Helga Davis: You wake up in the morning and then what happens? Oh, put your headphones on, Peter.

Shara Davis: Oh yes, come on, put your arms around me.

Peter: I want to hug you and hug you and hug you some more right through all these microphone cables.

Helga Davis: Go ahead.

Shara Nova: I know I'm in the right time in the right space.

Helga Davis: Do you feel that?

[music]

I'm Helga Davis. I have a really good friend who's a bass player who says to me that you don't meet friends, you recognize them. That seems to make sense. I was here at the station, I don't know, a couple of years ago, and one of the producers from another show asked me if I wanted to go and hear this concert in the Allen Room up at the Time Warner Center. I said, "Sure." I'm big on saying yes to things.

I went to this concert of this musician I'd never heard of before, whose name was Shara Worden. I sat down. They began this music. I'd never heard anything like it. I'd never heard anything like these stories. I'd never heard anything like these arrangements. I felt immediately that I recognized something about this person and about myself. All I wanted to do after that was meet her. Was to figure out how I could meet her. I didn't know.

At intermission, I went outside and I actually saw someone I knew. He said to me, "Hi, Helga. What are you doing here?" I said, "I got invited to this concert. It's amazing." It turns out that he knew Shara Worden. He said to me, "I'm writing an opera with her. Do you want to be in it?" Just like that. Just like that. In the studio with me, today is Shara Nova whom I first got to know as Shara Worden.

Shara Nova: [laughs] Oh, yes.

Helga Davis: Okay. Bad luck by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. Do they play that in your new gym in Detroit?

Shara Nova: That's right. They play it in the gym. I knew it was a good day because I had finished my workout and then walked into the locker room and the speakers in the locker room are a little bit louder and I was like, "Oh, Bad Luck is playing. I know I'm in the right time in the right space."

Helga Davis: They got through the whole thing because that breakdown section at the end when he talks about going outside to get the paper, and he says, "I sat down on my living room floor, opened it up."

Shara Nova: Opened it up.

Helga Davis: Opened it up.

Shara Nova: Opened it up.

[laughter]

Helga Davis: I saw the President of the United States and then he says but what I know is that he's leaving all the poor folks behind.

Shara Nova: Exactly.

Helga Davis: Then he starts to pray, right? He says, "All I have is my God. Jesus be with me."

[laughter] I'm so happy to have sent to you that song. To play that song for you because that's the gym. Are you working on a new record and it's going in that direction or something or do you just like it as dance music, as motivation music, as what?

Shara Nova: I fully admit to finding disco drum samples and downloading them. I am currently working on a disco track. What's cool is that Detroit House came from disco. In 2001, I'm listening to a lot of Detroit House that is coming from-- It starts disco and then builds into this four-on-the-floor house music. It's interesting to me to begin to explore that, especially as a vocalist because there are a lot of really amazing singers. For me, how does that translate?

Helga Davis: They are singers who came out of other traditions, right? They came out of church traditions and you come out of that tradition too. It's not such a reach to me that you would be attracted to that. You're working on a new record now?

Shara Nova: I am.

Helga Davis: A new My Brightest Diamond record?

Shara Nova: Yes.

Helga Davis: You've actually changed your name.

Shara Nova: I did.

Helga Davis: Do you know the Roberta Flack record, it's called First Takes. You don't know that record? I have to get that for you.

Shara Nova: What song is that?

Helga Davis: The song that I'm thinking about is I told Jesus. I told Jesus it would be all right if he changed my name. When you told me that you were changing your name, I thought about you and that song immediately. It's I told Jesus it would be alright to change my name and Jesus replies child, you know your mother won't recognize you if you change your name and your brother won't, and it goes through all the list of people who won't know who you are anymore if you change your name.

Then at the end, it's, it's okay. It'll be all right if you change my name. Change my name. Change my name. I'm wondering what that experience has been like for you.

Shara Nova: When I think about the art-making that I've been doing in the last several years, I realize that so much of the work has been so uncomfortable and it's like these walls of our identity that we have constructed for ourselves, the art continues to push against these walls. As my identity was continually being confronted through the art making, these things that I thought were the foundation of my identity started to shift and to soften.

