With apologies once again to Stephen Colbert, this is the second installment of Terrorbird's tragically sporadic "Better Know A..." series. Read the first installment with Kay from Kanine Records here.

This time around we talk to Mirah just as the venerable Kill Rock Stars releases her collaboration with Thao Nguyen of the Get Down Stay Down, the appropriatly titled Thao + Mirah. Read on to find out about their recording process, their involvement with social advocacy groups, and the dynamics of navigating social media as an artist.

Stream Thao + Mirah via NPR First Listen

Terrorbird: You've toured with Thao before & the two of you frequently combine forces on stage or perform each other's songs when on the road together. How did that experience influence the recording of Thao + Mirah?

Mirah: It helped us to get to know each other as musicians and as songwriters and to be able to track each other's energies and strength and weaknesses. She's an awesome guitar player and good at improvising on guitar and figuring out parts, so getting to know that part of her musically on tour confirmed that that was an aspect I'd want to draw on in the studio. We didn't write the individual songs together, except for one which was a total collaboration between Thao, [producer] Merrill [Garbus] & I. In every other case, we brought our own songs. It's almost more intimate to do it that way... it was like bringing our dreams into the naked gaze of the other and having to look at them in different way because of being so immediately visible rather than only existing in our own dreamworlds.  

What kind of ideas, both sonic & thematic, did you bring with you to the Thao + Mirah sessions?

I have a very adventuresome spirit in the studio. I have very practical parts of my personality, and very fantastical parts of my personality and I try to bring both of those to the studio. I've been making records for longer, so I feel like I brought a lot of experience.   My own albums tend to sound very distinct from song to song, I tend not to use the same mic set up or same instrumentation or even the same voice for each track.  I like to give each song room to have its own character and feel compelled to confirm and illuminate those distinct characters rather than homogenized them. So hopefully I brought those things as strengths to this project.

Almost all the songs had basic guitar parts worked out and all the vocal melodies and some back-up vocal ideas before we went into the studio. The two songs that were the least fleshed out were "Likeable Man" [Thao's song] for which she had some pretty strongly conceived of ideas, and "Rubies & Rocks." For "Rubies & Rocks" I had a lot of descriptive ideas, but it's not a guitar-based song, so I only had the ideas as descriptions rather than as parts worked out.  

I think that we both approached making the album in a similar way as we've each approached songwriting before; which is simply to spend time alone with our instruments.  When I give myself that time alone, something is able to be born which has a contemporary reference to my own life and experience and what I see in the world around me, something which has an intention to be communicated.  Songwriting is very much like dreaming, or daydreaming, or lucid dreaming.  

"Hallelujah" is one of the songs that came out which isn't about my personal experiences within relationships with others or myself, it has more of a broad reach.  While writing it I was thinking about hardworking people and how they often don't get the recognition or even the material support for living that they need, and about the feeling of not being able to keep enough food on the table or make enough money to take care of your family, the feeling of barely being able to keep your head above the water.  There are a lot of different themes that show up on the record but it wasn't approached as a concept album.

Both of you are heavily involved with Air Traffic Control. How did you initially get involved with the organization?

I met them through Thao.  She's lived in San Francisco a few years longer than I have and so has had that many more years to become involved with musicians and activists here.   I'm not sure how she fist met the ATC team, but she had done the New Orleans retreat last year, when we were first getting to know each other.   So I met the three women who run ATC because of meeting Thao and becoming her friend and musical collaborator. It was in the same way I got involved with K Records, Olympia being a small town and all roads leading to the same friendly place. SF is just a big small town so it seems pretty natural the way that we found each other.

What are some of the issues you're most interested in addressing through your involvement with ATC?

We kind of had to narrow down the focus in terms of what ATC could help us accomplish through their involvement with us in promoting the record. Obviously there are many issues we both feel strongly about. I'm super engaged with environmental issues and policies and practices and have a long background in anti-nuclear and anti-war activism.  But we had to choose one so we chose an issue about which both Thao and I feel very strongly which is supporting local and international women's and children's organizations and domestic violence shelters.  We're particularly inspired by organizations which address sexual violence and childhood sexual abuse from a preventative stand-point. 

How will ATC be involved with your upcoming tour in support of Thao + Mirah?

They provide support services to musicians to do their own advocacy work by being a logistical support team for actively raising money and awareness about the social issues that each band that they work with has chosen to focus on.  They basically set up the container for fundraising, by helping to arrange the ticket surcharge and then helping to distribute those funds back to community organizations in the towns where we collected the money. That stuff can be so complicated to keep track of that it makes it not an option when you also have to worry about rehearsing your band, and getting yourself fed and to the next venue and all the other things involved with being a touring musician. They can help set up community service days when we have a day off on tour, if we have a day off.  They are a great group of people, super dedicated and motivated and inspiring, and their whole goal is to help us make our jobs into the most meaningful jobs they can be.    

Kill Rock Stars will be releasing Thao + Mirah as a one-off. This isn't the first time you've contributed to one-off recordings... what are some of the lesser known projects you've performed on or with that you're proud of?

