Virga’s Faith Maddox talks new record Eremocene ahead of this week’s run at White Schoolhouse, Howdy

Faith Maddox of Virga. // photo credit Nell Schmidt

Faith Maddox – the brainchild behind Lawrence “rock” band Virga – has been experimenting with the sounds she has wanted to explore ever since her time at Kansas University. Six years and seven projects later, including her solo material, she has zoned in on a heavier creative side in Eremocene, but the future holds a different sort of bar for her.

We sat down with Maddox just before their July run of shows in the Lawrence and Kansas City area to discuss the seven-track behemoth.

The Pitch: It seems like your songwriting process changed for Eremocene. The self-titled record felt very direct, almost emo at times, and here you’re more nature-based.

Faith Maddox: That’s actually a great insight. I feel like I was actually thinking about that today. I think the first record was kind of just random songs that I had written. There wasn’t really a unifying theme, it was sort of just “here’s all the songs we’ve been playing together.” With Eremocene, I had been thinking about making a concept record specifically about climate change and grief for a couple years because it was something that I had studied in school.

I think that I took a more conceptual approach, being very intentional with the tracklist and the order of things. I wanted to force people to listen to the whole thing in context, because to me, there is a narrative.

Was the idea of five long cuts, with an almost-interlude and an outro a concept from the beginning?

Yes and no. I wrote “Iowa Gambling Task” and “Alice” first. I knew that I wanted to create a feeling of continuation. Usually, when we’re working on the new songs, I write all the songs by myself and then I bring them to practice and we layer things in that way, so it’s easier for me to know the narrative arc that I’m creating.

With the interlude, I knew that I wanted to incorporate a hymn that was reimagined and so that just ended up working better as an acoustic track. For the outro, I knew that there just needed to be some type of conclusion in terms of the tone. I was kind of just trying to think how I’d sculpt this feeling of journeying through the plains and the image I had in my head of what the narrative arc was emotionally.

Talk about the album title, as well as the bookend track titles, “Iowa Gambling Task” and “Lonnie Thompson’s Dream.”

Eremocene was a word I came across while working on my college thesis, which explored the literature of climate change and how we discuss political issues. There’s this organization that has started this archival project online where they’re creating a new dictionary of words to come up with new language to describe climate change specifically.

Faith Maddox of Virga. // photo credit Nell Schmidt

“Iowa Gambling Task” was just a reference to the psychoneurological test that I had to take a couple years ago that deals with having to delay short-term gratification for long-term rewards. That kind of felt like a theme in the record and it made sense to start with that. Ending with “Lonnie Thompson’s Dream” feels like a dream sequence tonally. It is a reference to the ecologist Lonnie Thompson. There was a documentary I watched where he talked about his dream of sharing information with the world and reaching the top of a mountain, and that felt thematically appropriate.

Was the idea of bringing in cello and violin a must-have to develop your change in sound?

I think so, and I think that those two songs became my favorite on the record because of the cello. I met Emily Ward, who plays cello on the record, through a band that she is still in, Something Blue. As much as I love doing the guitar-forward music – which feels like an important part of my taste and my interest as a person – I wanted to explore what alternative instruments I could start incorporating to create this similar effect in a different sonic layout. I would definitely like to work more with strings in the future after doing that.

There is screaming on five tracks here that isn’t really present on the first album, aside from “Ghost.” Was that a transition to get back to that sound a bit?

I think I found a lot of catharsis in screaming in Caufield’s studio when we recorded “Ghost” and “Portal.” A lot of the music that I like has screaming in it, but it’s something that I’ve never really dared to explore until more recently, just because I think that I’m a very rigid person. It requires a certain level of freedom that I don’t inherently have as a person, but now I feel like that’s different since I started doing that.

These two records are mixed by a member of the Lawrence group Sweeping Promises. Talk about that collaboration.

We met Caufield and Lira [Mondal] at Eighth Street Tap Room at our third show ever. We got done playing and both of them just came up to us and said that they loved us. Caufield was like “you should let me record your first album.” We kind of started texting back-and-forth, I went over to see his studio, and recorded the album with him.

It was such a good experience in terms of working with him as a person and getting a lot of inspiration from him, because he’s been involved with music for such a long time. I view him and Lira as mentors and sources of inspiration to me.

I read that you started playing music because you felt a block in your life. Have you continued doing it for another reason?

If you had asked me two years ago what I thought the purpose of any of this was, my answer would still be the same – I love doing it. It brings me a lot of fulfillment. It feels like the only thing that I should be doing with my life sometimes. I never thought it would be something I wanted to do, or even remotely entertaining the idea of it as a job, but now it’s kind of the only thing I actually want to do most of the time. This makes me feel like me. I enjoy being in service to the music and feeling like a conduit.

What are some plans you guys have for the rest of the year? I know you have these two shows coming up in Lawrence and Kansas City.

We’ve got four shows in July, we’re going on tour in August, and potentially doing a couple of out-of-town dates in September. We are going to take some time off to work on new projects. There’s been a long-term plan to rearrange some of the instruments that are involved, and we’ve started working on that. I feel like we’ve just been hitting it really hard, so I think that we’re just desiring, especially in the fall, to have more time to write and experiment more.

I always end my interviews by asking an artist what the best thing they’ve listened to lately is. It can be something that just came out or something that came out in the ‘60s.

Ora Cogan’s Formless, from up in Vancouver, has probably been the most inspirational record that I’ve listened to personally within the last year.

Virga plays at White Schoolhouse in Lawrence on Wednesday, July 2, and at Howdy in KCMO on Saturday, July 5. Eremocene is available through their Bandcamp now.