Georgia Turman
On making music and everything else too
Georgia Turman is the L00king Glass’s new musical obsession.
The songwriting senior from LA just released her second album Multiplication on March 6th and we can’t stop listening to it.
In a tell-all interview conducted at her Benefit St. apartment (which also gets featured in her latest music video,) Georgia spoke about what it’s like to put an album together at Brown, and the expansive, playful ethos around all she creates…
On The Album:
Multiplication is a 10-track largely folk record that is “both serious and silly” with flares of rock and bluegrass influences. Recorded in Providence over the summer, the album was mixed and mastered by the recent Brown Grad John Turner. “I’d never worked with him before, but I knew him because he played in a student band called Adeline. So I just texted him and we met up in Coffee Exchange – truly a Providence story — I told him what I wanted and he was like, ‘Great. Let’s do it.’”
The room they recorded in now belongs to the album’s banjo player William Loughridge.
“Almost everything is recorded live and continuously.” The naturalistic production, with guitar and vocals recorded at the same time, creates an intimate “feeling of you being in the room,” like Georgia is singing right to you. Her casually poetic lyrics, handwritten in notebooks, often feel like a musical diary of Brown student life, with references to “booking it down Power (St.)” in I don’t think of you at all and lines from Horses George inspired by a Thomas Wyatt poem she studied in an English Class.
“I’m interested in writing about the people. Not just people I know, but the people that you would know.”
On Making
The cover art is a paper collage Georgia made, based off a photo her roommate took of her in a party hat. “I am obsessed with the cone hat” she explained. “I want some scholarly research on it.”
“It’s like a clown but it’s also like a Dunce cap,” she added. “It’s a marker of difference that’s sometimes positive and sometimes negative, so I think claiming that is exciting and sort of resonant with me.”
Georgia’s sonic and aesthetic interest in ‘silliness’ is also part of the reason why she chose the title Multiplication.
“ I liked that it’s a bit childlike.”
“I feel like generally in my life I’m embracing a sort of playfulness and sarcasm more. There’s also sincerity on this album, but I think I’m balancing it with something lighter that makes it more listenable maybe and maybe more true. I’m trying to make things that are funny.”
The name also nods to her embrace of “things going in different directions” and generating ideas without a fixed artistic goal. “I truly like to make things. I also write stories and poems and I paint a little bit. With this album I was trying to sort of welcome that spirit of just like creating and breeding a multiplicity of things… things that aren’t necessarily completely cohesive.”
Influences:
Georgia’s foundational lyrical inspirations have been folk songwriters like Bob Dylan, Gillian Welch, and Simon & Garfunkel, alongside poets like Eileen Myles and Lucille Clifton. For this album, she was particularly influenced by Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters. “There are a lot of random sounds on it and things like that” which prompted her to experiment with using “found sounds” as part of her instrumentation – such as the creaking door sound that kicks off the album in Want It So Bad.
Sonically, Georgia’s recent work draws heavily on rock influences like Cameron Winter and Mj Lenderman. “When I listened to MJ Lenderman’s album Manning Fireworks, I was like this is so awesome I really want to make something like this.” That shift is most evident in Jenny’s Bedroom — her favorite track on the album. The song ditches her staple acoustic guitar for a full band sound, with a chugging base, strong drum beat, and electric guitar riffs. “It’s so exciting that I can make a song that sounds like that and that I can play with all these people.”
“I love the idea of making a genre album. Making a full pop record sounds really fun. I also dream of playing the fiddle...”
Songwriter Origin Story: dog, ukulele, guitar pipeline…
Georgia’s first muse was her dog “Sailor” who she insists “had a dark past” and inspired her first ever song written in Kindergarten. “I had this idea of creating a full musical production about him and I wrote the opening song for that musical. It’s called You Sparkle and Shine.” (Despite our efforts, she is not currently willing to share You Sparkle and Shine with The L00king Glass readers.)
Things picked up when she was gifted a ukulele for Hanukkah in the 8th grade, which led to her learning the guitar and starting to write songs in a “more intentional way.”
These days Georgia mostly writes songs in one sitting; “I often feel like it just arrives and then I write them pretty fast like in an hour.”
Stand Out Songs:
I don’t think of you at all 1, to Georgia’s surprise, has been an album favorite. “I was rehearsing it and I was like, oh, this song is so cringe. I can’t believe I have to sing it. But since release everyone keeps saying how much they love it.” It’s slightly ironic, slightly tragic account of a college breakup and its an addictive melody is so relatable that this author’s entire household has had it on repeat for the past month. “In some ways I conceptualize this as vaguely a breakup album and that song is the most.”
Doll Song is “a special one” for Georgia. The song tells the story of a doll she made from a pillowcase over winter-break “just to have a craft project to stay sane.” This doll (named “she/her — because she’s just so girl”) sat beside us throughout the interview in a very high-tech dress that can zip open and closed. “Her hair is kind of falling apart now, but I felt like this was the ultimate making project— where I made this thing, then I made a song about making the thing.”
Musical Advice :
“I think just play with your friends and people that you like. When I came to Brown I encountered so many people who just wanted to play music for the hell of it and it felt like it was very low stakes and welcoming.”
“I joined the Old-time string band for fun – I had never really heard old time music before coming here and I feel like that’s a random part of New England that I gained access to through coming to Brown. Like I now have a multitude of friends who play the banjo? I sometimes also play with an accompanying fiddle and things like that…harmonica too.”
“It all started being a lot more generative when I decided to just make music with who I like and record with people who I like. Then it’s fun to perform too. And push people who are interested to try it. I always wanted to be in a band in high school and I was way too scared and I just wish I had done that earlier, cause it’s so fun.”
The sense of friends truly having fun with what they make is clearly visible in the music video that just came out for the album’s opening track Want it So bad. The video, released on April 3rd, was also made entirely by Brown students over the summer.
Now go listen to Multiplication! And watch the music video. You’ll get to fall down a brilliant rabbit hole into the musical world Georgia’s built in her album and art, and see how passionate all the students involved have been in creating this Providence story.