Wandering star Jolie Holland

By GRAHAM REID



Jolie Holland's first album Catalpa was the little record that wasn't supposed to be. She'd recorded some tracks at home with friends, passed them around a bit, sold the recording at shows and then made it available through her website.

Next thing you know her hometown paper The San Francisco Chronicle picks it as one of the top 10 albums of last year, people like Nick Cave and Tom Waits are namechecking her, Britain's rock press (Mojo, Uncut) and mainstream media (The Observer, Independent) are weighing in with hefty praise, and when it's sold through amazon.com it's shifting units like a rock album.

And Catalpa was nothing like a rock album. Holland - who grew up in Houston and was an itinerant performer until settling in San Francisco - pulls elements of blues and folk together, can come off like she grew up on Appalachian folk or Bessie Smith blues, and was a founder of the Canadian alt.folk band the Be Good Tanyas before she headed out on her own idiosyncratic path.

Her first proper studio album, Escondida, follows much the same wayward path down the backroads of musical styles. But once again people are liking it. A couple of weeks back it was the second-biggest seller out of amazon.com.

Once again it is as musically itinerant as she was: on the opener Sascha she slips around the melody like a 30s jazz singer; on Old Fashioned Morphine she writes a new song in the old Southern folk-blues tradition; sings an old Anglofolk song (Mad Tom of Bedlam) and a Civil War ballad (Faded Coat of Blue). It could be country, folk or even jazz and the instrumentation reflects it: upright piano, ukulele, mandolin and banjo, trumpet, musical saw and saxophone.

All over the place really, isn't it, Jolie?

"Oh yeah, but I'm really bored with music that's too self-referential or about one tradition too much," she says from her home in San Francisco. "I have a free use of different types of music basically because I don't really know anything about any particular type extensively.

"I'm interested in all types of musical expression. Maybe I'll hear a musical concept and I'll hold it in my head for a long time then when I have an experience that seems like it could be expressed through that medium I'll pull it out and work on the song in that vein.

"I think all the higher level musicians have combined different styles; Ray Charles played country music at the beginning. Music is beyond marketing, but even the blues is a marketing concept these days. But Jimmie Rodgers recorded with Louis Armstrong, and John Coltrane was a big fan of Hank Williams.

"Good music is good music and I'm interested in many different things and been in so many different kinds of bands. I've been in a hip-hop band, I play in jazz bands and theatre performance bands; I'm interested in so many types of music and in the particulars of each different kind and the quirkiness of the idiom."

In conversation Holland is equally flighty, she veers from intensity to flashes of humour, and her chat is notable for the rising inflection at the end of sentences. She has a breathless, permanently surprised tone which rings with hippie/new age delight. "Wow," she whispers when I know of explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, whom she references in Old Fashioned Morphine.

And like a hippie she constantly sees herself as part of a collective mind: she repeatedly refers to her friends. Sascha is about her friend who is working on "this amazing project" bringing alternative medicine information to people with bi-polar problems, and her profile allows her the chance to deflect attention on to the "many people who are brilliant and committed artists and forward thinking people" whom she knows.

"It's inspiring being around these people."

And Holland has been around many different people. Part of her distinctiveness stems from years on the road playing in what has been referred to as a "circus" troupe.

"Actually it was just my friends and the word 'circus' just expresses the character of what we did. Some are circus performers but it was just a very creative group of visual artists and musicians; my peers."

They were itinerant - "poverty makes you itinerant, music makes you itinerant", she laughs - and she played violin on the street in Austin, New Orleans and San Francisco. It allowed her to engage an audience directly.

Out of this melange of experience she pulls sometimes remarkable and unexpected music.

One of the best tracks on the album, Goodbye California, starts like a road song of farewell then soars into an almost pantheistic rumination on the cosmos. The song came in two distinct bursts of writing, each about 15 minutes: "I discovered I have a really bad reaction to sugar and thought I had a problem with depression, but this traditional Chinese doctor suggested I stop eating bread and sugar for a month and see how this might clear up. And I never got depressed.

"I wrote the first part when I had a crash and it starts out really dark. I wrote it in Golden Gate Park and was feeling very down. Then the second part changes and is how I think things work for me now. It is more uplifting."

As critical praise piles up for this second album she says she has no reference points outside her own circle to compare her music and life with. Half the people she listens to are dead and the other half are her friends. "And my friends are really amazing musicians; in my circle the bar is set really high and I appreciate that."

The best part of touring is getting to see other friends scattered around the country, but she remembers where she came from and still gets back there from time to time, just busking for bucks.

"What I've learned is if you like what somebody is doing please give them some money because they are having a hard time there. It's really hard work and there are no benefits and no medical.

"It's amazing that you can be the top of the charts and play on the streets and people will still spit on you.

"It can be a very degrading experience, but it can be a real high. I've had people be very generous. You can meet sweet little old ladies.

"I love doing it and do it when I feel like it. It can be good for your soul and really humbling."