Q&A: Macie Stewart Explores the Beauty of the In-Between on ‘When the Distance is Blue’

MusicQ&A

Mar 21

INTERVIEW

MACIE STEWART HAS ALWAYS BEEN DRAWN TO THE SPACES BETWEEN – the gaps in time, the distance between places, the feelings that exist just beyond words. On her newest album, When the Distance is Blue, the Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and songwriter transforms that fascination into a deeply immersive sonic journey. A collection of layered textures, field recordings, and intricate string arrangements, the album captures the quiet magic of transition, of movement, of the moments spent neither here nor there.

The album’s title comes from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, a book that meditates on distance and longing. For Stewart, that idea resonated deeply. “I realized that I wrote a song that has ‘when the distance is blue’ in the lyrics,” she says, recalling the process of naming an instrumental album. “It encapsulated the feeling of in-between—like when you're flying in a plane and you look out over the horizon, over all the clouds, the distance… it’s darker the farther away you get. You’re always drawn to go in there, or looking out over the ocean.”

That sense of being pulled toward the unknown is interlaced throughout the album, not just in its concept but in its construction. Stewart took recordings from opposite ends of the world—sometimes separated by years—and layered them together, creating sonic collages that bridge time and space. “I was taking recordings from opposite ends of the world and even two years apart and collaging them over each other, and giving them meaning together, even though they're from totally separate times and spaces,” she says. “It felt connected to me.”

Lead single “Spring Becomes You, Spring Becomes New” begins with a series of unmetered and searching prepared piano repetitions before blooming into a rhythmically pulsing waltz of ennui à la Margaret Leng Tan’s approach to the material of Cage or Crumb. Electronically enhanced sustaining notes merge with droning violins in a dense teapot upper register, then are slowly paired away to reveal the inner layer of consonance and comfort, as the metallic rhythms of the prepared piano are co-opted by pizzicato plucked strings. When the sound of the piano re-enters it’s in its natural, unprepared state and in service of a simple melody. “This piece reminds me of a cross country train ride through different sceneries and landscapes,” says Stewart. “It’s the feeling when you’re witnessing everything pass outside your window, knowing you may never set foot there.”

Stewart has always been a shape-shifter in music, from her work in avant-garde and experimental circles to her more song-driven collaborations. But When the Distance is Blue feels like something singular—a project unbound by genre, untethered from expectation, existing fully in its own liminal space. In capturing the in-between, Stewart has created something timeless.

LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what inspires your artistic style and sound?

MACIE: I grew up playing piano and violin, and felt myself drawn to music in general. I've played a bunch of different styles of music, and I've been writing songs from a really young age, improvising and playing in bands. My inspirations are pretty broad and varied. I play in a band called Finom that's a more experimental rock band, super based in harmonies and atonal guitars. I have my solo songwriting project, and then I have a lot of improvisational music side projects. I have a duo with my friend Lia Kohl that is super important to me, and a trio with Lia Kohl and Whitney Johnson that's more string-based improvisations. I make music with a lot of different people and do a lot of string arranging. I get a lot of my joy from playing music and playing music with other people.

LUNA: You have released your album When the Distance is Blue and huge congratulations. You described it as “a love letter to the moments we spend in-between.” What inspired this concept, and what themes and emotions do you explore?

MACIE: This is my second solo record, but it's my first one that's instrumental and on International Anthem, and comes from a different place in many ways from my first songwriter solo record. I've been friends with them [International Anthem] for a while, for 10 years, since the label started, and I've been doing strings for a lot of the artists on International Anthem too. I've done strings for Makaya McCraven. I just did strings for Alabaster DePlume. We're all really tight friends, so they asked me if I wanted to make a record with them, and I was really excited about that because I love what they do and everyone that they work with.

The first thing I thought of was wanting to start with prepared piano, because piano is my first instrument, and I also have not been so inspired by piano in the last 10 years or so, but I found myself recently craving to get back into it. I was inspired by a lot of prepared pianists around Chicago, and people that I've seen while I've been touring. I started this record from wanting to revisit this thing that's very much intrinsic to myself, but mess with it enough and fuck with it enough to make it unfamiliar and exciting in that process. I think through starting from that little seed and then picking up all of these other things along the way, like field recordings of my travels and string improvisations from home, I found some meaning about this record through the process of making it, which was sitting in uncertainty or being able to sit in these places. I feel like we're always so focused on where we're going or where we came from, but all the interesting and complex stuff about life happens in those in-between moments.

I was hit with that in a profound way through making this record. There's a beautiful book by Rebecca Solnit called A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and so many of those essays are about being lost and not knowing where you're going, being afraid of it, or looking at people who are in-betweens. I felt really strongly about that, and there was a connection between the way I was making this particular record and this particular music. It's not so much about the end goal. It's about the process of getting there and being able to embrace all of the different existences that are there moment-to-moment

LUNA: The album’s title is drawn from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. What about her writing resonated with you, and how did it inform the themes or textures of this record?

MACIE: I didn't really make a connection with it until after I finished the record, or at least a connection between the record and between the content of the book. That book has been something that sat with me for the last four or five years since I first read it, and I've reread some of the essays over and over again, and I've also gifted it to people. Once I finished the record, I was listening to it and trying to think of what to call it, because when I'm making a record with songs, I feel like it's a lot easier to name it because you can grab a lyric or grab something that's been said already in your songs and attach that as an overall view of the record.

It was like an interesting process to take an instrumental record and be like, ‘what do I call this?’ I realized that I wrote a song that has ‘when the distance is blue’ in the lyrics of that song, and I had written it somewhere along the process of making this record. I felt that encapsulated the feeling of in-between, like when you're flying in a plane and you look out over the horizon, over all the clouds, the distance, it's darker the farther away you get. You're always so drawn to go in there, or looking out over the ocean. I think that was a little bit of what connected all of these things together. I was taking recordings from opposite ends of the world and even two years apart and collaging them over each other, and giving them meaning together, even though they're from totally separate times and spaces. It felt connected to me.

LUNA: Field recordings play a key role in shaping the atmosphere of this record. Where did you capture these sounds, and how do they contribute to the narrative of When the Distance is Blue?

MACIE: I'm an avid journaler—mostly writing stream-of-consciousness thoughts. But in the past few years, I've also started collecting recordings. The iPhone recorder is honestly one of the greatest tools we have right now. It sounds great, it's easy to use, and the compression is surprisingly nice, so as I’ve traveled, I’ve been capturing sounds that catch my ear. My friends who are also on International Anthem, the way they use field recordings feels so personal, like you can hear them in the sounds they capture—even when it’s not their voice or instrument. It made me realize that I’ve also been collecting recordings for years, but I hadn’t considered using them in my own compositions until recently.

When I started looking back at my recordings in a new way, they became another texture—something that could inform the composition process. The ones I ended up using were actually some of my more recent recordings, made while traveling. Two of them were from my tour in Japan with my band, Finom. It was the farthest I’d ever been from Chicago, a place I had always dreamed of visiting. I spent a lot of time walking through new spaces, absorbing everything without actively engaging—just letting the environment happen around me. Some of the recordings held a certain energy that felt right. In one, I can hear my friends laughing at Tsukiji Market, reacting to something someone said. That moment touched me deeply, and I knew I wanted to include it. These recordings feel like traveling, and that’s something I really wanted to evoke in this record.

LUNA: The album has a very cinematic quality—do you visualize scenes or landscapes while composing? If so, what kinds of imagery guided you during the making of this album?

MACIE: That's a really good question. I don't know that I was guided by imagery. I was more guided by this desire to capture space, this desire to capture the spaces I was in, and also to sit with silence and to let things resonate. As a kid, I was always drawn to music that was really fast or super dramatic, or there's a lot happening because it was fun to play. After the last five years, I want to hear where I am, and I want to hear spaces with other people, and let the piano ring out and hear what happens to the harmonics as they disappear into the ether. That was what was guiding me for this record was, ‘how do I capture space and the exact moment of time that I am in?’ And collaging all of those moments together and seeing what happened when they started interacting.

LUNA: What is your favorite song from When the Distance is Blue and why do you love this song? Is there a certain element or message that you gravitate towards the most?

