Originally, singer-songwriter-musician Ben Watt’s career trajectory was supposed to follow that of a young solo artist. It began at age 19 with the release of his first single “Cant” in 1981 on an indie London record label. Then, came a folk-jazz guitar-led EP Summer Into Winter in 1982, followed by his first full-length solo effort North Marine Drive (1983), which cracked the Top 10 of the UK’s Independent Album Chart.
But then he took a very successful detour for seventeen years as one half of the impressively diverse pop duo Everything But The Girl with fellow singer-songwriter-musician (and girlfriend) Tracey Thorn, whom he met in 1981 (they married in 2008.)
In the midst of Everything But The Girl’s recording career, Watt survived a harrowing brush with death after being diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease, Churg-Strauss Syndrome (EGPA). That experience inspired some of the songs on the duo’s emotionally wrought 1994 classic, Amplified Heart (and was also detailed in his 1996 memoir, Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness.) Together, Watt and Thorn released nine Everything But The Girl studio albums of varying critical and commercial success before shelving their creative union in 2000 after the release of 1999’s Temperamental.
Since then Watt has lived quite a life as a man wearing many proverbial hats. He’s been a record producer, remixer, club DJ, radio DJ, party-thrower, book author (a second memoir, 2014’s Romany and Tom), record label head (three of them) and, most importantly, a father to twin daughters and a son.
He’s also an avid birder and the maestro behind a popular public Spotify playlist of his favorite songs (over 1,000 so far) called “SpinCycle.” It features a whiplash-inducing curated list of artists and bands like Sonic Youth, Wynton Marsalis and Atlanta-based R&B singer Mariah the Scientist (who released his favorite song of 2019) that shows Watt’s continuing hunger for discovering, devouring and disseminating all kinds of music for the masses.
After thirty-one years, Watt finally revived that dormant solo career with his award-winning Hendra (2014), followed by 2016’s Fever Dream. Now, Watt’s on the eve of releasing the third chapter of his critically-acclaimed solo career resurgence with the intricately layered and revelatory Storm Damage, due out January 31st.
On the ten-song collection, of which he’s unveiled five songs already, Watt sought to broaden beyond the guitar-led musical palette of his previous solo efforts by mixing a “future-retro trio" of upright piano, double bass and hybrid acoustic-electronic drums with digital bits of manipulated “found sounds” he sourced from public-domain recording archives online.
Lyrically, on the album he mined internal queries about mental health (“Summer Ghosts”), family ties (“Hand”), long-term relationships (“You’ve Changed, I’ve Changed”), and existential questions about life and purpose brought on by global political upheaval (“Figures In The Landscape”).
I recently rang up Watt at a studio in London—where he was working on putting together an upcoming performance—to talk about Storm Damage. Did I want to ask him if Everything But The Girl would ever reunite? No. Because, it’s clear now—more than twenty years since the release of their swan song, Temperamental—that the separate and successful creative paths both he and Thorn embarked upon are currently and truly fulfilling to them both.
But, Watt did bring up the pressure they face when asked about re-forming the duo and how that surfaced a bit within the lyrics of “Irene” (featuring Low’s Alan Sparhawk) which appears on Storm Damage. And, if you want to know if Temperamental will be reissued on vinyl, well, read on.
Watt previously mentioned in a podcast that he doesn’t prefer to over-explain what’s behind his songs. But, thankfully, with pointed insight and a hearty laugh at times, he opened up during our chat about the dark moments and inner questions that drove the creation of Storm Damage and a handful of its songs.
In looking up tickets for your upcoming tour stop here in Los Angeles, I came across the blurb for the show that teases, “Singing songs from his brand new album Storm Damage and gems from his four-decades-long career.” How does it feel to hear the phrase “four-decades-long career”?
Ummm, a mixture of pride and anxiety, I suppose. [Laughs]
Where does the anxiety come from?
Well, just that I’m getting old. [Laughs] But, I guess I’m very lucky to still be here doing this stuff and that people are still interested. You have to look at it that way.
I’ve listened to Storm Damage several times and really love it. In the title, what does the “Storm” refer to?
You know, the writing process wasn’t easy this time. I had an intention to go straight off the back of the Fever Dream tour into another period of writing and recording, but I finished touring in early 2017 and I suddenly hit a brick wall. And it took me by surprise.
My brother had died the previous summer [in 2016], unexpectedly, which had followed kind of hot on the heels of the death of my mother and my sister. I had been on tour at the time and I managed to make it to his funeral and then I was back out on tour again. And I don’t think the whole scale of it really hit me until I got back in early 2017.
I was just a little bit winded by the whole thing, you know? I just felt the whole thing was unfair. I suddenly realized that the members of my family to whom I was the closest had all just fallen like a house of cards one after the other.
I found it very hard to write. And I got quite housebound. Tracey was really busy at the time with her book; she was in and out of the house—touring, doing events, getting great reviews—and there was a lot of that kind of noise going on in the house which was not easy when you’re feeling down about your own stuff, you know?
Plus, the fact that every time you switch on the TV there’s this crazy right-wing lurch that the world is going through at the moment, which I found equally daunting. And, I don’t know, I just went into a difficult place for a while, so I guess that was the “Storm.”
When you‘re in that difficult place are you able to write anything in order to just keep track of where you’re at so that you can go back to it later?
The problem is that you’re just kind of filled with doubt when you’re in a bad place. Everybody knows this—anyone who’s suffered from any kind of depression or anxiety—all your demons kick in. You have a very low opinion of yourself.
It’s not the first time it’s happened to me, I’ve written about it before both in books and in songs. I’ve had a history and difficulty with dark places and that kind of stuff. So it’s just something you have to work through, and come out the other side. There is always love, there is always something at the end that you reach for. And it’s just waiting for that light to start burning again, you know?
Is that where the lead single “Sunlight Follows The Night” sprang from—being able to look back on that period from the other side?
I think, yeah, that’s true up to a point. I think there’s seams along those lines that thread through all three albums—Hendra, Fever Dream and Storm Damage—this idea of stress and difficulty is alleviated by hope, resilience and love. In a nutshell, yes, sunlight does follow the night and you just have to cling on to that.
So were all the songs on the album inspired by this dark period? Or were there any that you had written a long time ago?
I think there were some scraps of lyrics and perhaps a few little chord changes that were on my voice memos in my phone; there was nothing complete. I began to write again because I realized I had fallen out of love, briefly, with my guitar and found it difficult to write on it.
Hendra and Fever Dream were quite interesting in the sense that I suddenly discovered a world of altered tunings for the guitar, which was something I never really did very much with Everything But The Girl. A lot of songs on those two albums are written in quite unusual tunings. But, I just got to a point where I was beginning to repeat myself and it just felt a little bit commonplace to do it again.
I ended up, instead, sitting more at the piano to try and write. Gradually, ideas came to me. And then I began to get the idea for this album, sonically, of a traditional piano trio which inhabited a kind of sonic landscape of samples, found sounds, cut-ups and montage—an almost cinematic sound bed that the whole trio could sit among, you know what I mean?
So, those elements add an extra dimension of sonics to the album?
Yeah, definitely. It really plays into my whole interest in using pre-recorded ideas—the way I produced records like Walking Wounded (1996) and Temperamental which were a mixture of live performance and sampling. It plays into my interest in DJing, which is all about stringing together pre-recorded pieces of music.
I really like the marriage of those two worlds where you can have something very live and passionate and real like a piano trio with wood, steel, human voices and fingers trying to make something emotional out of simple instrumentation. And then you add to it these kinds of cut-ups—pre-recorded pieces of music and manipulated audio. I just think it creates a good tension in the sound.
I’m always curious how artists choose a song to open an album, when they’re allowed to do so. Why was “Balanced On A Wire” the one you chose to begin Storm Damage?
The song was very much inspired by our kids leaving home recently. They’re all in their late teens, early twenties now, and leaving for university, moving into their own accommodation for the first time. They want to break free from the home they’ve lived in all their lives, but it’s a big thing for them, you know? I was quite moved by that and it reminded me very much how I felt at nineteen—standing on the precipice of something new. Not really knowing what the future held.
Then it also made me think that we never really lose that feeling. And even in our fifties, well in my fifties anyway, you still have that feeling of trepidation about new work. I feel that even now making albums—embarking on a new process, trying to do something different than what you’ve done before. You are standing on a cliff edge hoping people will like it.
There was originally an intro on that song. And at the mix stage we chopped it off and we let the vocal come in cold right on the top. I thought that added to its drama and that’s why I put it on the front of the album—because you are on the cliff edge of the album at that point. And I’ve opened up and I’m saying, “Here I am. Here we go, take it or leave it. This is what I’ve got to offer. This next 35 to 40 minutes, these are my new ideas.”
Have your kids heard the song?
They have—particularly my daughter, Alfie. I had a long conversation with her in the car as I was driving her out of town one day; she opened up to me about her fears and her hopes and stuff. It was a really lovely conversation. So, then I played it for her. She was knocked out to be on the record. She was going, “What, dad? I’m on the album? I don’t believe it!”
Let’s talk about “Figures In The Landscape.” When I heard lyrics like “Everything’s a drop in the ocean / Everyone’s a karaoke star / We’re living through the blur of the seasons / We’re figures in the landscape,” that sort of felt like a protest song to me.
It’s really a song about feelings of powerlessness and how you respond to that. And also the idea of political powerlessness. In the West, particularly, we’re given this idea that we have a democratic vote, that we can influence our surroundings. But, in recent times, that seems to be being eroded—that whatever it is we vote for seems to be valueless in some way. And leaders can come in and change their manifestos and their agendas the day after we voted for them.
This idea that we have no agency in the world, no purchase, no way of influencing things. You know, are we just literally “figures in a landscape,” random atoms in the universe? That we have no agency, that we can do nothing? It came out of my period of depression as well—you’re not able to change, you’re stuck in a hole, which is the classic sort of depressed scenario. You can’t act on the world, so this was the kind of background to the song.
But then the conclusion of the song is, “What are you gonna do about it?” Well, you have two choices. You either get up and make the most of what you have, clap your hands. Or, you take issue with it and you get out there and try to change it. You have a choice at the end of the day, you know?
“Irene” is a very hypnotic song, I found myself listening to it over and over. Who is the “Irene” you’re singing about?
Well, it’s an amalgam. It’s not one person. It’s a lot of ideas coalescing in a fictional figure. That’s another song about change and how we cope with change. The story is centered around this memory of a nightclub where this singer sang; where a particular scene existed and people were moved by that moment in time. And then that scene moves on and what happens, you know?
It’s from multiple points of view. From the singer’s point of view, they just needed a break, they wanted a change in their life—they had a right to do that. From the audience’s point of view, there’s a portion of the audience that is just completely nostalgic—they can’t let that moment go. They kind of insist that the singer comes back and relives the past for them. The narrator of the song is a little more sanguine and philosophical about it all, accepts that he misses that time but realizes that things do move on.
And then at the end there’s the image of the city itself, which couldn’t really care less. It just welcomes in another scene. [Laughs] That line I say, “The neon city always ageless and unsung” —it’s always renewing itself. There’s always room for another generation to come in and set up their clubs with their music and their people, the city doesn’t really mind. I learned that very much from my clubbing days, you know?
Some people have asked me, “Is that Tracey right in the middle of the song there as Irene?” and I say, “No, it’s not Tracey but there is part of Tracey in it, you know?” She was a singer who’s chosen to walk away from live performance—still records albums, still writes books, still is very active on social media, but just prefers not to sing in concert halls anymore. And there’s a bit of pressure on her from the fans all the time, you know, “When are you gonna re-form?” or “When are you gonna sing live again?”
I feel that, too—the Everything But The Girl pressure to re-form. And as I say in the song, “Everyone’s entitled to a change.” We’re doing this now, you know? We did that, now we’re doing this. Just show a little respect is kind of what it’s saying.
Speaking of Tracey, is “You’ve Changed, I’ve Changed” a love letter to her and your almost forty years together?
It is a love song and it’s about the value of longevity in relationships—the value in accepting change between people within a relationship, and working out how to keep going forward, even if you do change. The accepting of difference is one of the keys, I think, to long-term relationships. Accepting that the other person is just different to you and they need their own space to do certain things their own way. And you can’t force them to do certain shit, and nor can they force you to do certain things.
And once you come to that kind of accommodation, I think you can move forward. It’s not always easy. You can have disagreements, good times, bad times—any couple in any relationship would say the same—but what the song is saying is that there is a way to make this last.
I was really moved by the album closer, “Festival Song.” I’m someone who’s been to a lot of concerts and festivals. I’ve had those cosmic experiences where music connects you to something beyond yourself on the ground. Was it written from your own personal experience? Or was it written from the point of view of what you would see when you were DJing to large crowds of people?
It is from the perspective of being a crowd-goer and a crowd watcher. And I’ve obviously had both of those experiences. The actual inspiration for the song came in 2016 when I went out with my band to play the Primavera Festival in Barcelona. We did a set in the late afternoon and then, in the evening, we all regrouped and went down to the main beach to watch Radiohead.
Now, the song is not about Radiohead or about that particular night, but I was in the edges of the crowd overlooking the main beach, watching this event take place. As soon as the band came on, all these phones came out in the dark and it was like glowworms all on the beach, you know? It was very vivid. I just immediately made a kind of mental note that that was a great idea for a song.
But then you go away and you remember all your other experiences of DJing, being at festivals, and it all just coalesces and you try and come up with a lyric that can mean something to everyone, not just to me.
More so than my interest in what opens an album, I’m fascinated by what song artists choose to close an album. “Festival Song,” in terms of its subject matter, feels like a bit of an outlier compared to the other songs that precede it. Why did you choose this song to close the album experience?
I think the last couple of songs [on the album], “You’ve Changed, I’ve Changed” and “Festival Song,” are optimistic songs at the end of the day. Some of the more difficult stuff is tackled earlier on in the album. I just wanted the album to rise slightly and there to be this feeling of some kind of salvation or redemptive feeling that, in spite of all these things we go through, there is longevity in love, there is the communal experience with people—these things make life worthwhile.
I’ve spent hours on the dance floor in clubs. So, I love that’s what you’re vibing at towards the end of the album—that, in the end, music can be salvation.
But not just the music, it’s the communal experience is what I’m driving at, you know? The fact that we all get together in a room and it’s a kind of ritual that we go through—it’s almost like the atmosphere of the party is bigger than any one person in that room. It’s even bigger than the DJ, or it should be.
When I was DJing, I always loved the club nights where the booth was in darkness, you know? You were in the corner of the room; you weren’t the focus of attention. I always loved the early days—Lazy Dog, the Cherry Jam days—when it was just a tiny club, small room, decks on the floor, and it was just about the party, not about me.
One of the things I really started to dislike about DJing was this thing of putting the DJ on the stage, like some god-like altar where everyone faces the stage. I did a few festivals towards the end of my DJ period and I used to feel quite embarrassed up there, you know? [Laughs] I was just playing records; Jesus, it wasn’t like a big deal.
Well, speaking of records, at Albumism we celebrate the album as an art form. So, what are your five favorite albums at this time?
Shit, why didn’t you warn me? I’m not really a completist kind of person; I have reservations about nearly every record that’s ever been made. [Laughs] What have I been listening to? I’m just looking around my studio here…
Ok, a record that no one really talks about is Elmer Bernstein’s soundtrack to the film Hud (1963). It’s a sixties film with Paul Newman. It’s almost like a Greek tragedy set in the Wild West and the soundtrack is these really simple Spanish guitars with simple orchestral arrangements. It’s kind of dry as tumbleweed, but it’s really, really beautiful.
I love Nick Drake’s Pink Moon (1972). I discovered Nick Drake when I was in university in the early eighties. Hats (1989) by The Blue Nile—it’s a cinematic kind of big sentimental record. It’s like sort of torch songs with synths.
The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975) by Joni Mitchell. I think the middle section in that album— “Edith And The Kingpin” through to “The Boho Dance”—it’s one of the best four or five songs ever, one after the other, on one album. I think “Edith And The Kingpin” may be one of the best sets of lyrics ever written, actually.
I’ll tell you a jazz record I really like—Fred Hersch’s Alone at the Vanguard (2011). He’s a jazz pianist; still plays now. He was diagnosed HIV positive in the eighties but he didn’t announce it until the early nineties. Around 2008 he fell into a coma and when he came out of it, he found he’d lost his muscle memory and couldn’t play the piano anymore.
So, he re-learned how to play jazz piano. In 2011, the Village Vanguard in New York gave him a week’s residency and this is where this album was recorded. It’s an incredibly emotional record. I really related to it because I had a very heavy hospital experience myself in the early nineties; I nearly died from that and came back and all that stuff. So, that record touches me a lot, actually.
Ok, one final question. Any news on when Everything But The Girl’s Temperamental album will be reissued on vinyl?
I think we’re looking around March or April, so sooner rather than later.
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