Elysian Fields on their 30 Year Anniversary, Nature, Greek Mythology, and more
Elysian Fields © Mathieu Zazzo
Timelessness comes from something genuine. Jennifer Charles and Oren Bloedow have been making music together for thirty years, and the sincerity in each song they’ve crafted is what keeps them classic. As the world pushes the mainstream, as it always has and will, the duo that comprise Elysian Fields have found respite in things they value, not the things the world expects them to. Art, literature, theater, music, nature, and the life around them are what they pull inspiration from. Each song is a genuine reflection of their unique interests. Love, dedication, and creativity ooze from the seams of each chord, of each melody. Their story is just as well-spoken as their tunes.
I'm so honored to have the chance to talk with you today, you’re one of my favorite bands ever.
Jennifer Charles: Aw, thank you. I'm Jennifer, and this is Oren.
Nice to meet you guys.
JC: Thank you so much. You already won my heart by saying we're one of your favorite bands.
Well, I mean, I'm trying not to fangirl too hard, but I am on the inside.
JC: We can take a little.
I'm going to start off pretty simple. Who are Elysian Fields? How did the band come into fruition?
JC: Well, it was a little over thirty years ago, incredibly, and Oren and I started making music together before we were calling it Elysian Fields. We met at the original Knitting Factory, which was kind of a downtown hotbed of, you know, experimental music and stuff like that. Oren was playing there one night when I met him. I was doing an internship because I was still in college then.
Very nice. Was that in New York, or was that somewhere else?
JC: It was in New York in a neighborhood that they call Nolita now. Back then, it was just called, I guess, the East Village.
Have you always been based out of New York, or was there anywhere else that you were?
JC: I'm originally from Washington, DC but I came up here for university. Oren grew up in New York City on 53rd Street.
I'm so curious, did you go to university for music, or were you studying something else?
JC: I was actually studying theater because I had started doing it when I was really young. I always knew that I was an artist. I never really thought too hard about how I was going to make a living because I knew I had to be creative, and you don't really think about the practical aspect of that when you're dedicating yourself to the arts. But, of course, it comes up and bites you on the butt every now and then.
How did you end up going from theater to starting a band? Was that also still in college?
JC: You know, I never gave up doing theater, and I actually still do theater sometimes. I started acting when I was about 10 and then professionally when I was 14 in Washington, DC. I continued to study that and do that acting in Off-Broadway stuff in New York and went to Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Then, I met Oren at the old Knitting Factory.
It’s amazing how organically it all started.
JC: Wanna say how it happened, Oren? You wanna talk about that?
Oren Bloedow: Well, I want to say while we're on the subject of you making that transition that, you know, Jennifer had already performed as a singer by the time I met her. She was towards the end of college when we met. I was a few years older, which I still am. She was all in on drama, but she was in a rock band at that time that would mostly do rehearsals, I think.
JC: I was in a couple different rock bands while in college.
OB: It was called Prayer Box?
JC: No, that was called something else. I don't remember.
OB: I believe you certainly had the song “Jack in the Box” already. It was something that Jennifer had written based on this horrible true crime story that she had encountered. When we did the Elysian Fields version of it, I got involved and gave my contributions, but she basically had that song already done, and some other songs. She was songwriting, she's just a creative person. She made visual art. She wrote poetry. You would share poetry in class from a really great poet that I can't remember the name of…
JC: Gwendolyn Brooks.
OB: Yes, that had been very encouraging to you. So there was lots of creative stuff that was going on, and you had done cabaret performances where you sang songs from your mother and grandmother's repertoire.
So when I first met Jennifer, one of the first interactions that we had was when I was playing a gig over at the Knitting Factory, and she was working there at that time. Her shift ended with her sweeping the floor. She was sweeping the floor in an extremely thrift shoppy, like, ancient dress, and she was singing “I Just Wanna Be Loved By You,” which is a really old song.
JC: Tin Pan Alley, it’s from the 20s.
