KT Tunstall doesn’t at all seem to mind that her ubiquitous 2005 single, “Suddenly I See,” has become her career-defining opus – at least thus far.
“It’s been amazing – it’s been phenomenal,” she confirms during a phone conversation we had in early January. “It’s sort of like creating this little creature that travels around and sends you postcards now and again going ‘I’m in Tokyo Fish Market!’ (laughs) I get messages from people saying ‘you’re playing in a shop in India!’ It’s so cool. It’s also…it’s hard to write decent, upbeat happy songs – it’s much easier to write sad songs. And so, I feel quite proud that I managed to pen an uplifting song that has kind of stayed the distance and that people still feel emotionally attached to. It’s not just a kind of two-dimensional, fun, flippant piece of work. It’s quite a meaningful song. And so, yeah, I’m enormously grateful for what’s happened with it. It took me to a level of success that I never expected and has had many, many great repercussions over the years.”
Her debut album, 2004’s Eye to the Telescope – a nod to the time she spent as a child in her father’s physics laboratory at the University of St. Andrews – propelled her immediately onto pop music charts in her native UK, Europe, Canada, and the U.S. The set’s lead single, the catchy, blues-infused “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree,” earned her a top twenty hit on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Tunstall’s next three albums, Drastic Fantastic (2007), Tiger Suit (2010), and Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon (2013) evolved her sound and explored a myriad of genres.
But by 2013, Tunstall had grown weary of crafting mainstream music and touring. “I think it was a number of factors,” she explains. “The last record was this folk record and a real departure from my usual style ’cause it was written at a time of heartbreak when my dad had passed away and my marriage had broken up. And life was a mess, you know? I’d kind of done all the things I’d wanted to do and I actually wasn’t very happy. I only had myself to blame for that, so I had a lot of inward looking to do – inward seeking.”
Moving herself from London to Los Angeles in 2014 proved to be a significant catalyst for Tunstall’s personal and artistic renewal. “I found that a change of continent was a perfect time to just try and start again and have a look at maybe what directions had gone wrong. And I think it was a natural end of an era for me – it was a ten-year period of a lot of success…but also of the music world entirely changing in how it operates and how it works and how people listen to music. You know, I was the tail end of an album-buying public when the first record came out. There’s anomalies with Adele and Beyoncé and people like that where people will buy records.”
Her most recent album, KIN, was conceived unintentionally while Tunstall had been trying to steer herself in another direction musically. “My personal life, by default, had been thrown on the fire by everything that happened – and I felt like I just really needed to do the same with my work and start again, in a way, and build back up and see what I wanted to do. Because I didn’t feel excited about making records and going on the road. And it took a year – I was writing for film, and I loved doing that, and I’ll continue to do that. But then these songs really just sprung up from the ashes. I called the album my joy phoenix; it was real kind of feeling that it rose from something. The last album sounded like the soundtrack to a funeral. A good funeral (laughs). This was definitely a kind of rebirth of something, and it does feel like the kind of second half of my life.”
With new music firmly in hand, Tunstall is looking forward to reconnecting with audiences on the road in 2017. “I started playing gigs for this record last May, actually – all through most of last year with a full band. And it was so exhilarating to play with a full band again and I absolutely loved it. This year, I’m going to be out with a solo show and pushing myself more in terms of how I present the songs – and really trying to involve myself in a very interesting way of presenting things as a one-woman show. And it’s always more intimate when it’s just a solo show – I find more and more as I get older that people really appreciate me talking to them almost as much as they do me singing to them. So it’s a kind of storytelling show as well as a music expo.” Tunstall also hopes to leverage social media to involve those who come to the shows. “On this tour, I’m going to be doing a fun thing on Twitter with fans. At each venue, fans can request a cover they’d like to hear me play. So I’m going to really try and do a different cover every night at the suggestion of somebody in the audience.”
Tunstall will take the stage at A&R Music Bar on Wednesday night, kicking off an extensive world tour that will eventually lead her back to England at the end of August.
So you’re a west coast transplant now after living in the UK for many years. How has that transition been for you?
“I love it. It’s so strange because I actually lived in L.A. for a year when I was a kid – my dad was a physics lecturer. He had a sabbatical to UCLA when I was four years old. So, I spent a year here – a very formative year here – my first memories were of California. I’ve been coming back here for ten years doing gigs and it never really occurred to me to live here. I always went to the Sunset Strip and stayed at The Standard, or wherever, and did the shows, got wasted, stayed until the sun came up and left L.A. It was only a couple of years ago that I had some work that I came over for which was more film related, and I was staying down in Santa Monica. I borrowed a bicycle from the hotel and took a ride along to Venice Beach and the canals and completely fell in love with it. And I was just really hankering after finding a sanctuary where I could live and be and not have to work all the time. I find that very difficult to do in London. It was really hard to just chill out and stop, especially with a musician’s schedule where you’re really not working regular days – and I would find that I’d have a day off in London and I would go sit in the park on a Wednesday and just have people giving me evil looks because they’d have to go to work (laughs). Whereas in Venice Beach you’ve got this community of people who – a lot of people here – are not on a regular schedules. So there’s sort of a coffee shop culture all the time, and it’s lovely and I really like it – I really enjoy the peace of it. And I never expected to find such a haven in a metropolis like L.A., but it’s a lovely bubble.”
Your new record, which I really enjoyed listening to, has a California vibe to it – a little ocean breeze, if you will.
“Yeah, it does – for sure, for sure. It’s made a huge difference. I wasn’t gonna write records, you know – I was gonna write film scores, and it’s partly why I moved to L.A. And it was quite a surprise writing an album, and it was born from driving through the canyons and the hills and listening to Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty and all this amazing music that was made here. It just totally inspired me to start writing these pretty big pop songs, which I hadn’t really written…in a way I felt like I hadn’t really been in that place to write that stuff since the first record. So it was kind of a return to that stuff, in a way.”
You’ve referred to writing for film a few times during our conversation. Tell me a bit about that process and what you’ve learned about it along the way.
“During my ‘sabbatical’ year from making albums, I was accepted onto the Sundance Film Composers Lab, which is just the most extraordinary, extraordinary learning curve of my adult life. Learning from greats like James Newton Howard, and Harry Gregson-Williams, and Alan Silvestri. Back to the Future is one of my favorite films of all time, and Alan Silverstri had done the music for that – it was very exciting to be learning from such incredible talents. And I did go and score some stuff – and the film world’s tricky, you know? You might write a score and the film never comes out. Or you write a song and they decide not to use the song. And it’s definitely a different skill set, as well, to write scores for films. But I’m very interested in it, and I continue to be so. And I just wrote on the Bad Moms film score with Chris Lennertz, a composer that brought me on board – and that was great. So it’s the beginnings of a new area of work for me, which I find very exciting because I can write outside of my usual style and outside of my usual bandwidth of arrangements and instruments. It’s really interesting for me, and I think it’s good for my songwriting as well to do those different things.”
I want to ask you about growing up in Scotland. I’ve read that your house wasn’t really very musical at all – which I find fascinating given who you are.
“Well I grew up in St. Andrews, which is this really lovely little town tucked away on the east coast of Scotland. It was about an hour-and-a-half northeast of Edinburgh. It’s got the University, it’s the home of golf – it’s quite cosmopolitan even though it’s an out-of-the-way seaside, rugged little town. I was adopted at eighteen days old, and I didn’t grow up in a musical family. But they were enormously supportive of me and my brothers trying things that we gravitated toward. Both of my brothers were sporty – and I was quite sporty as well, but I had a lot of interest in music, dance, and theater. Theater was actually my first passion and what I thought I was going to do, actually, from the age of eight – I thought I was going to go into acting. At four years old, I started classical piano training – begging my parents for a piano – and went on to learn classical flute. But I wasn’t built to be a classical player and I was definitely programmed to play my own material and wanted to do more contemporary stuff…less disciplined stuff (laughs).
And so at fifteen I’d gotten a hold of a guitar, and it was really great because I just taught myself guitar – I didn’t have any lessons and I think it was quite important that I didn’t have anyone guiding me or telling me what was right or wrong, or how to do it. It was a very self-contained journey. And that was when I began writing, in earnest, songs. I was just hooked. At that age, I was just much more excited about writing my own words and being myself rather than signing someone else’s words and being someone else. So I kind of left the acting behind – funnily enough, now that I’m a bit older, I’d love to go back to it because it’d be great to be someone else! (laughs) And they could be me for awhile. But it’s all part-and-parcel because it’s all self expression at the end of the day, and creativity – that’s the important thing. I just love the thrill of creating something that didn’t exist a minute ago.”
Since you didn’t have a lot of outside musical influences around you during your formative years – what was the first record you heard to which you actually connected?
“The first record I bought…I’d gone to do a theater course in Glasgow for the summer when I was fifteen. And it was the first time I’d met people my age who were properly obsessed with music. I had a friend in the course who was a bit of a goth and was into all of this kind of weirder music I didn’t know. And she told me that I should buy Heaven in Las Vegas by the Cocteau Twins. I was kind of getting into a bit of the Rolling Stones, and I loved Beck – I’d seen him and Weezer had come out on MTV. But the first record I bought for myself was Heaven in Las Vegas. It’s quite a weird choice. It was funny because I’d won a writing competition at the school and they give out these book vouchers if you won a competition, you know – there’s math, science and all these subjects. And I won a writing competition. But I don’t think the school knew that the book shop had started selling albums! So of course you’re meant to go and buy books, but all of us went and started buying albums. So the teachers were looking rather confused at the prize-giving ceremony where they wrap your chosen book – and they’re just giving out a bunch of albums, which was so cool! (laughs) So, yeah, I received it on stage for my writing competition prize. And I just couldn’t believe this record – it was so experimental and so ethereal. Elizabeth Fraser has one of the best voices I’ve ever heard – she remains just one of the most extraordinary vocalists…and of course went on to sing ‘Teardrop’ with Massive Attack, which was so cool and experimental.
But with the Cocteau Twins, she sang in her own language. She’s not even singing English half of the time – she’s making up the words, and it’s a made up language. I’d never heard anyone do that before, and it really made me think about people from other countries who listen to English-speaking music, but they don’t speak English. It’s so common in the rest of the world that they listen to music and don’t necessarily understand what it means. And it was so great listening to it in a very visceral way, not having to understand the words to feel what the song was about. It really got me more interested in guitar playing and effects, and just not necessarily sticking to a typical song structure when you’re writing. It’s a great album – I still go back to it now. It’s gorgeous, gorgeous music.”
One of my favorite songs on the new album is the title track – it’s really lovely. Can you tell me what KIN means in the context of this record?
“Oh, well thank you! I did a show at the Hotel Cafe here in L.A., and it was a few months before I’d started recording the record. And I was talking with my friend Paul (Broucek), who’s the head of music over at Warner Brothers Studio. So he’s overseen the scores for many, many big movies throughout the years. We were both talking about the effect of human voices on film scores, and he said ‘as soon as someone hears a human voice…it doesn’t even have to be specific words…there’s a very tangible shift in their reaction to the music.’ And I said ‘well, why is that? Why does that happen?’ And he said ‘because they’re kin. It’s hearing your own kind and locking into a shared sound – and therefore a shared experience.’ And I said ‘oh well thanks, Paul! You’ve just named my new record.’ (laughs) I’d been looking for that one simple word that meant…I didn’t want to call it Tribe.
But I’d been through some really heavy shit, you know, in the years preceding it. So the songs were very much about coming through that, and surviving that, and actually being better for having coming through that stuff. Being a better person, a more compassionate person, a more understanding person, and a deeper person. And I was laughing to myself that hundreds of years ago, we’d be born into our tribe and we’d live in our little hut – and we wouldn’t really travel. We’d maybe go to the next village along, but we were sort of given the group with whom we’d spend the rest of our life. And now, it’s a kind of crazy game the universe plays where we’re born in the middle of a sea of choices and, often, in what feels like the entirely wrong group of people. And it takes us twenty years, thirty years – sometimes forty years – to find people who we really feel like are our ‘tribe’.
So the name is not only about family and friends and what all that means, but it’s really about finding those friendships and those people in your life that lift you up when you lift them up. You galvanize and you progress, and you live and grow with these people. It’s also about interconnectedness and being connected in some way. It was an important message for me to live in over the past several years to learn that you really decide how these things make you feel. You don’t just feel. It’s actually a conscious decision as to how you’re going to let this stuff shape you.”
KT Tunstall will perform on Wednesday, February 15, 7:00 p.m. (with Kelvin Jones) at A&R Music Bar, 391 Neil Avenue in the Arena District. Tickets are general admission – $23.00 plus taxes and fees via Ticketmaster.