Katie Melua
Album No. 8
BMG
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A decade ago, Katie Melua arrived at a decisive moment in her career with The House (2010).
Her fourth studio set had been preceded by a commercially decorated sequence of recordings on the Dramatico label—Call Off The Search (2003), Piece By Piece (2005), Pictures (2007). This triad instantly established the Georgian-British vocalist as the new gold standard of commercial achievement in the United Kingdom and throughout parts of mainland Europe. For these outings, Mike Batt—a revered English writer, producer, and musician—had guided Melua. This meant that her triumph came with an unfair (and incorrect) critical caveat: she was viewed as a product of Batt’s shrewd genius.
Suddenly, the platinum rush of success threatened to cage Melua; in her own words, she recalls, “I was very fortunate that those early records I made with Mike...they did incredibly well, in terms of sales in Europe, it really transformed my life. But there was pressure to better that level of success and frankly I found that very stifling after a number of years.”
The House offered Melua an opportunity to politely break with her teacher for the first time; Batt logged credits on just one track out of the eventual twelve that comprised the finished effort. Left to her own devices, the singer-songwriter-guitarist coaxed producer extraordinaire William Orbit out of (then) semi-retirement to infuse her palatial adult pop stylings with an idiosyncratic vitality. Respectable sales and favorable notices greeted The House—Melua had evinced that she was capable of initiative and vision parted both from the burden of commercial expectation and the influence of her mentor.
Since then, Melua has issued three albums: Secret Symphony (2012), Ketevan (2013), In Winter (2016). The two former projects saw Melua trek back to familiar sonic terrain, whereas the latter collection saw her turn again toward innovation with Batt having amicably departed from her sphere. If one assumed that Melua was likely to pivot once more to conventional comforts with her current affair via the BMG imprint—the aptly titled Album No. 8—they would be wrong.
Album No. 8 resumes the forward thinking thrust that made both The House and In Winter so enthralling, but there is a newfound urgency and intention present. Melua describes her mindset when going in to craft her eighth outing, “Calling this record Album No. 8 was to highlight the fact that it has taken eight records to get to this point; it is also to highlight the fact that the more you do...I certainly believe that things get better. The general development (on Album No. 8), for me, has been actually quite a big one—because this is the first record where the lyrics are entirely my own and that is a new position for me.”
Album No. 8 is not a departure from Melua’s classically scaled, artful pop—it is a deepening of its varied tones. From the orchestral rumble which evocatively introduces the LP opener “A Love Like That” to the zephyr acoustica that bubbles pleasantly on its closer “Remind Me To Forget,” every lyric sung, every note played and arrangement realized feels richer, more expressive and looser than anything Melua has committed to wax prior.
Referring to the framework of the long player as “an invisible architecture that people can just dive into and escape if they need to or if they want to have their senses heightened to the wonders of life,” Melua’s attention to detail is staggering.
This shift in her sound is partially owed to her selection of Leo Abrahams as the record’s principal producer and arranger. Melua began the search for Abrahams—originally through her team ATC Management—before a mutual acquaintance—her longtime live band and studio bassist Tim Harries—introduced her to Abrahams.
“So, there I was—March 2019—I’m sitting opposite Leo on our first meeting and he offered to produce the record and said to me, ‘Look, I feel my job is to bring to life the artist’s vision,’ and, you know, that’s always wonderful to hear, but I’m also very open and I want to see what the collaborators that I’m working with…where their truth and heart lies. I’m not someone who just believes in bringing just my identity to it, I really believe in actually...well Flannery O’Connor, let me just jump to Flannery O’Connor quickly! I’m a huge fan of hers and because I’m talking to you in North America, I just want to mention her. Her essays about writing, the way she says, ‘a great writer has to have the sharpest eye,’ that’s about observing what’s around you and capturing the way you see the world. To me, it’s about it trying to distill ideas, trying to observe what is going on around me, and also inside me as a human being, and seeing what will create the best material for songs and records.”
Melua and Abrahams hit it off immediately. Abrahams was attentive to all the references—from literature, to paintings, and music—that Melua shared with him in regard to how she desired to cast the atmosphere of the LP.
“I also played Leo a couple—well, more than a couple—of influences, one of them was a Georgian composer called Giya Kancheli. Being from Georgia, that cultural influence that I have means a great deal to me—I keep up my roots with Georgia very frequently. But I also played Leo the works of Charles Stepney, he was the Chess Records producer and arranger who worked with Earth, Wind & Fire, with Minnie Riperton and Ramsey Lewis. And it was remarkable, I mean, Leo really took all of that on and he worked just so brilliantly with heightening what I was trying to do with really bringing that into record form. Then the string arrangements actually blew my mind! I didn't know that we’d be able to get them to be so rich, emotive and so ethereal. He (Leo) said it was about getting every single musical phrase in the orchestration to reflect something that was going on in the lyrics.”
Music and lyrical synchrony are a central tenet of Album No. 8. The saucy drum patterning, flushed brass and other late-night lounge accoutrement that groove effortlessly on “Voices In The Night” complements the sensuality of its text; then there is the chamber-pop swell of “Maybe I Dreamt It” that is as sonically chimerical as its words. An additional standout in this already stunning batch of tunes is “Leaving The Mountain,” a balladic dazzler that blends piano, acoustic guitar and pockets of symphonic finery to act as the canvas for Melua’s story song about her and her father’s journey to the Caucasus Mountains near the Black Sea—that marriage between the accompaniment and the songwriting lets Melua sketch out her once private memory so audiences can experience it for themselves.
Keen musicianship is a required touchstone for Melua on Album No. 8 and this long player afforded her a chance to recruit old friends (Tim Harries) and make new ones to action the tracks accordingly.
“It was a different kind of energy (on Album No. 8), but, in a way, the previous musicians I’d worked with, I’d say they instilled (in me) that love of working with great session players—like Tim Harries, although Leo, interestingly enough, instead of getting Tim to play the bass, he got him to play piano on this record. Which was quite a unique move, you know? Generally speaking, the musicians that played on this record are younger—so they’re closer to my age than the ones I’ve worked with before. It’s about a different generation and it’s about a different set of references. You change one musician in a lineup, and everything shifts fundamentally.
Also, one of the other things that is a particular favorite of mine on this point...is the rhythm section on ‘English Manner.’ So, before the strings even come in, that is Leo on electric and acoustic guitar, Sam Dixon on bass and Emre Ramazanoglu on drums. The three of them are also good friends and so you can kind of feel that (on ‘English Manner’). They are some of the most esteemed session players in this country right now. It really is a sort of distant art form, the session player, but the feelings I’ve experienced when a band strikes up and they do things that are completely unexpected, and they suddenly present a different side to a song that only existed in your head as a demo is just complete alchemy.”
Returning to the songwriting aspect, Album No. 8 marks an uptick in Melua’s ability as it is her first-time out scripting on her own. Her freshly minted technical prowess graces entries like “English Manner” and “Joy” with an incisiveness that is noticeable. Melua elaborates, “I deeply care about the words of a song, I’m really fascinated about the art of songwriting. On this record, I actually said to the five co-composers I worked with, ‘Okay, this structure is great, musically it’s all set, harmonically it’s all set, but I’m now going to go away, on my own, and work on the words’—and that process took a long time and that was quite new. The words I had to do them alone because that was the only way I could do them truthfully.”
From a thematic vantage, there was even more significance to what Melua wanted to say on Album No. 8—especially when it came to the topical evergreen of love. “The thing is that I released my first record (Call Off The Search) when I was eighteen, nineteen. I had a really beautiful song called ‘Nine Million Bicycles’ when I was twenty-one and those early songs talk about love in a way that I think a nineteen or twenty-one year-old kind of me felt was true to me then. So, it was quite wide-eyed, and it was naive to some respect.
I completely accept the thirty-six-year-old I am now, the woman I’ve grown into and how my world view has changed about love and what I’ve witnessed and what I’ve observed. To me, it (Album No. 8) was just about honestly tackling love in the way that I see it as the truth today. You know, so for example, I separated from my husband of seven years—it was a very amicable separation, that was a year ago—and I wanted to talk about it honorably, and sensitively, and delicately in a way that a matter like that should be treated—with respect. And also, to not be awkward about it. I really feel that songs—even though they’re miniatures and they’re three-and-a-half minutes long—I think that they can take anything that we give to them with love and truthfulness.”
“Your Longing Is Gone” and “Airtime” rank as some of Melua’s most personal works in her oeuvre thus far, communicated as they are with such genuine sensitivity. However, none of the songs contained on Album No. 8 would work without Melua breathing life into them. Her vocal instrument is as ravishingly versatile as ever—the understated intimacy of “Heading Home” an example of her unerring gift to know just how to read a lyric to maximum effect.
Yet, the vocals for Album No. 8 became an unforeseen, if temporary stumbling block for her. “We thought that the voice and the recording of the voice would be one of the less challenging aspects of this record, because when it comes to singing, I have quite a natural approach. It was only on the last record (In Winter) where I teamed up with the Gori Women’s Choir in Georgia where I got back into the technique of singing through their vocal coach—a brilliant former opera singer Anzori Shomakhia—but, apart from that, it’s about the song and it’s about me expressing the lyrics.
But, for some reason, on this record the instrumentation was feeling incredibly special, while still being part of that world that I believe that I’m trying to create with the records I make...but I couldn’t get the voice to sit in the right place. And we were up against a deadline. Leo actually said to me, ‘You need to come in and you need to do your vocals again,’ and, at first, it was like ‘Oh no, we still haven’t got the vocals’ and it was quite difficult. But, I thought ‘No, we have to just keep going, we have to perfect it the best way that we can,’ and so what we did on those final vocal sessions—we already had the run of the album pretty much as it ended up being—and so I did the vocals from the first song on the album to the last song on the album—and I did that three times. Whereas what I would normally do is I’d sing every single song from five to twenty takes, but this was done as a performance from song one through to song ten; I think that gives it this sort of a live feeling and sets the narrative of the record quite well.”
Like every artist in 2020, Melua finds herself putting out this body of work in an unprecedented time due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but she has taken a hopeful viewpoint to what she was able to learn in spite of this crisis. “I try to look for positives, so, for example, I’ve learned to drive like a beast around London—I had been quite a timid driver (before). I’ve learned to take film photography and that’s the photograph on the cover of Album No. 8—a self-portrait that I took with the help of a great photographer, Rosie Matheson, but because of the pandemic we couldn’t meet.
But on a serious note, I think we’re all just hoping that it will be over soon and that the live music industry can come back. But, you know, I’m staying in touch with my crew and my band and just by putting a record out there...that’s at least something.”
Given all that Melua had achieved in the seventeen-year wake of Call Off The Search, she is still a woman possessed by the restless spirit of creativity.
“Before embarking on any record—particularly on this one—I do remember really giving myself a hard time about it. Because I just remember thinking, ‘What is the purpose of making another studio album?’ when I could mentor some young artists that are coming into the industry; I could produce; I could continue working with the Gori Women’s Choir...what is the reason to go out and put your work out there like that? I realized I really didn’t have a choice, I had to get these songs out, I had to see if this intense challenge was something that was conquerable. I wanted to also celebrate the work of art that is the recording process, the songwriting process, and making a record today.
I really think this is quite a magical game and I feel really lucky to still be doing it. I have to say, I also spent quite a long time speaking with a Georgian artist, a painter, called Levan Lagidze. He had some really interesting theories, like, one of the things he said that really resonated with me is that he doesn’t believe that in today’s world the function of art is to shock, provoke or surprise—rather, it carries a mission for harmonious existence and happiness. And a relationship with painting is a participation in this infinite happy game. If I were to swap that—the word painting with songs—it makes perfect sense to me.”
Album No. 8—from top to bottom—is a record teeming with musical intelligence and imagination; it is also an elegant statement of Melua’s power, which should never be underestimated going forward.
Notable Tracks: “A Love Like That” | “English Manner” | “Remind Me To Forget” | “Voices In The Night”
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