An Album With a Single Evocative Word in The Title

Mána Taylor Hjörleifsdóttir in conversation with Shélan O’Keefe 

Shélan O’Keefe is one half of the band Swellshark, which she started with her partner Henry Kellam around 2016. Henry plays drums, bass, guitar, and makes electronic beats while Shélan writes lyrics, sings, plays the ukulele and occasionally her own handmade cigar-box guitar. After losing a hard drive that contained most of the recordings for their upcoming second album, Shélan and Henry found a new connection to songwriting by slowly writing their way through a string of unplanned songs that had their own identities, structures, and not tied to this idea of an album. The photoshoot for their release was spontaneous as well, their friend and photographer Brandi hand-picked clothes from their closets and captured the band and in their most comfortable selves right before they released Same Face last month, featuring spoken word artist Raphelle. 

Shélan and I have been friends for almost exactly 10 years now. I am still living in Chicago where we met, and Shélan moved to Atlanta a few years ago. We have both grown in many ways, as has our friendship. I’ve seen her go from busking, to touring around the US with her band Swellshark. She is a visual artist, a musician, a writer, a scientific observer, and much more. Our conversations are among my favorite. Last week, I decided to record us talking about Swellshark’s release of their single HereHere released today, October 16. 

Mána: How does it feel to revisit old songs and create new ones, after almost three years of not releasing music?

Shélan: In my phone notes, I wrote down “an album with a single evocative word as the title. That is the title of the album.” I feel almost superstitious talking about it a lot. I think that is one thing that has definitely changed once we lost the songs that we originally were working on. We had created this whole narrative of “second album coming soon!” and the album never actually came. It reminded me that you have to create something privately first, and engaging with that first before you can share it. 

Definitely. Can you remind me what happened with your files?

So, Henry was saving files to this folder that he thought was backed up, but it wasn’t backed up so we lost most of our demos that were leading towards tracks on the album. I remember being really lost at that time, and devastated by that. I feel like it was such a part of my identity as an artist and a person… 

It’s interesting because what I love most about our projects like Dear July and our poems, is that they don’t fit into a traditional format of write, record, produce, share. I think more people should be open to a less linear way of making music, or art in general. Even letting go of things that are lost or destroyed. 

Yeah, I feel like there’s this new interesting thing in the internet of people having an intimacy, but also an agency with recording music, and other art. I really like it, and I feel like it resonates with people. We haven’t posted any music in about four years, but people still occasionally like our page or follow us or are curious to see what’s next, and I like that. 

Me too! I also wanted to ask, then, how it felt then to write songs again after having lost the original ones?

This time was very interesting. I tried something different where all of these lyrics were freestyle essentially. So, Henry would create a track and then put it on a loop - some of them became what the song is now. HereHere, for instance, I made the lyrics up when the track was recording. I enjoyed when the loops didn’t line up together as well. I’m also trying to create stuff that’s less personal. That just works with the song, instead. I find that even then, it becomes more personal than I intended anyway. I feel like it does not need to be as autobiographical anymore. 

You’re also a painter and illustrator. Do you think about your art as straying away from self-reflection and autobiography?

Definitely. It reminds me actually of this interview I watched with Robert Pattinson about The Lighthouse. He said he was trying a new acting technique of not creating backstories for characters anymore. He was saying that he likes to say the lines in a way that feels good, instead of inventing an idea of a past for that character. 

I like that! I was thinking a lot about lyric analysis of old music recently, and how sometimes it’s best to just let a lyric be instead of digging into what it means. Especially for the band Radiohead, for instance, I used to think the lyrics were so meaningful but they are delightful in how simple and meaningless they are. It’s interesting though because we’re both writers, so we do care about the meaning and intent behind words, as well as using the right words. But, sometimes it’s nice to not have lyrics that carry so much weight and depth. 

I’m personally very surprised when people ask me questions about lyrics, because of course I meant what I said and the words were chosen with intention, but with sensation in mind if that makes sense? Asking about the meaning is confusing to me.

That’s why I love the little prompts we gave to each other in our Bookshelf Poems album. We were just pulling words from the bookshelf and creating collages of new lyrics, and somehow they are more deep. We wrote this lyric “waiting for vaccines” in our song Simplicity around four years ago…

To explain to readers, Shélan and I started a band one night in her apartment when we couldn’t sleep. We both were avid “phone note” keepers, meaning we would use the notes app on our phones to write poem ideas and record little moments in life. That night in her apartment, we exchanged our phones and each read the other person’s notes. With those, we wrote down in separate notebooks what moved us the most and those became songs. Years later, in my home, we had the idea to collect the titles of books on my shelves and create song lyrics with them. That became our Bookshelf Poems album. 

Oh my gosh! Yes, you definitely allow yourself to be more deep and vulnerable when you allow yourself to play and that feels good to your brain. I think sometimes, especially for music, people make too big of a deal about the “creative process.” 

Everyone’s creative process is their own, anyways! Do you have any other Swellshark plans that we should know about? 

I get very cautious, since we lost stuff before. In my head, I do eventually it see becoming an album-like project. I think this one is going to be different. I can see it having interludes and snippets that are varying degrees of finished. Same Face was very polished, even though it was very off the cuff, but I think there are certain pieces that I found that are all going to fit together, that have been slowly coming together, that seemed to not relate before. I found an audio file of me layering vocals on top of each other and making up lyrics on top of it, and I thought “oh! I don’t need to do anything to it!” Like we were talking about before, playing around with when something is really finished. 

I asked Shélan if she had any last words before I stopped recording and we continued to catch up as friends, she said “I don’t necessarily know what we’re making or when it will be out, and that feels really nice.” 

The song HereHere represents the beautiful spontaneity that can occur in songwriting when letting go of a specific process. You can listen today on all streaming platforms. 

Words by Mána Taylor Hjörleifsdóttir.
Photographs by Brandi Gant