> articles > beth-lehem.com > email

MORNING STAR
Beth Orton doesn't go looking for songs, they just bowl her over like a sunrise. And her new Daybreaker should do as much to you

By Scott Frampton

"Am I really that tall?"

Beth Orton unfolds her tangle of limbs and slides out from behind the cafe table to size herself up, curious. She's a few inches shy of six feet. Not that tall, it's agreed. She's also not morose, or a delicate flower. She's not a lot of things she's read about herself. Squinting in the sun of the first hot day of the year, it's like she's peering in a distant morrior, trying to see what everyone else is seeing.

Daybreaker (AstralWerks), her third record, has alot of what people love about Beth Orton. Her wounded bray nestles comfortably in electronic textures, a full band with strings or just acoustic guitars tumbling like rain; her gentle rasp holds soft notes like a lover's whisper. On songs like "Paris Train", words splash over the choruses as if she's trying to catch up to a part of her life that's getting away.

As much as the annual break in her voice imbuses her songs with heartbreak, that kind of desperation isn't a tenable persona, and gtetting caught up in the middle of how she sounds and waht she's trying to express leaves her flustered. "I don't know if I ever try to express anything, really." she says of her songwriting. "It just sort of comes, to be honest, I don't mean to be an ass, but it's true. I never go in with an intention, necessarily. The intention takes its own time.

I don;t know. It's really hard to describe," she continues. "I don't sit down and go, 'I want to write a song about this particular subject,' and yet at the same time, I sit down and write about a particular feeling, which isn't the same thing.

"I'll tell you a story about 'God Song', and how that came about. I was doing a Harry Smith project. You know Harry Smith? The folk anthology? [The seminal three volume The Anthology of American Folk Music]. They wanted me to do two songs, and I'd been busy, and the day before the gigs, the CD arrives, you know, the folk anthology, and the idea is there are particular songs they want me to song. So I tried to put the CD on, and for some reason my CD player decided to break that day. So all I had was the words, and the chords at the top of the page. I had never heard the song 'Frankie And Johnny' before. 'He's my man and he keeps doing me wrong', is the chorus. So I just had these words, and I just made up my own melody. And I sang it that night, and I was like, "Fuck I Love this,' and I was like, 'I'll just do a cover of it, 'And then I was like, 'Oh, fuck it!' And then I heard the original, and mine is nothing like the original. And I was like, 'What if I wrote my own words to the chorus?' So I started just messing around in my own time, not for anyone else, not for any reason, but for my own thing. And then I was just mor einterested in the idea of he's my man and I keep doing him wrong. And now, maybe this is my answer to that song, maybe this is me being Frankie. Maybe, maybe, I'm the modern-day Frankie and I'm just admitting that actually I'm doing him wrong, or maybe he is God, and maybe when you reflect on someone, you reflect on your relationship to God. And... I don't know... If you want to get really into it, there is a literal sense in what I'm saying, but what I'm saying is also really not literal. It's kind of a ... I don't know... I just really get into all that... For me, it's like this on top of this, that underneath.

She guestures, satcking her hands, and hoping to augment whatever intuitive sense she made with that last sentence, and draws a ling breath. Her eyes darting around the table, the patio, the idling linen truck a sidewalk away, and make contact. They really are that big. She was lost for a few minutes in that song, but now she's back.

"Do you know what I mean?"