Blake
Blake has been delighting fans since they burst onto the scene back in 2007 and 2013 will see them return with their new album Start Over.
But the record sees them go down a pop path more than ever before as they have penned their own tracks as well as putting their own stamp on a handful of covers.
I caught up with Stephen to chat about the new record, changing their sound and what lies ahead.
- Blake are back this week with their new album Starting Over so what can we expect from the record this time around?
As we have progressed over the last six years and evolved we have become what we wanted to be and that is a pop/harmony band. This record is really about evolving as a group and changing a lot.
The name Start Over, even though it is one of the tracks, is very fitting because it is a new start in a style that we have felt fitted us but we have never had the opportunity to really commit to.
It is all about original songs as we have written eight original songs for this album and collaborated with some fantastic songwriters such as Diane Warren, who has written over twenty five U.S. #1 hits for artists such as Beyonce.
We have put some covers on there as well which kind of mix in with what we have done before. The likes of To Make You Feel My Love, a brilliant Bob Dylan song recently covered by Adele, Desperado by The Eagles, Amazed by Lonestar and a little known song by Paul McCartney called Beautiful Night.
So it is a harmony album and it is 100% the four voices working together, as they always have, but it is now more contemporary and designed for the ears of younger listeners.
- You have slightly touched on my next question really I listened to the album this morning and there is more of a pop feel then ever before so was it a conscious choice to go down this path? And if so why the change?
It has never been about a change for us but rather evolving from where we were before. This is our fourth album and over those albums we have slowly increased the amount pop material that has appeared on each album mainly because it is what we enjoy doing and it is what our voices suit really well.
But also it is what our audiences at our live shows… we do about 150 live shows each year around the world and forty to fifty in the UK and doing so many live shows per year you get a real sense of what people like most in your music.
Oddly enough it wasn’t the classical stuff that we came from many years ago people really enjoyed the more pop orientated songs. So it was about us evolving into what we felt happy with but also into what our fan base seem to want the most.
- And how did you find the challenge of changing your style?
Well we recorded in a very different way because previously when we use to work together as a group we would record our vocals separately; we would record the orchestra separately and so on, so it was a very different way of working.
On this album we have worked directly we each of the musicians on each song at the same time; so we have been in the studio with the guitarists, drummers and keyboard players and they were working with us.
So when we created our vocal sound it was packaged in real time - us working in the studio with all of the other instruments around us as well.
So it was much more akin to the way a group like the Bee Gees or somebody like The Beach Boys possibly would have worked - the instruments were working with the voices at the time and that is so different for us.
And it is also so different from the majority of what people call ‘boy bands’ now who tend to… the instruments and the band backing is often recorded 10,000 miles away from the singers who are putting their parts together.
But for us it is always about taking the four vocal parts and making them very prominent so people can enjoy vocal harmony and then mixing the instruments around but doing it with pop songs was a very different approach for us.
Ultimately it has been something that we have found very rewarding because it has been such a challenge but the resulting album, which has us nearly three years to make, has ended up being this very unusual synthesis of pop music but also harmonies that are more traditionally found in more complex music.
- So how have you found the response to the album so far?
It has been phenomenal. We have actually been touring the songs from this album for the last six months or so; so songs like Start Over, Beautiful Night, Make You Feel My Love and Amazed have all been touring in our live shows here in the UK as well as in China and The Philippines.
There is always a degree of feeling slightly nervous when you are showing someone something brand new that they have never heard before - especially Start Over because it is a totally original song that we wrote with songwriters and no one has heard it before.
When we take it to a concert for the first time where no one has heard it you can’t rely on it being a well known cover but we feel so proud because ever time we perform it it gets the same fantastic response that covers by well known artists have received during the show.
We are very proud by the way that people are reacting to the album and we feel like it will be our best one yet.
- You have mentioned a couple of times that you have penned some of the tracks on the album this time around so how did you find that experience?
Writing songs is therapy - I think that that is the easiest way of putting it. When looking through the tracks on the album I think it becomes quite obvious that what links Blake together is four guys who are very much old fashioned romantics - I think that is true of the relationships that we had, how we grew up and the music that we listened to.
I think that the four of us hope for a lot more romance in the world that perhaps we even get ourselves. In terms of the way that we put love across in the songs and talk about relationships you can get the sense very quickly that we hope for great things in love and romance.
Sometimes in life we get things and other times in life we don’t, I have certainly had bad patches in life like everyone else, but the songs on here are about celebrating when we do get love and it is really fantastic.
- As well as original songs there are a few covers in there as well so how did you go about choosing those tracks because they fit in perfectly?
Yes I think that that was part of it. We started penning this album three years ago so in the summer of 2010 we were already sat down working with songwriters and coming up with ideas for the album. Adding in the covers as well was something that we did this summer.
We started off with sixteen or so song that we had penned with other songwriters and we cut that down to eight that we were really keen on and we though were good enough to be part of an album that we had been working on for three years. So we wanted to add in some covers to show off what we have been doing for years anyway.
Choosing the songs was about fitting them in with the songs that we have already written but it was also about songs that between us four… there are four covers there and I think it is fair to say that each one of those songs can be claimed by one of the singers as one they really wanted to do.
