story in every song.
Hugo- Back in the day, I wrote and rewrite some scripts and tbh I salute anyone who can get any movie made! I was lucky enough to have several in development at the LA studios with very interesting names attached. But it was like watching paint dry, though the paint is usually a lot quicker. It was so refreshing to go back into music and produce satisfying work relatively quickly. Forgetful, perhaps, of lessons previously learned, we are sloooowly writing the script for a 1970’s- and UK-set musical comedy; and I’m working on a couple of stage musicals, one with Rolfe Kent and Joanne Harris, both legends. And yes, our musical taste and, hopefully, our work is very cinematic - visual ideas inform the song treatments from the get-go.
You have described art as an expression of hope and belief in humanity. In what ways does that expression manifest itself in your art?
Aja- In every way! It all about sharing the journey, growing, and relating to the human experience that we all share. I want people to see themselves and their own journey through the work that we do so we might all help lift each other up.
Hugo- What she said. Uplifting, cathartic work is what we strive for, and especially because of and over the past 18 months.
You have talked about traveling a great deal before Covid and how connecting with different cultures and glorious humans who are not like you was a transformative experience. What can you tell me about your experiences in traveling and in what ways it has transformed you? Where did you travel and where are you hoping to travel next?
Aja- The first year of our relationship, Hugo and I traveled extensively and it was sort of a way of introducing each other to our various friends and family and getting to know each other’s communities. Then Covid hit and we took all that we collected and focused it into this project. I think the work we’ve done will take us so many more places literally as we share our music, and figuratively as we explore new “worlds.”
Hugo- Luckily and naturally, my long-term, long-distance music colleagues fell in love with Aja on first meetings during our travels; so when things shut down, we opened up the lines of communication and collaboration and have been blessed with their brilliance. When we can, we are also keen to bring the music and ourselves to far-flung places, embracing Asia, Africa & Latin America, for instance, and are actively seeking collaborators in those regions.
What led you to move to New York?
Aja- NY is where it all happens! Every block is jam-packed with new stories and whole worlds unto themselves. It satisfies my lust for life and allows me to connect to people from across the globe simply by walking outside our front door.
Hugo- My younger kids are on the east coast, so it was a no-brainer for me and a relief that Aja wanted to live here. Now they are away at school and college, so they probably would be fine if we lived in Timbuktu, but at least we know we are not too far!
What can you tell me about the concept of your new music project The Sound of Aja? What has it been like working together on the project and how do you feel it helped you to get through 2020?
Aja- I wanted to approach music in a much more complete way than just writing and performing songs and I was looking for a way to do that after leaving Los Angeles and starting the next phase of my life. We were introduced in late 2018 professionally as we had a lot in common in the way we saw music and performance and how it could transport the experience beyond passive listening. We knew instantly that we wanted to share everything and that all-encompassing expression naturally worked its way into our decision to create this project. Words can’t express the fullness I feel in having the opportunity to live and create in every way with my partner. We strive to grow ourselves and have been the missing piece for one another in more ways than I can count. This challenging time of Covid was the alchemical pressure and compression we needed to galvanize what we were creating.
Hugo- She’s really quite nice, isn’t she? It’s been heaven, a delight, to learn music through each other, and each other via the music. It was an absolute godsend that it could happen during the hurting times of the past 18 months.
You are currently finishing your album 100 Years of Song, a reworking of songs from the 1920s to the present day. What inspired you to explore, celebrate and re-evaluate songwriting from the past century, which you have said is possibly the most fascinating century of human culture and development? How did you go about deciding which songs to cover and what was your process of reworking the songs? What can you tell me about the virtual collaborations you did with artists from elsewhere in the US and internationally?
Aja- It was the easiest way for us to travel when we couldn’t do any traveling! In the process of getting to know each other, we shared our favorite music with one another and studied the origins of our favorite artists and songs. We started by covering a couple of various songs as requested by a dear friend and enjoyed the process so much we wanted to expand it. We, like everyone else living through the last year, continued to question how things were done in the world, how society is changing, and wanted to related to people from different eras and see how they used art to express and grow through their respective cultural shifts. Universal themes emerged and we sought to bring our voice to some of those cultural themes. Of course, we missed our friends and family terribly so we found excuses to work with them remotely every chance we found and the result is a project infused with love in all forms.