OB: I was just, you know, absolutely bowled over by her style. She already had so much music stuff going on that it really didn't create a ripple. But, she started teaching me jazz tunes, and I would play the chords behind her, and it didn't create a ripple that we would book a gig to sing those songs somewhere. And then it didn't create a ripple because we both wrote songs. It didn't create a ripple that we wrote a couple songs to slip in there with all the covers, and it didn't create a ripple when we didn't do any of the covers anymore, and we were just doing those songs.
That whole time, she was going to auditions and being in plays and taking acting classes and doing stuff. But, there's just such a difference between the speed and accelerability of your own music project and being in the endless loop of waiting for the comparatively, like, corporate theater or television or movie, waiting for those gears to to mesh.
So while Jennifer was doing auditions and being involved in the theater world, we were just going ahead and making making recordings and booking gigs. The next thing you know, we had only played three gigs in front of people before we had a record deal.
JC: We also started writing original material.
OB: We started to to have original music that we could play in the jazz show.
JC: This was before we were called the Elysian Fields, this is the really early, early days.
OB: We would play classic songbook songs, and so we wrote some songs that we could slip in there, and then we wrote some songs that maybe didn't slip in there quite as well. Eventually, those were the songs we did, and we were more excited about them than doing a pastiche of American songbook songs. There were early songs like “Diamonds All Day.”
I was just listening to that on your Bandcamp last night.
OB: We had we had a few like that in the beginning, “Diamonds All Day,” “Crazy Old Man,” which you never would have heard, but that's a good song. And also, “Off Or Out.” These were all tunes that were, those two anyway, “Diamonds All Day” and “Off Or Out,” songs exactly as you hear them. That was stuff that we just went into the studio just to record what we were doing. We didn't have a record label.
A friend of ours gave our demo cassette to her dad, and he passed it to another guy at the same law firm that was at the entertainment end. You know, law firms can be like that. Like, there's one guy who's doing personal injury and one guy who's doing entertainment. I don't remember what our friend's dad did, but he passed it to the entertainment guy. He came to see us play, and the the people that he invited, one of them offered us a record deal, and we took it. We already had “Diamonds All Day” and “Off Or Out,” and those came out exactly the versions of them that you hear on those first couple records.
That's so interesting, it’s such a long history of how everything came together. I am super curious, though. You mentioned that “Jack in the Box” was based off of a true crime story. That's one of my favorite tracks from Bleed Your Cedar. I'd love to hear a little more about it.
JC: Well, it's a pretty serious story and and pretty disturbing. When I talk about it, I talk about it with the utmost respect and sensitivity regarding the person that it happened to, which was, you know, really serious. We all know that a lot of scary things happen in this world anyway, and this particular happening, a woman was kidnapped and held captive.
I really wanted to talk something about the psychology of that, what happens when that's all you know, when being held captive or being imprisoned or held in a small environment, and that becomes your whole psychology and the only thing you know.
In some ways, you hear about Stockholm Syndrome, or people just having some kind of empathy with their captors because that becomes their normalcy. Luckily, with this woman, she was able to escape, and I hope that she has the safest and best life that you can have now after going through such a trauma. But, I guess I've never shied away from from trauma. It's something that I've always been empathetic towards because I can put myself into that feeling when I see people suffer, my heart goes to them. So that's a little bit of the history of that song.
It's interesting that you say that too because I think in all of your music, I can hear and feel how deeply you feel things as well. It completely comes across in everything that you make. But, it's also fascinating because I had no idea of the back story of that song, and it's making me think maybe I should have paid closer attention to the lyrics. But, yeah, thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate you opening up about where it came from.
JC: Of course. But, you know, don't don't chastise yourself too much. I think that's the beauty of art and music is that it can bring people in without necessarily you know… You can experience Guernica on one level and say it’s terrible what happened to these people. You can experience art just for the the purity of the art itself or music taking you away to another place.
OB: Or you could think, ‘Shit. That's cool,’ You know? Eminem has a rap that is, I think, pretty clearly built on top of a riff from “Jack in the Box.” Could be an accident, but I think it's more likely they were listening. People in hip-hop are always scouring the universe for stuff to to make beats out of. I think somebody scoured their way to Elysian Fields during that period, and they were like, ‘oh, let's give them one like that.’
