A Conversation with KT Tunstall – HuffPost 10.6.10

Mike Ragogna: Your new album Tiger Suit is a wonderful mix of organics and synths.

KT Tunstall: Thank you.

MR: What was the motivation behind recording a project like this?

KT: Yeah, basically, the title of the album is based partly on a recurring dream I’ve had since I was a kid, where there’s a tiger in my garden and I’m stroking this amazing tiger. Then, I go into my house, and it’s not until I look at the tiger through my window that I am completely seized with fear and think, “What was I thinking? I could have been killed.” I can’t see myself in the dream, and I’m like, “Am I a tiger as well. Am I disguised as one?” Something’s going on where I can communicate with the incredible beast, and I’m safe. I relate to the dream in terms of how I have always approached music, and life a lot of the time, where I sort of just do it and worry about it later. It’s also just about acknowledging the kind of armor you put on as a performer because I don’t have a character on stage, I go on stage as myself. But there is definitely this kind of augmented version, where it’s like, “I am the warrior, and I’m going to be who I want to be on stage.” (laughs) But then also, acknowledging that I really need to take that off when I am writing songs. So, all in all, the album kind of ended up with a wilder streak, I think, than I’ve had before.

MR: You wrote, and I’m quoting from a press release here, “a staggering seventy-five songs” for this project?

KT: It was really unexpected as well because I don’t write on tour. I find it really difficult because it’s way too distracting and there’s much fun to be had. I’d been touring for about six years solidly and really had only taken a bit of time out to write the second album, but not as much as I would have liked. So, for this, I just knew that I had to take time out to write material, and I just purged it. It’s like it had been stored up for all those years.

MR: How does one choose an album out of seventy-five songs?

KT: I know, right? So, that was kind of a little daunting, but weirdly I think–and this is where I’m such a big fan of the album as a piece of work–that a forty or forty-five minute experience is so great for the human brain. That you can listen from start to finish, it keeps your attention, and you get this beautiful collection of stuff. Now that people kind of download one or two songs, so many people’s favorite song is an album track. I just think the album is such a great thing, and in the end, me, my record label boss, my manager, and Jim Abbiss, my producer, listened to all this stuff and said, “Okay, let’s come back in two day’s time with a Top Ten.” It was really obvious which songs were working with which songs. They were kind of grouping together naturally, and they all had a kind of vibe about them.

MR: Again, the organic process taking over.

KT: Yeah, exactly.

MR: I hear you recorded your demos for these in your solar-powered studio, is that right?

KT: I did. I built a studio during the year I took out, and it’s really cool. (laughs) It’s been my lifelong dream to have my own studio, and it’s amazing to have that self-sufficiency on top of it.

MR: You start the album with “Uummannaq Song.” Could you go into the story behind it?

KT: Yeah. Uummannaq is this little village up in Greenland in the Arctic Circle, and I had taken a trip there with a climate change group called Cape Farewell, who are great. They took up twenty scientists and twenty artists on a boat for ten days, and I am on this boat with Jarvis Cocker, Laurie Anderson, Vanessa Carlton, Feist, Martha Wainwright, and Robyn Hitchcock. It was an amazing group of people, and it was kind of this real love-hate thing, where I made such good friends with people on that, it was a really enriching beautiful experience, and the landscape was incredible–some of the most amazing landscape I’ve ever seen. We saw the northern lights, we saw whales, and it was just beautiful. At the same time, that was the first traveling I did at the beginning of taking my time out, so I also knew I had this mountain to climb to make an album that was really going to turn me on and get me excited about what I was doing. I’m surrounded by these incredible artists, and I was like, “Oh my God, I’m rubbish, I’m a jingle writer.” My ego just got out a bit and started to attack me. The song really was about a moment that I had where it just seemed more appealing to get off the boat and stay there rather than get back on and just live in this incredible place for a while and take time out from the madness that I’d been in for a few years.

MR: KT, you were nominated for a Grammy for “Black Horse And The Cherry Tree.”

KT: I was. The whole thing’s been such a ride, and most of it incredibly positive. But as with anything, there are moments where it can get pretty hard. You miss your friends and family, you leave home for two years at a time…but I can’t complain. It’s an amazing way to spend my life.

MR: Now, your single “Fade Like A Shadow,” I think might be one of the best representations of what you did with this album as far as combining organics with a synth approach. How did you come to this style, either as a songwriter or when it came to the production process?

