It’s a hot and steamy mid-summer day in Raleigh, North Carolina, where women on the street confuse Texas-born folk songstress Jolie Holland for an Englishwoman. Perhaps it was all the time she spent in Canada, as part of the Vancouver-born group the Be Good Tanyas than confused the Raleigh-ite, although Holland doubts it. She puts it down to just strange Raleigh, North Carolina people.

Given the sound of her second solo album, Springtime Can Kill You, it’s relatively easy to see how anyone could be confused – this is music of not fixed abode, of no permanent time or place. The album really could have come out anytime from 1930s to now, from Paris to Pennsylvania. It wouldn’t have mattered. “It’s not something I think about, and it’s not something I’m going for,” Holland says. “It’s very natural and I don’t think about it.”

Instead, what she does think about in the recording construction is texture and trying to capture a certain sense of energy. “It was very easy for me to come up with the sound of this record because there’s so many amazing musicians in my scene,” Holland explains. “The whole thing felt like painting and getting everybody together and splashing some colours together and see what happens. Some of my favourite moments on there you can really hear different types of audio decay on “Please Don’t Tell Them What You Know About Me”, where the electric guitar is dying, and the sound of the electric is fading. Everything is transparent.”

Another key focus for Springtime Can Kill You became the sonics – in several instances there’s two slide guitars playing simultaneously, and that was a very specific motif that was created for the record. “One of them is a lap steel player who’s 50 and he’s a total classic player, and then the other guy is in his late 20s and he’s a brilliant pop guitar player,” Holland says, “and he’d never really played that style of guitar playing before so he brings this really refreshing ignorance, this beautiful outside view of the technique, and this very pure sonic attitude. I really love how the two sides interact, and it’s like an estuary where you get the salt water and the fresh water. It’s definitely almost a subliminal effect.”

For the most part, the songs on Springtime Can Kill You came not from playing them live but instead were completed within the confines of the studio. As such, deciding how to represent them live comes down to gut decisions, and they way that everything morphs on the night. “Everything is a lot more forward live; I really wish that I hadn’t been so overwhelmed in the studio, and a lot of times the singing that’s on the record is first or second take and then I couldn’t sing anymore after that because I was so overwhelmed,” Jolie outlines. “I think if I had my wits together more in the studio the record would be less sleepy-sounding.”

For the creation of Springtime Can Kill You, Holland effectively had three roles – she was the artist, the producer, and the band leader – all at the same time, and it proved to be a much harder experience than she was bargaining on. The new album has a much more languid pace than predecessor Escondida. “Live they’re a lot punchier,” she outlines, :but I’m not a very practised producer, so I wanted to get more of how we were live in the studio, but the minute I walk into the studio everything gets scared and it automatically reverts to this quieter sound. I don’t have enough skill as a producer to get exactly what I want, but next time I’m not going to do it – I’m going to work with someone which will be exciting.”

Definite plans are not yet in place, but the next time she steps into a studio Jolie Holland will be working with Rob Schnapf, who worked on Elliott Smith’s latter records. “He’s a friend of a friend,” she says of Schnapf, “and I really love the sound of Elliott’s records, so I’m looking really forward to working with him.”

The recording process for that future release will differ again from Springtime Can Kill You, which took 24 days total to complete, where Escondida was a mere ten days. “On this record there’s a lot more going on,” Holland says of the new album, “and a lot more sonically to work with, so it took way more time to mix things than it did on Escondida.”

Escondida featured relatively simple instrumentation, whereas this time there was a whole lot of instruments all happening at the same time. Holland confirms that her new batch of songs are really straightforward by comparison, whereas Springtime Can Kill You takes its influence from old-fashioned music influencing her at the time – Willie Nelson, Jimmy Rodgers, Riley Pucket (who’s “Though You’re Not Satisfied” was used as the template for “You’re Not Satisfied”), and the Anthology of American Folk Music. “But then the next batch of songs is when I was really getting into Daniel Johnson, and thinking about pop music a lot more, and the Velvet Underground,” she explains. “So the next album is going to be a lot more musically direct.”

Jolie Holland’s Springtime Can Kill You is out now, with Holland the opening support for Augie March’s current theatre tour. Dates:
5 August – Barwon Heads Hotel, Geelong
10 August – The Tivoli, Brisbane
11 August – Enmore Theatre, Sydney
18 August – The Forum Theatre, Melbourne
20 August – Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide