Biita Houdei is a singer-songwriter from Missouri, now based in the Catskills; Anna St. Louis is a singer-songwriter also from Missouri, now based between New York and LA. Biita’s new record This Bed Was Made For Me just came out last month on Father/Daughter, and to celebrate, the two Missourans got together to talk about their I-70 roots, how place affects their songwriting, and more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Biita Houdei: Are we gonna talk about how you went and got your nails done without me?
Anna St. Louis: [Laughs.]
Biita: [Laughs.] I'm just kidding.
Anna: I wanted to ask you about your balancing of multiple different creative outlets and art forms. One thing that impresses me about you is how creative you are in so many different aspects of your life, and your commitment to art in general. I feel like it's such a huge priority in your life. You bake, you garden, you quilt, you make sculptures, you paint. And you make music, obviously. So I was curious about how all of those work together for you, if it's a juggle or if it's more of like they feed each other.
Biita: I would say they feed each other. I mean, you also paint, you also do photo, video. I feel they all live together, and they can't really exist in my life without each other. I think we're both similar: creatively, for our music. we both have to have input on everything. I had to design the album cover and I had to have all these things in my head and have them be how I want to be perceived, how I want the art to be perceived. And I feel like your website, your artwork, your album covers, everything feels cohesive. It feels like you. Has anyone else done your stuff?
Anna: I definitely feel like it's helpful to learn how to let people in and help you, but I do stay very close to all of it. It just feels like mine, even if somebody else is in there with you. But I feel the same — sometimes if music is feeling more stale or dried up, I can go over to another medium like painting and it supercharges things in other areas of my life again.
Biita: I feel the same exact way. Like right now I'm trying to finish a bunch of quilts for many babies that have been born — because we're both going to Missouri in a week or so. We're both from Missouri… Do you feel embarrassed or proud that you're from Missouri?
Anna: Proud. A hundred percent.
Biita: Me too. I think it's fucking cool. And everyone, the Ding Dong Remuses out there, thinking it's not cool? Wrong. Wake up. I will say, St. Louis is a cooler city.
Anna: What, than Kansas City? Oh, my god, are we about to have I-70 series beef right now?
Biita: [Laughs.] Absolutely. But I would love for you to change my mind. I'll maybe come to Kansas City someday and you can show me around. I haven't been there in a long time.
Anna: I remember growing up, I used to think St. Louis was actually cooler.
Biita: Sure, and I thought Kansas City was cooler.
Anna: Really?
Biita: Yes. We went maybe once a month in the summer, which we thought was so cool.
Anna: Well, I feel like St. Louis felt more like a bigger city — it felt more like East Coast to me. I don't know why… But I always thought St. Louis was very cool.
Biita: I think it's pretty cool. I mean, I grew up in the country, in Defiance, Missouri.
Anna: How far is that from St. Louis?
Biita: Oh, god, maybe 45 miles. Did you grow up in a rural area?
Anna: No, I grew up just in the city.
Biita: Wow, city girl.
Anna: Yeah, good ol’ Kansas City. Did you do family vacations at the Lake of the Ozarks?
Biita: Of course. Did you?
Anna: Yeah, it was the spot to go!
Biita: I went every other weekend in the summer. My grandma and grandfather lived over there.
Anna: Here's my question for you: Speaking of growing up in Missouri and your art, which of your mediums came first?
Biita: I remember in grade school, I was writing books and little stories quite a bit. And then I remember this tiny little sun that I made out of clay — and I flashed back to it when the pandemic happened. That's when I started sculpting again, 2020. Anyway, there was a little bit of clay and a little bit of story writing, but I would say that was just fleeting. Music was the first real [medium].
Anna: Do you know what you were writing about at that age?
Biita: The stories were kind of adjacent to what was happening in my life, but it was mostly about my very favorite place in the world at the time, which was my friend Betty Jo's farm house in New Melle. Literally the best memories of my life over there. I would write about a girl — I was kind of putting myself in her shoes, if I had a farm, if I had Bessie the cow, if I had Jack the horse, whatever their names were. I wrote about her life, basically, and made it from my perspective. I really wanted horses when I was young.
Anna: I mean, who doesn't want a horse?
Biita: Let's talk albums. Are you working on anything?
Anna: I'm writing.
Biita: I love that. Do you feel you do an album or an EP — to me, they're the same thing — and then you start writing again? Do you go in order?
Anna: I kind of go in order. And I feel like a lot of times when I'm working on one batch of songs, I'll be really focused on some element and then I'll wear myself out on that and then the next time I'll be like, Well, I want to do the opposite thing now. A lot of times, I just feel like contrasting what I did before, so I'll get out of the phase of one album or one set of songs and then be like, OK, now I want to do something else. So then the next thing I do, I'll be exploring different things, whether it's open tuning versus chords or, “I want to write songs that are really close to my heart that I can play solo just me and a guitar,” [versus], “You know what? I want to fucking arrange the shit out of a song and make it so catchy.” So I feel like I do stay in one zone and then go to the next. What about you?
Biita: I don't really know. It seems random because lately, I don't sit down to write anything intentionally. But now, as the time has gone on since I recorded this album, I've written so many songs whenever it calls to me since then, and now I feel like I have the next one already but with maybe a couple additions. But I just have no idea when a song is gonna come into my [head]…
Anna: How does a song start for you?
Biita: With guitar. And then humming, mumbling, and then placing lyrics with those humming, mumbling melodies. Sometimes the melody just easily comes and sometimes it'll take me a while to finish it. Because I have to be called to sit down and write a song in the moment. I can't pre-decide that I'm gonna do some songwriting. What about you?
