> articles > beth-lehem.com > email HARP MAGAZINE SUMMER 2002 ISSUE No.4
By Geoffrey
Himes
Orton's soprano, small but distinctive, traced the leaping rise and tumbling fall of that melody with the weariness of one who is reluctant to give up secrets but can't stop herself. Unprotected by microchips, she acknowledged the painful loss of a lover but refused to sound defeated; instead she savored romantic pleasures that can be as short-lived as "catching snow on my tongue." When "Sweetest Decline" emerged that spring on the album Central Reservation, it was wrapped in strings and Dr. John's piano, but the song's essential elements had all been there on that Austin barstool. For Orton is a classic singer-songwriter, no different really than Joni Mitchell or Carole King. And that truth is clearer than ever on her new album, Daybreaker (Heavenly/Astralwerks), where her troubadour bent is bolstered by crucial contributions from Ryan Adams and Emmylou Harris. But just as it would be wrong to assume that electronica is the essence of Orton's music, it would also be wrong to assume that the synths and loops are irrelevant. "Daybreaker" features collaborations with Orton's original champions, William Orbit and the Chemical Brothers, giants of the British dance scene. And the atmospheric synth swooshes and emphatic programmed pulses do add something valuable to her songs. In a way, Orton is like Bob Dylan, another acoustic-guitar strummer who picked up the technology of his day to give his songs extra oomph. Dylan's songs are good enough to work in a solo-acoustic context, but they gain something special when backed by a rock'n'roll band. Something similar happens when Orton's barstool ballads are hooked up to disco machines. "Maybe it's from the same logic as Dylan going electric," Orton concedes. "We're all like little ants who scurry around with the materials that are at hand right now. Each generation finds new materials. Its just evolution, isn't it? "It's not like I was a big believer in electronica; I was just going to give it a go. I had other things I wanted to do, but they weren't coming to fruition. This opportunity came along, so I ran with it. Then it created a life of its own and dragged me along." Orton is surprisingly ambivalent about technology. One moment she is talking enthusiastically about her original plans to build the new album around a blend of synths, samples, and orchestration similar to Danny Elftnan's soundtrack for Blade Runner. The next moment she gushes about how refreshing it was to hear the stripped-down, acoustic sound on Ryan Adams' first solo album, Heartbreaker. She recalls her youthful days at raves with fondness, but still finds it odd that these people who bonded so joyfully in the clubs didn't talk to one another on the street. 'As a child, I always thought that by the year 2000 people would be walking around in silver spacesuits," Orton says. 'And this phenomenon of people dancing to electronic sounds was something like that. In a way, it was very scary; it was like cloning and computers were taking over the world. On the other hand, I loved going to a rave and bouncing around and feeling free. "I've always hated snobbery. I hate snobbery against folk musicians, and I hate snobbery against techno musicians. I wanted to contradict the prejudice against electronic music, so I figured if we were moving into this computer-generated world, I would bring a human voice to it. I said, 'If people are going to dance to these songs, wouldn't it be nice if there were something interesting going on in their subconscious."' Something interesting is going on in "Paris Train," the first track on the new album. One loop suggests the clickety-clack of railroad tracks, while another synth provides the whoosh of wind outside a train window. These sounds set up the lyrics about riding a train away from a volcano. The protagonist stares out the window and wonders if the end of a recent affair was as "inevitable" as the eruption of the mountain above her or the path of the tracks below her. And the lyrics set up an arresting melody that rises with hope that she might "see beyond her history," only to fall with the sighing realization that "the last thing on my mind is the first thing I do each time." The song wouldn't be nearly as effective without the studio tricks, but the tricks would be meaningless without the song. "That's the song where I came nearest to my Blade Runner idea," Orton says.' After the basic track was recorded, I sat with Adam Peters, the keyboardist, in New York for days. He'd play ideas, and I'd say, 'No, that's not it,' or 'Yeah, that's great.' When he came up with those train sounds, it blew my head off. I knew what I wanted, but I couldn't do it on my own. "But the strings on that song-in fact, the strings on all my songs-are real strings. I don't like computer strings; I think they sound horrible. It's a terrible waste when you can get the real sound of a bow going across a cello string. I'll do whatever it takes to help the song. Some songs sound very good on a stand-up bass; some sound better on an electric bass, and some sound better on a keyboard bass. "Before you worry about what genre it is, about whether it's a loop or a drum, it's about what suits the song. It's using what's within your reach but also reaching for everything you can. I don't know if I always get it right, because I don't know every sound yet."
