Hottt List: She & Him Issue #38

Really Got a Hold on You

By Kate Williams
Published: December 1st, 2008 | 12:00am

Officially, the story of She & Him began in 2006, when Zooey Deschanel and Matt Ward actually met. To believe in fate, though, is to believe it actually begins in Southern California in the early ‘80s; where a young Deschanel, in Los Angeles, and an equally young Ward, in nearby Ventura County, found themselves falling in love with the music of their parents’ generation. For Ward, it was Brian Wilson; “He still casts a pretty big shadow over music in California,” Ward says over the phone from Austin, Texas, while waiting to perform at Austin City Limits. “It’s a little bit of mythology and a great example of what can be achieved in music.”

Deschanel spent car rides absorbing the sunny sounds of the Lovin’ Spoonful and Linda Ronstadt. “I grew up listening to an oldies station in L.A.,” Deschanel says one morning from her home in Los Angeles, “and Matt listened to it, too.” Deschanel would go on to find herself a big-time Hollywood actress, and Ward, a respected Portland-based indie troubadour slightly on the shy side. But when they finally crossed paths, nearly 20 years later, they would find themselves to be musical soul mates. If this pairing strikes any of their fans or critics as weird, to hear Deschanel and Ward tell it, it is actually anything but.

The duo met on the set of the film The Go-Getter, when director Martin Hynes paired Deschanel, the film’s star, with Ward, who was doing the music, for a duet. “I had never met Zooey. She was familiar with my music and I was familiar with her singing and everybody was just kind of going on instinct that it would go well,” Ward says. “And it actually ended up going really well. We both have a love for older sounds and older sentiments when it comes to songwriting.”

For Deschanel, especially, the meeting was something she’d been waiting for. “I always sang in choirs and I did musical theater growing up,” she says. “I always thought I would be a singer before I would be an actor. I sort of became an actor by accident ... and then it became an all-consuming thing.”

Deschanel performed intermittently with Samantha Shelton in If All the Stars Were Pretty Babies, a cabaret act, and occasionally got to show off her vocal chords on screen, in films such as Elf (2003) and Winter Passing (2005), but, before meeting Ward, this was pretty much the limit of her forays into music.

“I always thought I would be able to sing and act,” she says, “but at a certain point, it became difficult for me to share the music part. So I was writing a ton of music, but not really doing anything with it. I didn’t really know exactly who to collaborate with ... until I met Matt, and everything seemed to fall into place.”

Ward is the textbook definition of a respected indie musician, with a career that has spanned a decade. He has opened for the White Stripes, collaborated with Rilo Kiley and Bright Eyes, and produced Jenny Lewis’ lauded solo debut. His own voice is like sandpaper, albeit a very fine grade, his songs are introspective, and his persona is earnest. That Ward had no reservations about collaborating with an actress is somewhat surprising, considering that historically, when actors indulge their musical whims — from Jared Leto’s 30 Seconds to Mars to Lindsay Lohan’s horrid attempt to cover “The Edge of Seventeen” — it has typically elicited more groans and giggles than acclaim. “I would have had hesitations [about collaborating] if Zooey were not a great singer, if it felt like we were trying to pull a fast one on people in the audience,” he says. “I wouldn’t have entered into a project with a singer who was not an incredible singer, or a songwriter who’s not an incredible songwriter, so it [Deschanel being a well-known actress] was never an issue.”

Shortly after their initial recording for The Go-Getter, Deschanel emailed Ward some demos of songs that she had written and recorded herself. “It was a no brainer,” he says. “They were incredible songs and they needed to be recorded properly. I was really blown away. The first thing was the vocals — she’s a great singer — and the second was the actual songs, the core progression and the lyrics. People weren’t aware of her songwriting skills, and I felt like I was hearing something that people needed to hear.”

During our interview, Ward frequently shows a preference for music that he says is “telling a good story with simplicity and heart,” and Volume One does exactly that. Deschanel penned all but two songs — a Beatles cover and a Smokey Robinson cover — on the debut album. They’re classic and sweet, even when hinting at heartbreak. As a producer, Ward is wise enough to ensure that the music doesn’t compete with Deschanel’s vocals. The songs evoke an era of primetime variety shows and singers like Tammy Wynette and Dusty Springfield. “Sentimental Heart” shamelessly details post-breakup despair in a way that would do Nancy Sinatra or Patsy Cline proud. In the video for “Why do you let me stay here?,” Deschanel, clad in cowboy boots and flouncy skirts, dances with cartoon birds, a la Zip A De Do Da. Her face is as expressive as a vaudevillian performer — and Ward, of course, plays the straight man.

“I think the hardest thing and the scary thing for me was like, ‘Uh, what am I doing?’ I’ve never really played these songs for people. I mean, Matt had heard the demos, but then when we were playing them, having the engineer there, it was a little bit scary,” Deschanel says. “But I got over that really quickly, so maybe I was nervous for about 15 minutes, and then everybody made me feel so comfortable and everyone was so nice.”

Deschanel and Ward have described Volume One as a love letter to the musicians who inspired it — and in addition to their taste, the two also shared a very similar approach to making music. “I liked the way that he worked,” Deschanel says. “He had a very sort of spontaneous, improvisational approach to making music and I like to work that way. It wasn’t about planning things, it was about trying things.”

The next day, in a separate conversation, Ward says, “There are some people who obsess over every minute detail, then there are others who have a greater respect for what happens in the minute. Zooey and I have talked about how there are directors she’s worked with who want to orchestrate every gesture, and as an artist, it’s just not as fun to work that way.” Fun shoots through Volume One like rays of sunlight (many of the songs clock in at around two minutes) and it has the honest confidence that comes from people doing what they truly love. Also, the fact that both Deschanel and Ward already have established, successful careers meant they weren’t overcome with a desire to turn their debut album into something perfect. “I’ve worked with people who need to re-record their vocal tracks a million times, where it gets to a point where it starts to feel a little bit machine like, or a little bit dead. I am sure there are people who can do it [that way], but I’m not one of those people,” he says.

For Deschanel, making Volume One was a chance to finally have creative control rather than being just a player in someone else’s project, and she found recording an album to be a much more laid-back process than making a movie. “Most of the time, working on a movie, you’re a very small part of a really huge picture. There are just hundreds of people working on a movie set, even if it is a really small movie, there are like 20 people,” she says. “Whereas in the studio, there were no more than five people. Most of the time it was just three of us: Matt, myself, and one of our engineers. I think, basically, to see something through from the genesis to fruition is a really lovely thing.”

Recording the album was, in ways, a departure for Ward as well, as it found him working more behind the scenes than in front of the microphone. “I got to have a different perspective on the songs, because Zooey wrote them. I spent a lot more time in the control room, and it sort of changes your perspective,” he says. “Some people are surprised, but it was a great thrill for me to follow my instincts and have a different role in the recording studio.”

“All the guitars are Matt,” Deschanel says. “He really is amazing at layering guitar parts, and then all the vocals are me. He pretty much let me have free reign over all the backing vocals. Basically, we would talk about things that we liked and he was really good at figuring out how to manifest those things in the context of the songs. It was a really great dialogue, a conversation. He wasn’t like, ‘I’m producer and what I say goes!’ It was really fun, and really collaborative. He’s just a very open person and a very kind person.”

If anything, She & Him has played down Deschanel’s fame by using fairly anonymous names that let the music sing for itself. “We wanted something sort of anonymous and something that wouldn’t indicate anything about the record,” Deschanel says of calling their debut Volume One.“We didn’t want to say too much about the record before people heard it. I think that was sort of the reasoning behind the name of the band as well, it’s sort of anonymous to keep it about the music and have as few implications in the name as possible.”

She & Him toured for a month last summer, an experience of which Deschanel says, “I don’t think there was a moment when I didn’t enjoy myself. All the shows were fun for different reasons, but we had one really great show in Chicago. It was just electric. There’s something about the room: You can have a bad room, but you can also have this amazing energy in a room and it builds on itself and you’re feeding off the audience and the audience is feeding off of you.” Deschanel’s love of performing live is left over from her musical theater days, and she enjoyed being able to do it without having to play a role that someone else had written for her. It also goes without saying that this was a draw for show-goers as well — to see Zooey Deschanel on stage being Zooey Deschanel. It seems to have worked out for both sides. “I’m the sort of person who’s comfortable being [herself],” she says. “So it was nice to be myself.”