Do you remember what song this is? I'm so curious.
OB: I don’t.
Well, maybe I'll have to do some deep diving now on Eminem. He must have good inspirations. But, I wanted to ask about the name Elysian Fields because I'm a huge Greek mythology nerd, and I'm curious if that's—
JC: That's very much where it came from, and I love to hear that you love Greek mythology. I do too, and I love myths. I love stories, and it's very much of of who I am. Ever since I was a little girl, stories and fairytales and myths have captured me. I think that there's a very good reason why they exist, and it makes a lot of sense.
So, yes, I was very much thinking of, in Greek mythology, the paradise in the afterlife where, the heroes and poets went when they died with the name Elysian Fields. I'm glad that you know about that. You know, a lot of people don't know, and they think, ‘oh, did you name it after the baseball field?’ I'm like, no, I didn't. Even though there was the very first baseball field named Elysian Fields. They probably named it after the same thing that I did. Even in Paris, people are like, ‘oh, yes, you named it after our famous boulevard because we are a wonderful shopping street.’ I'm like, well, no. It's not about shopping. It's from the Greek mythology.
That just warms my heart to hear. I'm studying Classics and Humanities in college right now, so I'm deep in it.
JC: Good for you, where are you doing this?
I live in Oregon, so I'm going to University of Oregon right now. I'm in Humanities, but I'm kind of focusing in Classics.
JC: This gives me a lot of hope that there are still young people studying the Classics. It's so important, and language is important, and history is important. In fact, the—she's not a little girl anymore—but a girl that I used to babysit who lives upstairs, she's very much becoming a Classic scholar, and I'm very, very proud of her for doing that. She's speaking Latin now.
I took it two terms of Latin this year and it was so much fun. I really, really enjoyed it and deeply appreciated the language. So, again, that just warms my heart to hear. I mean, when I heard the name Elysian Fields, that clicked in my brain. I was like, this band is gonna be awesome.
JC: How did you discover us?
I sort of had a question that branches off of this, but one of my favorite things to do is… Well, I love Autumn, and I love Halloween, and I love Fall. Every year, I try to go in and I find bands that kind of match that vibe in my brain, the kind of music that emulates that season somehow. I think I was on Spotify and I had been doing this deep dive two or so years ago. You guys came up, and I think one of your songs was on a playlist. It may have been “Sugarplum Arches,” actually. I think that was the first song I heard. The name Elysian Fields was on it. I was like, okay, this is gonna be my next favorite band. I already knew by the name.
JC: Oh, I love that.
It was kind of a random way to find you, but I'm so glad that I did.
JC: It’s the universe bringing us all together. I feel like we’re all connected. It’s the cosmic thread… So if the universe brings us together, that's very good.
I'm so grateful that I'm here speaking with you. Like I said, I'm trying not to fangirl too hard, but I'm going to segue into the question that I had about the vibe of your music. As mentioned, the past two-ish years, Bleed Your Cedar and Queen of the Meadow were two of my favorite albums for kind of the Autumnal, Halloween vibe. For some reason, they fit into that season for me.
Your music as a whole, it embraces this beautiful gothic sensuality. I'm curious how you're able to portray this almost ethereal sensuality, and if it comes naturally in your music making process, or if it's something that kind of comes from different influences, from things all across the board, and overall how you're able to put this beautiful spin on your music in the way that you have.
JC: Well, that's very lovely. All I can say is that it's just for myself. It's just who I am and what I am inside and reflecting that. I think that everyone has the the dark and the light and we need to embrace all of it. The dark is not a bad thing. It's the mystery of life and the natural progression and cycle of what life and death are. Death is as much a part of life as life is a part of death and the seasons. It's all very natural.
So, like you were saying with Autumn, it's part of it, and there's something poetic and sad about it when the leaves fall off the trees, but you know that it's going to have a rebirth someday. I like celebrating the whole cycle.
