An atheist finds religion

God, thy name is free fall:

A chat with Rachel Taylor Brown

Last month I had the pleasure of interviewing Portland-based singer/songwriter/pianist Rachel Taylor Brown for Bullz Eye. Not only does she make truly unique, though-provoking music, she's a genuinely nice person on top of it all. The only problem? She needs to get some more live shows booked!

Here's an excerpt from the interview, where she talks about the genesis of her toy piano fetish:

[Producer] Jeff [Stuart Saltzman] has all these interesting instruments lying around in his house, which is a studio, and when he’s working on something, I’d start playing around on different instruments. Like the VSF 30, that’s where I first saw the Yamaha VSF 30 and I had to have one. And it’s kind of the same thing with the piano. A lot of what I have, I’m just copying Jeff Stuart Saltzman (laughs) because he has so much interesting stuff around his house. So that one song on Ormolu, there’s this kind of like experimental tune similar to “Hemocult” on Creatures where it’s toy pianos and Mellotron and things like that. And that was one of the times where I was messing around on the toy piano, and then Jeff is just really good at just silently setting up microphones around me when I’m involved in doing something like that, and that whole tune just ended up being improvised on toy piano and all the other stuff, kind of like “Hemocult” was. And so, yeah, once I played Jeff’s toy piano, I wanted my own toy piano, and I wound up with three or four, ‘cause I’m greedy.

Her latest album, Half Hours with the Lower Creatures, is out now.