Mary Lattimore
A Mary Lattimore show is a singular experience.
The Los Angeles-based harpist plays the kind of music — intricate, subtle, rewarding patience — that can be at odds with today’s showgoers, who sometimes spend more time at the bar or on their phones than paying attention to what’s happening onstage. That’s not the case at Lattimore’s own gigs, though, as fans flock to her live performances to escape exactly that kind of atmosphere in favor of an hour or two immersed in the beauty of her playing.
“I have noticed that not a lot of people have their phones out [at my shows], which is really cool,” Lattimore tells the Scene. “I think that the world is really hard, especially now, and people are looking for a moment to zone out or to dig into things that are not in their feed, you know? It’s so hard to be a human right now.”
On Sunday, Lattimore will play at The Blue Room at Third Man Records in support of her new album, Goodbye, Hotel Arkada. A six-song collection of mostly instrumental music, the record is Lattimore at her best: Gorgeous, complex arrangements highlight her mastery of the harp while also pushing the boundaries of what the instrument can do, as well as the feelings it can evoke. Some songs, like opener “And Then He Wrapped His Arms Around Me,” hum with a quiet hopefulness, while others, like the playfully titled “Blender in a Blender,” don’t shy away from discord.
As a whole, the record is a chronicle of the past five years of Lattimore’s life, mining personal experiences alongside the collective grief and upheaval wrought by major global events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Lattimore first began work on Goodbye, Hotel Arkada during a residency on a cattle ranch in Wyoming in 2018, with “Blender in a Blender” revealing itself first. She wrote that song alongside Roy Montgomery, a New Zealand-based guitarist known for his avant-garde solo work as well as collaborations with acts like Grouper and Dissolve. Other songs began to trickle out from there.
“I feel like this one took me a little bit longer to make,” Lattimore says. “So it feels like it’s a little more vulnerable because of that. I’ve had more time to kind of ruminate on the music.”
When Lattimore felt she had amassed enough material for a full project, she tapped friend and producer Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Kurt Vile) to help fully realize the demos she’d written and recorded in her apartment. The pair spent time polishing the tracks, with Schnapf making occasional edits and adding upright bass from his engineer Matt Schuessler.
“That’s when I could really see that the record had cohesion and a potential to, you know, have a vibe that that it didn’t have before,” Lattimore says. “I think I attribute a lot of that to Rob, you know, kind of solidifying the feeling that the record has.”
Other collaborators on Goodbye, Hotel Arkada include Meg Baird of Heron Oblivion and multi-instrumentalist Walt McClements on slow-building opener “And Then He Wrapped His Wings Around Me” and The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst, who adds moody synths to the otherwise dreamy “Arrivederci.” Singer/multi-instrumentalist Samara Lubelski and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell join Lattimore on album closer “Yesterday’s Party,” a gentle and drifting send-off with floating vocals from the pair.
Asked what makes a fitting collaborator for her own creative process, Lattimore says she looks for “kindred spirits” whose work could be in dialogue with her own rather than any specific skill or line on a résumé.
“It’s all social,” she says. “It’s all conversational. A lot of these people who are on the record are dear, dear friends of mine. Either that, or they’re people whose music I’ve admired, and I can kind of see them through their music. So having that conversation through creativity is really cool.”
The LP is named after a real hotel in Croatia. Though Lattimore herself never stayed a night there, she visited and enjoyed the property, which was full of character. Upon hearing the hotel had undergone renovations, Lattimore began thinking about the nature of change, and the sadness that often comes with seeing something old and alive with history made new and shiny. The “Goodbye” in the record’s title is as much a farewell to the former incarnation of that hotel as it is an acknowledgement of the constant change inherent to everyday life.
“I just really thought it was a cool-looking place, and you could just tell it had seen a lot,” she says. “The title isn’t really attributed to that hotel, necessarily, but it’s a note to appreciate things the way that they are because they will change, for better or for worse. Everything’s always changing. It’s a way to crystallize things before they eventually change.”
