Beth Orton is the most genial kind of diffident interview subject: She dislikes the process, but entertains every question, and will readily cop to that fact that, even when the subject is herself, she doesn't have all the answers.
"I feel people's disappointment is palpable when they meet me," says Orton. "I think people think I am sadder than I am. And sometimes I am more sad than they know. And sometimes I am more full of joy than they know."
"You make a record in a weird sort of vortex," she says of her third album, Daybreaker (due July 30 on Heavenly/Astralwerks). At the time of our interview in May, the music had been completed for three months, and in the interim, Orton says she has been consumed by "quite a sense of loss."
"I am over it. I have never had a baby, but you must sit back and go, 'What the fuck is that? Who are you?' It is an extension of what is me, I suppose. And then I have to talk about it, and it is like: Right, OK. What is it about?"
Like her 1997 debut Trailer Park and 1999's sophomore effort Central Reservation, Daybreaker takes her heartfelt songwriting and brazenly gives it a trippy dance makeover. Daybreaker brings in guests such as Emmylou Harris and Ryan Adams from the Americana fold, appearing alongside the Smiths' Johnny Marr, electronica mavericks the Chemical Brothers, remixer William Orbit (Madonna, Blur) and Everything But The Girl's Ben Watt.
It is to Orton's credit that the collision of sensibilities never sounds forced or awkward. She seamlessly integrates those disparate musical strands with her smoky, compelling voice and flair for evocative lyrical imagery; as accomplished as her work is, she says the whole business of explaining herself is beyond her grasp.
While preparing the press bio to accompany Daybreaker, Orton was asked to isolate the album's common themes. "Water. Boats. Movement. How people move in space and time. The way they walk. Stuff like that," came her apparently unsatisfying reply. "I can't yet find the thread that pulls it together as an explanation or an analysis," she apologizes.
"I am happy to write whatever comes into my head and whatever I feel," she explains, adding that the inspiration for a song is "like a wonderful friend who comes back to visit, to say hello and see how we are and what we are up to.
"Once you start analyzing it, you start trying to own it. That is really dangerous. Creatively, it is dangerous to question things. It is much better to be lighthearted or heavily political in interviews. At least you are not getting into the fine detail of what you are doing and why you did it."
Yet over the course of two separate interviews for this article, Orton repeatedly violates her own rule. She is neither political nor lighthearted, and she's capable of personal revelations.
"I know. I have been analyzing the whole time," she sighs. "I am full of shit."
Orton was born 31 years ago (when asked about her age, she says: "I feel like I'm 80, but most people treat me like I am 12") in Norwich. "Someone recently described Norwich as the big ass that sticks out of England," she laughs. "When I came to America, it was amazing how much it reminded me of the skylines of where I'm from. Just huge, big sky -- like a renaissance painting."
Her parents split when she was eight, and her mother moved her and her two older brothers to a tough, working-class neighborhood near North London. Although she saw her father every Sunday, she's not sure precisely what he did for a living; something to do with architecture. When Orton was 11, he died of a heart attack.
Her mother, Christine Orton, was a social activist and author who specialized in the issue of how families cope with special medical needs; she wrote essays for The Guardian, The Observer and The New Statesman. A check of the British wing of online book retailer Amazon credits her mother with titles such as Child With A Medical Problem In The Ordinary School, Children With Special Needs, and Care For The Carer. When Orton was a teen, she marched with her mother and a parade of supporters to the British Parliament to introduce a child care bill.
"My mom wasn't very ambitious, but she was incredibly passionate. She basically worked for every underdog," Orton says with pride. "She was just pretty incredible, but very understated. Her ambition was low....My mom was really from another world, I always think. Really inspiring."
Her mother instilled an independent spirit in her daughter, who was taking acting lessons and looked forward to a career in the dramatic arts. All that free-thinking didn't necessarily serve her well academically. "I was a terrible student. I hated it. They hated me," she says of her formal education. "My mother taught me to speak my mind and treated me like an adult. I didn't understand going to school and being treated like a child. I answered people back, and I was naughty as well."
When Orton was 19, her mother fell ill just before the holiday season. Doctors told them it was pleurisy, an inflammation of the membrane covering the lungs. As soon as the holidays were over, the true diagnosis was revealed. Cancer.
"I suppose they didn't want to ruin our Christmas. That is total bullshit. Fuck Christmas! I want to know!
"They told us one day, and she was dead a week later."