The most elaborate project was a K Records release with Spectratone Intl who were sort of like the next generation of The Black Cat Orchestra, who I also worked with as that incarnation, on an anti-war themed covers album. Share This Place is the only concept album project I've done. We chose a theme, which was insects, and I did a lot of research and read a lot of books and articles and utilized my studies to write the songs. It was also the most thoroughly collaborative in terms of the music. Lori & Kyle would send me little snippets of a cello part of a song they were working on and I would see what I could write to it. I was the librettist but I could say things like 'oh this part needs to be twice as long', or 'it needs a third part' and they would oblige.  I think that's the collaboration I'm most proud of, because of how it really stretched me as a songwriter.  I was writing songs not as just me... I was writing as a cicada, as a fly.  It gave me a lot of insight into the possibilities of my creative process.  

Joyride was pretty interesting to work on, because it was such a different capacity of work. I was mostly the project producer, the person behind the computer keyboard, mostly just communicating with people about ideas. I didn't sit down in the studio with the re-mixers, half of them I still have never met.  I think the two biggest benefits I gained from that project were an appreciation for letting go of control and that the experience of hearing my songs re-contextualized helped me to know my songs better, or know them in a different way. They're still my songs, but they're wearing different clothes. And that's a real new experience for someone who has such an intimate relationship with her songs.

Bryce Kasson is a dear old friend of mine who's been involved in some capacity on almost every thing I've done, and he is part of the two person team that created "The Garden." 

Also, my relationship with Phil Elverum was crucially important in my beginning stages of becoming a recording artist. I feel like I could have become a songwriter totally in my own right, but being able to identify as a recording artist and beginning my process of becoming an adventuresome person in the studio is very much related to Phil. I was inspired by him from the moment we first met.  He was just a  kid, he was like 18, and he had these tapes he had been working on as The Microphones. Some of my earliest recordings I made as presents for him, because I was so enthusiastic about what he was doing.  Even though he's younger it was kind of like having an older brother and looking up to him and wanting to do what he was doing. That's the only reason I joined the crew team in high school... Lord knows I wasn't a good coxswain!   But my brother had been on the crew team and I wanted to be just like my brother.

What draws you to work on some of these collaborative projects rather than deciding to sit down and record another solo project?

It keeps me tuned up as a person. It helps get me out of grooves. I can be very habitual, and I recognize that about myself, and I don't need to emphasize it, so when I work collaboratively it's an automatic jostling of those tendencies, and that feels healthy, keeps things flowing. Plus, meeting people through music and within music is a really beautiful way to connect. The retreat in New Orleans was amazing because I learned so much, and had this incredible opportunity to get to know the musical and cultural heritage of the city... but truly the highlight was being with those people- those on the retreat with me and all the amazing folks we met.  I was about ready to move there by the end of our three days together.  I fall in love pretty quick, especially when there's music involved.

You have a long history with K Records. How has this relationship evolved over time?

K is like my family. I have a really close personal relationship with everyone who works there.  They're literally like my family, since my entire 20s were pretty much spent in Olympia and that was such an incredibly formative decade, especially musically.  K and all my people at K are wrapped into my history, we're wrapped within each other. They've always been incredibly supportive and super excited about all of my ideas and projects and I feel very lucky to have had that. In the last couple years though I've felt a change coming on,  like it's time to individuate. It seems like a good season for growth, a time to seek out some new relationships and see what comes of those, just the same I always seek out musical collaborations. Working with different people brings out different points of my personality, and musical personality. It feels like if I could have the opportunity to work with a different label and more musicians in different places in the US or the world, it will only serve to enrich me and my music, and that's why I'm alive, so that's where I'm headed, totally wide open.  

You recently opened a Twitter account. What is the biggest challenge the internet & social media presents to you as an artist?

Distinguishing between public and private parts of me that wish to be known, and the parts of me which I would prefer to remain not widely known by strangers. I'm a really open person, and so it's almost a feeling of fear or danger getting involved with social networking, because of the possibility of non-awareness of the presence of an audience.  Kind of like accidentally going outside naked because you're so comfortable being naked but then all your neighbors are staring at you wondering why you're standing in your front yard naked and you also are wondering how it has come to be that you are standing in your front yard naked.   

My job inherently involves reaching into public realms from a very personal level, people listen to my music and feel like they know me intimately. In a certain way, they do. But it's still appropriate to maintain certain boundaries.  I feel like the world of social networking for a band  like me where the band is myself the individual presents a challenge for maintaining the band entity as something separate from me as a person. Inside of myself I don't differentiate that much, but for the sake of privacy and my own psychic space it's important to keep the two distinct.  I would say that social networking does not make that easy, but I'm feeling confident I can do it.   I want to try to connect to people and be just myself by myself at the same time. Since my music is very personal, and the way that I sing that has such an intimate quality about it, I've already made the unconscious choice to draw people in towards me, so I don't want to be completely unavailable in other ways.  Ideally, social networking will help rather than hinder my goal of helping people have access to me, yet also be able to respectfully differentiate between Mirah the band and Mirah the person.

The factor which has finally pushed me into the realm of social networking though is seeing the role that social networking sites, most notably twitter, have taken in revolutionary social movements in the last few years and particularly in the last few months all over North Africa and the Middle East.   Being able to view Facebook and Twitter as powerful tools for social change rather than as the weird space-out drug that suddenly turns all its users into bullies and brats has radically altered my whole take on them.