Terre Roche Acknowledges Her Inner Adult

Terre Roche’s newest release, Inner Adult, is a multimedia project: part picture book, part album. 

Fans of the Roches—the folk-pop trio she formed with sisters Maggie and Suzzy—will recognize the mix of whimsy and intelligence. But even if you’re unfamiliar with the Roches’ output (which includes an album with Maggie, Seductive Reasoning, and various solo projects), Inner Adult is a delightful surprise. Roche’s illustrations complement the lyrics, with QR codes provided to listen to the songs themselves as you’re reading.

Terre Roche plays the City Winery Loft in New York City on May 20.

 

You’ve released this album in a unique format as sort of a book album. Can you tell me the  genesis behind that? 

The first time this format was used was two years ago, when I released a project called Kin Ya See That Sun, which was a series of live recordings of my sister Maggie and me. When we were teenagers, we toured all over the country to colleges. And someone sent me these recordings. So, I decided to do a project where I interviewed a lot of people that remembered us from them and that worked with us back then. Michael Tannen, who was Paul Simon’s business partner, and they had signed Maggie and me to their company, he and I did this project two years ago, and it was his idea. I did the drawings, you know, around the lyrics because I wanted to lead with the lyrics. Because, you know, lyrics are so tiny even when they’re on CDs or LPs. And it was Michael’s idea to put QR codes on each of the lyric pages so that you could just go to that song. 

 

VIDEO: Terre Roche “Can We Keep ‘Em Dad”

Back with LPs, a lot of attention was given to album cover design, layout of lyrics, and something similar, and I think this book sort of recalls that. 

That was one of the things in my generation that we get the album, especially if it was a double album. And there’d be all this information in the form of the picture and the design of the actual album. And I know that that’s coming back, using the LP format. And people had suggested, oh, you should do an LP because that’s once again popular. And I thought, “Yeah, but you can’t really see the lyrics.” And so this whole format is kind of based on leading with the lyrics and the drawings because I love to draw. So to me, the drawings and the songs, they’re all kind of related. 

Inner Adult was recorded in a studio on the island of St. John [in the Virgin Islands], and the engineer was Allen Clapp. It’s his studio in his house. He has a group called the Orange Peels. He had moved to Saint John from San Francisco with his wife, Jill. And I made this recording in his studio, and I think he did a beautiful job with whatever microphone he used. And it was all live, just singing and playing at the same time. 

This idea of inner adult, you know, everyone’s talking about; you heal the inner child. And I thought, well, I just turned 71, you know, I’m not a child. I don’t even remember the inner child. But the inner adult…I realized that it’s “IA.” So it’s the opposite of “AI.”

I never thought of it that way, but that’s a great, great point. 

It’s the opposite of artificial intelligence. This is one person with one guitar, no embellishments. I could be wrong, but I don’t think that AI could come up with this particular record. 

 

I’m curious. What are your thoughts on the role of AI in making music? Because there’s such a big debate over it in the role of it in art in general. 

I think all of us are trying to find our place in this because I’m getting to the point where almost everything that I hear or that someone tells me, I don’t believe. And I’ve never been that kind of person. I’ve always been sort of gullible. 

 

One thing you mentioned in the notes is that a lot of those songs have been written over the course of four years. At what point what made you finally decide, okay, it’s time to record them? 

Well, that was an unusual thing because I wasn’t thinking of making a record. I realized that I had thirteen songs that had been written over the past four years, and I just wanted to hear them recorded nicely. And that’s when I called Allen up and said, “Can I come and do a session with you to put these songs down?” And it wasn’t until I listened to them that I thought, “I want to put this out. I want to make this statement at this time.”

 

One of my favorite songs on the album is “A New Serenity Prayer.” Can you give me an idea of how that came about?

During the pandemic, one of the things I found myself doing was writing fan letters to certain people that I wanted to, you know, say that I liked their work. Father James Martin ten years ago had posted a little video talking about the Roches’ version of “Good King Wenceslas” and how much he liked it. 

And so it never occurred to me to write to him, and then I thought, “Well, I’m gonna write him a fan letter.” So I did. And he got right back to me and we wound up writing this song together just, you know, on the Internet. And turns out he lives seven blocks away from me in New York. That was a wonderful experience because what happened was, he sent me the prayer, the lyrics. And I sat down with the lyrics and just sang through them into a recording device and that was the song. And so I sent it back to him and he liked it.

 

VIDEO: Terre Roche “Fish Out of Water”

About the about the drawings, could you tell me a little bit about that? Because I think that’s a part of your artistic identity a lot of people don’t know about. 

When the Roches were on tour, I would do a drawing for each member of the band for every show. I have these little boxes that have all the set lists from all the Roches’ shows, and it’s just something I would do.  

I’ve always loved to draw, but I’ve never been trained as a person to draw, you know. That’s one thing I like about it, is that I’ve had a lot of musical training and lessons and things. But with drawing, it’s a whole different experience. And with this project, I just listened to each one of the songs and did the drawings as I was listening to the song. 

 

I understand you did everything in one take? 

I went down to Allen’s studio at the beginning of September, and I put down eleven songs, and at that time they didn’t have any guitar intros. I just went right into the lyrics, and when I listened to them, I thought, “Well, I’m gonna take each one of these and really put a leading-in guitar thing to get the listener used to the key we’re about to go in.”  

Then I wrote two more songs. I wrote, “Can We Keep Him, Dad?” and “Hey, Won’t You Come Back?” Those two were the last two that I wrote. Now I had really decided what the order was gonna be according to which song flows into the next. And I said, “I just wanna do pretty much the same thing what we did a couple weeks ago, only this time I just wanna go straight through.” And that’s what it was.