[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Last week, we aired the first installment of our seasonal book club series. We're calling it Summer School. Here's what it's all about. We know this is a great time to head to the park or the beach to dig into a current bestseller, but it's also the perfect time to revisit that classic, maybe a book you loved reading once or one you've always wanted to read but had never gotten around to doing so. For this series, each month of the summer, we're choosing a classic New York novel and invite you to read along with us and then join us to discuss each work on the radio with an expert.

It's like summer school, but fun. Last week, we read James Baldwin's Another Country and talked about it. Now, we're ready to announce our August selection, edith Wharton's 1920 novel, The Age of Innocence. The book won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Literature, making Wharton the first ever woman to win the award. It takes place in a long gone old New York of the 1870s and tells the story of Newland Archer, a man of high New York society who finds himself caught up in romantic feelings for two women, his fiancée, May Welland, and his cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska.

Just from that description, you can tell there is much drama, smoldering glances, and heartbreak to come, and there's no better place for the story to unfold than New York City in the Gilded Age. Grab a copy of the book from the library or your local indie bookstore, and then mark your calendars for Thursday, August 17th, when All Of It will be discussing the Age of Innocence with Sarah Blackwood, associate professor of English at Pace University. She wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics centennial edition of the book, and she'll join to lead the conversation and take your calls and questions about the book.

Now, a brief programming note that's personal, I won't be with you in August to take part in Summer School. Starting next Monday, I'm going to be on medical leave for a few weeks because I'm going to be donating a kidney. I'll explain more on the show on Friday. You listeners will be in good hands because several of your favorite WNYC folks will be filling in for me while I'm out. Bridget Bergen will be the first guest host next week and she'll be speaking with people like, oh, author Ann Patchett, who has a new novel out.

I'll be reading along with you, so join us for All Of It Summer School as we read Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, and then get ready to discuss it on August 17th at 1:00 PM. That is in your future, but right now, let's listen to some music.

[MUSIC - Sally Potter: One Day]

Alison Stewart: That's the song One Day from filmmaker and musician, Sally Potter. On the song, Potter sings to a teenage version of herself on her new semi-autobiographical album, Pink Bikini. As a director of films like 1992's Orlando, Potter's work has been shown at festivals in Venice, in Berlin, and her movies have starred the likes of Tilda Swinton, Cate Blanchett, and Javier Bardem. Though she's composed music for her own films in the past, Pink Bikini marks her official debut album as a musician at the age of 73. The songs mine memories from Potter's childhood and adolescence in and around London. Sally Potter joins me now for a listening party. Sally, nice to meet you.

Sally Potter: Very nice to see you too.

Alison Stewart: What's your first memory of music?

Sally Potter: Of music?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Sally Potter: Oh, well, I think my father playing '78 records. He was a very big fan of Beethoven, in fact, which for him, was the real rock and roll. I remember sitting as a very small child, watching him listening and seeing what it really meant to get so passionately moved by music and I became moved too. He would often cry while he was listening to his favorite music. It wasn't just Beethoven, it was Ella Fitzgerald and many other kinds of composers as well and singers.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting in your liner notes, you said as a child you worshipped Billie Holliday and Charlie Parker, Bach, and the late Beethoven quartets, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Bertolt Brecht and [unintelligible 00:05:10], Billy Fury and Elvis. That's jazz, classical, show tunes, experimental, and rock and roll.

Sally Potter: Yes, but we've left out Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen. [laughter] There's many others. Fortunately, we have a cornucopia of musical history that we can relate to and play again and again and again. That's one of the wonders of it.

Alison Stewart: Are you someone who puts on music to match your mood?

Sally Potter: No, I don't think I do. I think I write music to change my mood, actually, if anything. I do find myself drawn for reasons I don't understand particularly to listen to one kind of thing or another sometimes obsessionally over and over and over and over. My tastes are very eclectic. It's really world music, so as per that list, but it could be Romanian Gypsy music or it could be something from Uzbekistan or it could be Armenian or French or whatever, Greek.

I think it's that feeling of rich, diverse cultures expressing themselves through music in a way that we can relate to so directly. That was part of the appeal for me of writing and recording songs at the moment, was the directness and simplicity in the way of the song as an art form.

Alison Stewart: When do you write music?

Sally Potter: Oh, all day. [chuckles] Like I stop. In fact, last night, for example, I woke up at about 4:00 AM and I thought, "Is it time to get up yet?" I really want to get into my hut, which is where I am right now in the corner of France, and carry on with the song I was writing yesterday. I have a real yearning to do it and I do it usually in a quite regular way. I get up, have some breakfast, and then start work.

Alison Stewart: I can see, yes.

Sally Potter: Just as if I was working on a film, but at the moment, it's music more than a film. Though I am preparing a film as well. I haven't said goodbye to filmmaking, but I've been saying a lot of hellos to music.

Alison Stewart: People, I can see that Sally is sitting by a piano right now. Is that your main instrument you write on?

Sally Potter: I write on the keyboard. Yes, actually, I usually write on a note [unintelligible 00:07:22] piano, but the keyboard I have to my left is the one that is plugged into my computer and the Logic app, which is the one where I can compose using samples from that library that I play on that keyboard. It's a wonderful invention, as all musicians will know, that allows one to really get a good demo of the full arrangement of whatever you're writing with all the instruments.

Never as good as the real musicians who you later record with, but it's like a really good dress rehearsal, I think, of the music that you're writing. It's been a very exciting process learning that and finally being able to get out music that I can hear in my head.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Sally Potter. Her new album is called Pink Bikini. When you were in your 20s, though, you were involved with, people know you as a filmmaker, but you've been involved with music your whole life. You were part of an improvisational group. Tell us a little bit about that group, how you got involved with it.

Sally Potter: I was involved with several groups, one of which was called the Feminist Improvising Group or FIG for short. It was an all-female group with some wonderful, wonderful musicians in it. We toured a lot throughout Europe and a little bit in Canada. As the name would suggest, it was all improvised music, which is the best kind of ear training because you have to listen simultaneously to what every other musician is doing and respond in a nanosecond so that the whole thing has a cohesion. I also was in some other groups that were writing music and I was writing lyrics and working sometimes with a composer, Andy Cooper, to write songs together.

That was my 20s, but once I'd made my first feature film, I was, in a way, on the juggernaut of filmmaking, which is alluring, seductive, huge, exhausting. It's a big canvas on a big international stage or screen. I love it for all those reasons. I've continued to work on music in a more under-the-radar way by working on the soundtracks to my films, either by collaborating with some great composers or other musicians or by choosing work that has already been written and putting it on the soundtrack or composing myself and bringing in musicians to play what I've written.

Increasingly so particularly the last film. It was, in a way, a logical step then to go into really full-on, how can I put it? Coming out as a musician [chuckles] and as a singer and as a songwriter.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a listen to a track from the album, Pink Bikini. This is Ghosts and we can talk about it on the other side. This is from Sally Potter.

[MUSIC- Sally Potter: Ghosts]

Alison Stewart: That's Ghosts from Sally Potter. There's that great line there, "songs that are more than a pretty tune". When you think about songwriters who makes songs that are more than a pretty tune, who comes to mind?

Sally Potter: Wow. Again, let's go back to Billie Holiday for a moment, whether she wrote some of the songs, she interpreted other songs, but one would never say that her voice was pretty, her interpretation was pretty. Everything was gritty, and yet it was musicianship of the highest, highest order, so moving, so pure, so direct, so unaffected, nothing to do with style, and there were no studio effects added. It was just her and a microphone and whichever musician she was playing with. I would say that was by definition much more than a pretty tune. I think this song later in the song refers directly to both Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, both of whom I'm massive fans of their work as poets.

That's so different. Leonard Cohen with his relatively simple melodic lines but complex long poems, really, that he refined and refined, that he's singing very romantically often.

Then Bob Dylan, very protest-based actually, and gritty, and harsh in many ways coming from a different kind of tradition, but both extraordinary writers. I think what this song does, though, is it explores, in a way, the women that some of these people were writing about, whether that's in Leonard Cohen's case, Suzanne or Marianne. These mythological, magical, and very "mysterious figures".

Even Bob Dylan when he sings "lay lady lay, across my big brass bed", and this is not addressed to another songwriter, it's addressed to another mysterious female. I found that that was puzzling me as a teenager when I was listening to these songs. These were two artists I was listening to on repeat in my teenage years. In my discomfort, I gradually realized was because I didn't want to be the muse, I wanted to be the one writing the song. That was where it changed my relationship with the songs I was hearing, really, and whether I could ever be part of that, if you like, magic circle.

