Ponybird Creates The Space

The sound enters like a cool breeze through an open window. The voices are next: is it a choir of ghosts bearing witness to the changes in the air or is it the beginnings of a hymn? And then, the lyrics: ​“Put me on your wings / show me how to fly / I want to be taken / where the mountain needs the sky.” It could be the soundtrack to a summer’s dream, but it is as real as it gets: it’s the latest single, ​“I Could Never Love You,” from Ponybird, the moniker used by singer songwriter Jennifer Dauphinais, and the first in a series of songs she has been creating as an ​“art piece” that will be released as an EP later this year.

“This song is a lot different than what people are used to hearing, which is just me and the guitar,” Dauphinais said. ​“There’s actually a batch of songs that were written back in 2015 and are currently in demo mode. This is the first one we brought to full production with this new idea in mind. Those songs had been sitting around because I had been finishing a doctorate so I haven’t had a lot of time. We took one song and we decided to go through this production that was more toward the space, experimental-rock collage style.”

Dauphinais talked about the process of making these ​“collages” come to fruition.

“What I’ll do is record the nuts and bolts of it. A lot of it was written on keyboard actually, so I’ll maybe key a song or strum a song and play the keys on top and get the vocals down, and then I’ll add digital drums and digital bass. Then I’ll bring in my husband [musician Jay Bates] to play the drums.”

Dauphinais also enlisted the help of an old friend this time around.

“I have one other person who is helping me with the production. His name is Rory Derwin. He goes by the name Deadly West. I grew up with Rory and I asked him to come in and help with this lush kind of art piece for this EP.”

Marrying the dream and the reality has always been a goal for Dauphinais. ​“In my heart of hearts I have always wanted to do this because that is how I hear my music,” she said. ​“A lot of times when I write a song I hear full production. I’ll hear all harmonies, full choir, all instrumentation, but working solo I don’t have an established band. I have to hack through digital instruments to plot those things out and then go find folks to play on it. That’s usually my process, or I record them myself in some fashion, but in this case I passed the nuts and bolts to Jay and I worked on it with Rory and we went through and really finessed the arrangement.”

Bates has created a home recording studio that is ​“full service,” according to Dauphinais. He has recorded for bands such as If Jesus Had Machine Guns and Zero Years as well as Ponybird.

“The goal is to eventually have house concerts at the studio and welcome folks in to record and stay with us as we develop our skills and sound,” said Dauphinais. ​“Deadly West as a production group is helping co-produce that, so it’s growing. My music is kind of the guinea pig for how we are doing this, so this song is sort of emblematic of that.”

Dauphinais is hoping to have ​“around four or five songs” on the new EP, but also notes that might change as time goes on much in the same way as her style has been known to change over time.

“Something about Ponybird that’s been really unique is that I’ve changed styles or interspersed styles in one album. I’ll have an album where there’s a really straightforward rock song and then there’s a folk ballad and a spacey track, so for this EP I’m taking that one lens of spacey-ness and really blowing it out.”

Does she worry that the spacey approach is at odds with her shows as a solo acoustic performer?

“I’ve had people say to me ​‘you should split it into two projects and say Ponybird is just a singer-songwriter project and this is my other art thing,’” Dauphinais said. ​“And I’m like, ​‘no, this is it.’ It’s okay to have multiplicity. It’s okay to be diverse and bend genres. I’ve always done that under the one moniker. I’ve moved band members around. I’ve had fiddle players and done string band stuff. I’ve had a full rock band with hollow-body Fender leads. I’ve had harmonies and keyboards, and I’ve done me by myself with my guitar. I don’t see that I have to choose to put that under certain brackets because certain people don’t feel that they don’t really understand why I’m going in all these directions. To me it’s one umbrella: my artwork as it flows, me writing it, and then I invite and curate who comes in and how I want it to sound, and I’m okay with that. I’ve never really been here to please folks. I’m not one to play covers and play a two-hour gig for money. I’m just trying to get out what I’m hearing in my mind.”

