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KT TUNSTALL<\/h1>\nKT TUNSTALL<\/h1>\nThe pop folkie kicks expectations to make her own kind of music<\/b>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
For KT Tunstall, the catalyst for her fourth album, Invisible Empire \/\/ Crescent Moon<\/i>, was meeting veteran rocker Howe Gelb, frontman for Giant Sand. The Scottish singer-songwriter, 38, accepted Gelb\u2019s invitation to record in Tucson, Ariz. Looking only to experiment with sounds, Tunstall came away with a collection of Americana-inspired songs\u2014a marked departure from her pop sound. \u201cIt\u2019s really my purest album,\u201d says Tunstall, who broke through with her 2004 debut album Eye to the Telescope<\/i>. \u201cI was completely left to my own devices to make this album with no interference whatsoever. It\u2019s what you dream about as an artist.\u201d<\/p>\n
What inspired this record?<\/b><\/p>\n
The most important factor was meeting Howe Gelb. We had been on a tour that Robyn Hitchcock put together, and we hit it off immediately. After a few gigs he said, \u201cI think you would really enjoy coming out and recording in Tucson.\u201d He recognized I was stuck in a bit of an eddy in terms of being on a major label and what that entails, and what\u2014especially after having success on the first album\u2014that can do to you psychologically, feeling like there\u2019s pressure to try and strike gold again. It\u2019s not helpful to feel that\u2019s something you have to re-create when you\u2019re trying to make music.<\/p>\n
Do you feel pressure to have hits?<\/b><\/p>\n
There\u2019s always this feeling of disappointment when you put a record out and it doesn\u2019t do what your big album did. I never knew that. I was never yearning for another big, commercial success. Howe really represented a very nonconformist, maverick attitude to making music. I recognized that I would get a lot out of working with him because of that.<\/p>\n
Did you have songs already written?<\/b><\/p>\n
When Howe asked me to go I didn\u2019t have any songs, but by the time I went, I wrote nine in two months\u2014which was a lot for me. The first session was really just getting those songs recorded, getting them down. The second session\u2014the Crescent Moon<\/i> half of the record\u2014was written when I was there, when I was in a very different place. By then I already knew Tucson and knew the musicians, so there\u2019s quite a different feeling to it.<\/p>\n
What was the initial session like?<\/b><\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t have massive expectations of the first session. I really didn\u2019t know what was going to happen. I told my A&R guy, \u201cThis is either going to be a pricey experiment or a very cheap album.\u201d The real joy of this album is the fact that I didn\u2019t care who liked it or who listened to it. It was just about making what I wanted to make, finally, without putting any pressure on myself. That was a very liberating experience.<\/p>\n
Were you trying to avoid pop songs?<\/b><\/p>\n
Genre has never been a particularly useful tool for me. Pop to me means that it\u2019s an accessible song. It\u2019s not niche. It\u2019s unfortunately been stolen and used as a dirty word in modern music, which is a great shame because there\u2019s incredible pop music now and from the past. But I\u2019ve never considered myself a pop star or a pop writer. I\u2019m a singer and musician, and I come from a folk background. There are a lot of different types of music that I\u2019m interested in. Howe was a real joy to work with in terms of helping me break out of that formulaic approach. It was really great for me to not feel I needed to adhere to any framework for what I was writing. I could go with what came out.<\/p>\n
\u2013Amanda Farah<\/p>\n
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KT TUNSTALL The pop folkie kicks expectations to make her own kind of music\u00a0 For KT Tunstall, the catalyst for her fourth album, Invisible Empire \/\/ Crescent Moon, was meeting veteran rocker Howe Gelb, frontman for Giant Sand. The Scottish singer-songwriter, 38, accepted Gelb\u2019s invitation to record in Tucson, Ariz. Looking only to experiment with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[6978,1073],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10757"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10757"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10759,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10757\/revisions\/10759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}