Uh Huh Her and The Sedated Dance

Camila Grey discusses the band’s evolution, electronic nature—and exigency.

Electro-pop duo “Uh Huh Her” takes its name from the title of PJ Harvey’s 2006 LP. It’s an act of appropriation that has had minimal bearing on the group’s actual stylistic choices. The music of UHH is upbeat, hook-based, and lacks the warped melancholy that saturates Harvey’s music. 

The band, which plays the House of Blues Friday, is composed of Leisha Hailey, formerly of Showtime’s The L Word and alt-pop group The Murmurs, and Camila Grey of Mellowdrone and Big Black Delta. They’re an interesting study in what is an often fraught intersection between artistry and fame, a fact reflected in the band’s swift popularity-by-osmosis—and the mentality with which Hailey and Grey treat Hailey’s The L Word celebrity in general.

Formed in January 2007, during filming of The L Word’s final seasons, UHH attracts a mixed audience of L Word devotees and music purists familiar with Hailey’s and Grey’s combined musical acumen. The band is still negotiating the disjunction. Grey, who has worked with everyone from Dr. Dre to Busta Rhymes, phoned in while on tour in Des Moines, Iowa to talk about Uh Huh Her’s new album, touring without label backing, and the band’s identity, past and present. 

There’s definitely more of an electronic vibe in UHH’s new album, Future Souls. Why did you go that route with this one?

That was where we started when we formed in 2007; that’s the tip we were on. [Electronic music] wasn’t as popular back then, but now that it has become popular, we want to revisit it and see where we would fit into that again. And it’s the music I listen to on a daily basis anyway.  

Other than that I would say it’s a little more philosophical in nature. A little more existential crisis in nature [laughs]. It’s like the older I get, the more questions I have. The content, lyrically-speaking, is a little more perplexing and different from what we’ve done in the past--lovey-dovey, defiant kind of stuff. 

So do you write lyrics first?

I’m a composer first. I always want to make the sound and then think of what I want to say over it. That's the hardest part for me because lyrics don’t come naturally for me. I’m always struggling. Leisha’s more lyricist-based; I think it comes a little easier to her. That was the hardest part for me this record, was “What am I going to say?” I speak with music. If it was up to me, I would write instrumental music all day [laughs]. Leisha keeps saying I should make spa music on the side.

You could. 

Hey man, why not? It’d be the best spa music ever [laughs].

Does this album reflect where you want to be aesthetic-wise? Or are you going for something where the sound evolves radically from album to album? 

I think that’s what we’ve done. We tried to switch it up between Nocturnes and Black and Blue. I constantly want to do something different. I think if we didn’t we would get bored.

What is the origin of the name “Future Souls" for the album? 

Again, it’s philosophical in nature. I’m constantly plagued with the question of existence and having crises about what the hell we’re all doing here. And so I wanted to speak to that in a way. The title suggests the questions of “What are we all doing here?” “Where are we going?” I feel like a lot more people are becoming conscious of those questions.

And not in the old school way of God and this and that. I think people are trying to dig into that question without religious views in mind. And the more we find out about Earth through science, more people are leaving that old school way of thinking behind and trying to decipher new ways of thinking about it. So that’s where I was at with all this. And that’s where I’ve been for a while, I just never talked about it. And I was raised in a very religious family, and that’s probably why these questions are coming to pass.

Is Leisha that way too?

No, it’s just me. I’m the weird one. You should hear the conversations I have with my friends. It’s a problem. [laughs]

I hesitate to say that this album is more “dance-y"--

It is more dance-y. It’s sedated dance, or that’s how we like to describe it.

That’s an interesting disjunction between the “sedated dance” element and the “philosophical” lyrics.

[laughs] Yeah, it’s like “What is happening to Uh Huh Her?” Sedated, philosophical dance.

Were you listening to anyone in particular during the writing process?

I think the references to Depeche Mode are pretty obvious. I love them; they’re my favorite. I listen to a lot of Pet Shop Boys and The Knife. I’ve been loving Phantogram’s new album.  And yeah all that definitely seeps in to the music, whether you want to admit or not. If you think about it, we’re all little sponges that go around absorbing everything.

Would you say the recording process was pretty collaborative for this album?

Yeah, this time around we wanted to involve more people. We still did it on our own, producing-wise. But we got a couple more co-writers in this time around, just to kind of get new blood in. So with songs like “Nothing Without your Love” we brought in Che Pope, and he’s this amazing hip-hop guy I used to work with when I worked with Dr. Dre. It’s such a random song; it’s one of our crazier songs. That’s what we wanted, we wanted to make splashes here and there but keeping the sound that we’ve always had.

How has it been recording and touring without label backing this time?

[laughs] It’s called AmEx. We have a lot of points and we’ll probably go on a really awesome vacation afterwards [laughs]. It’s a double edged sword, it really is. We loved having a supportive label but at the same time I love the fact that we’re  very informed and we know every dollar that’s spent and every dollar that comes back. We know where our money’s going and how we’re making it. It’s do-able and I think a lot of people should know that. When you don’t have a label, you really have to be business-minded and I think a lot of artists are naïve to that side of things. Knowing that we can do this without a label has been empowering. 

Are you still ambivalent about your band name?

[laughs] Ambivalence is a good word. Apathy is another good word. [laughs] What’s in a name? Everything and nothing at all. 

You were both involved in a lot of different music projects before UHH.

A lot of stuff I’ve done has just been playing other people’s music and being a hired gun. This was kind of an attempt to get the little melodies in my head out, and I think the same for Leisha too. For Leisha, she’s getting into another genre because the band she was in before was more pop, folk-rock driven.

We never intended on getting signed. When we got together, we started writing songs and then six months later we were signed. And then a month after that we were playing like sold out shows at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. It happened really quickly and we were both like, “What the fuck is going on?” We had no idea. And a lot of that was L Word fans. I think we started out with a bang, and now we’re having to constantly catch up. We didn’t start in the way that most bands start where you work your way up; you play the shows not in front of thousands of people and you make your mistakes and you grow. We had to grow and make our mistakes in front of 2,000 people every night. It’s a princess problem, for sure. 

Has The L Word thing subsided at all?

[laughs] No. At this point it’s pretty 50/50. It’s funny because the true music fans will actually heckle The L Word fans for screaming L Word things. And they get in little fights. It’s pretty funny. They’ll be like, “Shut Up! It’s not Alice, it’s Leisha!” We’ve seen fights happen [laughs]. From our point of view, we’re happy people are there, whether they’re L Word fans or not.