Interview: Luxury Skin

on embodying the human and the alien

What image evokes something both earth and alien, something completely natural but strange? For Juliet E. Gordon, skin–organ, armor, cultural obsession–came to mind. Her music is steeped in a feeling of uneasy sensuality, irresistible and dangerous, present in the name itself: Luxury Skin.

Juliet’s 2023 album It’s All Over is the result of her exploration of this complex relationship with the body and the self, the central theme of her work. To explain this concept, she invokes Francis Bacon’s theory that artists only ever have one real influence, around which all their art revolves in some way. Although embodiment, in both the physical and the personal senses, might seem more an ethos than an inspiration, she told me her music is a reflection of the idea that “anything is possible when you're really in your body.” She draws a continuum between the human and the alien, placing It’s All Over much closer to the human side–a record about falling in love with her now-husband, at the time of publishing.

It’s All Over (2023)

The humanistic angle seems to go hand in hand with the tenderness that generated this record, shrouding the songwriting in an air of softness. It also informed the production and instrumentation choices; Juliet describes the sonic styling as “five people in a room.” “I wanted this record to come from a place of love–sustaining and sustained love,” she tells me, rather seriously. Her frank attitude towards love as a stoic and rigorous concept worthy of careful artistic study, rather than the frivolous fatal flaw of pop music, is quite inspiring. She treats it with the respect owed to a muse.

This attitude fashioned It’s All Over into a much darker take on new love, which Gordon calls “socially acceptable temporary insanity.” She leans into that feeling, disguising traditional themes in off-kilter melodies that sound like they would be at home on the Twin Peaks soundtrack. Although she wanted to write the record in the midst of the experience, she treated love like a wild and capricious animal. “If you were to interrupt that to write a record about it, you’d be a psychopath,” she said.

Waiting to write the album invoked the more serious tone of a mature relationship. By that time, “you get a privileged look into the inner chambers of someone’s fucked up psyche, which ends up bonding you,” she states, “The song ‘Forest’ is about going deep in the mind of your partner, to a place they have hidden. They don’t remember, but you remember.” She also wrote songs specifically about those early butterflies and the more glorious parts of a nascent relationship. “Remember it, and honor it for what it was,” she says, with gravity but no wistfulness, “That access is what makes love.”

Juliet and band in the studio

While she “filled in with fiction”, Juliet wrote a mostly autobiographical record. Though the record is ostensibly about love and relationship, she also explores her personal embodiment in the idea of her legitimacy as an artist. “I wanted to be with someone who didn’t occlude me,” she admitted, citing past romances, “And I had the idea of someone who was not an artist. My partner is the most logical person I’ve ever met, he sees through to the easiest way to do something.” Musicianship, songwriting especially, does not always engender this obvious rationality; submerging oneself in the temporary insanity of new love again to write a record about it is a good example.

Juliet

Furthermore, embodiment is present on It’s All Over especially in Juliet’s newfound confidence in her sound, which became more focused than ever in Luxury Skin. “I thought that I needed to be everything for anyone to like me,” she remembers, “But interestingly, the more you try to do, the less distinct it ends up being, the less you get across.” Still, her influences are broad–Brechtian theatre, Debussy’s opera “Pelléas et Mélisande”, Nick Cave–and have distinct analogs in Luxury Skin’s sound. She traces her musicianship through musical theatre, bluegrass, and playing for parties of college kids: “My voice was a vessel of imitation.” It’s All Over is replete with moments of character vocals, especially on lead single “Vows”, but Juliet contends that these are all herself, true to her mission of authenticity in this project.

Juliet again :)

In that same vein, the vocals on the record are mixed towards the front, without any harmonies or doubling, giving the effect that Juliet is simultaneously at the center and on the outside of the sound. It’s fitting, as she is the center of the project, a director, arranger, lead singer, writer, and band leader. Juliet knew she did not want to play the bride in the music video for “Vows”, a spooky wedding romp shot at strange angles and in eerie lighting. As the pastor, she presides over the scene with cool authority, directing from within the image. The video references old Soviet wedding pictures and the Marilyn Manson video for “Get Your Gun.” 

I told her this style of cameo reminded me of Mitski’s recent video for “Bug Like an Angel.” Juliet emailed me a week after our interview to tell me she had watched it: “She's both characters—the crusty old drinker, both frail and belligerent, and then the narrator, watching with embarrassment, tenderness, and concern.” I see something similar in Luxury Skin: the human and the alien both present in the same body, in the same song.