For many weeks, she had been spitting the green fluid into a towel, not the same towel, but a rotation of towels, one of which she would keep on her chest. But the towel on her chest, my sister Beth and I found after a short while, was not such a good place to spit the green fluid, because, as it turned out, the green fluid smelled awful, much more pungent an aroma than one might expect.
-- from A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers
"Will you make a note of this, that I am telling you this," Orton says, of discussing her mother's death. She has understandably been loath to elaborate on such a painful subject in previous interviews, but has decided to open up on the topic because...well, she's not sure why. But although she has decided to talk about it here, that doesn't mean she's prepared to address the death of her mother in every subsequent interview.
"Other journalists who read this, it is not for them to bring up. I am not turning my life into an anecdote," she explains. "I don't want that to now be part of my press release. I just decided, and made a choice to tell you."
Orton says she tried to read Eggers' memoir of his own mother's cancer death, but found it hit too close to home. Not only does she share Eggers' sister's name, she likewise cared for her mother during the final week of her life, and watched her mother suffer the same fate.
"It was just too much," she says. "I nursed her and it was quite similar to [the book]....All that kind of really strange stuff you go through when you nurse your parent. Suddenly, they are your child."
As trying and sad as the process must have been, Orton also describes the ordeal as "incredibly beautiful." "I have never been more fulfilled in my life, in a weird way, helping her die. It was the strangest thing."
If Orton has been hesitant to speak about the loss of her mother to journalists, she concedes she has addressed the topic in song. On Trailer Park, the track "Someone's Daughter" touched on the issue, but framed it in surprisingly upbeat form ("I'm no one's daughter/I belong to the sun/Gonna ease your pain until the morning comes"). The song initially was about a teenage romance she had with a boy who had a rough relationship with his own mother. "I remember being especially scathing to him, and feeling bad for it after. Someone loves him; I shouldn't mistreat him.
"Years later, after all my family were dead -- I'm not being maudlin, honest," she interjects with a soft, self-deprecating laugh -- "I was writing a song with another boyfriend. I was going [she adopts forlorn singing voice]: 'I'm no one's daughter.' And he was like: 'Yeah, you are! You are someone's daughter!' I thought, fuck it! I am someone's daughter. That was beautiful. I will never forget that."
She shifts from the topic of her mother to thoughts of that long-ago romance. For a moment, she sounds lost in that memory, of running through the early morning, rain-slicked London streets with her boyfriend, shouting out improvised song lyrics, eating dinners he'd prepare and "sitting around together, totally in love."
"Sometimes, knowing where you are from, knowing someone loves you, is quite a thing," she says quietly.
The specter of her mother again appeared on Central Reservation, in the song "Pass In Time":
My mother told me just before she died,
'Oh darling, darling, don't you be like me.
You will fall in love with the very first man you meet.'
But mama, mama, some will never know;
The love that you have is still holding my soul
The initial spark was a lyric she happened upon in a book of blues songs. She doesn't say which song, but possibly Geeshie Wiley's "Last Kind Words Blues": "My mother told me just before she died/Daughter, don't you be so wild"; or perhaps "Jesus Paid The Fare", about a penniless orphan who declines to pay streetcar fare, saying, "My mother told me just before she died/That Jesus paid when he was crucified."
"I wrote the song about where I was with my grief, and where I wanted to be with it. I wanted it to pass. I wanted to feel the strength of what she taught me, rather than just sit in misery. It is really empowering to sing. The funny thing was, it was like a mantra to myself. I couldn't believe it, but I wanted to. I wrote it as a reminder to myself. Little Post-It notes in the sky."
Orphaned at 19, Orton and her brothers set out on their own. "I was just...left," she says. Was it difficult? "Yeah, a little bit. Quite strange, to be honest." At one point, Orton became so distressed, she temporarily lost her eyesight, and she was plagued by Crohn's disease, a periodic, painful inflammation of the colon.
Orton's late teens were shaping up to be a heavy, hard-luck story, but her fortune would soon change. Six months after her mother's death, she met an up-and-coming record producer named William Orbit, and that relationship would change her life.
Orbit had Orton hang around his studio as he made music, and that friendship evolved into a musical partnership. During lulls when he'd focus for hours on getting a particular hi-hat sound, Orton started fooling around with his collection of guitars.
"He said, 'Why don't you try singing? You have got really good pitch,' and I had lots of words. We just started messing around, and I just got obsessed."
They made some records together, which led to Orton collaborating with the dance outfit Red Snapper on a couple of singles. That brought an invitation from the Chemical Brothers to sing on the track "Alive Alone" from their 1995 album Exit Planet Dust. Set against the Chems' uncharacteristically chilled-out backing track, Orton delivered the lyrics in a bereft voice that betrayed her mother's memory: "I'm alive and I'm alone/And I never wanted to be either of those."
Even as her dance card as a guest vocalist was filling up, she was assembling her own band and songs, and soon recorded Trailer Park. The album's skipping dance beats and jazzy bass runs nestled alongside Orton's unearthly songs to create a sound that accommodated the psychedelia of "Tangent" and "Galaxy Of Emptiness" alongside the moody "She Cries Your Name" and a knowing cover of the Ronettes' "I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine".
Orton abandoned her acting ambitions to leap into music, a process she agrees was a bit like being fired out of a cannon. As a novice to music, she found it daunting to have to explain her work.
"I tried to come up with answers all the time: 'This is normal, I can deal with this.' But it was really weird," she says. "The weirdest thing was living on a bus with all these people. And finding out all this stuff about myself as well. There is all the performing stuff, but also a lot of personal stuff.
"It is like an embryo being poked with a stick: 'What are you?' I don't know what I am!...It's like pulling a flower apart to see what makes it beautiful -- plucking the leaves off, and then you have just a handful of stamen and broken petals."
She managed to squeeze in an EP, Best Bit, recorded with veteran folk singer Terry Callier, but barely had time to stop for breath between touring for Trailer Park and making Central Reservation. The tour in support of her sophomore album saw Orton expanding her audience through a spot on the Lilith Fair tour. Recalling the all-female, Sarah McLachlan-fronted outing initially brings out Orton's salty side; she jokes she was "interested and repulsed" by the experience, and amusingly recounts her friendly overtures being blown off by a haughty tour mate. But then, characteristically, Orton mitigates; she was "a bit of a lunatic" on the road. While "Sarah McLachlan and all that lot were sweet," Orton says she was drinking and "living a bit of a rock 'n' roll dream," which was viewed warily by some of the Lilith sisterhood.
She has found it particularly hard to deal with a convention of the music world: The intense-but-short showbiz friendship. "Since I have been making music, I have never made and lost so many friends so quickly," she says. "I would make these really profound connections with people, and then a month down the line, I don't see them anymore. It is a highly charged thing to do, to make music. I don't like it, sometimes."
She did manage to strike up a few acquaintances that would have an impact on Daybreaker, though. One Lilith participant who embraced Orton was Emmylou Harris. "She just inspired me -- just so not full of shit," says Orton. "She has maintained herself so beautifully. She just seems like a good person to me. Really down to earth. I would like to be her when I grow up one day."
Later, during a Los Angeles Lilith tour stop, she struck up a backstage conversation with a man who possessed what she recognized as a northern English accent. He said he was a musician, and when Orton casually asked if she might know his work, the stranger replied: "Maybe. Have you heard of the Smiths?"
"Oh, fucking hell. You're Johnny Marr," Orton said when she realized the stranger was indeed the guitarist from the legendary Manchester band. The pair continued their conversation until dawn, with Orton playing him some of her new songs, and Marr suggesting little changes here and there. One of their collaborations, "Concrete Sky", ended up on Daybreaker.
Aside from Marr's musical contribution, their meeting triggered a self-realization for Orton. She had entertained thoughts of relocating abroad (the liner notes to Trailer Park even referred to San Francisco as "my home one day"), but her friendship with Marr made her realize there's no place like home. "I was really getting ungrounded," she says. "And in the end, I thought, fuck it. I want to go home. I am English. I have a sensibility...I really need my home right now."
When touring obligations for Central Reservation were completed, Orton returned to England, and says she did not step on an airplane for a year. "I needed to stop taking notes, stop taking mental pictures. I needed to just live for a little while and let it pass by, and not try and turn everything into a bloody song."
Most Saturdays, when she was home in London, Orton would stop at London's Rough Trade record store. During one visit, the staff pushed at her a copy of Ryan Adams' solo debut, Heartbreaker.
"I thought it was some old bloke," she says, adding she had been a fan of Whiskeytown but didn't realize the connection between Adams and his defunct band. "I thought it was the most beautiful record in years; the way his voice cracks, the way he uses words and the way he plays with words. I found it totally inspiring."
