There was something of a curiosity in conducting this interview. As thoughtful and engaging as LA singer-songwriter Jillian Banks’ answers are, it is only after having written them down that I see how so much of their substance relies on emphasis – not simply what she says but the way in which she says it. For a singer whose accolades have singled out both the quality of her voice and the strength of her production, it seems fitting that even in conversation her meaning can’t be readily separated from her sound.
“It’s funny, the whole songwriting process for me is a lot like breathing,” Banks says softly. “If I need to express something, I don’t have trouble sitting down and writing, the songs just come out. Sometimes I’ll be in a certain mood and won’t even know exactly why I’m feeling down, or frustrated, whatever. But from that some lyric or concept will come out that says exactly what that state was. It’s my way of thinking straight. For me it’s like water, it just flows out of my brain.”
Although she only began developing a name as a musician last year after releasing ‘Before I Ever Met You’ on SoundCloud, Banks has been writing songs for over ten years now. It had always been a private endeavour, used as a way of sieving the experiences of her life into expressions that helped her make sense of the world. From there, finding record deals and popularity has been a great shift. Allowing others in the studio to have a hand in her songs, to find herself collaborating after writing for so long in isolation, is something that Banks does not take lightly.
“For ten years I wrote very privately, so I was able to develop a very strong style, a strong point of view. Now when I go into the studio it doesn’t feel like I’m giving anything away because I try to allow whoever I’m working with to inspire me,” she says. It is worth noting that while her answers are consistently direct and assured, Banks’ voice is so delicate it is hard not to think of her as being quite shy. This duality characterises our entire conversation. “If something doesn’t feel ready then I’m not going to do it. I don’t need to have total control over my own music, but at the same time I’m not going to work with somebody unless they inspire me, unless I really admire their gift and their heart, in terms of how they make music and what they create. When you work with someone it’s a really intimate thing. You have to trust them and to feel safe, you have to feel open. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s just finding the best way to bring together what I wanted to say.”
The implication is that there’s little separation between Banks herself and the dark alt-R&B star her fans witness onstage. Having crafted so much of herself into the material, it would be difficult to imagine her performances otherwise. “It’s me. It’s all me,” she says. “I am Banks, it’s just me. There’s no… I’m trying to be honest about my songs, about my life, and I think I’m lucky that way. I don’t have to try and be somebody else.”
Perhaps her talent, then, beyond the composition of the songs themselves, is her eye for collaboration. Enlisting people who strike a similar artistic note, and who don’t need to adapt in order to suit a style they are not naturally drawn towards.
“It depends. If I’m writing alone usually it starts with a chord progression, and play around with that until a word becomes a sentence, which becomes another sentence. It’s a very fluid process. If I’m collaborating with someone, it depends who I’m up against. I work with people who I think understand me as an artist, who understand the things that I like, the things that are me.”
With Banks’ time now filled with gigs, media, recording and writing, the 15-year-old girl who first sat down at a piano and started to find her voice appears leagues away from her life today. Despite all this, Banks still believes the two are essentially the same.
“Music is really my everything. Music is my food and my water and my breath, I live off it. I used to paint, and sometimes with interviews if they want to take a picture afterwards I’ll doodle something for them instead. But I could live without those other things, the drawing, the painting. I could not – could not – live without music. I need it so badly in my life and I always will. I needed it when I first discovered it, and I still need it now. So I’ll always be connected to that time because I feel like I’m still the same songwriting, still just trying to make music. Now, it’s more public and there’s a new dynamic with other people hearing it now, after I kept it quiet for so long. Which is really fun and exciting and interesting, sometimes scary and overwhelming, but it’s still the same. Always the same.”
