One In A Million: BANKS Interviewed

No one does atmosphere like Jillian Banks. For a decade, the L.A. singer, known as BANKS to the masses, has turned alt-R&B into a transformative Musée d’Orsay piece – reworking club confessions, ‘Thursday’-like highs, and hazy SoundCloud pop into a wide range of outré beats. Her work has defied hyphenates, with ‘Warm Water’, ‘Gemini Feed’, ‘Gimme’, and ‘Fuck Love’ being continuations of feminity and empowerment that trace her ingenuity, her brush with a spinal fracture and Hashimoto’s disease, and a fixation with Ableton where her slow-motion scenes of modern romance hit like the latter half of ‘Modal Soul’. Her latest project, ‘Off With Her Head‘, leans into the electronic soul that defined 2014’s ‘Goddess‘, revising it with intimate odes to love that silhouette her personal evolution.

To be honest, the alt-pop space needed an album like this: ‘Off With Her Head’ taps into ‘LP1’ and ‘Take Me Apart’, combining analog romanticism with metallic soundscapes, Blake-ian interludes, and intimacy that lives for escapism. It features Sampha, Doechii, and French singer-songwriter Yseult Marie Onguenet, and habitually underlines blushed textures and dancefloor seducers that orbit the heart with a purpose. Banks has accepted who she is right now – as ‘Stay’ is absurdly gorgeous and ‘River’ demands a BAYNK rework – and she is finally confident in who she wants to become. “Writing this album has helped heal me and come to peace with myself,” she admits in the bio written about her new record. “No one has ever seen what I can do and I’m excited to show them. I feel that I’ve always been ahead of my time in music, and now is the time for me.”

With ‘Off With Her Head’ out this month, we recently connected with BANKS for a chat about her fifth studio album, making ‘Goddess: Unplugged’, her love for fiction, reuniting with Lil Silva and other collaborators, and how starting a new life outside of L.A. pushed her to be more present.

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How important is it to make art without any restraints and expectations?

Ugh… it’s the most important. I can’t make art if I don’t have freedom because I feel like creativity only comes when you feel free and open, and if there’s any sort of parameters – for me, at least – it doesn’t work.

When did you realise you wanted to do something unique with ‘Goddess: Unplugged’? 

I think by just knowing the ten-year anniversary was coming up. I wanted to do something special and kind of celebrate it and give something back. I’m so grateful for what that album has done for me and how many people connected to it, so I kind of wanted to give a present to everyone who has supported me for this long and it was really cool being able to strip those songs back and kind of re-interpolate them. 

How has your own attachment to ‘Goddess’ changed over the past decade?

I mean… I guess it’s the difference between time. It’s like when you’re going through something, you interact with something different than when you’re looking at it in hindsight. It feels like a child of mine, that album. I made it and it’s a part of me and it just represents such a big part of my life. That time in my life was really important. I view all of my music like that though. I think that one [‘Goddess’], it just has a special place in my heart – not more special, but in a different sense just because it was kind of how my career started.  

I think it’s really cool that with songs, they really are timeless. Even if they meant something at one point in your life, the meaning can change and you can interact with it differently and that’s really fun to me about music. They’re kind of screenshots of time that you can change exactly what they mean to you.

What influenced your decision to move on from the life that you built in California? And what has it been like starting a new chapter in Seattle?

It’s been really healthy for me. I feel like my body is healthier. I feel like my cortisol is lower and my nervous system is more regulated. I grew up in Los Angeles and I love L.A., but sometimes being in this business and living in L.A. can feel quite overwhelming. And for me, it’s been really healthy to kind of have a homebase in between tours and press and all this that I come back to that feels really separate from all of that. And my fiancé is from here [Seattle]. 

We were living in L.A. together for a few years but while that was going on, I would also come to Seattle and spend time here and I noticed that every time I was here for two weeks, I would end up feeling really calm and happy so it was kind of just an exciting move to make. I’m in L.A. all of the time for work so it’s just like a two-hour flight to [Hollywood] Burbank Airport. 

Was it difficult at all to rediscover a sense of peace being in a different city?

No, not really. I mean, I have a studio at my house and it is definitely a process to find a new flow and find all of your favourite little spots; your favourite market, your favourite coffee shop, your favourite walk, and your favourite X, Y, and Z. But it’s been really inspiring and it’s brought a lot of joy to my life. It’s not nice when you feel like you’re stuck in one place and I think I was feeling a bit like that in L.A. I just wasn’t feeling inspired by it. And who knows, maybe one day I’ll crave it and move back. Who knows? The world is my oyster [laughs].

When you’re not writing and recording new music, what do you typically do for fun?

Hmm… what do I do? I mean, I’m pretty laid back. I like hanging out with friends and I like cooking dinner. I like going on hikes and walking and watching movies and drawing and painting. I don’t know… I like ‘bopping around’ [laughs]. That’s what I say when I just want to go have a fun day where I don’t know where the day is going to take me. I’m kind of a ‘live in the moment’-type of person. Sometimes it drives other people crazy because I’m not great with plans, but in the moment is where I like to decide what I want to do.

Lately, I have liked reading books that have fantasy elements in them – like magic [laughs]. I think it’s fun to get out of reality. I’m starting ‘The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo’ [by Taylor Jenkins Reid] and I read the ‘Mistborn’ series [by Brandon Sanderson] which is super fantasy and crazy, and I’m pretty sure that I got it from the Teen section of a bookstore [laughs]. I’m kind of all over the place with books. 

You were more of a private person at the start of your career. What pushed you to be more open and willing to share your experiences with anxieties and insecurities?

I think I just had to come to terms with the fact that this is what I’m doing for my career. Like if I’m going to do music and I’m going to share that part of myself – it was actually a lot more stressful trying to keep everything in. I’m still a pretty private person but when you’re so shut off from things, it can be more stressful because it’s kind of the antithesis of being a public figure and what being a musician in this business and this culture is.

I’m definitely still finding my way with how much I share and what I share, but I think it’s really important to talk about real things like that. I think everybody deals with it and if you relate to my music, you relate to me. We’ve all been through some similar things or at least felt similar things so it’s nice to connect with people by sharing stuff like that.

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What inspired the album title and artwork for ‘Off With Her Head’?

For me, I really love having fun with language and words. I like when things have dual meanings and sometimes opposite meanings. ‘Off With Her Head’ feels like it would be this really heavy, dark thing – I mean, it’s insinuating death and killing somebody and obviously it’s from ‘Alice In Wonderland’ when the Queen Of Hearts wants to kill Alice. For me, that sentiment has actually taken on a really positive place in my life. It’s about getting out of your head, into your body and being really present. The only way to really make art and experience joy is to be present, or else you’re living in this fake little world in your head. 

That’s what ‘Off With Her Head’ means. It’s about getting out of your head and being in your body. The cover photo was just this surrealist take on the empowerment that it gives me. Holding a mask represents all of those thoughts in your head, taking it off, and just the position my body is in is a bit out of the ordinary but it feels really empowered. Holding the mask like that in that position is me doing my own thing. 

When you first started writing and recording ‘Off With Her Head’, was there anything that you wanted to do differently in terms of vocals, melodies, and chord progressions?

Yeah, in the past I maybe used autotune as a creative choice and I have had a lot of fun with that, but with this album, I was kind of over that and I had gone through that stage. I wanted to hear my voice a bit clearer and a little bit more gritty. In terms of the soundscape, there are a lot of sounds and chord progressions – like on ‘Move’ and ‘Direction’ – that feel almost really joyful and elated. This album, in general, is the most joyful album that I think I have ever made. 

It’s also your most intimate album to date.

Aww, I love that! That’s so great. 

In terms of the new record and the way it anchors influences to surrealistic beauty, what inspired the song ‘Love Is Unkind’? And in what ways is it a counterpoint to ‘Stay’?

‘Love Is Unkind’ was inspired by a toxic relationship that I was in and that kind of addictive quality that can feel almost sexy when you’re in something new that’s kind of unhealthy and toxic. But eventually, hopefully [laughs], you grow out of that phase and you find something more peaceful. I think ‘Stay’ is about being really vulnerable. One of the first lyrics in the song is about being really sensitive and it’s kind of just like embracing being so vulnerable with your partner that you can admit to being sensitive; just wanting to stay in bed and snuggle all day. 

What was it like working with Lil Silva again?

Oh my god, it was absolutely incredible. We have both had space to grow as artists and as people. I think coming back together has just been such a joy in my life. I love making music with him and I think it’s cool that we’re both different people and artists than we were when we first worked together. So it’s just been fun finding a new dynamic, a new flow – it’s just great.  

A good friend of mine recently noted that your new music is still serving the ‘C-word’ — as it’s bold, sexy, and empowering. With ‘Off With Her Head’ embodying a different energy, how excited are you to perform your new material on tour later this year?

I’m so excited and I have literally been thinking about the live show and what I want to do. I don’t even know exactly what I want to do. I feel like the ‘Goddess’ anniversary tour was really eye-opening for me because I was just alone on stage with no band, no dancers, nothing, and I was able to feel really strong. I felt like it was… it was intriguing. I feel like it captured everyone’s attention the whole time and that was a really empowering thing to do. I don’t know. I’m playing around with new ideas but I am so excited to see it come to life. 

Given your own personal growth since ‘Goddess’, what’s one piece of advice you would offer to others who might find it difficult to delineate their own space and identity?

Oh, man. I think be patient and be kind to yourself. That’s the best advice I could give. It’s the only thing to do because you can’t really force anything. Everybody is special and unique, you just have to be patient with yourself to find the strength to just understand and accept that. Just be who you are.

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