That is another perfect segue into my next question, actually. I would venture to say that your music has a very common thread of nature within a lot of it. It's definitely loud and clear that it's something that you appreciate and something that you love. It holds everything together as the backbone in such a beautiful and deeply perceptible way. What role does nature play in your lives and in your music, and why you feel so inspired by it?
JC: Well, I really feel that, in nature and and the natural world around me, I feel the most connected to my soul and my spirit. I feel like with everyone, if they get connected to the earth and to things that grow, they can also get connected to their own spirits and their own nature more. Plants are my teachers. Cats are my teachers. Animals are my teachers. I don't know if you could see, but I have a lot of plants around me.
OB: I was thinking it would be so fun if we could just take the computer, and I just like to sweep through and show Cece some of the things in the place.
I would love to see. That was the first thing I noticed when you got on the call— how beautiful your space is.
At this point in the interview, Oren proceeded to show me around Jennifer’s space, pointing out trinkets and treasures of all sorts. There was a plethora of beautifully taken care of plants, bookshelves that seem to reach the ceiling, treasures from the sea such as shells, sea glass, and driftwood, dried flowers, antlers, so many other beautiful items. Oren proceeded to tell me about the cats, though in his words, “the cats just come when they come.” Seems about right.
I love seeing all the seashells, though. I grew up going to the Oregon Coast, and I've always been a lover of all the little sea treasures, anything that you can find by the water.
OB: If I go to the beach with Jennifer, I mean, she's like this in general. She's very gather-y. It just turns into, I mean, either you're harvesting stones and seashells from the beach with Jennifer, or you're standing around while she harvests stones and seashells.
JC: I cook a lot, and I make little potions with herbs and things that I grow.
I love that. Your home is so, I mean, I’ve said this probably three times, but your home is beautiful, and I can definitely see the reflection of you and all of the plants and all of the beautiful little things.
Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
I'm going to move on to my next question. I've read that you guys love Billie Holiday, and that really warmed my heart because I also have a deep, deep love for Billie Holiday. That's another reason I felt so called towards you. She's a wonderful influence and such a wonderful soul, and I'm wondering how your music has been inspired by her or how you guys people have been inspired by her and just the ways that she's kind of played into your lives.
JC: Well, do you wanna answer that, Oren?
OB: I'll just say for myself, she's definitely my favorite singer.
JC: She's never squandered a a moment. Every moment is true, and it's not about performance where a lot of people are drawn to, like, okay. ‘I hit a perfect ball with a perfect angle, and it scored a 10.’ It's not about that. It's about something that transcends anything that could ever be measured because it's infinite. I feel like what she does is transcend, and that's the kind of art that I'm interested in in, everything that can can transcend.
OB: I love what you said. You really got me with ‘she never squandered a moment.’ That's such a such a gorgeous observation. It's pretty hard to add much to that. That's a peerless remark. There's the transcendent side of Billie Holiday, and then there's also the particulars of of Billie Holiday. There's her way of channeling mid-century African American music/jazz slash/the sounds of New Orleans, if you wanna use Nicholas Peyton's, term because Nicholas Peyton doesn't like to use the word jazz. He just says New Orleans music, which is an incredibly illuminating way of looking at at the music that people call jazz. The whole definition of jazz has been so fraught for, like, sixty whatever years. These are the sounds that came from this town and spread out all over all over the world.
You hear the historicity of jazz in what she's doing, and so she connects you powerfully to this essential cultural stream like Louis Armstrong does, like Lester Young does, like, you know, other musicians that she collaborated with. When you put your hand into the water of Billie Holiday, you're putting your hand in the water of Louis Armstrong and Lester Young and Count Basie and Teddy Wilson and all these other kind of people. You've got pure jazz running through your fingers. That's just gold.
Billie Holiday would be our at the top of our pantheon any way you look at it, but also she's bringing something. The thing that she specifically brings, it's not what Sappho brings. It's neither better nor worse, but it just happens to be jazz. And jazz is awesome. New Orleans music is awesome.
