INTERVIEW: Beth Orton returns with new album 'Weather Alive': "It wasn't necessarily a record for for anyone, I just knew that I had to do it for my sanity and my well being."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Eliot Lee Hazel
English singer-songwriter Beth Orton became something of an international superstar in the late 1990s with her beguiling folktronica music. After first releasing music in 1993, a trio of albums Trailer Park (1996), Central Reservation (1999) and Daybreaker (2002) made inroads into charts across the world, including the US. Along with the single ‘She Cries Your Name’, Orton became one of the most acclaimed British singers of the era.
Today she returns with her first new album in six years, Weather Alive. It is an album that sees Orton break new creative ground, not only with the music but as her first self-produced album in her 30 year career. Through this process, Orton discovered a new strength, confidence and control in her music she has previously been unable to acknowledge. “I’ve spent a life handing elements of my work over to men in a room before I'm ready and having them reinterpret my perception, add chords to make something else happen and sometimes in the process take the music to a place I had no intention of going, it's subtle the ways that could happen but to be able to hold my own intention throughout has been a powerful experience,” she says.
Weather Alive was born after Orton bought a “cheap, crappy” piano and began creating music in her shed. “This old piano really spoke to me and held an emotional resonance I could explore in a way I wasn’t able to on guitar — a depth, or a voice, I’d never worked to before,” she says. “For me, the mood and atmosphere were another instrument. They were always consistent.”
The album is full of dreamy, otherworldly, ethereal soundscapes which draw you in and quickly sweep you away in bliss. Although it only contains eight tracks, most of the tracks are well over five minutes in length and Orton has created songs that are expansive but never outstay their welcome.
Title and opening track ‘Weather Alive’ sets the tone straight away, a seven minute long epic that begins with piano and a dreamy, misty soundscape that, fittingly, evokes the breaking of a new day at dawn: ‘It almost makes me wanna cry / The weather's so beautiful outside’, she sings.
‘Friday Night’ is an album highlight, an emotive and stunningly simple song with a warm, fuzzy soundscape which Orton has said is about someone “trying to decide what to give up or what to surrender to”. Orton’s wavering, off kilter vocal reflects the anxiety of indecision.
While the dreamy soundscape of ‘Weather Alive’ and ‘Friday Night’ is the dominant sound of the album, it is not the only thing Orton works with. ‘Fractals’ has an upbeat jazz vibe, while ‘Haunted Satellite’ retains the jazz sound, but with a fuzzy, distorted, more experimental feel.
‘Lonely’ has a steady beat, a piano, the occasional trombone and little else, and its sparseness and sense of repetition bring home the angst behind the lyrics ‘lonely likes my company’. The album finishes on ‘Unwritten’, and just how the album started, it a seven minute track that is almost the moody opposite to ‘Weather Alive’. With hypnotic beats, discordant vocals and an almost otherworldly electronic drone at the end, it is a track that pulls you in and makes you want to go right back to the start of the album and experience it all over again.
Weather Alive is in many ways the complete opposite to Orton’s last studio album, 2016’s Kidsticks, but it is just as glorious. Full of warmth and feels, it is the kind of album that embraces you like a warm hug and feels hyper-personal, almost as if Orton is singing just for you. A wonderful listen you will want to return to again and again, and a new creative peak for Orton. We recently caught up with her to chat more about the album’s creation.
Hi Beth, it is such such a joy to speak to you today, and to have listened to your beautiful new album, it is full of your gorgeous sounds. How are things with you?
Good, actually really good. I'm very excited as we get to the release. It feels more and more exciting. It's funny because I finished the record in May last year, and obviously now it’s September so it's been a long time.
It's complete indulgence, but in the best possible way. It's a really indulgent album. I always feel these words like indulgent and also manipulation, they're always seen as these really bad things, but they're actually really beautiful. In this society everyone has to be so goddamn grateful all the time and selfless and we've taken away the ability of indulgence and for me, this album has got a lot of indulgence, and I love it.
I guess that these terms have been kind of reconfigured into ‘wellbeing’. In a way, when I was making the record there was something about those last few months when I was just on my own in the shed, and I was working remotely with people and I was taking the beautiful music that had been kind of played around the songs and started to sculpt it and create a new sonic world for these songs, it was kind of an indulgence for me. I really loved it. I loved the experience of getting to transport myself and the music is transporting anyway. There was some gorgeous, gorgeous stuff to work with. It’s lovely to think of making a record that people can lose themselves in, because it's not always the most jolly record. It's not dark, but it's deep.
We don't need another jolly record! It almost should come with a warning of you may possibly drown in the bath if you lay in listen to this whole album while sitting in it, because it's definitely a submerged in water album as well. It's so beautiful, and I love reading about the creation as well, particularly this visual of you on a battered old piano in the garden shed. Can you talk to me about that?
I bought a piano in Camden, in London and it was from this lovely guy - he would take pianos to Africa, literally fucking carry them on his back! He bought this piano, him and some young 19 year old and he's in I swear his late 60s. He just kind of dragged it up the hill, like a boulder, most people will be complaining and he stuck it in the shed. At first he didn't even want to sell me this piano because he said it was the granny piano, and I was like, ‘no, this is the piano with a good warm sound’. Anyway, I loved it from the moment I got it and it just had this real resonance. Every key, every time the string would twang or ring out and it would bring with it all these other kind of resonance. I just immediately fell in love with sitting at it and playing.
