A condenser mic is enough to amplify Shara Worden's wineglass arrangements onstage.
Worden, magical-realism composer/arranger of the band My Brightest Diamond, will bring her string-based music to the Cooperage on Sunday.
"I do all the arranging, and I tell everybody what to do," she said. "There's no improvising in the Brightest Diamond band. I have an anti-jam policy. I definitely know when something is amiss. To me, it is important that what I wrote is what I meant, but it's not important in a performance if somebody messes up. It's really the feeling that's much more important."
The tour coincides with the release of her album A Thousand Shark's Teeth. Clare and the Reasons, also from New York, will open the show.
For this tour, Worden has amassed a violin, viola, cello, kids' music toys, musical saws, ukuleles and kalimbas. She also uses puppets during the show.
"The string players turn into puppeteers on the last song," Worden said. "And there's a lot of ladders and ascension into the heavens that happens in the puppet show."
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Her major non-musical influences for the album were painter Anselm Kiefer and photographer Robert ParkeHarrison, who graduated from UNM's photography program.
The artists' vast landscapes, charged with emotion and metaphor, helped Worden conceptualize the songs on A Thousand Shark's Teeth, she said.
"I wanted there to be songs that were much more Earth-focused and some that were more airy and celestially sounding and special, so the wooden instruments and bassoons and kalimbas and bass clarinets were the ones that sort of had the elements of life that are kind of your menial tasks," she said. "And (the songs) 'Diamond' and 'Pluto's Moon' are more about that desire to reach the unknown. Kiefer says we have the desire to touch the infinite, and stars have represented that for mankind for a really long time. So for that, instruments with hair - harps and strings - and the horns tend to take more of a prominent role on those songs, the celestial ones."
Worden used to work with songwriter Sufjan Stevens and sang on his album Illinois.
"It was quite a long time ago now, but I toured with him, gosh, maybe it's been almost four years now," Worden said. "Katrina Kiedis, she sang background with me as well on Illinois, and she just also happens to make my costumes for this tour."
Worden flashes her flair for theater between songs with storytelling, and she illustrates for the audience how her songs came into being.
"We have a puppet who looks like me - she catches the wing of a bird and flies up to space, and she picks flowers from the moon, and a ladder transports her back down to Earth to, we call him, Conehead Man," she said. "It's some guy with a mustache. He actually dies. The white birds come to carry him away. So he floats up into the clouds.. It's this little love story in a way, but kind of using all those same images of flight and sailing through the space and having an adventure and relinquishing the ones you love in death and being at peace with that."
