STACK May 2016 Issue 139

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Q3/ I’m pretty sure I can hear your
piano stool creaking in Bangor.
Do you make sure not to suck
those little signs of life out of your
recordings?
I’ve always been a fan of the Lomax
recordings and any recording made in
a natural environment, so I guess that
bleeds into my own music making. I like
it when it feels real, and I hate it when
it feels cleaned up and homogenised.
Things are what they are and there is
truth in that, so best to leave it alone for
the most part.
Q4/ When playing live, you often
ask the audience to sing the long
drone note in The Wild Swans On
The Lake – when did you begin that
tradition?
I’ve always been a fan of unified
voices whether in old gospel music or
folks at a festival screaming out the
chorus to a well-known tune. I enjoy
moments on gigs where we all sing
together. It makes it less about what’s
going on on stage, and more about
what’s going on in the room. In those
Q1/ You use some amazing pedal
steel throughout the album; is it an
instrument you were automatically
drawn to early in your musical
career, as a natural progression from
guitar?
Anyone that doesn’t appreciate
a good bit of pedal steel isn’t worth
appreciating. I’ve always been a fan
since ever I heard my dad playing country
music around the house. It was the one
instrument I could never tell right out
of the gate what it was. It’s an ethereal
instrument.
Q2/ What kind of instruments are in
that swelling synth-string blend in
She Burns?
Well, I could say that there are a
mixture of instruments making that
sound, and that the only thing I remember
[is] that every instrument playing during
that section remained on the same note,
and relied solely on dynamics. However
the truth is that I used magic.
moments we’re all making music
together and that’s a really uniting
feeling.
Q5/ What do you think about
someone as young as Ed Sheeran
being in a position to sign
someone like yourself, who’s
been performing professionally
since Ed was a kid?
I think it is a sign of his tenacity,
drive and ambition to succeed
paying off. Him signing me I see as
a testament to his genuine support
of the music I make. He has put his
hard-earned money where his mouth
is and I don’t know too many people
who do that with such ease. There is
a one man revolution for you if ever
I saw one.
movement. I’m trying to describe the beauty in what I
saw, in that moment of paralysed pain that tips into an
acknowledgment.
Q5/ You were only a baby in 1973. What do the early
‘70s mean to you?
With this track [1973] I was reminded of Blondie and
Talking Heads. I would feel what it was like to listen to
them and I sang out with that feeling in me. I wanted this
to be a playful track. These are the words and the melody
that fell out of me. I like the nonsensical nature of singing
about a time that I wasn’t there for. Aren’t all songs and all
memories a jumble of times and places we claim to have
been? Grains of truth and fantasy all up against each other,
living quite happily.
I know! It amazes me how we wander around doing all this
mundane stuff whilst meanwhile everything we do is due to
the push and pull of planets in a galaxy we have no conscious
awareness of. That our feet are on the ground and our
heads in space... If I stop and think it’s still too enormous to
contemplate. Sometimes though, my perception shifts in just
the right way and I get a glimpse and a sense of the enormity
of it all and when that happens it never fails to inspire me to
write about it. Moonis a simple idea: the idea that we are all
ruled by the exact same forces and as powerless as the next
to do anything about it.
Q4/ The lyrics on Petals are very intriguing. Tell us
some more about this track.
Petals is a song about grief. When you become so still
in a room you are barely there anymore. You become part of
the upholstery, just another inanimate object. When you are
this still the room sort of sighs and gets on with its hidden
life. I had this experience... it was like I describe it in the
song, basically. The petals fell from their stems like it was a
decision that had been made between them, a synchronised
Q1/ You’ve used references to motion a lot in speaking
about Kidsticks – do you mean it was a bodily, corporeal
motion that inspired you, or a more theoretical/mental
motion?
I was driven by the energy of the music and the energy of
changing countries. Moving to LA had a propulsion and an
excitement, and I needed to shake things up. I didn’t start the
record with that expectation but looking back I needed to shift
energy in my life and in my body.
Q2/ There is so much incredible tuned (and untuned)
percussion on this album, particularly on Corduroy Legs.
How much time did you have to experiment with these
kinds of sounds?
When Andy [Hung, co-producer] and I got in the studio I had
no preconceived ideas of what would happen in there. I played
the synth and as I did so Andy would be on Massive going
through presets. As he went through the sounds we would egg
each other on. Sometimes my husband would pop by and he’d
hear these insane, loud sounds coming from the garage we were
working in, and then on entering he’d find us giggling like kids
whilst being all British and polite to each other at the same time:
“I quite like that,” and so on.
Q3/ Moon is beautiful. It's intriguing how the moon
influences our bodily rhythms; it’s like magic, but it’s just
accepted by everyone. Why are celestial bodies inspiring
to you?
visit MUSIC REVIEWS
06 MAY 2016
MUSIC
INTERVIEW
The Wild
Swan by Foy
Vance is out May
13 via Warner.
FOY VANCE
continued
Kidsticks by Beth Orton
is out May 27 via ANTI.
Beth Orton waxes poetic and philosophical
about her seventh studio album Kidsticks .
The inimitable
Irish singer-
songwriter
releases The
Wild Swan this
month.
BETH ORTON
INTERVIEW