It’s been ten years since the last new Dear Nora release. What made you go for it now?

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KATY DAVIDSON: I guess a bunch of time passed without me even really realizing it. I used to write 50 songs a year, and then it dwindled to 20, and now I write, like, three songs a year. I’d like to write more often than that, but I just got involved with other things and started dealing with other priorities — I got super focused on my other job, and bought a house.

But then when we went on tour last year, and the Mountain Rock reissue came out, I felt like, I need to do this, I have these songs, they’re ready, I need to release them! I need to get them out! I want to play! Touring in support of Mountain Rock was a kick in the pants.

Like Mountain Rock, Skulls Example has an intense sense of place.

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Definitely. A friend of mine who’s a professor of Japanese history — in fact, he collaborated on some lyrics on this album — will call out which of my albums are about time, and which of my albums are about space. I love it. It maybe seems so obvious, but I hadn’t thought about it in those terms. Mountain Rock, There Is No Home, those are about space; the Lloyd and Michael album, that one’s about time.

That’s funny, because I would say this newest one is about both.

I think about time and space all the time. I’m obsessed with the seasons. I have this weird knack for remembering things chronologically. If someone says a month and a year I can tell them where I was, mostly because I was on tour and I remember what tour it was. I always like trying to guess what time it is. Those are silly examples, but I’m obsessed with environments. I think that goes along with my astrological sign, which is Libra. I’m kind of just tripping on time and space at all times.

Your songs pick up some of the incongruities that occur when you’re moving between places, the difficulty of toggling between different environments.

Totally. I’ve been obsessed with lava. I’ll go to these dried lava rock beds in Oregon and I’ll just think about standing on the lava and using my phone, taking a photo with my phone. Those feelings were really sticking out to me when I went to Mexico, which I wrote about on this album. I would do these little solo day trips and check out little towns, and just trip on the integration of the ruins into the contemporary city, and how ancient cultures are still at play, but they’ve been shaped or sculpted by time.



What has changed in your recording and songwriting processes?

I purposefully and very actively integrated an analog machine in the recording process. I didn’t have to; I could have just recorded an album using everything digital. But I love limitations. When I was recording the Dear Nora albums a decade or more before, analog recording didn’t feel like a limitation, it just felt like what I had. Now that ten years have passed and we all can just record albums on our computers, I was like, There are too many choices, it’s taking me forever to make an album!

I got a four-track again, and we tracked a lot of the instruments through it. It was specifically for sound, and also to move things forward — by limiting myself to a certain number of tracks. It was also sort of in homage to what Dear Nora was. I got out my old master tapes and just recorded over them. I’d be recording some of the songs on this album and then a song from There Is No Home would bleed through. But I did integrate analog and digital quite a bit on this one. It’s lo-fi, but it’s not all the way lo-fi.

In terms of songwriting, my approach has clearly evolved in some ways, but I think there’s a lot of the same threads running through these songs as you can hear on the rarities comp, of songs I wrote in 2000. I’m much more lyrically focused now, though. Like, much more.