The Bob Dylan track To Make You Feel My Love was one that was pretty unanimous. Someone brought it to the group and said ‘lets have a go at this’ and we weren’t sure because it is a very sacred song and everybody loves it.
But we knew that every version that had come before had always been based around a single solo line and a very particular approach on the backing - which was normally just piano. We were in London and we were working in a studio that had previously recorded Pink Floyd albums like The Wall and so we had access to some amazing Hammond organs and Leslie organs.
We just thought ‘right, lets take this song that everyone knows well and take it back to a different era and try and pull the harmony around in a way that perhaps a Motown record or a soul record would and then let simple acoustic instruments do their thing.’
So that is why it is very simple with just a Leslie organ and a small string quartet and then the slide guitar and it allows that song to bloom in a different way than it has been shown off before.
That is what we tried to do with all of the songs that we brought in - they had to fit in with everything else but we had to be able to do something new with them.
There was no point us doing You Raise Me Up or something like that because it has been done a thousand times before and it is a bit old and haggard as a song now.
We wanted to take songs that hadn’t been done in harmony before and would still fit with everyone else. So it was about fitting but it was also about using the vocal style that we have to make them bloom.
- You have worked with a whole host of producers on this record including Steve Greenwell and Tim Ross…
The reason that we ended up working with such a diverse range of producers on this album is because of the time that it took to make - it would have been very difficult to work with just one producer for the whole of this album as it has taken three years of going back and forth and trying different approaches.
With some of the songs on the album there are five versions in existence that are all produced by different people. So were in the enviable position about three months ago of having multiple versions of most of the songs on the album and so we were able to chose which ones we thought worked best.
The lovely thing is that each of those producers has their own unique style and a different way of working and a different way of approaching the voices; so someone like Steve Greenwell has worked with some most of America’s big soul singers was able to help us bring out the vocals of those songs by Dianne Warren in America.
He knows Diane Warren really well and he knew what she was looking for in these songs when she wrote them - so it was very important for us to have someone who really understood that material.
Someone like Tim Ross, who is a very well know chart producer here in the UK, he had more of an upbeat and contemporary sound and that worked well for the songs that he produced. So we were very lucky to be able to work with all of these amazing producers and even the session players were just phenomenal.
For instance we had all of Michael Buble’s band playing on a number of the songs written by Diane Warren because they are such a fantastic and tight group of players.
So they produced a lot of the horns sounds, guitar licks and drumming - the song So Happy for instance is very much Michael Bible’s backing band who turn that into the upbeat number that it is.
It was always about finding the best people to work on each song. This is an album that we are very happy to stand behind and say ‘this is three years of work that we are really keen to show to people.
- It was back in 2007 when you released you debut album so how do you feel you have developed in that time?
Well I have developed grey hairs that’s for sure. Six years as a group you get to know each other and you get to know each other’s characters both musically and just in terms of day to day personality. We wouldn’t be a normal group if we didn’t have our disagreements every now and again and have barneys and arguments.
But I think that that is what has ended up making us much stronger because those types of… whether be artistic differences or personality differences those can either split the group apart or you learn to live with each other and various different idiosyncrasies and characteristics and you become stronger through it.
We tour constantly our UK tour show is ongoing and doesn’t ever really stop - we do forty or fifty shows a year - you can’t spend that much time on stage with each other and bantering with one another without knowing what makes each one of us tick.
Our shared sense of humour, probably more than anything else, is what keeps us going as we all love films like Withnail and I and Monty Python movies.
When people come to the live shows I think that that is what they see more than the music just four guys who get on very well and are able to laugh at each other and with each other.
It basically means that we have a nice life touring the world and singing songs that we like - and a great mixture of songs. So it has been a good six years and I feel that we have really grown up together.
I know I have known the guys six year but it really does feel like I have known them twenty years - and that is in a good way rather than in a negative way.
- Now that you have tackled pop is there where we are going to see you stay or are you going to go back to more classical music with further recordings?
In terms of recordings I think we will create music that we feel the public will enjoy and if that is more poppy from now on then that is where we will stay.
Going by our live shows it is always mixture of pop songs and classical songs as well as rock songs and stuff from musicals.
The live show is very eclectic and we keep it that way because that is what people want - one the things that Blake can do that no one else can do is to sing a big pop/rock ballad like With Or Without You by U2 or Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol and then intermix them with Nessun Dorma or Jerusalem.
It is all about harmonies and as long as we are singing in harmony the genre of music… we feel that we will probably pass through many different genres over time. But at the moment we are very much in the pop vein and we are loving it and enjoying it.
- Finally what is next for you? Are there any live shows planned on the run into Christmas?
Yeah we have a couple more live shows in the UK. We are actually touring oversees a great deal before Christmas and so we are touring in America and will be California and Florida before Christmas.
We are also over in The Philippines, we are doing eight shows out there, and we are also touring in New Zealand. We are going to finish up, I know how jammy this sounds, but we finish just before Christmas with a concert in Hawaii.
In the new year we go straight back out and we have multiple shows in China and Russia before we have another tour of Australia.
It is wonderful that the British harmony sound that we have become know for seems to be enjoyed all over the world. So it keeps up very busy and it keeps us flying the British flag wherever we go.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw