Interview with Sibyl Vane: “Our album Duchess is about family and being used but being yourself’

Pärnu, Estonia-based, indie rock band Sibyl Vane brought out their third album, ‘Duchess’, earlier this year, which takes a long hard look at family relationships and what lurks beneath.

‘When we started to work on ‘Duchess’, we kind of knew what we wanted to write about,’ said Helena Randlaht, Sibyl Vane’s frontwoman and guitarist. ‘Most of us have been brought up by one parent, so it’s about what that’s like and also accepting life as it is and being grateful for the life that we have. We tried to sound upbeat but some of the lyrics are a bit morbid!’

Sibyl Vane also comprises Heiko Leesment (bass) and Mark Kostrov (drums). The name itself is taken from the tragic actress by the same name in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ who kills herself after giving up her art for Dorian Gray, who subsequently loses interest in her, leaving her heartbroken.

‘It’s quite tragic and romantic,’ Randlaht said. ‘It was a mandatory book in my school and still one of my favorites when we started this band 10 years ago – we played in a punk bank together called John Stuart Mill before that – we wanted to have a real name, something cool and I thought of this story.’

Randlaht’s powerfully recognizable and unique voice – at once rocky, bluesy and warbling – lends itself well to their honest, often raw, storytelling. One of the standout tracks on the album is the haunting opening one, ‘Thousand Words’: ‘It’s special for us because it’s the first song that we wrote for the third album,’ she said. ‘It was the anchor song for us, so when we were working on other songs and something wasn’t quite working, this was the song we went back to, to stay focused on that sound.’

‘It’s about things that are left unsaid’

It’s also a deeply personal song for her: ‘Really, it’s about things that are left unsaid. ‘Thousand Words’ was written at a time when I was feeling a bit left out when it came to relationships and I think that shines through. It’s about a relationship I was in with a certain person and which ended.’ (The person in question is likely not aware of the song or that it is about them, she said.)

The lyrics back that up: ‘Check your soul, check your soul, fall in love, fall in love, some things you never say, stick with you ’til the end, some things you never say, say another thousand words, classic dreams to classy girls, say another thousand words, the pretty ones not the kind that hurt.’

Another song, ‘Go Baby Go’ was written about a friend of hers: ‘A lot of my friends are having kids and I was a bit jealous,’ she said. ‘I talked to my friend afterwards and she asked if it was about her, she’d wondered if it was. You know, I was surprised that she even heard that in the song but I told her that it was. She was worried she’d done something wrong (there is a reference in the song to the friend preferring her family to her friends and ‘ladies in their best years hunting dudes’). I told that that of course she hadn’t!’

‘S.O.M’ – or state of mind – is one of the strongest tracks on the album and has been a Sibyl Vane staple for more than a decade, Randlaht said: ‘It’s really funny because we’ve been travelling with it for many years,’ she said. ‘We wrote it before our first album (Love, Holy Water and TV, 2012. Their eponymous album came out in 2017.) but never recorded it. Somehow, we started playing it again and it felt like a good time to finally record it.’

Essentially, it is about ‘family relationships and being used by people close to you but being yourself’, she said, as the lyrics attest to: ‘Get over with that control, you smell like mouldy fruits and all, get up or lie down on the ground, your daughter ain’t a goldmine, put your finger on it, it can break her down, you creeped the love out of me, you’ve got colours, colours.’

They will release two singles from Duchess, ‘White Trash’ and ‘Love Department’, with accompanying music videos, around November this year.

Randlaht writes many of the songs but some are created together at rehearsals. ‘We like to do it old school,’ she laughed.’ We don’t use music software, although we have thought about using it. We just start jamming and build songs from there. We kind of like it that way.’

Estonia has a rich musical backdrop, producing artists such as Rita Ray, Anett, Trad Attack, Facelift Deer, Cathouse Radio and Smilers. Randlaht is a big fan of Estonian rock band HU and Metro Luminal: ‘They sing in Estonian and have an awesome singer and drummer, they’re so different to other bands and the music they play is mezmerizing,’ she said.

The country’s musical diversity is especially impressive, given that Estonia was annexed to the Soviet Union from 1940 to 1991, under which time western music was hard to come by. In fact, the so-called Singing Revolution in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from 1987 to 1991 – with spontaneous mass evening singing demonstrations – were instrumental in helping them towards the restoration of their independence in 1991.

‘We basically sang ourselves free of the Soviet occupation’

‘We have a big history of singing,’ Randlaht said. ‘We basically sang ourselves free of the Soviet occupation. It’s a really big thing to Estonians. We didn’t have that much western music available during the Soviet occupation. Afterwards, people started to discover bands like Guns ‘n’ Roses, which had been popular 10 years before. Even in the 1990s, a CD cost €20 but people were only earning around €40 a month. It was absolutely crazy! The positive thing that came out of it was that music piracy boomed [laughs] and people wanted to find a creative outlet. I think that’s where all the bands now come from. It’s quite romantic when you think about it.’

Sibyl Vane have strict rules when it comes to performing songs. ‘We have a specific way of adding songs to our repertoire,’ Randlaht said. ‘We have a strict rule that all of us have to love it. If someone doesn’t, we’ll try to fix that or try it differently another time but if that doesn’t work, we won’t use it.’

She also notes that some songs are more fun to play live, citing ‘Temper Tantrum’ from their second album. ‘It’s a bit more difficult for me vocally, because the vocal range is bigger but I really enjoy it.’

The band have been touring in Estonia, Latvia and Finland since July and will start a new tour this week that will run until early November. ‘They are starting to reintroduce some lockdown measures, so I hope we don’t have to cancel any shows,’ she said.

If Randlaht could collaborate with anyone, she’d go for someone ‘really, really out of my comfort zone’: ‘I don’t have anyone specific in mind but I’d want to do something very different, really bold. I’d want to surprise myself.’

She also loves how our interpretations of songs may not be remotely grounded in what they are really about. ‘I was listening to a song recently (Karnivool ‘All I Know’) and I think it was coloured by my mood. When I googled it afterwards, it wasn’t at all about what I thought it was about! Music is a universal language, I love that, but if you want to hear something in the lyrics, you hear it.’

(Photo from left to right: Mark, Helena and Heiko.)