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25.08.02: Insound.com Interview July V.28 |
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| august 25 > Insound.com Interview July V.28 |
| An Interview with Beth Orton by Alexander Laurence (July V.28) Beth Orton is a six-foot singer/songwriter from Norfolk. She has done two previous albums, Trailer Park (1996) and Central Reservation (1999), both of which received much critical acclaim. In '96 she scored her first Top 40 single with "She Cries Your Name," and did a sell-out tour of the UK to celebrate a Mercury Music Prize nomination for Album of the Year. Her follow-up Central Reservation made her an indie favorite in the US. It's been three years in the wait for the new Astralwerks album Daybreaker. In the meantime Beth has done some DJing and appearered as a guest vocalist on several projects. The past five years have been fruitful for Beth. She recorded with a personal hero, folk-jazz legend Terry Callier, worked with the Chemical Brothers on Dig Your Own Hole, toured America with Sheryl Crow and Emmylou Harris as part of the Lilith Fair, and performed in a packed-out tent to a crowd of 10,000 muddy Glastonbury-goers. At six foot tall and disarmingly sharp, Beth Orton is not exactly what you'd expect. Despite an ability to reduce people to tears with her songs, Beth is more likely to steal your last cigarette than cry on your shoulder. Born in Norfolk, England in 1970, Beth moved to London with her mother at the age of fourteen and settled in Dalston. Since her older brothers had already gone the punk rock route, she felt the most rebellious thing she could do was "get into folk." She spent her late teen years immersed in everything from Nick Drake, to The Stone Roses and Rickie Lee Jones, before toying with the idea of acting and a drama course. After a couple of years in fringe theater she hooked up with dance producer William Orbit for her first musical project, a cover of John Maryn's "Don't Wanna Know About Evil." Having worked with Orbit for two years she co-wrote the first two Red Snapper singles and teamed up with the (little known at the time) Chemical Brothers on "Alive: Alone," the haunting final track from the Brothers' ace debut album. The Brothers invited her back on their most recent album after a noticeable absence. Now years after first hearing her first solo album, Beth Orton seems like a major artist with a wide range. Her new album should be worth the wait. It will be out in July. I got to talk to her backstage at one of her shows in Hollywood recently. It was brief, but I look forward to hearing her records in the future. ______________________________________________________________ AL:You have done a bunch of collaborations in the past with people like The Chemical Brothers. All while maintaining a band of your own. When you go into a studio what do you hope these friends and band members can bring to the album? Beth: I think that when you work with the same people for a long time you create a relationship. It's with the band as well. We have built a certain level of trust over the years. It's a comfort in a way. But I wouldn't call it comfort necessarily. It's a lack of self-consciousness around one another. We have an open relationship where now on this record it can be real special. I remember on one song I went over to Ted's house (a band member) and he started playing a riff. It was winter and we were sitting in his room. Ted had just told me a story about a girl that he met, wondering if he would ever meet her again. When he started playing I just started singing along straight away. The melody and the words came out at once. It's so exciting. It's like peeling away an onion. You can have all sorts of relationships, but there's something with musicians working together where you can have relationship that can just continue to grow in a beautiful way. Then you get your William Orbit's and your Chemical Brothers and that's just like icing on the cake really. AL: What was it like working with Johnny Marr? Beth: I did some writing with him. I had a song called "Concrete Sky" knocking around for ages. I met him and I played it to him and he said "Oh, I love that song. I got chords." He got all these chords out of the cupboard and he was putting in all these little things. He got involved. I was happy with it but he just added this other dimension. With me I have a lot of beginnings and Ted has a lot of ends. With Johnny he has a lot of bits and pieces and these things that take it to another level all the time. AL: You invited Ryan Adams to work on this album too. Can you tell us how that turned out? Beth: I did. I heard Heartbreaker which is his first solo album. There's a record shop in London called Rough Trade Records and often I go down there on a Saturdays with some friends and buy some records. We look through the racks and they all suggest things. Oh I got this and this. All my DJ friends are all across the board. One week they'll say "Oh, I got this Ryan Adams and you have to get it." Oh, cool. Thought it was some old bloke. Went home and put it on. It was a great record. I was surprised that there was someone in my generation who was like this. I also like Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, and Dolly Parton. They just move me. Well, Johnny Marr sang backup vocals on "Concrete Sky" on the demo but he was on tour with someone else by the time it came to record it. We called up Ryan Adams and he was up for it and it was brilliant. He came over and we went into the studio. He put the vocal down and then he put some guitar and piano down and that was great. Then he played me some song that he had and it just blew me away. He wrote the song about some girl. And I could relate because I was in a similar situation. I learned it and then I was like "I have to record that song!" We did one take and that take is on the album. We met and our voices go beautifully together. It's called "What You Want" and it's going to be on the album. It's very beautiful and very magical. AL: Since you worked with so many different people, does "Daybreaker" have the feel of one continuous album? Beth: Yeah. What is surprising sometimes is what you leave off. We recorded 25 songs in two weeks with the whole band. Then there's the stuff I did with Johnny. There's stuff all over the place. And these are the ten songs that ended up being on the record because for me they encapsulate the mood best of the time we are recording the album. It took about six months altogether. That's not too bad. It was probably actually a year because I was looking for someone to do the mixing and things weren't working out. AL: Who is a great producer? You have worked with William Orbit and Ben Watt.... Beth: Ben Watt is incredible. He took the record into Technicolor. We had this beautiful record and he came along and he just got it. I wanted it to be really classy. I wanted it to be lush and beautiful. I don't want any of your Lazy Dog stuff. He said "Okay cool." He came in and mixed "Paris Train" and it was just incredible. AL: You are doing a small tour now and the record comes out in July? Beth: Yeah. I am playing a few acoustic shows. Then Daybreaker comes out. I'll be back in August with a full band for a longer tour.
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| august 11 > Rollingstone daybreaker album review |
| British singer-songwriter Beth
Orton has one of those voices so hot-wired to her heart that she could jam with Mantovani
and the result would still be raw. On Daybreaker, Ben Watt of Everything but the
Girl piles on the orchestration, mixes fat stacks of swanky instrumental harmony louder
than her voice and studio-polishes the tracks until they sparkle like the tinsel on a
tree. But it all still sounds like an Orton album, just as sure as a hangover is gonna
give you a headache whether it's Christmas morning or not. No more neo-this or folk-that.
Orton delivers some gooey pop complete with sticky tunes and honey-dipped ear candy - yet
it's heavy, disturbing, recondite. Whether she's harmonizing with Emmylou Harris on the
haunted "God Song" or bouncing on the Chemical Brothers' digitized beats during
the doom-y title cut, Orton cries as if someone has left her cake out in the rain. BARRY WALTERS
(RS # 901 -
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| august 11 > Billboard.com daybreaker album review |
| On her third studio release—which features
production by Ben Watt and William Orbit, among others—Beth Orton continues blending
organic and electronic sounds, mixing them to an often entrancing cohesion. The opening
track, "Paris Train," floods listeners with a mixture of programming bleeps and
echoes, warm string arrangements, and dramatic, cryptic phrasings. Orton has a flair for
penning languid, spacious songs whose forlorn characters seem as adrift as the music's
fleeting acoustic guitar chords and absentminded piano tinkles. Guests here include Ryan
Adams, who wrote one of the CD's more hushed offerings, the moody, cello-accented
"This One's Gonna Bruise"—a tune that showcases Orton's ghostly pipes.