When she was planning her next album, she told her label she'd love to draft Adams for backup vocals. A request was forwarded, and it turned out Adams was eager to help out. Initially, he contributed vocals to "Concrete Sky", but it turned into what Orton describes as "this incredible meeting of the minds."
While they were together, Orton played him an older, leftover song called "Carmella". Adams instinctively heard something in the sing-song melody and haunting narrative, and added his own guitar and bass to round it out. On top of that, he wrote Orton a song titled "OK", and teamed with Emmylou Harris to provide backing vocals on Orton's "God Song". (All three tunes ended up on Daybreaker.)
"God Song" originated with Orton's participation in a London tribute concert to musicologist Harry Smith; Orton rewrote the melody to the standard "Frankie & Johnny" and performed it at the show. "Then I just started writing my own words, as well as my own melody. I took it as an I'm-doing-him-wrong rather than him-doing-me-wrong, 'cause it's more honest," she says. On the finished version (redubbed "God Song" by a friend of Orton's), she deliberately slurs the last word of the line "I leave justice to the hands of the lord," so it sounds like it might be "law."
Daybreaker was recorded at Ridge Farm, a residential studio in Surrey. Orton and her collaborators completed their work in 17 days, including interruptions for an Easter egg hunt ("I was sticking them up people's trousers when they weren't looking," giggles Orton) and after-hours sojourns to collect locally-grown magic mushrooms.
"They cook a big dinner, and we would drink wine and talk. And it was like a big family table. I love that! And then you go in and record. It is just like, the momentum doesn't get broken. There is a real focus."
The track "Anywhere" features a gorgeous horn arrangement by Beck sideman John Birdsong, and she called in the Chemical Brothers to do a subtle remix job on what would prove to be the title song. Altogether, they put down 25 songs (ten made the final cut); Orton says there's even more songs left over from her stint working with Marr.
"They are miles and miles apart," she says of her diverse roster of collaborators. "I couldn't find anything to pull them together, except my record. It is just how my life is, and the people I meet."
When it all comes together, the results are remarkable, particularly on "Paris Train", Daybreaker's leadoff track. Over a restless guitar figure, unsettling string sounds and an insistent locomotive rhythm, Orton sings "Now you're sitting on a Paris train/Laughing at your own jokes again/Sun splits the trees into beautiful broken light," and she yearns to "see behind the scenery."
Orton says the feel of the song might be related to her recent interest in the composer Vangelis' soundtrack to Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner, but the lyrics also have root in reality. "It was a boy who was on a train going from Paris to Denmark. And he was calling me from the train and being a smartass. I got off the phone and started [she sings the melody] doing this manic song about him."
When she returned to the song, it transformed into her own revelations about the music industry, "and you start seeing behind the scenes. And I don't really want to see behind the scenes. Sometimes the scenery is circumstance. Sometimes the scenery is the front people put up."
Orton is quiet for a moment, and then starts anew. "I suppose it is about burnout, relationships that burn out. It's about how it is, sometimes, when you meet people; you are there just to meet and to burn out really quick....I was also thinking we have a passionate relationship with this earth, that we are burning out. Is that evolution? Or is that destruction? I don't know. Are these relationships evolutionary or destructive?"
And then a light bulb goes off. "I think there is that theme to the record. I suppose that is actually the theme," she says, with more than a hint of relief.
Orton believes the titles she has given her work have been weak. "I mean, Best Bit? That's the most terrible title for anything," she says of her 1997 EP. Daybreaker sounded like a good idea at the time. It isn't actually a word, so what does it mean to Orton?
"One time, I was coming back from a friend's house, and we had been up all night drinking and laughing and talking and listening to records. He gave me a copy of Dusty In Memphis to go home with," she says of Dusty Springfield's 1969 classic, which transposed the British pop singer's moody vocal style (at times echoed in Orton's sound) to the funky, laid-back groove of the Deep South.
"I put Dusty In Memphis on and listened to it and watched the sun come up. Lovely. It was beautiful. That is a daybreaker, to me. You know, when you are a bit off your nut, the sun is coming out, and you are listening to the most incredible music. That is pure joy to me.
"We used to think music could change the world," she adds. "But I think it is wonderful to put on a song and have it change your day, have it make everything seem a bit better. That is when music matters. Maybe that's all we can expect of music."
ND contributing editor Paul Cantin has previously profiled Wilco, Cowboy Junkies, Oh Susanna and Ron Sexsmith. His daybreaker album is Love's Forever Changes.
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