Dauphinais has been dwelling in the creative realm since childhood. Her father Robert played in a band called Editors, and Dauphinais grew up with that band rehearsing in the basement. She went to shows to see Editors play, and also went with her father to see Killing Joke, Fugazi, and Jane’s Addiction. That led to her ​“really being exposed to the underground scene early, so that by the time I was 15 or so I was pretty much living on the streets of New Haven going to any possible underground show, rave, or gig I could find.”

That’s when Dauphinais met ​“the Mighty Purple boys,” she said, as well as ​“the Jasta 14 crew and all the hardcore kids.” For a long time, she said, she was ​“totally immersed” in the hardcore scene. Meanwhile she had been playing drums at home and also in the drum line at high school. Todd Zullo, the drummer for Jasta 14 and one of her best friends, helped her take it ​“to the next level,” playing drums out on the street in front of the Daily Café and eventually playing in local bands including Belle Star and Spider and Fly, crossing genres there as well. That phase of her musical career ceased when she got sober around 10 years ago.

“Once I got sober I was like, ​‘there’s a whole other thing going on in here, in my development creatively, that I’ve never given voice to,’” Dauphinais said. ​“It was always this secret wish to play the guitar and sing. I had dabbled as a teenager, but I had never sat down and gave it any mind. Then about 10 years ago I wrote my first song, ​“I Am With You.” I think honestly some of my favorite and best songs were the first ones, like ​“Thief,” ​“Beacon,” ​“I Am With You,” and ​“Rambling Rose.” I was like, ​‘OK, this might be a thing, this could happen,’ and then I just told everybody, ​‘peace out I’m going to play the guitar.’ I stopped hanging around the bar scene and started writing.”

Her first EP, Climb Yourself Up, came out in 2008 and Ponybird, a name with an interesting past as well, was born.

“At the time I named the band it was when Animal Collective was around, and all these other musicians were using animal names as well. I used to call myself The Running Horse Publicity because I did a lot of underground publicity and writing, including copy for people’s websites and helping with promotion and booking. So I thought, ​‘hey, Ponybird is in that same neighborhood as Running Horse and horses and birds are my favorite.’ But I also had this inkling of an idea that my granddad might have been Native American.”

She was right.

“When I ended up getting the records from the Canadian census and writing to the Canadian government, we ended up getting tribal status in Canada under two different tribes — Cree and Anishinabek. I had kind of felt it, and I was like, ​‘all right, I’m going to just hold that name as a tribute to what I think is probably the truth,’ and come to find out it is. So, now it’s taken on another life, as an ancestral tribute.

“It’s a name that’s given me some freedom to be in this artistic realm that’s very much like passing between not only genres but passing on to me,” Dauphinais continued. ​“A lot of those songs are prayers or visions or dreams that I try to bring from another place to a recording, so if you go back and listen to some of the more spacey stuff or my experimental drafts on SoundCloud, even the images that I make — all that artwork, my digital or illustrated images — I’m always working with bending the dimension. It should be layered. It should be multiple. It’s kind of indiscernible: is it a dream, is it real, is it an ancestor talking? … the vocals sound like that sometimes, so that’s more of the palette that I’m working with. This EP has got that. It is 100 percent what we decided to do.”

Though she added a modern twist.

“I’ve said, ​‘with technology, how far out can we make this sound, how much of a hallucination is this?’” Dauphinais said with a laugh. ​“It’s really good on headphones!”

Dauphinais also said that on this record, you can hear how her voice has changed over the years, and ​“how I’m getting more confident with my voice. A lot of that not only has to do with singing ability, because I’ve always sang, but it has to do with owning a vision and not listening to other producers or other folks who have designated themselves as gatekeepers for young musicians, or female musicians, or whatever, and being like, ​‘Yes dude, I can sing, and by the way, I’m going to sing in a five-part harmony that’s going to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck because I’m bringing something from a real deep place that has nothing to do with you, and you can choose to participate or not. I’m not for ​‘I’m just a folk singer who has to tour and have a lot of gigs.’ I’m making my healing process transparent.

“That’s a different kind of work than just being a performer,” Dauphinais added. ​“This is how I grow. I’m OK with errors on my previous records. I’m OK with flat notes on my previous records. I think that’s great. I like making people aware that a song has many iterations and has a life cycle, like a writing draft does. It never really ends. It changes. And it’s been great because as a songwriter I’ve really invested in loving the process and not the product. About six years ago I went to a Dar Williams songwriting retreat, and that community of folks has been incredible — as muses and a supportive force — because we’re all completely in it just to write. It has nothing to do with the results. They are the first people I send things to for feedback and ideas, so I think that’s really important to have a community of people who believe in the vision of your music and can support you and people in the scene who follow the same ethics and the same values that you do.”

Dauphinais has also paid it forward as a mentor this past year to singer songwriter Meggie Czepiel, a role which she calls ​“a privilege.”

“Mentoring Meggie and other songwriters that I work with in the Dar circle is more important to me, nurturing the process and the safe space for people to learn their art and to understand. To give people the space to find their own voice is really unique. Often the music scene tries to make people’s voices the same, or conditions you to comply with certain conventions, and that’s not ever what I want to do,” she said. ​“So with Meggie, my job has been to not only give her 100 percent safe space to be herself, but to also say, ​‘this is how we set up a gig, this is how we say no, this is how you go to a gig and keep your space.’ All that process of creating space and mentoring and being creative also flows into what I do in my academic life.”

That academic life is twofold. Dauphinais is a doctoral student of curriculum and teaching at Columbia University as well as professor of education at Quinnipiac University, where she works with a range of students from high school to graduate level. ​“I have 25 advisees, so my capacity for mentorship across all of those ages and spaces is major. Similar things [that come up with her songwriter mentoring] will come up with my students, like ​‘how do I teach and keep my individual identity?’ and I’m like, ​‘I know this answer!’” she said with a laugh.

“Students will say ​‘can I do this and that,’ and I’m like, ​‘yes you can, let me give you an example,’” she added. ​“Then I’ll ask, ​‘how can I help you get that accomplished for yourself?’ So a lot of my mentorship with students is helping them bring in their talents, interests and visions to kind of bend the rules and expand the concepts of learning and teaching in the classroom with other kids. Then I hope they do that with their students, just like I hope Meggie does that.”

Girls Who Write Songs, a songwriting group put together by Czepiel with the help of Dauphinais, is one such project. ​“She’s now taken that ball and run with it in her own amazing direction,” Dauphinais said. ​“We worked on designing the project together, but ultimately it’s hers. Every time I look online I’m like ​‘and there she goes! Go, Meggie, go!’

Creating a sacred space to realize a vision and then passing that along to others and encouraging them to do the same is the thread through all of Dauphinais’ work, whether it be in the classroom, in the recording studio, or on the stage.

“That’s the key: to give folks a safe framework and say, ​‘go, you breathe your life into this. I’ll help you see kind of the vision and the structure but then you go.’ That’s what I’ve been looking for with a producer too, someone who understands this and isn’t here to ramp me back down or put a sound on me. That’s why I did my own thing, but I definitely needed Rory. He gets it and he is very specifically saying, ​‘my job as a producer is to help enhance what you already hear so you feel fully happy with it.’ He doesn’t have a belief that he created me or made my sound. He’s just building from this.”

In addition to the new single and subsequent EP release, Ponybird already has a number of live shows planned for the months ahead, including a night at the Branford festival on Saturday, June 15 with a full band and a Father’s Day Sunday Buzz show on June 16 at Cafe Nine as a duo with her father. Fans can continue to expect the unexpected.

“A lot of people want to hear what they want to hear at a show,” Dauphinais said. ​“That can happen after a while. People can project on to you like you’re flat. It’s like you’re a jukebox: play this, do this, and you’re like, ​‘no, I’m not going to do that. This is going to go my way.’ Even the listeners need to know that, and if you have a really invested listener, they are going to ride the ride with you.”

“I’m psyched if people like it, but I’m also not thinking I’m going to lose listeners if I don’t play folk music. Maybe there are other folks I’ll find, or maybe I’ll find a new place to go, but I’m more into the journey.”

For more information about Ponybird’s music and upcoming shows, please visit her website.