ALDOUS HARDING
Aldous Harding is intensely private. She might have grown up in Christchurch, New Zealand but when I ask her about the tragic mosque shootings that happened there in March she respectfully declines to comment. It’s obvious she’s thought deeply about the tragedy. “It was horrible,” she offers. “If I did know what to say or how to—I don’t think an interview about my album is the place.” She also loathes talking about the meanings of her songs. “I don’t want to muck with other people’s ideas and I don’t want people to muck with my mine,” the now 28-year-old once remarked, in an interview with Office Magazine. Yet, her songwriting, beautiful as it is, is opaque and can benefit from accompanying cliff notes or some kind of enigma machine to decode meaning. Fortunately, she decides to oblige today. First the caveat: “I don’t always feel like discussing [my songs] you know, but I think I will now, just because I’d rather say it than try and figure out how to dart around it.”
We’re discussing “Zoo Eyes,” the third, her third album. “Why? What am I doing in Dubai/In the prime of my life/Do you love me?” she sings in the opening lines, drone-like and raw, in the deepest register. When she gets to the chorus, it takes off, a kaleidoscopic layering off “zoo eyes” in ascending falsettos—it’s ethereal and faerie-like. But what exactly are zoo eyes?
