Macie Stewart and Thanya Iyer Want Space

Macie Stewart is a Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and songwriter, who performs solo and with her band Finom; Thanya Iyer is a singer-songwriter and violinist based in Montreal. Both have new records this spring — Macie’s When the Distance is Blue just came out last month on International Anthem, and Thanya’s TIDE/TIED will be out April 30 on Topshelf — so to celebrate, the friends got on Zoom for a morning chat. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Macie Stewart: How you doing?

Thanya Iyer: Good! How are you?

Macie: Pretty good. I’ve got my coffee. The time zone…

Thanya: We need it. How’s Chicago?

Macie: Chicago’s really good. I just got back a couple days ago, I was doing a short run. I love being home. It’s really nice. But I’m leaving tomorrow to go to Big Ears.

Thanya: Oh, fun! You’re traveling a lot.

Macie: I am, yeah. This spring has been a bit crazy, but in a good way. It’s all really good things, I think, it all just happened at once. Do you feel like that happens with you, where there’s periods of time where you’re like, “Alright, I feel like I’m not really doing anything.” And then suddenly you’re like, “Everything’s happening now!”

Thanya: It’s really wild how that happens. I try and remember in the slower moments that this is good and OK. Because when it’s busy, it’s too busy.

Macie: I feel you with that. I feel like that’s something that I’m constantly trying to remind myself of — like, If you have space, it’s OK to sit in the space. It’s not always going to be this way. And that’s also a really healthy thing to do.

Thanya: That’s one of my special questions, because of your album is so beautiful and I loved what you wrote about it, with being bored and embracing that silence and spaciousness. What’s that like for you? 

Macie: I was thinking about this this morning. I’m just starting to play that music live in front of people, and it came from a time where I felt like there was a lot more space. I was in an in-between period of, I was touring a lot but I also had a lot of traveling time where I could just sit and not necessarily have to be sending an email or anything. I feel like I had time to be bored — you know, while sitting on a train or an airplane or in the car or walking around before a sound check. It was beautiful to let myself exist in that because, I think I’m hyper productive. Like, if I get in the zone of doing something, I can absolutely just steamroll.

Thanya: Me too. Wait, remember when I came to Chicago last in 2023 — and we went to that bar where they had cookies at midnight —

Macie: Scofflaw! 

Thanya: Yeah. Was this record what you were recording then? 

Macie: I think that must have been this record, yeah. Because that’s what I was working on 2023 to basically the end of last year. 

Thanya: I remember you were having fun with… was it bells you were recording?

Macie: Probably. I was just trying stuff out. I think making an instrumental record was a special challenge. Usually I start with a song and then work from there, but this one was like, Woah, what is the structure? It could be anything! So I was kind of just putting a bunch of things on and seeing what stuck and collaging them together. 

But also, your songs are so freaking beautiful. I was listening to them this morning and I was reminded of how amazing your voice is, and the arrangements too. It made me really excited to chat with you this morning. I was curious: when you were writing this record, what did you start with, and what is your process for arranging a song? Because they’re so lush, they’re so orchestral, but all the textures are so interesting and intricate. 

Thanya: Usually I’ll come with a little skeleton of a song, and Pompey and Daniel [Gélinas] will fill in a lot of things. We’ll just improvise and have fun. For this one, a lot of the songs start with just me improvising on the piano and having fun, and then a song comes out pretty fast. I just was doing a lot of string arranging and wanted to bring that more into the music, so I had a lot of demos and more of a vision for what I wanted the songs to be like. But even though I make these demos, I try not to stay too attached to it because I know I’m going to bring it to the band and something else cool and magical is going to happen, and then they become songs. And then when we were recording, I just have overdub ADHD where I’m like, “Everything should go on,” and want to just put every single idea on there and then start to parse out after. Which can get to be a really big job. Like the song that recently came out, “Low Tides” — there was maybe too much was on there, and I think Pompey spent months carving it.

Macie: I do feel like the process of making something is, you amass all the material and then it’s just chiseling away a little sculpture. You find the shape underneath the block of marble.

Thanya: Totally. Is that what it was like for you? Because there’s a lot of improvisation in the pieces. 

Macie: Yeah, this process was pretty different from making things with Finom. It was kind of similar to making my first solo record, but I felt like I knew that the core that I wanted to start with for this record was the piano and space. Space was the most important part for me, because just like we were talking about earlier, when things get busy, they get so busy. So how can you have those moments when it’s not busy and not feel bad about about it, or not just blow right past them? It’s special to be able to sit in silence. I know every time I do that, I feel better. 

Thanya: So much better.

Macie: And for this record, I was just really excited about returning to the piano, because I had not really made anything on the piano in a long time. 

Thanya: We need more piano albums and we need more space.