JC: Hey, I love Sappho!
OB: I know, and Sappho's poetry is awesome.
That's such a beautiful answer. I feel like we have a lot in common, so I feel really connected with your answers. Thank you for giving such a beautiful one for that.
To me, your music has a very David Lynchian sound, and I was curious if you’re into his films at all or if that was any source of inspiration for you.
JC: I don't know that he was a source of inspiration, but I definitely love David Lynch and and the worlds that he created. I feel like we're kindred spirits in a lot of ways, and in some ways, perhaps not. There's also a kind of, I don't wanna say kitsch, but he has a very particular stylized aesthetic with some things, we aren't that stylized in terms of a kitsch aesthetic.
But in terms of embracing the mystery and having a sense of humor and also being sensual and, you know, mysterious… Absolutely. And a little scary.
Last night I was listening through What The Thunder Said, and thinking like, wow. This would fit so well in one of his films or something David Lynch adjacent. It kind of feels like something you'd listen to sitting in a jazz bar, which, you know, makes sense knowing the Billie Holiday connections and your love for jazz.
JC: I feel like we were kind of ships in the night because we were making things around the same time, and I knew Eraserhead first and loved that. Then David Lynch was kind of off of my radar for a while. Then, people brought to attention the Twin Peaks thing to us, and they were like, hey. People started telling us we’re very Twin Peaks, and we hadn’t seen it yet. So I think we were parallel ships in the night in that kind of experience, maybe in the next life.
I recently watched Twin Peaks for the first time so that was definitely on my mind with certain songs.
I’d like to ask about your most recent project, 2024’s What the Thunder Said, in particular “This World is Just a World.” That song resonated with me a lot because over the past few years, as I’ve gotten older, the realization that all things are temporary has felt heavier. I’m curious what that song means to you, and if it’s similar to my interpretation, how are you able to channel that realization? Is it less despair about the impermanent state of the world and just quiet acknowledgement that all things have an end?
JC: All of the above absolutely resonate through the song. I'm glad the song spoke to you. On a more personal note, the song spun itself from the aftershock and ache of a friend's death by suicide. Though you may not have closure, nor said goodbye, there is the acknowledgement that all things are temporary, and this world we are in now, is only one of an infinite array, each perhaps just as valid as this one.
You mentioned Sappho, Billie Holiday, Greek mythology, and more as things you love. Is there other media—books, music, movies, etc—that you feel inspired by? Or that you love so deeply that it naturally makes its way into your music?
JC: If I were to list all the artworks, books, music, plays, poems, films, that I love, we could be here endlessly. I love libraries, and I always have, I encourage everyone to keep an up to date library card; I have fears of something so elementary being in jeopardy. And beyond media, above all there is nature — my greatest inspiration — wildlife, trees, plants, the seas, animals big and small… All of that makes its way into the songs.
You’ve played a few live shows recently, I’m curious how those went. Are there any songs you look forward to playing for an audience most
OB: These recent concerts in California were so great. We had gone out in January just as the LA wildfires broke out and flew home empty-handed, shaken and sad. It took months to re-plan and get back and it was a joy to reconnect after those tragedies. But still it is true: Global Warming is real and extreme weather events and natural disasters aren’t going away.
You mentioned that we love nature. Part of that is crying over what it’s come to. You can hear that in songs like “We’re Losing Her,” which is about the oceans, and other songs of ours as well.
We adore sharing music live with our beautiful audience and anyone who comes with an open heart. There are always lots of technical and logistical challenges and one can always find places to improve. But, none of that matters; it’s just as Willie Nelson said, “the life I love is making music with my friends, and I can’t wait to get on the road again”!
Personally, I always want to play the newest songs, whatever is hot off the grill.
Lastly, is there anything upcoming you’d like to talk about?
JC: Starting in late October and through late November we will present a series of special concerts in New York, commemorating our 30th year as a band! We will also be re-issuing some of our earlier albums for the first time on vinyl.
I really, really appreciate your time and your thought out answers.
And we appreciate you wanting to take a deep dive on the music.