Orton, now 31, grew up in Norfolk, a flat, agricultural area about two-and-a-half hours east of London by train. In recent decades, the county has attracted a good number of artists, bohemians, and left-wing activists, making it the English equivalent of Vermont. Orton's mother came out of that tradition and she pushed a child-care reform bill through parliament and founded a summer arts program. So young Beth grew up with art classes, amateur theatricals, and sing-along folk music. But her father, an architectural draftsman, died when she was 11, and her mother died when she was 19. She is reluctant to talk about those deaths today, admitting only that they "affected everything about my life." But surely it's no coincidence that so many of her songs allude to the transience of life. On "She Cries Your Name," her 1997 Top 40 U.K. hit, she asks, "How long can this love remain?" On "Central Reservation," the title track of her 1999 album, she describes herself "living in the middle of the ocean, with no future, no past." On "Pass in Time," from the same album, she advises a friend, "Come on now, child, you're just here for a while." On "Daybreaker, the title track of the new album, she declares, "Nothing's gonna last." On "Concrete Sky," the first single from the new CD, she promises, "I wouldn't take up all your time, because it's so precious." I live like every day is my last," she admits. "The good side of that is the enthusiasm; the bad side is the panic. Sometimes I have to tell myself, 'Beth, just chill.' As much as I take things to heart, though, I really treasure things when they happen. A lot of people don't realize how fleeting time is. I'm always surprised when I meet people who take other people for granted." After high school, she moved to London and become one of the city's thousands of aspiring actresses and singers. She joined the experimental Tabard Theatre company, named after the pub below its quarters. The troupe traveled to Russia with an adaptation of Arthur Rimbaud's poem,'A Season To Hell" ("I played Rimbaud's whore," Orton says). It was at this point she had her fateful meeting with William Orbit. "He saw me act and liked my voice, so he asked me to do some spoken-word stuff on his records," Orton explains. I loved the chance to do music for a change. You had to know something to go to the theater and it cost a lot of money. Music, on the other hand, was so accessible, so subversive. Conversation can be so lumpy at times, and a song can say so smoothly in six lines what people try to capture in hundreds of ways by talking. I didn't see myself as a singer-songwriter at the time. But when William learned I could sing, he started using me more. He'd say, 'Come on and sing on this song and I'll give you 500 quid,' and I'd say, 'Brilliant, it will pay the rent.' But I figured if I'm going to sing, it might as well be something interesting, so I started writing little couplets, and he'd use them. "I'd be sitting there for hours while he recorded the high hats or whatever, and he didn't want me to go home because he wanted me there when he needed me to sing. He had all these beautiful guitars lying around, and Id pick them up and play them, and before I knew it, I'd say,' William, I've got a chorus! Then I'd say,' William, I've got a whole song.' Finally he said, 'Let's record them."' Orton co-wrote and sang the lead on "Water for a Vine Leaf," the influential single from Strange Cargo, one of Orbit's many vehicles. Another vehicle, Spill, featured Orton's vocal on a techno remake of John Martyn's "Don't Wanna Know About Evil." When Orbit's friends in Primal Scream formed a spin-off group called Red Snapper, Orton co-wrote and sang their first two singles. She sang 'Alive:Alone" from the Chemical Brothers' Exit.Planet.Dust album. Finally she got a chance to record her own album, Super Pinky Mandy, which was released only in Japan. "That first record," she says, "was OK. It was me just trying things out. It sounded like William's early stuff, and a couple of the songs were actually quite good. The original version of 'She Cries Your Name was on that record." Orton finally emerged from the shadows in 1997. Not only did she land a Mercury Prize nomination for Trailer Park, her first album in the U.S. and U.K., but she was also nominated for Brit Awards for Best Female Artist and Best Newcomer. She sang on the Chemical Brothers' number-one album, Dig Your Own Hole, and to cap off the year she released a four-song EP, Best Bit, which featured two collaborations with her hero, the American folk-soul-jazz artist Terry Callier. She moved further away from the British techno ghetto on her 1999 album, Central Reservation. Employing string charts and collaborators such as Callier, Ben Watt, Ben Harper, and Dr. John, the disc revealed that Orton was no dance diva but a genuine singer-songwriter This led to invitations to contribute to a tribute for Harry Smith and to perform on the Lilith Fair tour. "The Harry Smith people sent me four or five songs I might sing," Orton remembers. "I chose Frankie and Johnnie,' but as I so often do, I put off learning it to the last minute. When the deadline came, my CD player wasn't working and all I had was the lyrics and the two chords. So I just made up my own melody. Then I took that melody and made up my own verses, my own modern-day slant on the story. It came so easily that I realized what a natural progression it was from British folk to American country." That progression was helped along when Orton met Emmylou Harris on the Lilith Fair tour. The young British singer, a longtime fan of Gram Parsons and Dolly Parton, was so star-struck that she impulsively took off her necklace and gave it to Harris. Months later, when Orton was planning her new record, she was nervous about inviting Harris to participate. But when the two women met backstage and Harris was still wearing Orton's necklace as a bracelet, all that nervousness evaporated, and the American wound up singing harmony on "God Song." About the same time, Orton heard another American country-rock singer in a London record store. "The guys in the shop said, 'You have to hear this guy Ryan Adams,"' Orton recalls. "It was the Heartbreaker album, and the generosity and spirit of the record just blew me away. No singer-songwriter of my generation has made me cry like that record did. It made me want to write; it made me proud to do what I do. "When we met, right away he said, 'Let's write a song.' I accused him of being an overconfident American, but we really hit it off. It was a real meeting of two minds who didn't know fuck all about each other. We met again six months later to do the vocal on 'Concrete Sky' and it was amazing. He put down the vocal and some piano just like that. "When he was finished, he said, 'I have this new song called 'OK' that you have to hear. 'You know how people always ask you, 'What song would you have liked to have written?' Well, at that moment, it was that song. Every fucking line in the song described exactly what was happening to me at the time. I said, 'I've got to sing that.' He said, 'That's cool, because I want you to."' As a result, Daybreaker contains Orton's most country- flavored work ever. But it also features several machine-driven techno tracks, including the Chemical Brothers' title cut and 'Anywhere" is marked by R&B horns and Philly-soul strings, while the other three tracks co-produced by Everything But the Girl's Ben Watt are moody folk-jazz arrangements with drum brushes and finger-picked guitar. In other words, the album's sound is all over the map, united only by the strong, consistent personality projected by Orton's songwriting. If her lyrics still resemble strung together, stream-of-consciousness phrases more than the storytelling craft of her heroes, her ear-catching melodies and strikingly personal vocals more than compensate. And her willingness to offend purists-whether they be techno purists or singer-songwriter purists-makes her one of the most interesting young artists in pop today. "I'm like a fucking sponge," she agrees. I listen to different things and they seep into my music. 'Sponge' is an insulting term, but it's not that far from the truth. I keep looking for new sounds, but I never let go of the old ones. Everything that's ever been important to me is still important."
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