"It must seem pretty odd to people that I made this record about South Africa in my apartment in Berlin. But I guess it took me moving away from home to see South Africa with fresh eyes. People I met here in Germany were asking me questions about my homeland that I couldn't adequately answer and this awareness of my own ignorance inspired me to read up about South African history. And then the things I read inspired me to write," explained Cheri MacNeil, the voice of Dear Reader.
She continued: "Of course, it was something I undertook with a certain amount of anxiety, nervous that I would inevitably get it wrong, that I would offend people. Ultimately, though, this work is intensely personal. It's something I did for myself - a grappling with my sense of rootlessness and the guilt feelings that I carry around. These are not things that can be solved with a pop record, but I guess it's a start."
It's a brave artist who seeks to take as inspiration one of the most complex and controversial aspects of recent international history, but this is - at least in part - what Cheri MacNeil has chosen to do with her third album. It's not the only challenge that she's accepted, however, and "Rivonia" is a testament to what can happen when musicians steps out of their comfort zone to pursue unfamiliar goals, to push themselves to do things that they've never done before - both on a musical and a personal level - and trust in the results.
Now based in Berlin, Germany, MacNeil this time took matters into her own hands, conceiving her third album's themes and techniques in advance, writing and meticulously arranging each song independently before she even reached the studio. It was the first occasion on which she'd worked without a producer - an undeniably ambitious decision - and for a long time she kept the album a secret from even her closest friends, nervous that she might fall short of her goals. But the results are an astonishing artistic and individual leap forward for her, a vindicating culmination of all that she's learned since she started the first incarnation of Dear Reader - then known as Harris Tweed - back in 2006.
After the dense textures of 2010's Brent Knopf-helmed "Idealistic Animals", MacNeil chose to focus on a few key elements - voice, piano and percussion - and recorded much of the album in her own apartment, bringing in friends to perform the parts she'd constructed alone with little more than her voice. At times she'd set up elsewhere: Calexico's trumpet player Martin Wenk was recorded in his rehearsal studio, The Tindersticks' drummer Earl Harvin laid down his tracks in a small studio on a busy street near where she lives, and the woodwinds were performed by her friend Friedrich Brückner and his parents at their home in Leipzig, also the setting for the choral performance with which the album culminates. Essentially, however, "Rivonia" found MacNeil almost singlehandedly spearheading the entire endeavour until she finally handed the recordings over to be mixed by Eli Crews, whose work for Tuneyards, Deerhoof and Why? she admired.
Unlike other records inspired by South Africa, Dear Reader's "Rivonia" banishes broad, crowd-pleasing political strokes in favour of a specifically human outlook. At times troubling, at times deeply moving, the album is unafraid of raising more questions than it answers and achieves this within the context of a collection of magical, dramatic, heartfelt songs.
