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By Ken Scrudato
Photos by www.perouinc.com

Unless perhaps you're Robert Downey Jr., It's hard to argue against the axiom that there's no such thing as too much press. But in some cases it's clearly more easily applied. If you're a Jennifer Lopez prepackaged entertainment commodity, there's very little grey area. When it's album time, or movie time, the press machine just grinds into gear until every human being is inflicted with at least 3.75 J-Lo images a day.

But what if you're a low-key, English folk-pop singer like Beth Orton? Before 1996, she could have no more calculated her place in the public eye than she could have played guitar with her teeth. Her debut record, Trailer Park, unpredictably shot her straight into the heart of the modern mad media circus, and suddenly the world was demanding a much bigger piece of her than she had probably ever imagined she would have to give up.

Oddly, although the international press was equally as frothy over her follow-up, Central Reservation, its creator doesn't appear to regard it as majestically as they. And three years of staring into the spotlight seemed to have exacted its toll on her, as it might on anyone who hadn't braced himself for it. The press actually began to create a character that they imagined was the real Beth Orton ("the really sad girl"), until even she wasn't sure who the real Beth Orton was.

Despite the difficulties and confusion, here she is, another three years on, ready to reveal album number three, titled Daybreaker. Indeed, she hasn't collapsed under the weight of her own curious myth, and, thankfully, neither has she shortened her name to B-Or.

"It's taken me a little while to iron that all out," she explains. "Just being told ten times a day that your songs are really depressing, and that you must be really sad. I wonder sometimes if by shutting a part of myself off and being evasive, in a way, I've allowed this image of me [to be created]. And is that dangerous? But I don't see myself as a depressive. I do get fucking really low, I do. And I think people, if they knew what kind of heartbreak is in those songs-just fuck off! They don't know the half of it! But they also don't know the joy in it. I've really experienced a lot of wonderful things as well."

"But the point is," she continues, "that I have cleansed my fucking head of all that."

Nevertheless, the struggle to hang on to as big a piece of herself as she could, to not play into the image of her created by the media, and dealing with the bizarre reality that suddenly millions of people were connecting with her most personal thoughts, literally made her quite ill.

She began to feel trapped and constricted. So much so, that she nearly quit.

"When I went in to make Central Reservation," she recalls, "I was very affected at that point by all of it. I went from being very much on my own with things in my head, to suddenly being connected in some way to so many others, and yet still in some ways being no further connected than I ever was to the outside world. I was aware that I was starting to react. Whether they were [saying] nice things or nasty things, it was hard to live with the character of someone whom I've never been. It was making me ill and making me really unnatural with myself. I just thought I probably wouldn't ever write again."

Her doctors went as far as to warn her that her music career, and the lifestyle that it requires, could literally be her undoing. Certainly, she could have heeded this advice and hightailed it to somewhere in rural England never to be heard from again. But as with most truly confessional writers, she couldn't actually give it up-and we're all the better for that. Daybreaker sounds like her most determined, musically confident album yet, aided by a list of collaborators-from The Chemical Brothers and Ryan Adams to Ben Watt and Emmylou Harris-that is as varied as are Ms. Orton's thoughts and ideas themselves.

Not surprisingly, Daybreaker has the immediacy of a classic folk record, with a grandiosity that results from the record's sweeping electronics and orchestrations. It often sounds something like Joni Mitchell collaborating with TalkTalk. Her magically evocative voice still aches with the emotional gravity of every word, her lyrics begin to reveal a guarded optimism. On "Mount Washington," she carefully confides, "There will never be a time that you won't live through." But on the gorgeous, devastatingly personal "Paris Train," her inner struggles are still divulged as she admits, "Sometimes, I slip inside imagery, the last thing that's on my mind is the first thing I'll do each time." What Daybreaker veritably proves is that she is someone who never could have really walked away or could have not done this album. The urgency is palpable and immense.

"It matters to me," she insists. "Each little thing really fucking matters to me. It's a burning desire to do what I do. I believe that to live is to suffer to a certain degree. But I'm very happy with the way things have turned out. Now I feel like I'm born again in a way. Not religiously, I just feet like I know what I'm doing. I believe that anyone can be anything they fucking want, anytime, any minute, and all that bollocks, I really do. Create your own reality. What else are you supposed to do?"