The Quiet Life

Ida

by Peter Aaron and photographs by Fionn Reilly, May 27, 2008

It’s 1:10pm and your typically overbooked music editor is stressing while doing his best to maintain the speed limit en route to a scheduled 1pm sit-down with Daniel Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell, the core members of lineup-shifting indie outfit Ida at Woodstock’s famously busy eatery Oriole 9. Having conducted interviews in crowded restaurants before, this scribe is nervously dreading the prospect of once again struggling to maintain the conversation’s focus while tuning out the extraneous clatter of a bustling bistro.

He needn’t have worried. After a quick move to a center table, away from the one directly beneath the stereo speaker, the tension dissipates and the surrounding world melts away, barely registering as Littleton and Mitchell, both 39, discuss their past, their family, and their excellent band’s beautiful seventh album, Lovers Prayers (2008, Polyvinyl Record Co.). Ida, it seems, can find the quiet in any situation. A crucial quality for a group that came of age in the world capital of noise, New York City, to make some of the most brazenly soft and intensely moving sounds in indie rock.

“It’s true, we were pretty incongruous with most of the rock scene in New York. But we kind of liked it that way, being different,” muses guitarist and singer Littleton. “Our music is, I guess you’d say, a lot more pastoral. Liz and I are definitely attracted to more stripped-down stuff. We love to hear the space between the sounds, and I think our own music has actually gotten even more spare these last few years.”

Critics commonly chuck Ida in a ghetto they call sadcore, a subset also reserved for such non-Gotham acts as American Music Club, Red House Painters, Low, and the late Elliot Smith, varied artists who all happen to play poignant music at glacial tempos. Yet despite the often heartrending moods that Ida’s songs share with those of the above, Littleton and Mitchell’s music is out of place in this grouping, too, thanks in part to their referencing of traditional folk styles; over the years, the acoustic-based band has covered Bill Monroe, Leadbelly, the Carter Family, and other such immortals, a method mostly at odds with its supposed genre mates, who tend to be darker and less roots-conscious.