Keren Ann on Her Latest Album Nolita

Songs from Nolita:

“Greatest You Can Find”
“Chelsea Burns”

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Is Café Gitane part of your “Nolita”?It is. The owner and his wife happen to be friends of mine. In Paris, you have the café just outside your house where you have an espresso before you go out and do anything; another where you have a coffee in the afternoon. It’s a habit, and I needed to find one of my own little habits around here.

When you were in Paris working on Nolita, did you keep a special place in your mind for New York?I wrote most of Nolita in New York, but my recording studio is in Paris. There’s a mood to New York, but there’s also a mood to Paris. I’m attached to many, many things about Paris. It has its own beauty, and it has its own bitterness, just like New York. You’re crazy about it, but it can drive you nuts. But when you’re away from New York you can’t stop thinking about New York, you long for New York. It’s like that for me when I go back to Paris.Some critics have said that Nolita is about “dysfunctional relationships.” Specifically, I’m thinking about songs like “Chelsea Burns.” Would you agree? Not [attaching feelings of] anger or loss to a partner, but instead [attaching it to] a place is something very feminine to do, I think. You get attached to places and you can burn them up if you’ve experienced love there. Like my character Alice [from the song] was in love with a rock star in the ’70s. Lost love is something I’m very familiar with: Not because I’ve been tortured by love, but people in my profession constantly live in a world of goodbyes; a world of getting attached and leaving. Alice’s love was on the road, she was the one left behind. And in my case, it’s the opposite.

How have goodbyes contributed to your songwriting? The people I’ve had to leave behind inspire me to carry things along with me. You want love to be simple and domestic, but when a relationship is based on a couple of days here, a week there, love can’t be simple. Every time you meet, love is ephemeral. It’s the life of sailors.