Fictional Truths

Songwriter's Monthly magazine, June 1998

Sweet-spoken, charming, and witty. Annie Gallup got a record deal more or less formatting around a campfire in Kerrville one year. However, I think you're about to find that there is a lot more to this fast-speaking songstress than meets the eye. Get ready for a wild ride.

Songwriter's Monthly: There is a lot of information and detail in your songwriting, if you don't listen carefully to every word, you can miss a lot.
Annie: Thanks for listening that well.

SM: Do you ever run into people who just don't "get it?"
AG: Oh sure, a lot of popular music doesn't take a lot of attention to appreciate, but if you're not paying attention, you probably won't appreciate what I'm doing.

SM: How do you begin a song? Do you ever do free-writing exercises?
AG: A lot of them do start as just free writing. I just write pages and pages of everything that comes to me while I'm thinking about a subject or even a vague idea. Then I use those pages as kind of my encyclopedia—I pull out lines from there and I find internal rhymes that were just unconscious freehand stuff.

SM: So writing in a notebook is a pretty important first step to your songwriting process?
AG: It gives me something to start organizing with, which are the different verses, what goes sequentially, which details are important and which can just fall away.

SM: Meter seems to be very important to your work.
AG: That's something I call "neatening up." After the writing is all finished and I'm putting it to music, the metric thing becomes really important to me.

SM: There's even a song called "Tom" on your latest album which doesn't have music, but for some reason it still doesn't sound like a spoken-word piece.
AG: I think of "Tom" as a song. It started as a song, but I just never adapted any music.

SM: That's very interesting.
AG: And it's in three-four time.

SM: There's a great descriptive line in the song, "Banal, predictable and insincere," that's got a very cool beat.
AG: That's the meter thing.

SM: So when you're writing do you ever think "hmm, I need a four-syllable word for sad?"
AG: With the beat on the third syllable. Yeah!

SM: So how do you come up with all these great words?
AG: I use a rhyming dictionary and a thesaurus. They are really inspiring books. They're not just crutches, you can hitchhike ideas on top of other ones that you wouldn't have expected to get to someplace really unexpected. (pause) I use a capo too. I don't apologize for any of this (she laughs).

SM: Do your lyrics come from real life experiences?
AG: It's more I try to tell a true story...but it doesn't have to have actually happened.

SM: How do you manage that?
AG: I work like a fiction writer. I study real life—including my own—but I'm not doing biographies or autobiographies. I'm writing fiction.

SM: So do you spend a lot of time doing research?
AG: A lot of times, yes.

SM: There's a song on your latest album called "100 miles" that seems very accurate in its portrayal of distances. Is that fiction, too?
AG: I did a couple years living in Kentucky, so the distances and a lot of the details were from that place...but a lot of them weren't (she laughs).

SM: So it's really about Kentucky, but it's not really about Kentucky?
AG: I've had to defend some of my songs that way to people who know the person I was writing about. There's a song on the first album about my grandmother. My sister takes great difference with that song because she doesn't think that's the grandmother she had. And it's not. I was trying to tell the truth and it didn't matter if it really resembled grandma or not.

SM: So how do you know what's true?
AG: When something rings true to me I know it.

SM: There's another song on your album that even gets as detailed as to say "scar runs the length of his left arm." Did that character originate from a real person?
AG: On the song "Cowboy," one of the things I was thinking about when I wrote it was painting. There was a painting that had very little information. It was kind of put together like a quilt block with mostly blank space and very few little squares filled in. However, you could look at it and see the whole picture which the squares that were filled in were implying. I was thinking about doing that with words.

SM: So, there are a lot of levels to understanding your music:
AG: Yes, there are.

SM: Is there a song that's particularly important to you on this album?
AG: "A Million Ways" is important to me partly because of the way it was inspired. It started with an NPR story reporting on a protest in Bosnia which described the fact that these people had come together in spite of the fierce political climate. Then I though about my own days in Ann Arbor when I was a kid, and I remembered that whole era of protest. Also, I had just been to Salt Lake City and I was thinking about the whole counterculture there—the general political climate is really oppressive in Utah, but the counterculture is really strong. Finally, I had been to Olympia, Washington, which is a very liberal scene, and I was listening to some radicals go on and on while thinking how hollow and empty what they were saying was. They were just defining themselves. It had nothing to do with the real world. So all that was kind of what inspired the song, and even though it sounded like a very autobiographical story, it was actually fiction put together from all these different little inspirations.

SM: Let me see if I've got this straight. You have a song without music, true stories that aren't real, and in your bio you speak of fictional characters that you have met! Is there anything we haven't covered that's important to your music?
AG: You've touched upon the most important aspect which is I work as a fiction writer as opposed to an autobiographer.

SM: Any you came up with that technique just so you could deny certain songs were really about specific people?
AG: So my sister will be satisfied that I'm not really talking about her (laughing).

As you can see, Annie is a very thorough songwriter, with a sly sense of humor. She has mesmerizing storytelling capabilities and great music. Plus she's a very interesting person. | Back to Features | Top