On Jilian, Jilian Medford calls herself an idiot. She knows how easily that kind of comment can become a habit. This time, she wanted to hear something funny in it.
“When I’m saying ‘such an idiot,’ I’m trying to be a little bit funny about it,” she tells Montreal Rocks.
Writing the song allowed the musician behind IAN SWEET to recognize her own patterns without treating every mistake as a catastrophe. She could hear herself making the same accusations again.
“That doesn’t make you a bad person. That doesn’t mean you’re fucking up your whole life. You’re just human.”
Medford describes Jilian as a defining moment in making Shiverstruck, her fifth album, released in July through Polyvinyl. Written during her second year living in New York and recorded with producer Ben H. Allen III, the album took shape as she was reconsidering a relationship and where she wanted to live. As production was wrapping up, she ended the relationship. She has since returned to Los Angeles, where she grew up.
She had written plenty about people who had broken her heart. With Jilian, she became more interested in what she might have contributed to the trouble.
“How about everybody had something to contribute here?” she asks.
She sounds happy to have reached the point where she can ask that question.
“I’m really enjoying growing up and being a more mature songwriter,” she says. “That’s been a really fun experience for me, to see how my songwriting has changed so many years in.”
After a decade of making records, Medford can look back and hear different versions of herself. She describes each album as a time capsule, an intimate picture of the person she was when she made it. She has changed considerably since her 2016 debut, Shapeshifter. Some of what she wanted for Shiverstruck, though, came from remembering how little stood between an idea and a song back then.
The first record was for herself and her band. They wanted to make something they enjoyed. She remembers following her instincts without stopping to imagine what a listener might think.
“The more you do this, the more is on the line, and you really want to succeed at it,” she says. “And you want to make stuff that people will listen to.”
That audience can enter the writing process before a song is ready for company. Medford recognizes occasions when she let the pressure hurry her.
“Some records I’ve made, I’ve maybe rushed a little bit or felt like I needed to get it out there. Maybe it wasn’t exactly the thing that I wanted to say.”
She still finds things to value in those records. For Shiverstruck, she wanted more time and a little less interference from the imagined listener.
“I really feel like I was intentional with this record to get back to that innocence and that joy.”
Teaching music to babies gave her a regular appointment with an audience whose responses were considerably less guarded.
Medford began leading children’s music classes while living in New York to help support herself. She had taught lessons before, but a room of babies and toddlers required something different. The oldest children were around four. She still does the work in Los Angeles.
“It was wild. It was absolutely wild,” she says. “It’s the best job.”
Whatever mood she arrives in, she has to be available to the children. They notice when her attention is elsewhere.
“You could be in a horrible mood that day and you have to show up,” she says. “You have to show the fuck up.”
She likes being part of their earliest encounters with music. It also gives her a reason to stop inspecting her own thoughts for a while.
“It really teaches you to get outside of yourself and be extremely present.”
Medford has considered making a children’s album. For now, she is finding more room for humour inside IAN SWEET. When asked about the sadness in her songs, she points to Deadweight as an example of teasing herself. She wanted more of her personality to make it onto this record, including the parts that can recognize something ridiculous while it is happening.
The title arrived more easily than some of the writing. Shiverstruck is a word she invented to describe being moved by something, caught off guard and left to respond. She liked that it seemed to contain a feeling she had been circling throughout the album.
“Very in the moment, very impulsive,” she says.
Medford had always thought of herself as easygoing. Getting older made her notice how much control she wanted over her surroundings and relationships.
“The most influential things that have happened to me in my life, and the most transformative moments, are the things that I’ve never expected would happen.”
A recent car accident has made that subject difficult to discuss without returning to a particularly unsettling coincidence. Medford says her car flipped in Los Angeles, leaving her upside down. She suffered a concussion; the car was totalled.
About two months earlier, she had filmed the video for 987 in a junkyard. Its release was already scheduled for the week after the crash.
“It felt so weird to be sharing that on the internet,” she says. “My car now was forever in a junkyard like that.”
She and the friend she makes her videos with were shaken by the overlap. There is also a tow truck on her tour merchandise. She is still trying to work out what, if anything, to take from it.
“I don’t know what the lesson is,” she says. “And maybe there isn’t a lesson.”
She has spent years writing and singing in the car, treating it as somewhere private enough for an idea to develop. When another interviewer recently asked about that favourite creative space, she had an awkward update: she no longer owned one.
Replacing it will have to wait until she gets home from tour.
First comes Montreal, where IAN SWEET plays La Sotterenea on @Saturday. Travelling with a full band, Medford names La La Love, Wild Heart, and 987 among the new songs in the live set. She is also looking forward to returning to Fairmount for hot bagels. Living in New York did nothing to dislodge her preference.
“Montreal-style bagel is it.”
Back in Los Angeles, her work with children has introduced another audience to IAN SWEET. Some of the parents whose children she teaches came to the Shiverstruck release show, taking a night off to see her perform.
The show took place at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, with dances choreographed for the puppets. Medford calls it “the best day of my life.”
The marionettes have not joined her on tour. She jokes about fixing that.
“Fuck the band. I’m getting marionettes.”
Watch the full interview below:
IAN SWEET plays La Sotterenea on 17 October. BUY TICKETS
