Naomi Greenwald and her band at the Mercury Lounge in New York City on April 4, 2013. The show celebrated the release of her new EP, “Composite.” (Philippe Theise)
Singer-songwriter Naomi Greenwald would prefer to be interviewed in the late evening or early morning, when some musicians might be out on the town or sleeping it off.
But Greenwald, who is also a fourth-year doctoral student in comparative literature, is in the midst of writing a dissertation on the figure of the neighbor in Gothic literature, and likes to have her days uninterrupted to write.
Coincidentally, her neighbor in Los Angeles is also writing a dissertation.
“It’s hysterical,” said Greenwald in a phone interview in mid-April. “We never see each other because we never leave the house.”
Greenwald, 32, tends to make any trips outside her apartment count. She teaches spinning classes at her local YMCA, and plays guitar as a volunteer for The Art of Elysium, an organization that provides arts programming for children with illnesses. The week before we spoke, she was belting out songs from her new EP, Composite, with a four-piece band at the Mercury Lounge in New York City.
The diverse yet disciplined EP comes two years after Greenwald’s debut, Darkbloom, and reflects an interweaving of her literary interests and musical sensibilities. And her cheerful, commanding stage presence shows that she’s come a long way from the days when her hands would shake before a gig.
Greenwald lived in New York for most of her twenties, surrounded by lots of opportunities to perform and, at New York University, enough successful indie rockers to exacerbate her stage fright. Though she wrote songs and eventually found a bandmate, she decided at 24 that she was too old to build a musical career and enrolled in a master’s program instead.
Ironically, the challenge of writing about European philosophy and modernist literature at the New School for Social Research, where I met Greenwald, altered her ethos in a way that eventually led her back to music.
“I think that it became part of my identity at that time to do precisely what I was afraid of,” she recalled. “And to do it as best I could.”
Darkbloom, a rich full-length whose musical palette ranges from The Shadows’ ominous twang through ‘90s alt-rock, came first in 2011. Composite features mostly quieter songs, with lyrics that reference a Frank O’Hara poem and the character of Caddy in William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, a young woman who has the author’s affection, but not her own chapter.
“She never gets a voice,” Greenwald said, in the husky, carbonated alto that is her own.
“James Harris,” the last song on the EP, goes even further. It takes the figure of the “demon lover” from a 17th-Century Scottish border ballad, since reimagined by the writer Shirley Jackson and Bob Dylan, and combines it with the story of one of Greenwald’s past relationships.
The particular musical styles on Composite range from haunting parlor pop to the anthemic, festival-ready blast of “Portraits,” in which Greenwald mentions O’Hara and “a porch made of words.” If you ever wanted to hear poetics and power pop in the same package, listen no further.
Greenwald said that she was listening to an abundance of sources while recording the new record, including indie favorites such as Neutral Milk Hotel and Black Heart Procession. She also cited more recent acts like Ariel Pink and Real Estate.
“[They were] referencing old stuff that I always wanted to reference, but they had their own twist on it,” she said.
Wearing a gray fedora, a sheer black top and tight black pants at the Mercury Lounge, Greenwald asked fans to come closer before ripping into “Cautionary Tale,” a Darkbloom track about an unappreciative long-distance lover. “My whole family’s here and I love it!” she later declared, a filial sentiment once uncommon in rock and roll.
Speaking after the show, her father, an oncologist in Kingston, Penn., praised his daughter’s songs but said he wants her to finish her doctorate—“because I’m realistic,” he said.
But who knows which is more realistic: an academic career in a difficult job market, or a musical career in an age when a determined artist can market herself? On the cover of Composite, an image of Greenwald, her hair cut pioneer-short, looks into the distance amidst groups of overlapping triangles in lavender and blue. This isn’t a hobby; it’s an imperative.
At the same time, her father needn’t worry: back in L.A., Greenwald is nearly done with the first chapter of her dissertation. Over the phone, she talked about Emmanuel Levinas, the French philosopher who believed that “subjectivity is formed in the face of the other,” as she explained. Considering Greenwald’s progressive development of her music and her scholarship, it seems that Levinas’s idea applies just as well to parts of her self.