"Anywhere" begins with a snatch of an old-timey film soundtrack before moving
into Brazilian-tinged horns and lounge vocal stylings. Other standouts include "God
Song," a somebody-been-done-wrong country ditty featuring Emmylou Harris.—KIT
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| august 11 > E!Online daybreaker album review |
| It may sound cruel, but we hope that Beth Orton never
gets her hands on a bottle of Prozac. Because then this dour Brit wouldn't be able to turn
genuine sadness and relationship confusion into the slow, stunning serenades she so
effortlessly delivers. Wider-ranging and more confident-sounding than she was on 1999's Central
Reservation, Orton is a folkie for the new world, exploring techno, jazz and acoustic
textures with the help of hip producers like Ben Watt, the Chemical Brothers and William
Orbit. She even takes a dip into a slow roots ballad with Emmylou Harris, while Ryan Adams
rides shotgun on "God Song." It's a downer, sure, but if you've got the
patience, this disc's subtle meditations have a way of working themselves into your heart.
B+
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| august 11 > Launch.com daybreaker album review |
| Associations with William Orbit and the Chemical
Brothers make her seem far more "progressive" than she actually is. Mechanized
beats, random swooshing, and swishings from visiting remixers and the constant surge of
electricity keep this Brit-girl constantly on the move. But listen beyond the surface and
you'll hear an old school folkie who could just as easily curl up with her acoustic guitar
and sing you to heavenly sleep (Orton sounds remarkably like '60s folksinger Melanie with
attitude). She's already halfway there. The Chemical Brothers warp out the title track,
but country star and everyone's favorite guest vocalist Emmylou Harris joins the harmony
for "God Song," with alt-country wunderboy Ryan Adams chiming in for the finale.
The lightly stringed and acoustic meditation "This One's Gonna Bruise" further
suggests Orton's future is not chasing sonic rockets' red glare, but in turning her sights
away from the city and settling for "back-to-the-land" rustic simplicity. In
other words, don't be surprised if we get an "all-acoustic" album before too
long. Rob O'Connor
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| august 08 > NME daybreaker album review (taken off NME website) |
| Every record has a defining moment. This is the one
from Beth Orton's
'Daybreaker'. With about a minute of ' It is the clearest glance you will get at A career as a singer-songwriter might seem a strange choice for someone who clearly has no great desire to be understood, and if anything, Orton's third album is even more withdrawn than the first two 'Trailer Park' and 'Central Reservation'. "Sometimes I slip inside
imagery," sings Orton
on ' If the spartan 'This One's Gonna Bruise' - written by cappuccino fun bundle Ryan Adams - is the most emotionally affecting piece of 'Daybreaker' then perhaps that's because it's the one that has the least (and most) of Orton in it. Given someone else's words, she seems suddenly set free. Just a voice. Just nothing. By contrast, the only truly drab moment - the Morcheeba-ly 'Anywhere' - is the only occasion when you feel that Orton is battling against her natural ability to be elusive. It is something that she really is unnervingly good at after all - for proof look no further than 'Concrete Sky', 'Carmella' and shaggy-dog country ballad 'God Song'. Cynics could say it's a Dido album for people too self-consciously cool to buy a Dido album, but to do so would be to mistake a black cat for a lump of coal. Aside from the workaday fact that it contains a hatful of luminously beautiful tunes, 'Daybreaker' is a record of uncompromising integrity rather than a drab, grey mothership for shit singles. So who is Beth Orton? What does she think? What does she do on her days off? If you're looking for answers, 'Daybreaker' can only disappoint. In the butcher's shop window of pop, we are used to grisly close-ups of bleeding hearts. Here, by contrast, is a blurred passport photograph seen from the window of a moving bus. A 51-minute vanishing act. Ignore it at your peril. Jim Wirth
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| august 08 > NME concrete sky single review (taken off NME website) |
