Indie composer talks musical relationships, boasts lyrical variety

Listen to "Inside a Boy"

If diamonds are a girl's best friend, My Brightest Diamond is a woman's.

"Someone said to me this week that they felt like, seeing the show, they had come into a sanctuary," said Shara Worden, the passion behind MBD, in a recent interview. "That they could just kind of be who they were in that space. That was pretty amazing to me."

Like many women, the musician has faced her share of discrimination for being female, but just as her namesake gem reflects light, she's learned to brush away negativity like a fleeting shadow.

"It was extremely difficult for me when I was very young," she said. "I had some really horrible things people said because I was a girl. 'You're just a girl, you just don't know enough,' 'You must be a folk singer - there's a million girls that do exactly what you do.'

"At the time, you know, I took them and was really angry about that. I think my early band, AwRY, was so much about trying to prove how I could be more complicated or more intense or more sophisticated or something, and ... My Brightest Diamond was kind of coming to that image and wanting to let go of that ideal, that I needed to be avant-garde and needed to be pushing and needed to be left of center.

"Then you think, well, I can't be too concerned about it," she said. "I think it would weigh me down too much."

The singer, composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist ("everything from kalimbas and the ukelele and piano") creates operatic, haunting indie-pop music. It's the love child of the New York Philharmonic and Band of Horses with Pavarotti and Bowie kicking in a few gene sequences.

Lyrical themes include children's opera and fairy tales, like Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" and Antoine de Saint Exupéry's "The Little Prince," and more universal themes, including the physical universe - stars, planets, abstract reality - and "the investigation of intimacy."

"Someone very close to me died, and I think these records have been a way of me processing something too big," Worden said. "When you lose someone ... you begin grappling with these sort of bigger, universal ideas, because your understanding of your universe has been rocked.

"Trying to get at, in death, if the spirit moves to this transcendent place, what is that place? And I have a limited language, and I think so much of that has been trying to grapple with really big questions."

Whether or not to pursue music, however, was never a question. Worden comes from a long line of musicians, including a national accordion champion, classical organist and epiphone-playing traveling evangelist, and she herself studied opera at the University of North Texas.

However, Worden said she never felt pressured to follow in her family members' footsteps.

"I think, being musicians, they all knew how hard it was to live from being a musician," she said, "so in that sense, they almost were kind of, 'Really? Are you sure?'

"But all of the family is really, really supportive, and made a lot of sacrifices for me to be able to study."

Worden is currently on a national tour with full string accompaniment, but one of her first big projects was touring with Sufjan Stevens as part of his Michigan Militia and Illinoisemakers backup bands. In January, she toured with Stevens and close friend Annie Clark, alias St. Vincent, in Australia and Japan.

"We always joke we're each others' doppelgangers," she said with a laugh. "That was so fun, just for the two of us to be together and geek out. We hadn't really spend a lot of time together before, mostly through e-mail, so it was really cool to tour with her."

When preparing for a show, there's one thing in particular that gets Worden into character.

"My hair," she said instantly.

I commented on her often elaborate hairstyles, asking how long they took to create.

Only about five minutes, she said, laughing. "I've got it down. It's the easiest thing.

"But I think doing my hair is a part of my ritual for sure. I think that's why I like costuming, more like an old-fashioned 'putting on a show!' kind of attitude. Something about that helps you get into the spirit of what you're about to do."

And music is something Worden wants to keep doing for a long time.

She listed continually growing as a musician and "being in positive musical relationships" with inspiring musicians as central goals.

"Everything else sort of comes after that," she said. "I want to have a long career and do music for the rest of my life. That's my hope. But I could do that in my living room, you know? So I think I will."

Hilary Stohs-Krause is a senior news-editorial and Spanish major. She can be reached at hilarystohs-krause@dailynebraskan.com.