Macie: I agree. I was like, Dang, this instrument is so deeply a part of me and I’ve just abandoned it. [Laughs.] I didn’t really abandon it, but I wanted to play around with it with a new perspective of where I am now. So I feel like that one was less a chiseling and more like, Where am I going? It was a lot of mystery. And I did try a couple different things, and I sent it to a couple different people to try things on, and I was like, This doesn’t feel right. And then I knew that I wanted to have strings involved somehow, so I wrote some string quartet pieces for it too. Then we did a lot of improvising also, because playing with Lia [Kohl] and Whitney [Johnson] is my favorite thing ever.

Thanya: I love string improvisation. It always sounds good. [Laughs.] Why does it always sound good?

Macie: I don’t know, they’re beautiful instruments. They’re like the most evil instrument that’s ever existed, but the most beautiful.

Thanya: Maybe that’s why. 

Macie: Yeah, there’s a darkness within. Who all is on your record? And when you were improvising, were you improvising by yourself, or were you improvising with other people?

Thanya: Usually there’s a large cast of friends on the record, and there’s a lot of winds who were improvising. Like in “I am here now,” there’s two of my friends, Fred [Frédérique Roy] and Eugénie [Jobin], who are just improvising along with the words. And usually in the live show, we’ll do more improvising, and we try and come up with the arrangement for the recorded song. 

Macie: I feel like improvising with other people is the spice of life.

Thanya: It really is. I remember going to fiddle camp a long time ago and… I guess improvising is a big part of Indian Carnatic music, so it had always been in the sphere, but going to this fiddle camp and feeling that kind of improvising and seeing all of the different vibes out there, it just integrated it in a different way. 

Macie: What kind of fiddle camp was it?

Thanya: There were teachers from all styles of fiddle, and there was jazz violin and even an Indian Carnatic violinist was there. It’s such a beautiful expression, to improvise. So many cool things come out when that happens.

Macie: I agree. That’s cool to hear, because my earliest memories of improvising are also playing fiddle music. I grew up playing Irish fiddle.

Thanya: Nice.

Macie: I didn’t even realize it was really improvising. We were just playing together, and the person who had founded the group would try to — basically, we’d put together a jig and a reel and another piece, and he’d be like, “Alright, find your way from A to B to C.” And we had to improvise our way through after we finished a tune to get to the next one. 

Thanya: Wow. 

Macie: Yeah. I feel like it was only recently where I was like, Wait, that was so foundational to the way that I make things. But I didn’t realize that you did fiddle camp too. 

Thanya: Yeah. Well, I started with classical violin, but then I quit because I was like, “This is a crazy instrument. It hurts my neck.” [Laughs.] Then I did piano, and then I kind of went back to violin and Indian violin, and then I went going to music school and was drawn to the jazz kids. I never formally studied that, but I just fell in love with improvising what a natural expression it can feel like.

Macie: Totally. It’s cool to listen to your music and know all of this about your musical background, because I feel like it’s so unique to you. You learned to play music in all of these different forms and all of these different styles, and channeled through you it becomes this very unique thing.

Thanya: That’s what I feel about you. I feel like you’re part of so many different worlds. I love your collaborative work and your solo work. How does it feel when you come to create your solo music versus creating with Sima [Cunningham, Macie’s bandmate in Finom]?

Macie: I think my solo music — definitely the first project came out of a need to just know what I could do. Because I feel like when you are creating things with other people, there’s always an element of compromise that has to happen. Which is a truly beautiful thing about collaborating — you come across ideas you would probably never think of on your own. And with my solo project, the first one, I was like, OK, I actually don’t know now what I’m bringing to the table, because I’ve spread myself apart too much with different collaborations and playing other people’s music. I think I needed to ground myself back into myself. 

I kind of feel that way about this second record, too, but with the knowledge that I have created something before. I have a little bit more of a language with myself and how I like to create things. I think that this record was more of, again, an exploration of space within myself. Like, how much can I hold myself in this gray area? I have a tendency to want to go really fast, and I think I could experiment with slowing down. 

Thanya: How are you finding slowing down? I have that tendency, too. How do you balance everything? I’m always trying to think about, If I only had five extra hours in the day, that would be sick…

Macie: That’s the big question. I don’t know. I mean, I think I achieve balance at certain points. And I think I’ve come to realize that balance is maybe less on a day-to-day and more on a macro scale. Which is sort of frustrating to me. And maybe it’s not always true. But it’s definitely something that I’m constantly thinking about and having conversations with people about, too. How do you view balance, on the day-to-day or in general?

Thanya: It feels like I’ve been struggling with it forever. Maybe I’m bad at time estimation or something, because there’s pressing things, and then the things for myself that I should do to feel good end up getting pushed aside. I did a lot of therapy in the fall and am just trying to get a better sense of myself and my needs and remembering what a priority it is to take care of myself. Because I feel like that’s the thing that falls apart when things get busy. I feel like there’s no room anymore to not do that. 

I don’t think we’ve ever talked about this, but I have this weird hip pain that happens when I walk, and it’s been, like, ten years that I’ve been kind of ignoring it and just pushing through with the pace that I want to be at, and feel like I need to be at. But it got so bad in the fall, and I was like, Oh, I actually should maybe understand what my body is trying to tell me instead of making it go quiet. The world tells us to do that, and then we also fall into that. It’s just so hard.

Macie: Just to find the flow and go with it.

Thanya: Yeah, and breathe. I still find it hard, and it’s almost like a practice — in the busy moments just remembering how you can fall away from it really easily and forget those lessons.

Macie: Yeah, it’s really true. I think I’m dealing with that right now, because for a little bit I had a really good habit of when I got home from tour, I’d schedule a day that’s just for me to do whatever I want. I don’t have to do emails, I don’t have to do anything. I just get home and there are no expectations for myself. I was scheduling that for a day after every tour, and it was so helpful, but sometimes you don’t have that luxury. I feel like I don’t have that luxury this season. So I’m like, Alright, where are the pockets that you can find for yourself? Because then you have more to give later. Isn’t that one of the rules of organizing, too? Like, if you neglect yourself, you don’t have anything to give to anyone else. So you do have to fill that cup to then be able to give it out.

Thanya: Totally. Because I want to be able to give the things out, and to be there. 

Macie: Did you ever play The Sims?

Thanya: A long time ago, yeah.

Macie: OK, well, I was obsessed with The Sims as a kid. Sometimes I think of myself as having the energy bars that the Sims have, where it’s like, “Sleepy,” “I need to talk to people,” all of those things. And sometimes I’m like, “My Sim bars are really red right now. I need to refill my thirsty Sim bar.”

Thanya: Yeah, I feel like my journey is knowing that I have Sim bars and becoming aware of it.

Macie: And not pretending you’re invincible.

Thanya: Yeah, totally. And just remembering about our basic needs, eating and sleeping.

Macie: [Laughs.] Why is it so easy to forget that? I don’t understand.

Thanya: I don’t know. But things are always intense, and it’s a practice.

Macie: It is a practice. I think also knowing that it’ll be nice again at some point [is helpful] too, that maybe it feels intense now but there’s usually a light at the end of the tunnel. I think it’s about perspective, and knowing that you are in control of it. Maybe not always, but at least there’s always an aspect that you can control and give yourself that break if you need it.

Thanya: Totally. And it’s great because — I’m sure you resonate with this — I love my work so much.

Macie: I think that’s why we’re busy, why it gets this way. Everything I do, I love. I’m not going to not do it. It’s just a problem because I love so many things.

Thanya: I know. And then it’s just like, “You love this!” So it feels easy. But then sometimes the administrative load with it just gets really heavy — even though a part of me kind of likes that stuff too. It’s a lot of correspondence and planning exciting things. It’s just the balance gets shifted, and I need to shift it back to creative and more live engagement.

Macie: It’s a learning curve. Do you have a morning routine? If you had your ideal day, how would you start it? 

Thanya: I totally have my ideal day. I actually I saw a palm reader in India — I went to India in January and he knew I had leg pain, which was so scary. And then he was like, “You need to give one hour to yourself and 23 hours you can give to the rest of the world.” And I was like, “I’m gonna cry.” I feel like that’s such good advice — even just one hour in 23. So, the perfect daily routine is that one hour where I can meditate and do breathing and pranayama and yoga and write and play music. Maybe it’s more like three hours. [Laughs.] That’s why I need four hours extra every day, to have a 28 hour day.

Macie: Yeah, that would be ideal.

Thanya: Yeah. But that’s the best morning. Oh, and remembering to eat instead of just working or doing the thing that feels urgent but isn’t actually urgent right away. 

Macie: Do you like cooking?

Thanya: Yeah I do. I like cooking a lot.

Macie: It feels like a creative outlet that is not related to music, and I really like that. After I’ve toured for a bit, if I get a little bit of time to be home, I’m like, “I’m in cooking mode. I’m making a cake.” What are your go-to meals?

Thanya: I really like making just everything vegetables and fun salads and Indian food and curries and warm big batch style things. It really reminds me that I’m human, to cook. 

Macie: I agree. I feel like food and sharing food is, next to music, one of my favorite things in this world.

Thanya: We need it. What about you? 

Macie: I feel like I actually gravitate a little more towards baking. I have this olive oil cake recipe that I really, really like, and that’s my go-to. I like to eat it for breakfast and also for dessert — I think every meal should have a dessert.

Thanya: It’s so true. 

Macie: So I’ll make an olive oil cake, and I’ll just eat a slice for every meal.

Thanya: I love that.

Macie: Are you touring soon?

Thanya: Yeah, we’re gonna do a little tour in April on the East Coast. And hopefully we’ll come to Chicago in August. 

Macie: Amazing. I will be there. 

Thanya: Hopefully we’ll stay for, like, a week. That would be the dream.

Macie: I’ll make you olive oil cake.

Thanya: Yay! And we’ll go to the place that has cookies at midnight.

Macie: We’re doing it.

Thanya: You’re the best. I love everything you create.

Macie: I love everything you create!

Thanya: Thank you.

Macie: I’m so glad we got to have a little morning chat!

(Photo Credit: left, Shannon Marks; right, Monse Muro)