More straw-sucking folk-fluffery from Our Lady of the Quilted Twelve String. This is so agrarian it could milk a cow at ten paces. Michael Eavis would probably whistle it while baling hay and/or trimming his unusual beard, or wondering what to do now with his huge fence. What does it sound like? Oh, you know, bluesy sweet-beats, trip-hopping background bits, nasal twangery; the usual, really. It's both vaguely trendy and quite nice, suggesting forthcoming album 'Daybreaker' is as far removed from previous slow-mo folk-fest 'Central Reservation' as a snail is from its shell. Sarah Dempster
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| august 08 > The Guardian: "Im Strong Like An Ox" |
| 'I'm strong like an ox' Waif-like folk singer Beth Orton tells Hadley Freeman why Crohn's disease won't stop her making music Friday July 5, 2002 The Guardian Beth Orton has
big, bony hands and a big, soft smile, both of which have a tendency to go flying upwards,
brightly and simultaneously, when discussing something that excites her (chauvinism in the
music business, for example, prompts much animation). Her voice, singing and speaking, is
a similar combination of the harsh and the soft: a pretty sweetness wrapped inside a
breathy rasp. Norfolk burrs clang against cockney twangs ("Awww, fanks a
lawwt!"). She works with the most cred-worthy darlings of the music world (William
Orbit, the Chemical Brothers, Terry Callier), but then tours with middle England's
favourite musical accompaniment for long-distance drives, the Beautiful South. She does a
nice line in contrasts, does Beth Orton. As if to confound matters, her new album, Daybreaker, doesn't really fit into any of the above pigeonholes. Like her previous two, it washes over the listener like spring rain, with its gentle strums and hums, but now there are horns and even - goodness! - drums, all used to evoke specific moments in time. "Daybreaker is really about experimenting in songwriting, because that's what interests me, not going on and on about my personal life." But is it still psychedelic folk-soul? "No, not really. It's probably less of all three," she says with a grin. Such contrariness has caused difficulties for the press. Last February, the Guardian called her a "crochet-sporting Norfolk folkie"; seven days later, she had moved southwards and become, according to the Times, a "Hoxton darling". Ed Simons of the Chemical Brothers (to whose albums Orton has added her voice) has contributed his own description. "She's not some soppy girl with Laura Ashley dresses who reached grade seven on the violin. She drives a big old green BMW and lives in Hackney." Actually, Orton recently moved out of Hackney and now lives in Clerkenwell: "So I guess I am a Hoxton darling now. Ohhh nooo!" Born in Norfolk in 1970, Orton was the youngest of a family of five. When she was 11, her father died of a heart attack. The following year, she started skipping lessons, was diagnosed as "school-phobic" and "just generally went off the rails a bit, don't really know why", accompanied by bottles of cider and Pernod. After Orton was caught nicking, of all combinations, a pork pie and a bag of marshmallows ("Marshmallows!" she snorts), her mother decided to move the family to east London in the hope of a new start. "And then everything was fine," she says, a little too breezily. Fine until 1989, just after her 19th birthday, when her mother went into hospital, suffering from breast cancer. Orton stayed in hospital with her. "And I can't watch you waste away/ And I can't beg you still to stay," she later sang on Central Reservation. One week later, her mother died. Orton fled to Thailand where she lived, to everyone's surprise, as a Buddhist nun. When she returned to London three months later, she began a relationship with Orbit. Inevitably, this history has provoked fascination with her private life. It hasn't helped that she sang about the death of her mother on her previous albums (though not on the new one, Daybreaker, because "I'm tired of turning my life into a personal anecdote"). "OK," she says, giving a sharp flick to her hair, "yes, I know my mum died and yes, I've written some songs about my mum dying, but they're more than that - they're about telling stories and experimenting lyrically." But it's really her music that has won Orton accolades, although, in the main, her lyrics are sturdier and more interesting than the windblown feyness of your average folk tune. On Daybreaker, she duets with Ryan Adams, who she has described as her "imaginary friend from childhood come to life". Their voices dovetail sweetly together on the forthcoming single from the album, Concrete Sky, and he wrote one of the album's prettiest songs, OK, for her. The two have been spotted "canoodling" by the tabloids. So are they in a relationship? "Nooooo. But," she says, "it's just really typical that if it's perceived the two of us are together, it's assumed that it was him who pulled me, you know? That's just so predictable." She later adds, twice, and rather proudly, that it was she who called him up to introduce herself after "falling in love" with Adams's debut album. Orton has been described as resembling a wilting sunflower, and usually the description fits: on stage, her shoulders stoop , pulled down by the reedy frame beneath them, and she has a sunny face and a cheery smile. Today, though, she looks more wilted than wilting, lying almost horizontally across the sofa, the occasional movements as languid as her drowsy voice. She repeatedly blames her tiredness on having just given up smoking; her PR frequently mentions jet-lag. Angry gurgles from Orton's midriff suggest another explanation. Since the age of 17, she has suffered from Crohn's disease, a degenerative illness of the stomach and alimentary canal with no known cause or cure. In the past, she has had to run off stage between songs, clutching her cramping belly. Today, she is looking very skinny - elbows poke harshly through the merry stripes on her jumper. She is, she says, looking after herself, eating only certain foods, not going out late, exercising. Aside from the discomfort and inconvenience, the illness must be a huge source of resentment. "Yeah, definitely in the past, but I had to brainwash myself into thinking it was all for the best. If I want to make music, I have to rein it in, and I'd rather make music than eat crap, and I'd rather exercise every day than get ill. It's not such a fucking effort really, is it?" On cue her stomach makes another burble. "Ooh! Sorry! I've just eaten and the food was terrible." Though her music is on the whole happy, even upbeat, Orton has been weighed down with reductive tags: "Yeah, 'ill girl' or 'tragic girl'," she says scornfully. Another,prompted by the fact that she's a young woman with a stool and a guitar, is "folk babe". She even has the requisite lank, straight hair. So as well as being lumped together with other stool-straddlers such as Jewel and Eliza McCarthy (despite differences in style), she is frequently compared to any other female in the music business, from Kate Bush to Alanis Morissette. Just a few months ago, a music review claimed the cheapy, chirpy Canadian Nelly Furtado was "just like" Orton (as are, apparently, Macy Gray, Gwen Stefani and, oddly, Penelope Cruz). Up fly the hands. "It's completely true. As I've got older, it's just got more apparent to me how limiting the social confines still are. Sometimes I wonder if there's been any advancement at all. Women singers, no matter how different they are, still get bunched all together in a way you never see with men. It's ridiculous and it's rife." Orton hasn't always helped herself in this matter. Although she has yet to sing pretty ditties about her breasts and the joys of herbal tea, à la Jewel, she did twice take part in the vagina-gazing fest Lilith Fair, the women's music festival in the 1990s. But whereas the other singers shook their grrrl power fists with enthusiasm, Orton looked decidedly embarrassed during her sets, even singing - very un-Lilith, this - about heartbreak. Didn't she think the idea of a women-only festival was a little, well, patronising? "Yes, completely!" she almost shouts, her whole body jerking up. "I think it just ghettoises women musicians even more, and it lumps us all together." So why did she do it? "Because my management said it would be a good thing to do. If I'm being honest, I can't really see, politically, what it was about, other than being a gimmick. At the end of the day, people were just saying, 'Yeah, it's just a bunch of birds on stage.' Even I was saying that. It was kind of a cliche." So. She's a woman singer who hated being a Woman Singer, the punk-loving teenager who became a songstress, the so-called former "dark chanteuse" who crumples into giggles at the overly-swank decor in her overly-swank hotel: "It does look like a whoopie cushion! It does ! And check out the paintings in the toilets - fookin' 'ell!" Her music is mournful but the lyrics are hopeful. "I think I'm quite strong. I'm built like an ox, it's bizarre," says the sylph on the sofa. "Just like an ox. Yes." Beth Orton plays the Electric Ballroom, London NW1 (020-7485 9006), on Tuesday. Daybreaker is out on Heavenly on July 29.
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