Alicia Witt is an artist in the true sense of the word. Known for her acting roles in 90s sitcom ‘Cybill’, the classic horror movie ‘Urban Legend’ and more recently the Country music drama ‘Nashville’, Witt has established herself as a captivating and versatile actor.
Alongside her acting work, Witt has been releasing music since 2009. Her deeply personal lyrics and emotive voice, combined with her impressive talent on the piano, have captured the attentions of fans across the world. This Friday, Witt releases her new EP ‘Witness’, her first body of songs since album ‘The Conduit’ in 2021.
I spoke with Alicia recently to find out more about the inspiration behind the EP, talk about her time on ‘The Masked Singer’ and to discuss her growth as an artist. Due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, we weren’t able to talk about her acting work but ‘The Masked Singer’ has an exemption so we could discuss that.
Your new EP ‘Witness’ is coming out this week. Tell me about your process going into making this collection of songs…
‘The Masked Singer’, they have an exemption so I can talk about it, that was the inspiration for going to the studio when I did. There had been a lot going on the last couple of years and I was longing to record some of what I’ve been working on. In addition to that, I had all these unfinished ideas that were sitting there in my notes. I felt time was of the essence and I really wanted to get that first single ‘Witness’ out in time for my unmasking episode that aired. I felt like we were on a time crunch to get the whole thing finished. It’s the first time I’ve released music within a few months of its inception and that’s really thrilling. Four of the songs on it are songs that did not exist before March of this year. Usually when I go to record, by the time we’ve narrowed it down and figured out what songs they’re going to be, not only are they songs I know really well, but they’re songs that have been in the brain for a long time. There was something amazing about jumping in with songs that were so brand new. It was just going on instinct and I’m really happy with the way those recordings turned out. The songs themselves are very true to where my brain was at the exact moment that I was recording them.
With your music, and I feel this particularly with this EP, it’s just from the heart. I can hear the amount of heart that you put into it in your voice. The song I keep coming back to is ‘Always Tuesday’, which has a Carole King/Jame Taylor vibe about it. What was the inspiration behind that one?
That song is so personal thatthere’s some things I can’t talk about and at the same time I know that song came, at the risk of sounding really, really out there (laughs), that’s not a song that I focused to sit down and write; it arrived to me from somewhere. The lyrics came to me so quickly, I actually had to pull over (in my car) and park on the side of the road and just type them into my phone as quickly as I could. It’s about what it feels like for someone who’s struggling with a darkness that comes from somewhere; a cloud… a mental illness of some sort. Although it feels like it comes from a very personal place, I knew as it was coming to me that it’s about much more than my experience. I can’t talk about it in detail because of the (actor’s) strike at the moment but there are characters that I’ve played that have experienced this very thing that’s described in the song. It’s all my personal experience with witnessing this, that the song talks about, and also these characters that were not so far away. It all kind of converged and it became that, and it feels like one of the most cathartic songs I’ve ever written.
The music came just a few days later. I was actually on my way in to a session with the producer Cliff Downs when those lyrics came to me and we played for about 15 minutes with the idea of him writing the music because I thought, ‘I don’t know where these lyrics came from and I don’t know if I’ll be able to harness the music for them’. We played around with it and I just said, ‘I don’t think we can do this. I think it has to come from me. It’ll come when it’s ready’. Then a few days later, I sat down at my piano and the music came almost all at once (laughs). Luckily, when I do that I have my phone with me and if I don’t want to take the time to hook it up to the GarageBand or Logic or anything, I just take out the voice memo and record just in case the right music arrives as I’m noodling, and it did. I’m glad I recorded it, because it wasn’t necessarily something I would have remembered if I tried to play it a second time. Thank you for pulling out that song of the bunch, because it’s very special to me.
When a song comes to you like that and you don’t have to force the music and the lyrics, you know you’re onto something good that’s going to resonate strongly with your audience. That must be a gift for an artist?
Yeah, I knew as soon as I finished it that as much as I related to it, I knew that a lot of other people were going to find some healing with this song. I don’t feel like I can even take credit for it, I really don’t because it feels like it arrived and if I hadn’t channeled it at that moment somebody else might have. I’m very proud of it.
Is there any song on this collection that was the opposite experience of that and turned out to be quite hard to bring to life?
Actually ‘Witness’ was like that. They’re a study in opposites (laughs). ‘Witness’ was an idea and the key parts of it, ‘will you be my witness?’, that melody and that line were running through my consciousness. I got together with my friend Matt Wynn in March of last year to try to write it. We made a lot of headway. That song is so very personal and every line in it is specific to my situation and my experience. It’s about the people that stood the closest to me, while I went through a really hard time. Even as I was still in the middle of that hard time, I knew that I was going to get to the other side of it and God willing, life would go on and would be wonderful again. This time in my life would always be there but only this core group of people, these most intimate friends, would truly know what that had been like. I knew everyone who’s gone through a similarly tough time would be able to relate to that idea.
When you have witnesses that you lean on and that stand by you, you also find yourself becoming closer to them. I found it deepened our friendships. I needed for every line in that song to be true. Often in songwriting, you take some creative liberties and add something here or there that feels true to the song you’re making, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be true to what you experienced, but this song needed to be a about my experience. Writing it, we had to keep pausing and we had to focus on every line. We switched out chords many times too, because I wanted the chords to accompany the words in just the right way so the whole thing together would tell the story. We had a version of it in March but it wasn’t finished. Over the months, I kept noodling on it. I kept working on lyrics. I would write a whole new set of verses and send them to Matt and we just kept thinking about it. We wrote some other things, meanwhile, as well but then in October of last year, we finally got back together with the intention of finishing that one. I played it for the first time at a City Winery show last November. ‘Witness’ is the exact opposite to ‘Always Tuesday’ in that way, but I’m equally proud of it. At the end of the day, it says exactly what I meant it to and I feel like it’s telling my story and (paying) homage to those people who are my witnesses.
Us music fans have a habit of taking artist’s songs and turning them into something that perhaps the artist never intended. We relate them to our own experiences and find a meaning that may be different to what the song means to you. Is it nerve-wracking playing a song like ‘Witness’ for a first time and seeing how an audience reacts?
Yeah, there were some tears when I played it for the first time last November. I actually said a little prayer before I started playing it because I was a little nervous that I was going to start crying while I was performing it. But I didn’t and it was galvanising to have performed it and to know that song is done; there will there will be no more rewriting, it’s finished and it’s exactly perfect. That was the one I was most excited to get into the studio with.
‘Clever Mind’, I should point out, is the oldest song on the EP. We have the four songs that were brand new that were written in March and then we have ‘Witness’ and then ‘Clever Mind’ was written nine years ago, I think. I’ve wanted to record it for years but it just needed to have the right time. When I go into record with somebody, I always want the song to be something they are really excited about and resonate with. This was a song that I sent to Cliff for a list of contenders that I thought would be good and that would feel appropriate for an EP about being a witness with that through line with all of the songs. He instantly loved this one. It’s got some beautiful writers on it Tia Sillers and Mark Selby. Tia wrote ‘I Hope You Dance’ (for Lee Ann Womack) along with many other hit songs. Mark was her husband. The inspiration for that song was trying to find empathy for a woman who was having an affair with a boyfriend of mine. I had this idea to write a song from her perspective, imagining how lonely she must have been in this relationship. I heard it as having a lot of country influence so when I had a session set up with Tia and Mark, I brought the idea to them, a little trepidatiously because in the song she’s having an affair with someone who’s married and I didn’t know how a married couple would feel writing a song about that. They loved the idea and we wrote that one really quickly.
That’s an interesting perspective because you often hear about the person being cheated on and not the other way around…
Yeah, there’s lascivious songs about it. The other day, Whitney Houston’s ‘Saving All My Love For You’ came on and I thought, ‘that’s a song about someone who’s having an affair with a married man but she’s not analysing her own issues. Why is she allowing herself to be taken in by this? She’s smarter than that. (in my song) he says (the woman) has a clever mind and is this indicative of a clever mind to be with somebody when you know they’re not available and believing someday they’re gonna just call you up and say, ‘Okay, it’s over. I’m with you now’.