As that began to happen, a whole lot of change occurred. One being that I separated from my husband. We were married for 17 years and then went ahead and decided to legally separate. Divorce. I grew up in a family where divorce wasn't ever spoken in my home. Idea after idea after idea of what I thought my life was going to be suddenly was shifting and becoming something else. It does feel like a lot of little deaths. Like little deaths of things that you hold and then you come into a point that you can't hold on to something that a part of your identity construct and you have to open up to a new place.

Helga Davis: Who named you? Did you name yourself?

Shara Nova: That's funny. I was praying, I was speaking to my-- I have a dear friend who's a barber, my barber downstairs in my building, and he's also a Comet scholar. I would go to him and I would say, "Pierre, do you have any sense for me?" He said, "You are every name. You are so many names that you cannot contain all that you are in a name." That gave me a lot of relief. [laughs]

My dear friends in Detroit, I had asked them, Andrew and Kinga. They said, "Well, for Shara, we're going to open a science book." They got a science book and they opened it and they saw the word, Nova. When they first told me, I thought, "Oh, I like that. I like that for a lot of different reasons." Then it wasn't for several months that I realized in Latin, it means new. Even though my parents aren't Jewish, my name, Shara in Hebrew, Shara, it's like a singing word. A word of song.

I thought this meaning of new song, "Okay, that feels like me. It feels like there have been so many deaths of what I thought my life was going to be and now I am in a period of newness that I had no vision for my life beyond what has happened now. There's not a model for me and my family that has preceded me in certain ways. I absolutely have my heroes in my family, but the structures of their life and a lot of the things I've had to release from my family." I think that's been interesting. A lot of people asked, "Why didn't you go back to your family name?"

It felt like that was so much of what I needed to let go of were these structures of form. Strangely, I'm closer to my family now in these last several months, and I feel more intimacy and more appreciation for them in the fact that I have claimed myself. I have named myself. I'm married to myself in a way that I thought that it would feel more like losing them. In a way, I feel more intimacy and more gratitude for what my family has given me, and at the same time not carrying on with some of the same pieces of luggage.

Helga Davis: [laughs] It's so interesting, the family peace in the naming of one's self. Do you think that being uncomfortable is important to some part of this process? This idea of little deaths, is it important to your creative process?

Shara Nova: It is crucial. It's absolutely crucial to be uncomfortable. I think that this time of, you can call it mid-life crisis [chuckles] you can call it transformation. I can pinpoint it to how uncomfortable I was in working on the Matthew Barney film River of Fundament. I would be side stage or off the screen and I would be weeping. I couldn't sleep at night. I was wrestling with that work and asking questions.

I think the ability of art to challenge us, to cause us to take a little step back from our beliefs, our ideas about things, and that we are forced to look at them. I'm so grateful for that. I don't want to do things in which I'm not uncomfortable, because then that means I'm not growing. If I'm in a musical situation where I can do everything and it's easy, then that can be fun sometimes-

[laughter]

-but it's also not going to make me a better musician. It's also maybe letting myself get off without risking vulnerability. Vulnerability is I think one thing that I am so afraid of, we want control or perceived control.

I think art making is like subjecting yourself to this admission that you don't have control. I think that many, or maybe all of my decisions are motivated by challenge, and in a way where I find that where my vulnerability is, is the exact place that I need to lean into. That's my work. That's what motivates a lot of the decisions. Yes, I want to work with interesting people and interesting projects and things that I find stimulating on multiple levels. I love that, good people, good project, good money, and you got to have two out of three to say yes, or all three.

I think it's important to do things sometimes where money is not a factor because money doesn't define everything.

Helga Davis: It doesn't?

Shara Nova: I know, it doesn't.

Helga Davis: Oh, no.

Shara Nova: I would also say in terms of being uncomfortable, that writing the opera You Us We All, which I wrote for you my dear, Helga, that was the most uncomfortable thing that I had done thus far. I was working 16 hours a day, had a three-year-old, and tucking him in, making lunch, getting him to bed, and then would go straight back to work and wrote an opera in three months.

I was so ghost-like in many ways by the end of it. What that did was it turned the heat up on everything so that a lot of things had to be revealed and exposed because the pressure was so high. Then as a result of that, a lot of these changes have come about, but I think it's through that art-making process that you lay yourself bare and then you are open to what changes you need to maybe begin to make in your life.

Helga Davis: You are in Detroit. Are you still enjoying that city?

Shara Nova: It's interesting. The radio feels like home because I lived about an hour west of Detroit when I was a teenager. I lived there for four years, and then we moved to Iowa, and then I ended up moving back for my senior year of high school. In total, I was in Michigan for five years, and the radio was the same. I still got the Detroit radio stations. Being there, it's so comfortable because I'm like, "Oh, I remember this Denise Williams song, and I remember this Teddy Pendergrass song from my childhood." It feels good to come home to that. I don't feel the radio is very particular, very localized stations, and that feels good to be home and to be influenced by that musically.

It's helping me integrate myself in a way because I grew up listening to soul music on the radio and then was singing Bach and Samuel Barber in school. I think being in that environment again is helping me integrate these loves of mine and finding out my own, I'm working through what my own vehicle of expressing that, integrating all these different things that I love.

Helga Davis: Detroit as a city right now offers you space. You have a son, a young son, you have a garden for him. Do you have a studio there also that you work?

Shara Nova: I do have a separate studio. I show up to the office. I'm there every day, and I go to work and I go home, feed my son and read stories to him and tuck him to bed.

Helga Davis: There are a lot of artists. There are a lot of people who have moved to Detroit from other places. How is it going in terms of making a community there?

Shara Nova: One of the things that's so fascinating to me is there's an unpolished quality to a lot of the spaces where music is happening. Sometimes that can be really, really frustrating when, an electrical snake doesn't work, and you're trying to plug in a microphone and it doesn't work. Or there's not good heating in my studio building and so by the end of the day, my hands are cold, and I can't really play guitar very well.

There are other moments that happen in these unpolished concert environments where it just the sensibility is like it feels that because you don't have all the overhead of space, you're a little bit more flexible in terms of experimentation. I like the grittiness and the immediacy of the idea of, "Oh, okay if I come up with a brand new set that has nothing to do with my other work I can try it out, and if it doesn't fly in Detroit and people aren't dancing and enjoying themselves then I'm going to go back and go to the drawing board again."

I moved to Detroit to be with people that were not in the art world, part of why I was propelled to leave is that I felt that my work was insular and that I didn't want to be in a place where I wasn't more actively rubbing shoulders with a construction worker or with someone in the factory or with someone in a different industry than I was doing and my view had become quite narrow in a way.

Helga Davis: Do you feel that part of your creative process also like do you every five years or three years destroy everything? Destroy is a big word but feel like you need to break out of whatever it is you've been doing and go do something else completely different that forces you to start over again, that forces you to look at yourself, and that allows you to imagine yourself all over again?

Shara Nova: Every record that I've made has been related to space in a unique way so it's almost like if I was making the same music in the same house in Brooklyn then I needed to move. I think also I love making classical music, I love the detail of it, I love working with people with instrumentalists, and I love that engagement. Then at the same time, I am a punk and so I need the immediacy of playing guitar really fast and loud and badly and screaming. I haven't figured out how to do that with orchestra, I'm sure it can be done but the physicality of rock is really a relief to me.

I find that I'm constantly going back and forth between my need to do something that is I would say less of social conversation and more about maybe an internal question that I have about music. Then I also desire to engage with people and I feel like pop music is more of a conversation between me and an audience. Of course, classical music is the same but the process of classical music I think can be a little more internal for me.

Helga Davis: Tell me if you think this is true, I have a friend who's a producer who said this to me and we were talking about relationships, about intimate relationships and she said, "Do you know what the problem with you artists is? You're always in love, you're in love with your work and then you get on a plane and you go somewhere and you're in love with that new place and then you meet someone who inspires you and you're in love." It sounded so dirty when she said it but I was thinking about it in terms of how I experience you as being really passionate about your work. I'm trying to suss out this feeling of where you are now with a new name, working on a new record.

Shara Nova: I think about my personality, there's part of it where I'm like an astronaut, and I'm constantly asking these questions or finding the edge of my own universe and needing to extend farther or say with a past experiment with music I learned something. Or I came to see something about the work that is dissatisfying or that I have a question about or something in the work that didn't get resolved.

Then the next piece I want to, "Okay, if I change these parameters then what happens?" I guess it's not that you're really looking for perfection because that doesn't exist but it's more like moving pieces of a puzzle around and just seeing what the result is.

Helga Davis: Still solving something.

Shara Nova: Yes. A lot of My Brightest Diamond albums have been about space. The first albums were drums and strings. Then the next I said, "Okay, I'm going to add woodwinds and marimba and a little bit of harp. I'm going to go earth and sky here.' Then the third one I said, "I'm so tired of everybody being the violinists just complaining and the drums never get to play loud so forget it, forget electric guitar. The third one we're going concert hall and going more acoustic and see what happens to make a chamber album." Then I said, "Okay, we did that now was the loudest thing I can do? Marching bands."

Then I wanted to break out of the concert hall and go into three-dimensional space and a marching band is surround sound so I started playing with that. In a way that experiment is continuing with my collaboration was so percussion like, "Okay, now what happens if I just stripped down to the voice and drums?" The next My Brightest Diamond album is a continuation of that too of like historically, what music has been made with beats and drums? Early rap was just beats and vocals. Digging into "Okay, I'm in Detroit what's that history and what music has influenced me, and then how do I filter that through my own life?"

Helga Davis: Are your songs for this record coming up? Are they about your new name? What are they about?

Shara Nova: It's a funny thing I started about 30 songs and a lot of them I just am like a teenager who's like, "I'm going to do everything my way." It's very rebellious and very annoying [laughter] in that way that a teenager is just obnoxious about it's me and I'm coming out and I'm going to do things my way. Thankfully that hard drive fell on the ground and wiped out.

[laughter]

About a month ago, I have had to start over. There were these songs that were very teenage early and really that's so much of how I feel is like a child again in a lot of ways. Then a lot as I was looking at the world and just speaking to the time that we're in a lot of the music also had a lot of social consciousness in it and finding my perspective and how I wanted to speak to social justice.

Helga Davis: Will you talk about that a little bit?

Shara Nova: Yes, one of the songs that will stick around is called Mama So Mad and it is based on Nina Simone's Mississippi Goddam. I took a little bit of her melody and then applied that to my feelings of outrage over the Flint water crisis and just feeling that as a mother like my son drinking water that's full of lead and me having no control over that. That people knowingly or however that happened but it was from some negligence and the injustice of that on so, so many families and so many people.

That being very, very close to home and the vulnerability of that, that we trust that the water that's coming out of our faucet is something that we can drink and the song ends with every son becomes our own or else we'll be undone. Every son becomes our own. It's true for all or no one. I think sometimes you feel like, "Oh, I should be only speaking about myself. Do we perceive the world through only our own perception or do we have a right to speak to someone else's reality? This didn't happen to me, it didn't happen to my son." However, someone said to me if there's a grain of rice, we are to share that last grain of rice.

To be in a position of power in any capacity we have to recognize that we have something to share. For me, in having a son and identifying with those women, I thought, "Okay, I want to speak to this through this song Mama So Mad."

Helga Davis: Where do you think motherhood fits into all of this? Does motherhood give you a skill or openness?

Shara Nova: Astronauts really love having a landing pad.

[laughter]

I love the experience in this life. I'm so grateful for the experience of having my son. When I look at him, it's like this radiant beam that is shooting out of my being toward him. It doesn't matter if he's throwing a shoe at me, it doesn't matter if he is telling me I'm the meanest mommy in the whole world, because I won't go buy him a new Lego set. It's the most incredible experience to be a mother and to think of we in a way that I didn't before having a child. At the same time, it's another fire and it puts the sense of responsibility and the adultness of being a mom is challenging. it's a gift but it isn't easy.