Alison Stewart: The first song on the album goes back to the very beginning, it's called Mama, and you describe it as "a song of gratitude to my mother". You write that she was only a teenager herself when she had you. When you think about a life lesson you learned from your mom, what is one that sticks with you today?

Sally Potter: Somehow she did it. She was 18 when she was pregnant with me, and when I think back to myself at 18, I think, "Oh, wow." [chuckles] The achievement really, and in a way, the unsung heroism. She was mostly a single mother and I think many of us took for granted our mothers and what they did and what they gave up and were resentful even of them for living limited lives. We perceived them to be limited lives, accepting second best, if you like. Why were they doing that? Maybe they were doing it because they were looking after us, in part anyway.

Doing something incredibly valuable and incredibly difficult, but it took me into my adulthood to understand that and to really give real value to what my mother had done.

Bit by bit by bit, it was like my eyes were opened and I felt this immense gratitude for somehow what she had managed to do under very, very difficult conditions. We had very little money and many struggles. Sadly, she is not with us anymore, so at the end of the song, I say, "I hope you can hear me thanking you." That's indeed where it begins, I think, is that first relationship, isn't it?

With our mothers. Fathers now do much, much more than the generation I grew up in. You could say it's parenting, rather than just mothering, but in my case, it was my mother.

Alison Stewart: This is Mama from Sally Potter.

[MUSIC- Sally Potter: Mama]

Alison Stewart: That's Mama from Sally Potter's debut album, Pink Bikini. There's a note in the track for Pink Bikini that says, "This song is based on actual events." As you were writing these songs, did you go back to specific events for inspiration or was it some sort of mix of specificity plus memory?

Sally Potter: I set of rule for myself that each song needed to be true. That doesn't mean accurate to the latter because we don't know. Our memories are strange, mutable things and keep shifting when we look back. You think, "Is this a real memory or did somebody tell me about this? Did I see a photo? Which is it?" As we start to write and rewrite our own memory, our own history, it becomes a kind of story, but nevertheless, the quality of everything in it, I hope, has the ring of truth because it is based.

Every song is based, it's a story based on things I lived, experiences I lived through, or people I was close to lived through perhaps, and perhaps also things I could imagine that I might have lived through, but they are close to being, let's call it, a lyric rendition of memory.

Alison Stewart: We're going to hear Pink Bikini. Why was this the track you wanted to name the album after?

Sally Potter: First of all, the words pink and bikini make me laugh. [laughter] It's very girly. This one absolutely is a true event. I really did see a pink bikini in a window, nearly missed a train on the way to the south of France with my mom and got very sunburned. I was so pink top to toe the bikini did not show and so on.

Alison Stewart: Here's Pink Bikini.

[MUSIC - Sally Potter: Pink Bikini]

Alison Stewart: That is from Sally Potter's album Pink Bikini. We got a text, Sally that says, "Hello. Great guest. One of my favorite films is Sally Potter's The Tango Lessons starring Sally Potter visually provocative and very essential. Check it out."

Thanks. That's from Bobby from New Jersey.

Sally Potter: Lovely.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: While we're talking about that that made me think. You mentioned at the top of the interview that you obviously have not abandoned film altogether. What is it that you're working on now so Bobby can be excited to hear?

Sally Potter: Oh, well, it has a title Alma. Not much more than that I can say. I'm in the middle of casting it. Of course, we're in a difficult situation at the moment where I'm in fully in support of the actor strike and the writers' strike. We shall see how long that takes to play itself out in the right way. Yes. No, I'm very, very, very, very much hungering actually to get back on a film set and work with actors and crew. It's a state of being that I've come to love over many decades.

Alison Stewart: You recently did a video for The Criterion Channel where you picked out six movies from their film closet, and one of them was a film called Dance, Girl, Dance from the 1940s, which is also the name of a song on this album. Are they connected?

Sally Potter: Yes, it was a homage to Dorothy Eisner by using the title of that for this song because she was a pioneering female film director at a time when there were very, very few in Hollywood.

Alison Stewart: Let's go out on Dance, Girl, Dance. The name of the album is Pink Bikini from Sally Potter. Sally, thank you for being with us.

Sally Potter: Thank you very much for having me.

Alison Stewart: This is Dance, Girl, Dance.

[MUSIC - Sally Potter: Dance, Girl, Dance]

 

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