Hugo- The concept simmered at first and then burst into life: luckily, we were commissioned to create a cover of a Donna Summer deep cut for an outside project. We loved the process (that song will be a digital bonus track on the album) and during the work, I realized that, at heart, Aja is not just a great vocalist… but a natural actor. She loves to interpret, mimic, explore travel through time and place in photographs. She wishes we could live at Downton Abbey 100 years ago, plus in Paris during La Belle Epoque, London in the 60s, New York in the 30s, for instance. We figured it was a no-brainer to have her travel through music, inhabit characters in 10 songs from the last century - and “100 Years” was a nice round number. The song choices were organic - some very well-known, others not so much - but that’s not to say some didn’t take a long while to jump and down and say “Pick Me!” We’ve been so fortunate to produce and arrange the songs with some of our favourite humans, in and out of music, exceptional talents all - especially Gregor Philp (Deacon Blue), Gary Clark ("Sing Street," Amazon/NY Times’ “Modern Love”), Ben Christophers (Bat For Lashes), and Chris Given Harrison (Sonos/Arora) who comprise our “home team.”
You have talked about your love for recording and about how you wish you could spend every day of your life in the studio. What can you tell me about the process of recording the album during Covid, which affected studio recording for many artists?
Aja- I really miss the formal studio environment and working studio engineers. It’s just a really magical and inspiring process. But being able to create quality recordings in our home studio was a tremendous gift during Covid of course and now forever after…
Hugo- I am sh*t with technology. Always have been. I’ve been in studios my whole life and avoided touching any buttons for decades! But music is my lifeblood, so… I love to produce by picking a song and coming up with a vision, a concept; having what Chris (above) calls a “Hugo Fever Dream” where I describe in a way TMI precisely what I hear in my head. Then send countless notes on structure and tone and references to our clever and patient muso colleagues. Then it’s back and forth for weeks or sometimes even months, depending on schedules, developing the mood, story and musical bed, before I’ll record Aja’s vocals in our wee apartment. The latter I can only do thanks to the aforementioned brilliant collaborators having spelled out how to do it right, as if to a small child. Vocally, Aja will try different characters and if we are not feeling it, we have the luxury of leaving it, coming back to try again anytime we want. When we got the “character” right for Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, she literally did it in one take. At first, we were frustrated by the lengthy recording process, but it was COVID! People had an awful lot going on, some very awful. And everyone was trying to reimagine their work and creative lives in the new, distressing context of 2020+. So, we learned a lot, faced some fears and have now fully embraced this way of doing things: we have been working on the last 4 songs on the album concurrently with different members of the team; writing a new The Sound of Aja original; recording jingles; and now music for a game.
You have said that you have been working towards this album in one way or another your entire life. In what ways?
Aja- Because of the way we’re approaching this project, it has no other option but to incorporate all of what we’ve collectively been through. It’s a collective opus and a process of creative romance.
Hugo- Yes, it feels like everything we have ever learned is going into The Sound of Aja. And all the love. No pressure for it to be good, then!
"Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" was the first single you released from the upcoming album. What inspired your take on the song? What can you tell me about the concepts behind your lyric video, which imagined The Sound of Aja as one of the original performers of the song in the 1933 musical 'Roberta', and official music video for the song, as well as the experience of shooting the music video in your apartment during Covid?
Aja- In our approach to researching and exploring the arts in the 1930s we found it helpful to organize around this imaginary character. We could use her to tell the story, and to live the experience through. Every day we had so much fun creating artifacts to tell the story of the love lost as expressed in the classic song, and posted many of them on socials.We used found newspaper clippings and old photographs from the time (or frommytime as a model) and adapted them to our characters. We incorporated each line of the song through new artifacts each day as a way to build anticipation and the lyric video formed itself magically through that process. All we had to do was put them all together et voilà! A historical fiction genre song was born!
Hugo- See above. Aja has basically lived dream lives across time and space, so she is incredibly good at inhabiting other skins. Once we had the concept, we had an absolute blast seeing and representing what our slightly naughty actress was going to do every day.The home video in the apartment, on lockdown, was a different matter. We definitely had to face fears on that one, and we learned a lot; andsorta quiteliked the result. We shot another video the same “day” and, apart from the footage we filmed at 3am, we ended up throwing out the rest and starting yet again. Recently, once things opened up a little and we could travel safely, we had the good fortune to shoot several ‘projects’ over 3 days in LA with an amazing team, led by Travis Shinn. Professionals! Love ‘em! It’s just a wonderful experience, to have one’s own game raised by others’ generous talents. We cannot wait for people to see the results.
You have talked about looking through images of NYC during the 1930s for "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" and discovering the work of Berenice Abbott. What can you tell me about her 'Changing NY' project and how her photos helped you to so easily step into that time and place?
Aja- I have always loved photojournalism and street photography for its ability to transport you to an entire world in one image. Ms. Abbott was inspired by the artists and the beauty of Paris, and came back to New York to tell the story of this city in pictures. It was a dark time during the depression and the timing allowed her to participate in a government grant program that invested in artists and their valuable contribution to keeping the soul and economic health of the country alive during hard times. Obviously, the relevance for our own times was not lost on us. She documented without flourish, or a need to put her own artistic lens on things and preserved this gorgeous city in striking clarity. The project sits available to us all to access for free on the NYPL digital arts collection. We can travel back and walk the streets of NY as they were in all their stark industrial emergence. It’s like a beautiful time capsule, and I’m so grateful to all the moving parts that needed to happen for that to be preserved for me to discover and enjoy, learn from and incorporate nearly a century later.
Hugo- I’ve learned a lot over the past 18 months from Aja’s fascination for the photographic image. She also takes a great photo, in front of and behind the lens. I do not. Unfortunately, she has persuaded me to lurk in the background in some of our new images, but no doubt I will learn to love it and become a prima donna.
The idea to cover your most recent single, "Bang Bang", was born from your friend Dany Garcia encouraging you to do a modern take on the song and to take it somewhere it's never been? What can you tell me about the track and your take on it?
Aja- It’s such an amazing hook, but a simple song and quite short in most versions. She described it as an “exciting promise that doesn’t ever deliver”. We wanted our version to feel like it takes you on a real journey and delivers on that promise.
Hugo- Yeah, the song is strange, unique, written by Sonny Bono in 1966 for his then wife Cher who had a massive hit with it. The same year saw the release of Nancy Sinatra’s cover, which had a rebirth decades later when Tarantino used it in his Kill Bill Vol. 1.There have been a lot of covers, but what struck me at first was how they all sounded similar, people didn’t really play with the rhythm or structure. There was a relatively recent version by Audio Bullys, a hit in the UK I think, where they at least sampled Sinatra’s version heavily and put a fat dance beat behind it. But we wanted to expand the story a bit- which you’ll also see in the video - and respectfully build on the original, with and for contemporary ears and eyes.
You also released a lyric video for "Bang Bang", the graphics for which were created by Hugo's son Pirate! What was it like working with him on the video? You have said that the video encapsulates how you see NYC-the lights, architecture, buzz of life and swell of music. What can you tell me about your love for NYC and how it inspires you? What can people expect from the official music video that will be released with the full length-version of the song in August?
Hugo- The lyric video is part of our homage to the great master of classic movie title sequences, Saul Bass. We worked with great friends in LA at BLT Communications, who went above and beyond (and then some) during Covid on hugely exciting animated sequences for the full video. And we have finally completed the live action elements (with Travis, again) that help us to dive into the campiness of 60’s classics like Bond or The Pink Panther.
Aja- So Pirate was able to take the beginnings of that animated work and expand on them for a lyric video - a movie trailer, if you will, for this really fun song. He’s so talented and was able to pull it off at lightning speed. My favorite part is when the horn section is visually interpreted through the energy of the lights and movement of the buildings of NYC. It’s a Gatsby dream of lights and jazz horns bringing the personality of Manhattan to life. I can’t wait to see New York like that again!
What's next for you? What are your plans and goals going forward?
Aja- Now that we know each other quite well (!) through this journey, our next step is to release original music written and imagined from the hearts and minds of The Sound of Aja.
Hugo- The first original(s) will be on the album representing the 2020’s. The full album, after lots of singles, will be out in the new year - so we just about squeeze into the 100 years! And next: maybe sleep? Maybe leave the apartment?