Anna: I feel like it starts a lot of times with a vocal melody. And sometimes with guitar, but usually it's with just something I'll be humming. And, same thing, sometimes it's so fast it’s like it just writes itself, and other times it's slow and I feel confused and frustrated because I'm like, I hear the song and I want to sing the words that I know are in there. It can be really hard to be patient when it's not a quick process. But the high I get when a song comes together quickly — oh, my god, it's the drug of my choice.
Biita: Yes, same. And it's like, then at that point, is it even us who's writing it? I don't know…
Anna: I don't know either. It's the best feeling. I heard, I think it was Phil Lesh, talking about songwriting once and he said something about, “When the muse knocks, you gotta answer. You wake up in the middle of the night and it's in your head, you gotta get up right then and do it.” I feel the same way. If I hear a melody and I like it, if I don't put it in my phone right then, it's gone forever.
Biita: Dude, I woke up from a dream a couple months ago and it was raining outside and the melody and the lyrics came at the same time — it was the first time that something happened with lyrics and melody at the same time. It was crazy. Let me see if I have the lyrics… It's not that impressive… “I woke up to the pitter-patter sound of the raindrops falling on wooden logs outside from my bed, and the robins were roaming around in the yard, overturning little leaves, flipping them upside their heads.”
Anna: I love that.
Biita: It's kind of cute.
Anna: That's funny because I actually had a song that came very [easily] — I don't think it's one I kept — but it was raining once and I remember I woke up and…
Biita: You heard the pitter-patter sounds outside your bed?
Anna: [Laughs.] Exactly. I wonder if it's something with the rain, the percussive sound of it, if it just is conducive to stuff flowing out. Do you have places where it helps you to write lyrics?
Biita: Not necessarily.
Anna: OK. Because I will say, the car, driving around and singing, things kind of pop out there. And then the shower.
Biita: Shower, absolutely.
Anna: There's just something meditative about those places. I feel like your brain opens a little side hatch and it's like, “Here you go.”
Biita: Yeah, I think you're right. I think traveling anywhere inspires me to write. For the album that's coming out — This Bed Was Made For Me, produced by Haley Heynderickx and Sahil Ansari — I think a lot of the coverage, the lovely articles that have been written so far, focus on Topanga Canyon, which is where I was living at the time, and California and now New York. And I actually wrote so many of those songs about leaving Missouri, how I felt about it, how leaving home for the first time in general is really empowering and expansive and lovely and sad. A lot of the songs were written in Washington. Some of the songs were written years and years and years ago in Missouri. I would say living in Topanga, my songwriting changed and got a little better, just spending time with the guitar and sitting in the cute little house in the middle of the mountains.
Changing scenery is important to my songwriting as well, and I bet you when winter comes around here in these little mountains, I'll be inspired to write. That's also why I wanted to move — because you live in LA and New York. You're bicoastal. That change, I would assume, helps you.
Anna: Yeah, I really relate to that. A change of scenery helps me so much with creativity. I think there's such a spark there, just being out of your routine and not in the space you do the same things every day. Even though that can also be a really good place to be disciplined and showing up to something. But something just clicks a little quicker when I'm in a new place or there's been a slight change around things.
With your new album — which is beautiful and stunning—
Biita: Thank you so much.
Anna: I feel a huge burst of growth and a leap ahead in your music. I feel like sometimes making an album is non-stop decision making for a long time. Who do I want to work with? Where do we do it? When? What are the sounds? How do I communicate that? And you come up to crossroads with every song — is it going to have a lot of reverb? Is there going to be delay? There's all these things and that can be very fatiguing. And I wondered, as you were pulling this together and creating this cohesive world, was there any element or theme or visual or feeling that kept being the guiding force of, “Here's the throughline, here's where we're going?”
Biita: Haley Heynderickx decided, “I want to produce your next record.” Great, absolutely. I sent her and Sahill, who also produced the record, 25 songs. They picked up a little bundle, I agreed with the bundle, and was like, “Let's go.” They asked me how I wanted it to sound and I told them some words — just words, like “warm,” “cavelike,” “cozy,” but also “expansive.” So that came together really quickly and easily. Haley understood exactly what I was going for. They both did. And Haley, in the production world, I didn't really realize means you're booking the studio, you're gathering the players, the instruments. We both heard the same kind of instruments, the same things. We were so aligned. And at that time I thought I was still going to release this album under my old moniker, LéPonds, and I thought it was going to be called Noble Kind. As we started getting into the studio, everything was very easeful, we knew going in what we wanted, and then as it started to build… In the song “Night Fright,” there's a lyric that says, “This bed was made for me,” and it started getting freakier and it just seemed like it was the crux of the album. Then Haley started playing a little alternate tuning of “Night Fright,” and I just loved it so much, so we were just humming, “This bed was made for me…” And while we were walking in New York after we were mixing, the three of us, I was like, “What if the album was called This Bed Was Made For Me and I went by my Persian nickname, Biita?” And it was like, “Yes!” It all swirled together in this way. It felt so right for what all the songs meant, and what the album meant.
Anna: This Bed Was Made For Me and the name change — how were those connected?
Biita: The way it sounded. I was like, “Should I change my name for this album?” That's how it probably started. Because people would ask me what LéPonds meant all the time, and I'm just like, “I have no idea. I wrote it down when I was 19 years old…”
Anna: I'm maybe just making connections that aren't real, but if it's in some ways about you leaving home, and “this bed was made for me…” It feels so loving and sweet.
Biita: Yes. Instead of, “You made your bed, now lie in it,” it’s, “This bed was made for me.” It's more empowering.
Anna: Like, “This is my experience.”
Biita: Yeah. And it all just kind of did it on its own.
Anna: I think that's the coolest part.
Biita: Little ghosts. They're out there, just dropping their little magical sparkles…