Yeah, like ‘come on, today’s the day’…
And you know better. You know you’re the other woman and that’s never gonna happen.
Your album ‘The Conduit’ came out in 2021. How do you feel as a musician and as an artist that you’ve grown between that release and ‘Witness’?
It’s hard to measure that myself, I just know that I have. I feel infinitely more grounded than I did then and I felt like I was pretty grounded at that time. Life has a way of just educating you constantly. I find myself now writing in maybe a more immediate way. It’s been one of my lessons from this EP and recording so closely on the heels of creating these songs. I’m part of a songwriting circle now, which I’m grateful to be part of because it forces you to write a song every week, whether you’re thinking you’re in an inspirational mood or not. I really am digging what’s coming out of me. I know that not all the songs I’m writing are going to end up recorded but there’s a few that absolutely will. I’m finding that there’s more confidence in sensing when the inspiration has arrived, and just letting myself write the lyrics as they come to me and not editing them as they come out. I’m surprised to see a lot of the time that they have structure to them, and there’s even internal rhymes and less editing needs to be done when that process is finished, than I would have thought. The topics I’m writing about are all over the place too. That’s cool.
I think being on ‘The Masked Singer’ has changed the way I am as a singer as well. Going in to record right after that experience, felt different. When you can connect to people through a total disguise, and all you’ve got is your voice to reach people with, it teaches you who you are as a singer in a way you might not have known before. We go through these lives, with whatever image we come in. Our identity as a person is readily visible, whether we’re a public figure or not, we just are who we are. Everyone we meet on a daily basis has assumptions about who the person inside of us is going to be. When you don’t have any of that, none of your identity is known and you’re just a voice, it’s an experience most people will never get to have. Certainly as somebody who sings on a regular basis, it was nothing less than profound for me. It was very emotional, and very moving, and truly life changing as a singer for me. There’s a different kind of groundedness, I guess, with knowing what this instrument is when I record on any medium now. Performing live is a whole different thing too. I realised that’s what it’s about more than anything when I’m live performing is the voice and that’s what it always was about. Having had that unique experience of not being able to look at someone, smile at them, touch them or wear something cute for them, you’re not you… you’re you with your voice.
It must be incredible to be appreciated purely for your voice, and as you say without the pre-conceptions that people have of you. Was that freeing for you?
It was. It was a thrill. An absolute joy. That experience of singing ‘Over the Rainbow’, feeling that audience lifting me up through the whole thing and and then hearing what the panel had to say at the end of it; that will I think forever be one of the highlights of my life. Just an unbelievable high. Such joy. It felt like I wouldn’t have known if I could do that until I did it because it’s quite nerve wracking.
I can imagine. Especially with that costume on too…
(It was) so heavy. Pip, the costume was so heavy! The head piece was pinned in place so that it doesn’t go off to one side or the other. The microphone had to be right up against the mask because otherwise the little parts would jingle. You can barely see. For most people, the mask is so significant in your vision that you have to focus to try to see between the little gaps of all the little pieces of fabric cover your face. I was in the midst of singing and glancing down trying to find my marks on the floor so that I would be vaguely where I was supposed to be for the cameras.
Do you have any plans to come over to the UK for some live shows in support of ‘Witness’?
I want to very much. I spoke to a friend of mine actually a few weeks ago about the possibility of putting together a tour together because he knows a couple of bookers, and he’s played over there quite a bit. At this moment, I’m booking my own shows so I’m also in talks with specific booking agents to try to figure it out. The UK and Europe are a whole different market as well so as a self-managed singer, these are all things that are major considerations. I’ve played some wonderful shows in London. I used to play at the Borderline and I would call them up and book show, but they’re not there anymore so I don’t actually know where to play. I’m open for ideas!
Alicia Witt’s new EP ‘Witness’ is released on Friday 25th August 2023 and you can find out more information at www.aliciawittmusic.com. Watch the music video for the title track below:
