{"id":4040,"date":"2021-01-20T09:11:02","date_gmt":"2021-01-20T09:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=4040"},"modified":"2021-01-20T09:11:03","modified_gmt":"2021-01-20T09:11:03","slug":"katie-melua-listening-to-musicians-she-hadnt-heard-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2021\/01\/20\/katie-melua-listening-to-musicians-she-hadnt-heard-of\/","title":{"rendered":"KATIE MELUA listening to musicians she hadn\u00b4t heard of"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

KATIE MELUA <\/strong>listening to musicians she hadn\u00b4t heard of<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Norman Warwick<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Terry Callier<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Her plush current release belies it\u00b4s mundane title of\u00a0Album No. 8, carrying, as it does, lilting textures of the Georgian Philharmonic Orchestra. Katie Melua has also drawn evocations from disparate recording artists like Brad Meldau, Charles Stepney, Terry Callier, Ramsey Lewis, even vintage Cole Porter, plus the choreography of Germany\u2019s Pina Bausch. In preparation for her new writings she read of folk trailblazer Bob Dylan via his\u00a0Chronicles Vol. 1<\/em>\u00a0tome, in which she highlighted any musician she hadn\u2019t heard of. Then she meticulously researched every last one to create her own edifying, and ultimately life-changing, playlist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever medium writers might work in, though, they still seek to find ways of writing the personal as if universal, and with her seven year marriage to James Toseland coming to an end she felt she wanted to sharpen her writing skills in dealing with the metaphorical. To achieve this she enrolled on an actual short-fiction-writing course at London\u2019s Faber Academy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Mike Batt<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Having worked under the aegis of hit-making producer Mike Batt after pursuing her craft at the prestigious BRIT School, she was determined to pen every last\u00a0No. 8<\/em>\u00a0lyric, and so she did. Mission accomplished\u2014apart from the sombre piano etude Heading Home and a conversely jazzy Voices In The Night, which were rooted in a trip back to the Caucasus mountains she undertook with her father,a good deal of the record deals with the breakup, albeit subliminally, in Joy, Airtime, Remind Me, and Your Longing Is Gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her career began with Call Off The Search in 2003, and in only three years she became the U.K.\u2019s best-selling female artist, although the singer was aware that she was also quickly acquiring a huge core audience overseas that still hangs on her every word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until reading a recent piece about her in Paste magazine on-line, (and believe me all music lovers should sign up for their e mail newsletters) I had always admired her writing, playing, singing and personality without ever being a great fan of a package that seemed to me less gritty than my usual fare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reading that she created her own playlist of artists she hadn\u00b4t heard, something I had done the previous week from my readings of Paste for a recent article called A Rose By Any Other Name, published in Sidetracks & Detours recently and still available in our archives, captured my attention. The verdict of Paste, a judgement I have quickly come to trust, suggested I should listen to this album. When I did so, I found a diversity and eclecticism of music and genres and a lyricism that suggested the young girl who had urged us to call off the search was now undertaking a search of her own and enjoying the experience. It seems her curiosity has provided her some answers to which she is now starting to pose some new questions, and it was to that curiosity the Paste interviewer posed his opening question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Katie told him that she thinks that curiousity has always been a part of her life and her nature. She recalled that she first noticed it when her family moved to the UK from Georgia when she was eight years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4In the nineties, when we left Georgia,\u00b4 Katie explained, \u00b4I\u2019d never been taken to a library, because the country was on its knees back then. But when I moved to Belfast, I of course went to the local library, and I was just blown away. I literally would just spend hours in there, browsing books, discovering anything I could get my hands on. And I was even more blown away by the fact that you could take away six books, for free, and I didn\u2019t have to hand over any money. It really just blew my mind. So that\u2019s when I first noticed that my curiosity was completely switched on \u2014 the first time I went to a library and understood how books made me feel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I have been affected by too many what you might call touchstone texts to even mention, really. But at the moment, I\u2019m completely obsessed with To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, and also T.S Eliot\u2019s Tradition And Individual Talent text. The literary world is just the world that I\u2019m massively inspired by, and it\u2019s been a particularly important part of the making of Album No. 8.<\/em> I\u2019ve always been fascinated by the mysticism that surrounds song-writing, and particularly lyric writing. So for me, where I\u2019ve been able to find a certain world that inspires my imagination is anything to do with the literary world\u2014delving into poetry books, going to study fiction writing at the Faber Academy.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She claims that nobody in her Faber group recognised her, and says that although she thinks people know her music she wouldn\u00b4t say her face is all that well-known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4This was a three-month course in short story writing,\u00b4 she responded to the interviewer\u00b4s questions, \u00b4and I went there quietly every week. I found that the most important author I got introduced to there was Flannery O\u2019Connor. Wise Blood<\/em> is just fabulous, and I just dove into her work. And in going through courses like that, you learn how writers develop their style, which you can then apply to how you\u2019re developing yours. So now, for me, it\u2019s about creating a world with a certain sense of style to it, while making sure that it rings true and also stands up to all the traditions that exist in our industry. And I found that once I read Flannery O\u2019Connor, Quentin Tarantino made sense to me. In Russian cinema and European cinema, that same level of violence and its brutal look just didn\u2019t happen. But then suddenly, you had that in Tarantino\u2019s work, so I felt like he was the godparent of that cinematic development. So if you listen to my song Airtime, of course there\u2019s a breakup in there, But I was more interested in how to take certain personal stories and treat them with respect, but also honesty, so the story is just hinted at but never completely black and white. And I also wanted to resist the urge to be judgmental or lash out at anyone or anything that I thought had been wronged.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The interviewer wondered how,even now, with the coronavirus, unavoidable climate change, and humanity teetering on the brink of its own destruction she could put to one side being angry and judgemental.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00a8I know, I know,\u00b4 she laughed, \u00b4and of course it is difficult. However, you can choose to get completely immobilized by all of that and feel utterly wretched, or you can look at how many people around you are pulling you up\u2014look at the love that\u2019s been on display alongside the pandemic. So it\u2019s all about thinking, \u201cWhere am I going to get my inspiration from? And how am I going to view the world? Am I going to wallow in all the injustices plaguing the world or am I going to get involved in, say, all the charity work that\u2019s being done and rally around the brilliant people that are making amazing strides forward in\u2014and for\u2014society?\u201d So, as a creator, I try to maintain a certain optimistic aesthetic, and I don\u2019t torture myself. I choose not to have a negative view of the world. But I don\u2019t deny that all of that stuff is going on, and that all of that is terrible\u2014you just can\u2019t be an idealist right now, unfortunately. But I just try to stop and think, \u201cHow is this affecting my space? How is it affecting my work?\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paste noted that after a few years that have seen herskydiving, taking flying lessons, even performing live deep beneath the ocean at one point in 2006, Katie now seems to be looking inward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Yeah. And the only person that can control that is yourself. No one else will do that for you. But that\u2019s probably in the same realm as healing, isn\u2019t it? Of medicine? And I find that utterly fascinating. If you do that through your writing, I think what happens on a daily basis is, you write as you dig deeper into your brain, your thoughts, your feelings, and your memories, and it ends up on records but really relieves your mind of those negative things. And to have that spark of self-discovery as you write I think is really magical.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whilst she thinks the internet is a fantastic resource she admits to occasionally finding it overwhelming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
The Temptations in Katie\u00b4s listening <\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4I love that, everything is available now, but you know,\u2026 for example, I\u2019ve always said that I wanted to dive into folk music properly. But I would just look at the Internet and not know where to start. Then, I came across that book by Dylan and, because I was able to highlight all the names in it that really mattered, I suddenly had a three-hour playlist. And it was brilliant, it was transformative. And I think songwriters have a responsibility to inform the younger generation. Like, my uncles worked so hard to educate me as a kid, so I knew who Led Zeppelin was, I knew who Black Sabbath was. And if they hadn\u2019t done that, I never would have been exposed to all that. So I just think that there\u2019s a joy in discovering things in the music world. And when we went into the studio on this record, Bob Ezrin was involved as an executive producer. And he said to me, \u201cLook\u2014write down your ten most perfect songs. And make sure you know them, and know what they feel like when you perform them. Because that\u2019s where you\u2019ll get your quality benchmark\u2014the standard that you want to live up to.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I still have that list in my studio\u2014I\u2019ve got Dylan on there, Joni Mitchell, Bill Withers and it goes back as far as The Man I Love by Gershwin. And #1 on my list was Summertime by Cole Porter, one of the most classic songs in the American Songbook. And I love Neil Young.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

photo 6 But there\u2019s also that classic sound of The Temptations that I really adore. Just My Imagination is a stunning piece of work. So I think it\u2019s important to know those traditions. You may want to rebel against them, of course, but it\u2019s important to know them.\u00b4<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I came across that book by Dylan and, because I was able to highlight all the names in it that really mattered, I suddenly had a three-hour playlist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4048,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4040"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4049,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040\/revisions\/4049"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}