It's absolutely gorgeous. It pours into that idea of it being this idle indulgence of an album, which is so beautiful. Particularly in how fast music moves today, a lot of artists don't feel that they have this space or the confidence to allow themselves the space to do that.The way the songs string together and the fact that you were toying with sound and emotion and even you were saying ‘imagine this song, but imagine it's sung by Solange’. You really took your time to pull apart these songs and reconstruct them.
At first, I thought I was gonna make a very spare record, I thought it was going be just voice, piano, some drums, quite austere. That was the starting place, but then these other ideas came in like, am I gonna write songs for myself, and what would it be like just to write songs for an imagined someone else, but these were fleeting. I think the reason that some of it is the way it is, is because I found out I knew more than I thought I knew. When I was in there, and I was left to this sort of world of ‘well, what would you do if you were to just do what you thought was the next best thing?' and I was like, ‘Well, I’d do this - so go on then!’ There's no one else to go ‘nah, I don't think that'll work, I'm not sure about that’. I just followed my instinct to put it really simply. There is a lot of space, though, I really did write to the spaces. I didn't think about it being a brave or a confident thing, but I took my sweet time and it just seemed like these were the right decisions. I have quite an amorphous relationship with time, so to me, it wasn't like, ‘Oh, this is a seven minutes song’. It just felt like this is the right amount of time to take to say what this needs to say, not just in lyrics and melodies, but in the whole picture of it.
It's so good. There is a confidence, a power in silence and a power of a single note or a key. I guess the anticipation is incredible.
It's interesting you use the word confidence because it's not like it came from a very confident place and yet, if I think about it, in a way there was a confidence. You've got a song that you wrote at a certain BPM, and you realise that later, when you were in the room, you got over excited, like ‘Friday Night’ suddenly became much faster. When I got home, and a couple of months later, I was just playing again, solo on piano, I was like, ‘Oh, this song isn't like an upbeat 100 BPM, how did that happen?’ And then I sort of managed this process of slowing everything down to that tempo and that was a confidence. I didn't question it, because I was on my own, I just sort of tried it.
You've complimented that pace so beautifully as well with the video. It's confronting your stillness and your presence and the eye contact because of the absolute presence, which we don't allow ourselves anymore. Another glorious song on this album is ‘Lonely’, which I love because you're throwing up a conversation about responsibility and motherhood and identity, can you break down that track for me?
Since having kids, every year they go through, I sort of go through a little bit of my own. I'm like, ‘Oh, wow, my daughter is eight, nine, ten’. And it was beyond me not to somehow relive a little bit of my years at that age and choices that maybe my parents made. I was like ‘wow, that's intense’, I would never leave my kid to kind of figure that out on their own. The song is, in some ways, a reflection of we turn to those people in our lives and we ask them who we are and how should we do this? And we can get a bum steer, and it's not always the parents fault, either. Being a parent, you suddenly just don't want to get it wrong. It's like looking in two directions at once. At the same time, I've always done that in songs anyway, I call it prismic thinking. I see things from different directions and perspective and I liked that because in songs I can really dig into that. In life, I find it quite hard that I can see things from many sides. It’s empathy, and it's not always straightforward to live with. In songs I can really develop that. With ‘Lonely’, it's a love song to be in slowly and just playing on the idea of wherever you are, there you are kind of vibes.
I feel like that's such such a big heart of the album. There seems to be this weight or this weight of expectation, and then the understanding that ‘Oh, do you know what? There’s no expectations, I put them on myself.’
That’s a good point. A song like ‘Fractals’ is this conversation about ‘if I forgive, then then it won't matter, right?' I won't hurt about this anymore, I'll deal with it.’ And actually, it's not that simple. We're not in control of outcomes, we just have to give into it. And at that point, you sort of believe in magic you believe in the serendipitous. The magic becomes often these relationships we have with other people who bring that into our lives and without we wouldn't have the beauty that we do have, and that interconnectedness. I just wanted to explore that. I find things much easier to explore with music. I try and write ideas in long form or prose, but I find songs get to deeper places, whether anyone ever understands or cares what the fuck it is about!
That's absolutely the power of music, even for those of us that don't create our own. It gives us a mantra when meditation bores the shit out of you. Sometimes you just need a song. Has that always been the case for you? Have you always turned to songwriting and melody to process your universe?
That's a beautiful way of putting it. I have internally and when I write songs, it's a very meditative process. Why I liked working with Andrew [Hung, on Kidsticks} so much was it was sort of like staying in that internal space. With him, I could keep the meditation of the songs. When it got to be guitars and drums and so many people in a room, you do get pulled along into a different kind of energy. Definitely writing is a meditative process. What happened with this record was I was allowed to stay with the pace and keep the atmosphere, there's an atmosphere to every song I write and I think sometimes it's the silent partner, it's like the part that gets a bit wiped out, because it's not obvious. It does take confidence to hold on to that bit of you that can't put into words, and you can't quite quantify that bit of the writing. But it's very relevant, it sort of gives the song its life in a way. With this record, I was allowed to return to that internal space. I didn't want to at the beginning, I was really afraid. But then I was like, ‘the only way through this, is through this’. At that point it wasn't necessarily a record for for anyone, I just knew that I had to do it for my sanity and my well being. It's so interesting, the feedback I get because it's like looking in a mirror and obviously, I can't see myself and I can't see the work I've done, in a way. But when I hear people it reflects back what I experienced making so often, it's never happened quite like that before when I've made a record where people reflect back to me something I recognise.
Weather Alive is out now via via Partisan Records / Liberator Music. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Beth Orton you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
