BANKS with MOVEMENT at the Phoenix (410 Sherbourne), Friday (October 3), 8 pm. $23.50. RT, SS, TW.
Jillian Banks has a visceral way of describing music. The way she talks, it’s up there with essentials such as the air she breathes.
“I had this thought once that all these songs are born in one day,” the 26-year-old southern California native, who performs under the name Banks, explains over the phone from a tour stop in Boston. “I was making these little bodies of work that were so real to me. The day before, they didn’t exist, and now they were these breathing things in the universe that people can grasp onto. Every little particle of air could be a new song.”
The album she’s referring to is her recently released debut, Goddess (Harvest/Universal), on which she unpacks feelings of fragility, anger and confusion against a restless soundscape of cavernous beats and buzzing distortion courtesy of producers including Lil Silva, Sohn and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs.
It arrived less than two years after she posted her first song on SoundCloud, and follows a succession of well-received EPs and media hype that landed her the opening slot on Toronto R&B star the Weeknd’s 2013 tour.
Sonically, her music resembles his electronic menace, but her message of empowerment through vulnerability and her willingness to get specific in lyrics are closer to Fiona Apple – an acknowledged influence.
Banks started writing music as a teenager “for my own sanity” and continued honing her craft as a psychology student at the University of Southern California, where she would steal away to a room with a piano to work on songs between classes.
“I remember feeling completely helpless – I didn’t even know how to talk to express what I was feeling, and I had all this anger,” she recalls. “When I discovered music, I felt liberated.”
For example, on Beggin For Thread – a song that came from feeling “comfortably crazy” – she sings about shooting her mouth off and overreacting while at the same time reminding a lover, “That’s why you wanna come out and play with me.”
Such songs have had a self-actualizing effect on Banks that she articulates without delving specifically into the situations that inspired them.
“Songwriting for me is not about conquering or changing any emotion,” she says. “It’s about accepting them. The hardest thing when I don’t write songs is that I’m avoiding emotion. You start feeling like gravity weighs an extra 100 pounds on your shoulders because you have all this shit in your head and won’t let it come out. With music, you can write about it, accept it and make space for it in your mind.”
music@nowtoronto.com