KT: The song is kind of like an exorcism because I’d met someone who’d just had this completely negative effect on me to the point where even though they were still alive, I just felt kind of haunted by them, and I just felt their presence. I couldn’t shake it off and I ended up wearing a shirt with their name on it to kind of exorcise the ghost, and I guess I did it by writing this song about it. So, the song is kind of like this empowering means to and end of getting rid of this thing. In terms of the production, one of the things that was great for me on this album was recording a lot of live–most of it live. So, what sounds like a drum machine snare, is actually a snare with a cymbal on top of it, and trying to recreate some of those dance sounds quite organically, and then afterwards, adding some of that synth quality. It was just so much fun playing live in Hansa in Berlin, the studio where Bowie recorded Heroes, and all of us were just playing for our lives to be as great as Bowie.

MR: That’s an amazing place. U2 recorded there too, right?

KT: They did, they did Achtung Baby over there. It’s got quite a legacy, and it’s an amazing place.

MR: There’s a video for your single “Fade Like A Shadow” that was directed by Paul Minor?

KT: Yeah, I love Paul. He’s just such a fantastic guy to work with. It was funny because I have a different single here in the U.K., and we recorded the U.K. single in Tennessee and we filmed the American single in London.

MR: And your U.K. single is “(Still A) Weirdo”?

KT: Yeah, exactly.

MR: How is that doing over there?

KT: It’s doing good. I just thought it was such a bizarre decision to release the little runt puppy of the album because it’s really just a fragile, eccentric, little song. The U.K. guys were just like, “Listen, it’s so different from everything else out there, and it’s really emotional.” And I think that’s the same with “Fade Like A Shadow”–it’s an emotional song. It’s a very emotional album for me, actually.

MR: Now, I would say you’re a prolific singer-songwriter because I tend to go there when I describe somebody who is working in the art the way you are.

KT: Yeah, my only issue with it is that sometimes people have a habit of using “singer-songwriter” as a genre of music. I just don’t feel like that is fair because I think that…we were talking about Bowie? I mean Bowie is a singer-songwriter, PJ Harvey is a singer-songwriter. So, I just get kind of frustrated when we get bagged into this kind of self-help, therapy, Phoebe from friends singing “Smelly Cat” genre. I don’t feel like that.

MR: (laughs) That’s exactly right. The stereotype is very “Kumbaya” isn’t it.

KT: Exactly. I ain’t no “Kumbaya” singer.

MR: No, you ain’t. (laughs) You’ve had many hits–“Black Horse And The Cherry Tree,” “Suddenly I See,” and “Other Side Of The World,” a few more. As you’ve been progressing, you now have a certain maturity as an artist. How do you feel like you have evolved from the beginning to this point?

KT: Well, there are three major things that happened. Making this record was a pretty profound experience for me, and it was a really important album for me. The first thing was, I think for the first time, I genuinely stopped caring about what anybody wanted from me. I think it’s a process of learning how to do that because, at first, you’re new, you’re signed to a label, they’re excited about you, and although I’ve always done what I wanted to do, I’ve felt a pressure of what people might want. I don’t think it’s affected what I’ve recorded, but it’s affected how I’ve felt about it. This time around I was like, “You know? I can’t worry about what fans might want.” It’s an accumulating thing because at the beginning of the first record, I had no idea anyone was going to listen to it at all, and so now on my third record. I know that people are waiting to hear what I’m going to do and I just thought, “I don’t want to people-please, I want to please myself and excite myself,” so that was a big thing. The second big thing was, for the first time, I really fell in love with working in a studio. I had never really enjoyed it before because it was always a really alien environment. I think that, first of all, recording with a live band and recording my vocals live and then getting a lot more experimental with the electronica, I got that kind of Brian Eno-itis, where I understood how to enjoy myself in a studio. Thirdly, I just feel like I really let go with my vocal. This album is much less about technical perfection and much more about a kind of wilder expression, which has been such a joy for me.

MR: Nice. Do you have any advice for new artists?

KT: Well, Robert Smith gave out a great piece of advice, and that was, “Never, ever take any advice from anyone.”

KT & MR: (laughs)

KT: The only piece of advice I would offer is whatever you do, go out and gig. Get out and learn the craft on a stage, and learn how to put on a good show because I think that that’s really the be-all and end-all of being a musician.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney