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Q&A: Tracey Thorn
Topic Started: May 23 2010, 06:24 AM (171 Views)
TickTock
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eMusic Q&A: Tracey Thorn
by Karen Schoemer


If you ask Tracey Thorn what the opposite of love is, don't expect her to say, "hate." For the past 30 years, on solo albums and as one half of the electro-Brit-pop duo Everything But the Girl, Thorn has written and sung countless love songs without ever resorting to a listener-coddling, Celine Dion-esque clichι. On EBTG's 1985 album Love Not Money, she got at the dizzy exuberance of a new affair, singing, "My love is like cathedral bells," but then added an ominous caveat: "— when all's well." On 1994's Amplified Heart, she explored the gaps that open in the most intimate relationships. "Even though I share your bed," she sings in "I Don't Understand Anything," "baby, I don't get inside your head." And on the new Love and Its Opposite — just her third solo effort, following 1982's A Distant Shore and 2007's Out of the Woods — she is as unflinching as ever, taking on divorce, emotional distances, the hollowness of wedding pageantry, the desperation of middle-aged singles scenes and the complacency that can creep into the most dedicated unions.

On a three-day press swing through New York, Thorn met up with eMusic's Karen Schoemer in the lounge of a downtown boutique hotel. Husband and longtime EBTG creative partner Ben Watt sat patiently in the lobby with his Macbook. Their children — a 9-year-old son and 12-year-old twin girls — were home in London, maintaining disinterest in their parents' fabulousness. "They're normal almost-teenagers," Thorn says of the twins. "They fake being not interested: 'Dad's going out DJing and I'm not looking!'"


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What is the opposite of love? You use the phrase in the song "Long White Dress," but you never define it.

"I've dreamed and I've dreamed of it/ Of love and its opposite." I think it's romance. The song is about being frightened of the fantasy version of love that you're sold as a girl. I always hated weddings, and never wanted one and feared having to dress up in a stupid white dress. I instinctively thought it was all crap. That, to me, is the opposite of love: romanticizing human relationships. You get the charmer character in "Oh! the Divorces," who's a romancer and buggers off. And then you get the situation in "Late in the Afternoon," where it's from the point of view of a couple who've been together for a very long time and know every blemish and scar on each other's bodies. That seems to me the opposite of romantic, and yet it's real and sustaining love.

I've often thought that marriage is love without romance.

We're sold, all the time, the idea that we should be on a constant quest for self-fulfillment. And the tips for reinvigorating a long-term relationship are often about play-acting: bringing the romance back, creating these phony environments in which you're supposed to feel romantic — having a date night, or giving each other a massage. I can see where it might help, but a part of me thinks [laughing], Jesus Christ, it's all over if it's gotten to that point.

In "All the Divorces" you mention Swedish songwriter Jens Lekman. Did he inspire that song?

Just the final verse. It took a long time to write that song. Once I started, I thought, this has got to be right. I don't want to be flippant and I don't want to end up saying things I don't mean. I really fiddled with it. The idea of bringing Jens into it was to lighten the tone at the end, because it's pretty gloomy stuff. The final verse introduces Jens as someone who's much younger than me and still writing from a romantic perspective. He often writes these idealized songs about girls he's in love with. And it's great, I love his songs. But they do seem to come from a different period in life when love is unencumbered. Relationships can seem life-threateningly dramatic when they end, and you can't possibly imagine you're going to survive. But you haven't got a clue what that means until you witness people who are older and who've got children and so on. You realize how horrible it can be.

Over the course of your career you've written a lot of s.ad songs and heartbreak songs. Yet the whole time you've been in a constant, steady relationship. Have you and Ben been through all the stages together?

Absolutely. The only thing we haven't done is totally split up. Everything else, yeah. How could you not? We've been together for a very, very, very, very long time. That's why there are so many stories to tell.

Could you characterize Ben's attitude toward your music over the years?

He's unthreatened by it, which is one of the best gifts a partner can give — to let you do your thing and stand back and go, "Wow, that's great." And not feel that it's driving a wedge between you, or it's a competitive thing.

Does he have much input on your solo records?

No, none at all. This one especially. I was working with [producer] Ewan Pearson, who lives in Berlin. So I kept going over there for three days at a time. I do find it quite hard to work at home. I just find it difficult to blend that domestic environment with being creative. So I kept doing little chunks of recording and then playing bits to Ben as they were finished. He probably ma.de comments, but he's very good at thinking, "If I make too many comments then I'm becoming a collaborator and I'm influencing the direction of it." So he was sparing in his comments. Supportive and positive, but in a very sparing way. And I deliberately didn't press for too much feedback. So there was a slight sense of me doing it and keeping it under wraps, and then presenting it to him as a finished piece of work.

Was it very different when you worked as Everything But the Girl?

Totally. Although we still did write our songs very much in isolation from each other. Otherwise there's that dynamic of doing it by committee — you have to agree about every line. Mostly we finished songs, or he would say, "I've got this great melody, this is how it goes," and I'd go away and write lyrics and come back with them finished. I think the only song we ever actually sat around the table and wrote completely together was "I Didn't Know I was Looking for Love" [from a 1993 EP]. I can't think why. We obviously decided we'd try it as an experiment. And it felt weird, actually! I mean, it's quite a good song, I don't not like it. But it wasn't something we ever did again.

I listened to your first solo album, A Distant Shore, from '82, back-to-back with Love and Its Opposite, and I was amazed at how much your voice has changed.

It has changed a lot, I think! It was deeper then than it is now, which strikes me as odd. On A Distant Shore, it sounds like someone who's barely ever sung before. That's how I remember feeling. I was just opening my mouth and being a bit surprised by how it sounded, and trying to work out what I wanted to do with it. Just very, very, very inexperienced. That's part of its charm. It has that innocence to it, which is genuine, not forced.

The Marine Girls had that quality as well. Those records still connect with people — you can hear the influence in bands like the Vivian Girls and Dum Dum Girls.

It's that quality of unprofessionalism, I suppose. People who aren't particularly trained in what they're doing and seem to be doing it without preconceptions. The danger with that, and the danger I started to feel quite quickly with the Marine Girls, was that you couldn't sustain it for very long. It could become limiting. It was one of the things that drove a wedge between us. I was already feeling after a couple of records that we couldn't get stuck in that. It was self-defeating to turn that into your raison d'etre.

You were aware of that, and the other girls weren't?

They were more of the opinion that, since we'd come out of the post-punk, DIY ethic, that had to be adhered to at all costs. It became a dogma. Of course I can see the charm of those records — I'm not at all blind to it. But at the same time, there are people who think those are the peak of my career, and that things got worse as they got better. I can't go along with that at all.

Everything But the Girl definitely went through a period in the mid '80s of being inside the big pop machine and going for a slick pop-soul sound.

In the mid '80s, pop music became very much a packaged product, and the rules changed. MTV appeared. Everyone thought they had had to make glossy videos. It became a game that was being played for much higher stakes. From the late '80s into the mid '90s, I can remember feeling like there was a lot of pressure. Some of it comes from outside, and then a little voice inside yourself kicks in, saying, "We ought to be more successful now."

Even your image became more heavily styled. I'm thinking of the album where you wore the big hat.

The Language of Life. I don't think it's possible to have a career in the music business without going through those moments. You'd have to be an absolute purist never to be touched by any aspect of that. It would be dull. You'd have to say no to a lot of things. Sometimes you feel like saying yes for a while, just to see what happens.

But you've come full circle now, releasing a quiet, intimate album on an indie label.

The big machine is great when it's helping you, when you're at that moment in your career when you're feeling ambitious and you want to reach out to a big audience. But I've come right down the other side of the mountain. I want to be doing it on a very small, personal level. Just being able to record music and offer it to people who are interested — there are greater possibilities for that then there were 20 years ago.

The industry is DIY, not just the music.

Yes. We lived through years of feeling like if our record didn't quite fit, that was it. It was very difficult to get it to people. Now you can bypass a lot of that. With the amount of access you have directly to your audience, you can do a lot of it yourself.

support her amazing new album available now:

http://www.emusic.com/album/Tracey-Thorn-Love-and-Its-Opposite-MP3-Download/11942532.html

http://www.amazon.com/Love-Its-Opposite-Tracey-Thorn/dp/B003E1QCEK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1274594229&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Love-and-Its-Opposite/dp/B003JL70WS/ref=dm_cd_album_lnk?ie=UTF8&qid=1274594229&sr=1-1

http://www.7digital.com/artists/tracey-thorn/love-and-its-opposite

http://ca.7digital.com/artists/tracey-thorn/oh-the-divorces/

http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?pid=8183068

http://itunes.apple.com/ca/album/love-and-its-opposite/id368983326
Edited by TickTock, May 23 2010, 06:25 AM.
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Lovely :)

I still haven't bought it yet, I want to buy it in a shop though. I dislike internet shopping
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