Thea Gilmore
Thea Gilmore returns at the beginning of May with her new album Regardless, which is the fourteen studio album for the singer/songwriter.
We caught up with her to chat about the new record, having time away from music and what lies ahead for the rest of this year.
- You are about to releases you new album Regardless so what can fans expect from this latest record?
It’s a record that is a bit more grown up than my previous records, I think that is down to the fact that I have had a couple of kids and it is very much informed by being a parent more than anything.
I often think that people think when you have children you get soft and I think that the opposite is true quite often as you tend to get harder almost and more aggressive and desperate to create a decent place for you children to grow up in.
I think that the record definitely has themes of love but also loss and the acceptance that you are the custodian of somebody’s life for a while but you do have to let them move on. So all of that is in there along with a healthy dose of cynicism - which is may trademark (laughs).
- I gave the album a listen this morning and there does seem to have been more of a concentration of instrumentation - especially strings - than ever before. So how did you find yourself going down this path?
A couple of years ago but I was asked to do a record by Island Records - they passed me some Sandy Denny lyrics. I was a bit anti it at the time and I was quite worried about taking a dead person’s lyrics and trying to put tunes to them. So I did shy away from it but I ended up doing it because it just sort of happened and the tunes just arrived and it felt very natural.
When I went in to record that album those songs completely commanded strings - that is how I make records I line up songs and the song tells you what it wants; it is terribly arty-ferryboat that is how it works out.
When I was making that album I realised how much I loved working with strings and how much my voice, it is a very particular type of voice and I am not someone who will ever have a rock voice, and it just really works with strings.
I just really liked the sweeping filmic nature of working with strings and when I lined the songs up for this album I just thought ’I can do the same thing here’. Because I enjoyed it so much on the Sandy Denny record it did make sense to use a similar take on things.
- Love Came Looking For Me is set to be the first single to be lifted from the album at the end of the month so why did you choose this track to introduce us to the rest of the record?
I think it kind of sums the record up as, in its way, it is an album about celebrating love and also accepting that you are not the kind of person that was necessarily expecting your life to be filled with it. I think with Love Came Looking For Me that is definitely it’s statement - love hit you in the face before you even realised that that was what you wanted.
It is in itself a very radio friendly track and it has a good beat to it and all of the other things that you have to bear in mind when you are working tracks to radio - luckily I get to stay out of that as much as possible (laughs).
- The album is out in a couple of weeks but have you been able to gage any early response?
I try very hard to stay away from responses in general. I know what I think about it and I love the record and I completely stand by it. So far the bits that I have heard about it have been positive.
Of course it matters and the musical ego in me will be sad if I get a crappy review and be happy if I get a good review, but it really doesn’t matter.
This is my fourteenth album so I am not new at this and I am not going to crumble when, and it will happen, I get a terrible review - I am sure there will be plenty out there but hopefully I will get some good ones as well. I will just wait and see.
- As you say this is your fourteenth studio album in many years so how does Regardless compare to other records you have released in terms of it's sound?
It is a completely different sound and it is a complete departure as it is much more cinematic and filmic. It is also a much lusher sounding record. I do keep coming back to this but I think that it is a much more grown up sounding record.
I listen back, I don’t do it very often but I have been doing recently, to older records of mine and I think there is a real sense of someone having not quite found a safe place to stand yet musically speaking and not quite comfortable in their own skin.
I think Regardless definitely has moved away from that and there is a confidence in Regardless that perhaps hasn’t been there in my previous records.
- You have taken a little bit of time away from music to have your second child how useful has time away been as you started work on this new record?
Time away is always really useful, especially for me as I am not someone who does it very often as I work through pretty much everything. But I needed to take some time off because I had a tough time having my second kid and I am someone who suffers from depression at the best of time.
It was a traumatic beginning to my second son’s life and we all suffered quite badly afterwards and I think I simply would have crumbled if I had tried to work through it.
It is a great leveller being able to step from the music business, which is by it’s nature is a completely unnatural and bizarre environment but you do forget that when you work in it all the time and you don’t take any time away from it. You forget how weird it is to be constantly in the spotlight and constantly under review.
Just to stand apart from it for a while and just be a mum and think about your life in context rather than through the magnifying glass of being a musician or a songwriter is incredibly useful to go back and write and record songs and rediscover your voice as a musician.
- You have worked with a wide range of producers including The Suppliers and Seadna Mac Phail so how have you found working with a string of different people?
It is always fantastic. I think of myself as a songwriter/dictator but a musical socialist. I find it very difficult to co-write and the only person that I can co-write with it my husband and that is because he knows me so well and he knows when to back off.
But in the studio all opinions are welcome and I absolutely love the collaborative nature of being in the studio and having a million ideas coming at you.
And it really is a joyous feeling to feel that there are lots of people who are passionate about what you are doing and have these incredible ideas.
Seadna for example is constantly talking about weird bits of metal saying ’what is it going to sound like it we hit this with a violin bow?’ I love it as it is so exciting; it is like being back at school again.
- As I said earlier this is your fourteenth album so is being in the studio something that you really enjoy?
There are such different parts to what I do; writing is one part, playing live is another and being in the studio is the third and they are all just so different that you can’t really compare them.
Being in the studio is the part of what I do that really encompasses other people and other people’s ideas, thoughts and feelings. I absolutely love it and it is part of the creative process that is very exciting for me. I just feel incredibly lucky to be able to do it.
- You have also written the album so how do you feel that your song-writing has developed over these fourteen records?
I think I have become les afraid of what people think, which is great. I remember reading an interview with Elvis Costello and I think he had just made his Brodsky Quartet album and there were a bunch of old Costello fans that were really hacked off that he hadn’t made This Year’s Model again. And he was like ‘I am in my fifties why would I be making angry young man music now? I am just a different writer’.
And I so strongly believe if you love and believe in an artist that you own them that duty of care to see them through that development - it is a process of growing up.
I find personally as a fan really exciting to see that process happen and listen to music made by people I love when they were in their twenties and listen they have made… I mean Leonard Cohen is in his seventies and he is still making beautiful, vital and exciting music.
It is just different and he is different and he is a completely different artist to when he was making music in his thirties, but it is still brilliant and it is still all him.
I think for me you can hear that growing up process. I have been making music a long time and I started very young, but I am not going through those experiences now and I am not that aggressive nineteen year old who has to fit as many words in a verse as humanly possible; it has changed and I have changed.
- You will also be playing three live shows at the beginning of next month so what can fans expect from those performances?
It is going to be a big show and there is going to be a lot of us on stage, so I am hoping that we will be able to make a big noise.
It won’t just be a complete representation of the record and it would be a reproduction of the record - I never like live shows that sound just like the record as I don’t see the point.
We do have strings with us because it is such good fun putting them on the road but there will be a big band and we are going to make a lot of noise. We are probably going to pull out some old favourites as well and do some strange re-workings of them. It is going to be a lot of fun.
- Finally what is next for you?
I have got lots of stuff at the moment. I am always writing and I actually working on a film project at the moment, but I can’t really say anything about that.
I have got some shows with the folk/punk poet John Cooper Clarke coming up in June, which I am really looking forward to, as well as more touring coming up later in the year.
So it is all about Regardless at the moment but I am always writing.
Thea Gilmore - Regardless is released 6th May.