MACIE: I do feel really proud of the whole thing. My personal favorite one is called “Stairwell (Before and After).” I had done a session of recording prepared piano improvisations, and we edited together some skeletons and frameworks for four pieces out of those improvisations. I had this theme that I had stuck in my head that appears throughout the record. I put down the piano recordings. I didn't listen to them for a while because I was on tour. I was playing a show in Paris, and there was this stairwell in the backstage area, and I wanted to be alone and play around. The stairwell had the most amazing reverb I've ever heard. I could sing a note and sing another note, and you could hear them both still in the room and it was really exciting. I recorded the improvisations just for fun. My next session that I had with Dave Vettraino a month and a half after that, I wanted to see what would happen if we threw the field recording with this little recording of me improvising in a stairwell in Paris over this piano improvisation from a year before that.

The recordings were a year apart and they were with no knowledge of each other, and they were across the world from each other, and somehow they fit almost perfectly. We only cut out two parts, and something about that really magical energy of having a chaos to put these things together and seeing if they'll work, and sometimes they rub up against each other. But there's also this insane beauty of knowing that there's some sort of kismet energy with how they existed. I think that's my favorite track on the record, and that also was the one that unlocked the record as a whole for me.

LUNA: The creative process sounds incredibly expansive. You mentioned traveling to different countries while recording this album—I was curious, which country was your favorite in terms of musical inspiration during the making of this record?

MACIE: I would say Japan really inspired me. My mom lived and worked there about 40 years ago, so it’s always been a place I’ve wanted to visit. Experiencing the incredible music scene there was truly inspiring. But beyond any specific country, I think the process of traveling itself inspires me. I love taking trains, watching the scenery pass by, and even long drives on tour. Just last week, we were driving through Kansas and Nebraska—such vast, open landscapes. That sense of openness has really influenced me creatively.

LUNA: How did the process of making When the Distance is Blue challenge or expand your understanding of your own artistry?

MACIE: That’s a great question—thank you. Improvisation has always been a huge part of my creative process and how I move through the world. I’ve done a lot of instrumental music, but making a through-composed instrumental record was a real challenge for me. I’m used to either the structured form of a song—with lyrics and chords—or the complete freedom of improvisation, where everything unfolds in the moment. Those two extremes are where I feel most at home, so navigating the space in between was both exciting and frustrating at times.

There were moments when it felt like nothing was working, but ultimately, it was a welcome challenge. It pushed me to rethink my approach to composition—how to create something structured without the familiar guideposts of verses and choruses, yet not fully improvised either. Finding that balance between structure, stillness, and freedom felt nebulous, and honestly, I’m still figuring it out.

Through this process, I’ve realized that what I love most is simply the act of making—documenting a moment in time, both musically and creatively. This record also gave me the opportunity to revisit instruments and techniques that have always been part of me but that I hadn’t used in a while. I feel really grateful for that.

LUNA: What do you hope listeners take away from this album? Is there a particular emotion or experience you want to evoke through these pieces?

MACIE: I want people to feel like it's okay to sit with stillness, uncertainty and uncomfortability. I think there are some moments in the record that feel really open and really inviting, but then there are also some moments where there's something being worked out or not being explicitly stated to you. Something that would be really exciting to me is if people are able to take away this patience with themselves and with the universe, and be able to hold all of these uncomfortable things at once, and find peace with it.

LUNA: What kind of atmosphere or emotional space do you aim to create for your listeners?

MACIE: I feel things really deeply, which is a reason why I create and have to get it out some way and communicate it. I think that's why I enjoy collaborating so much, because I get to share those feelings and emotions with other people and then see it mirrored back to me. What I do hope is that there is a genuineness of feeling that comes through and that people can also find within themselves. I think there's always a little nugget of truth in the emotional aspects of my music that I hope people can feel and find for themselves. I think that's the core of what I'm trying to do.

LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like that you would like to share with Luna?

MACIE: I'm so excited about everything I’m creating right now. I’m planning to make another solo songwriter record, and I’m currently working on an album with Lia Kohl and Whitney Johnson—two of my favorite people and musicians. Plus, it looks like Finom is bringing back Full Bush with our friend Alex, which is our Kate Bush tribute show. There’s a lot on the horizon, and I couldn't be more thrilled.

Looking ahead, what feels most important to me is continuing to create with people I deeply care about. I love making solo work and will absolutely keep doing it, but I’m also exploring ways to bring others into that process. Collaboration has always been such a core part of how I create, and I want to keep finding new ways to weave that into my work.