Courtyard Concert Series | Fiawna Forté

Fiawna Forté on overcoming obstacles and bringing to life the music in her head

Tulsa singer-songwriter Fiawna Forté has been a musical force of nature since before she could hold a guitar. She wrote her first song when she was a toddler, and hardly a day has since passed that she hasn’t spent creating music.

Her first full-length album, “Transitus,” was released in 2010 and acclaimed for its primal, rock-infused power. For her sophomore effort, “mi-MOH-suh-pud-EE-kuh: A Lo-Fi Album,” Forté toned down her signature ferocity in favor of a more intimate, haunting, stripped-down vibe.

Forté visited The Tulsa Voice headquarters to regale us with a selection of tracks from the record as part of our ongoing Courtyard Concert Series. We took that opportunity to corner her for a chat about the album, the record label she started with husband Phillip Hanewinkel, and the virtue of getting back to basics.

The Tulsa Voice: The new album is called “mi-MOH-suh-pud-EE-kuh.” Where does that come from?

Fiawna Forté: It’s actually a plant. The word is Latin. I’m kind of a Latin freak. I don’t know why.  “Transitus” was Latin, too. The word means “transition.”

TTV: I understand the album was recorded with very minimal equipment and technology.

FF: Yes, very lo-fi. There were no computers involved. Phillip and I have been trying to do more of that. In fact, we’re doing a side project called “Nine and Ten” where we’re going to be recording straight onto tape. Basically, just because it’s fun. It’s not for any pretentious reason. It’s just interesting to try to do things the old-school way.

When you’re recording onto tape, you take it a little more seriously, because you can’t just hit “erase.” It’s actually permanently there. You can tape over it, but then the quality is diminished. For some reason it just feels more valuable when you’re recording on tape than when you’re using a computer.

This album, I did everything myself. I played everything, wrote everything, and recorded it. It was all just because I wanted to record some songs. It wasn’t supposed to be an album, to be honest.

TTV: Why not?

FF: Well, I had a pretty hard year. I won’t go into the details, but I had some physical hardships and basically had to sit on the couch for weeks. It made me really think about things a lot.

One day it started snowing, and something about snow really makes me want to write. So every morning I’d get up about 5 and just start writing and playing. And I’d go all day. For about five months, that’s just what I did. At the end of it, I had 16 tracks, and Phillip said, “This has to be an album. You have to release it.”

I’m still a little uneasy about it. A producer may hear it and wonder what I was thinking, but it was something that was just for fun, and I wanted people to hear what came out of it. 

Phillip’s got me in the habit of recording myself whenever I’m playing around. I write songs all the time. I probably write five a day. Some of them are really bad. Some of them are OK. And some turn into something that I actually want to put out. 

But with these songs it got tricky. I like to consider myself a producer in some ways, but I’ll hear things in my head that I don’t have. So I’ll have to kind of make up that sound with guitars and organs and things. I’d hear a trumpet or a trombone in my head, and want to put it on there, but I’d have to make it up, try to recreate the sound in my head.

TTV: How did Foe-Fum Records come about?

FF: Because of certain things I’ve seen in my life, I never wanted to be screwed over by anybody. I don’t want anybody to own my image or what I do. If I do it, I want to know that I did it.

Even if it’s a mistake, I want to know I made that mistake. It’s not because someone else tried to warp something of mine into something they wanted.

So even as a kid I always knew that I wanted to be in control of what I did. I’ve walked away from probably 15 different offers to sign deals— some kind of big deals—simply because I knew that I wanted to do things my way. And people can do that. It is possible.

So Phillip and I started buying up equipment to record our new albums, and started thinking about the future and what we wanted to do with our lives. We thought, well, if we want to do what we want to do, why don’t we just start a label and put out our music ourselves?

People ask, who puts out your albums? Who represents you? Well, we do. Only us. And we like it that way.

mi-MOH-suh-pud-EE-kuh: A Lo-Fi Album // Foe-Fum Records

Pick up a copy of the new record at Ida Red or Dwelling Spaces, and follow Fiawna Forté on Facebook and Twitter for news on upcoming shows—including the Center of the Universe Festival.