Every parent knows that as well. There are those days when you question, "Okay, I'm not able to do those 16-hour days in the same way that I did before, and is my work suffering because of that?" It's often that. I've had to soften the fact that I may not be able to get as many projects done or as much work. What's challenged me is that my identity even as being a musician is being confronted because we were all musical. I had value as a human being in my family, in church, and in my communities because I could get up and sing and they passed the offering plate. Or people knew me because I could sing those high notes or whatever. I created an identity structure for myself. Being a mother confronts even that my identity is now in also a different role or a different capacity.

I think it's like toggling always between a need for home, a need for connection, a need for community and family. At the same time needing to go away and needing to go far and needing to be isolated for long periods of time in order to do this work and needing to feel like you belong and that it matters when you get off the plane, who you're coming home to, and creating that root system for yourself.

I saw an African priest and he was speaking to me about, in his tradition, he would put all the portraits of his family in a corner. That's the ancestor's corner. He encouraged me to do that. He said, "Do you cook your grandmother's food?" I said, "No, I'm not in the habit of making meatloaf and green jello, fried chicken, and mashed potatoes with extra sour cream." My grandparents are from the south.

Fried okra and collard greens, but I did start making my grandparents' food, he said, "You need to get in touch with your ancestors. You may have moved all over this country, but you still come from a family." Even though my family doesn't know where we came from, we are an American amalgamation of so many things. We've been here, we forgot where we are from. I think a lot of Americans can relate to that. People, "Where are you from?" "I don't know."

I am an amalgamation of many different states and many different cultures because that's the reality of my-- I lived in New Orleans as a little kid. Mardi Gras was part of my family culture for several years. I have a family with Trinidadians that we have a blended cultural family, this thing of, "Who are you? Where are you from? Where are your people from?" I'm embracing that because the new world, the next phase of global citizenship is one where culture is going to continue to blend. I think we have fear of that. We have fear of those changes, but I'm recently just embracing that in some way I also reflect that blend of culture. May it continue to happen.

Helga Davis: I think too we're afraid of losing something that feels essential to who we are. I can feel in the stories of some of the elders I come into contact with, how important it is to them that I not forget that whatever it is I'm doing, I'm doing it because they did something too. I understand that feeling as well. I think part of what's so important about these conversations, Shara, is that by sitting across from one another we also give people permission to explore, to feel, to be, and to question at their edges.

It's really great and interesting to talk to you at a moment when you came up against an edge in your life and that you made this choice about a name, about changing your family structure, about moving away from, and moving toward something that feels more true for you.

Shara Nova: I think it's interesting making a decision in this day and age and you have to realize, "Oh, people are going to think this is publicity or blah, blah, blah." Whatever people think, but knowing for myself that this is a very personal choice and it's a little unusual, [laughs] I guess, for someone mid-career to suddenly change your name, but it feels like something I really needed to do even if it didn't make sense.

Helga Davis: Even if it doesn't make sense, it does--

Shara Nova: For other people.

Helga Davis: There we go. For other people. It does feel like it's in line with as you said all the rest of your creative conversation which needed to not be held so tightly. I will really look forward to speaking with you again once you get this record made and being able to talk to you about it and about where you are then, right?

Shara Nova: Yes. Everyone has advised me right at this time of transition. It's like in one month, I'm thinking completely different things than I was thinking a month previous. It is a very strange time to write a record because it's like I'm in almost a rapid movement. Songs are like photographs where they stick you in time and it's difficult to commit to a point of view because in a month from now, I will have a different idea about a lot of things. I'm trying to give myself the permission to just take a photograph in a song.

Helga Davis: Yes. Come back and talk to me.

Shara Nova: Okay. [chuckles]

Helga Davis: Thank you.

[music]

Shara Nova, new name, new path. I'm Helga. This is also a new path for me, these conversations, and I'm really enjoying sharing them with you. I'd like to hear from you. You can always email me at helga@wqxr.org or follow me on Facebook. I'm curious whether or not something in today's conversation resonated with you. If it inspired you in some way, if it inspired even your creativity, do reach out and let me know.

Speaker: This episode of Helga was produced by Julia Alsop and executive producer, Alex Ambrose, with help from Curtis Macdonald, and original music by Alex Overington. Special thanks to Cindy Kim, Lorraine Maddox, Michael [unintelligible 00:42:10], Jacqueline Cincotta, and John Chao.

 

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