| Taking it slow: Emiliana Torrini |
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| "Miles Leonard from asked me to write the Kylie song – I still don’t know why, and I don’t think he does either" |
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“I went through a difficult time in my personal life. It was a life-changing experience. I needed to break away from what I’d done before and start afresh.”
Emiliana Torrini is explaining why she parted company with record label One Little Indian despite being on good terms with its owner Derek Birkett; but in doing so she puts new album ‘Fisherman’s Woman’ into context, explaining why it is so much softer, and more intimate, that 1999’s debut ‘Love In The Time Of Science’.
“When I started making this album no music was talking to me – I couldn’t relate to anything. So I started with a really blank slate. The album was born by itself”.
With the desire to do things differently this time round, Emiliana wrote ‘Fisherman’s Woman’ outside the studio, without any real deadline, or any firm recording contract. “It’s great to work that way,” she says, “it is so much simpler. You write the songs at your own pace. I hate it when you're given a strict schedule in which to write a record. You arrive at a studio and are like ‘so, what are we going to do today?’. I just end up running away from it all, and spending all day drinking coffee and chatting, then you’re like ‘ah, are we meant to be making an album?’. It’s so much better to have the freedom to write as things come to you – so that all you have to do in the studio is edit and fix”.
That said, without any schedule there’s the danger of never getting round to anything, and Emiliana admits her publishing company Warner Chappell provided the little bit of structure that she needed this time round. “They did call a couple of times and say ‘when are you going to write anything?’ That provided a little push!”.
The Warner Chappell team also played another role in shaping the new album – by introducing her to Mr Dan, one half of Lazyboy and the producer of Emiliana’s new album. “We just clicked – we connect musically,” she says. “It’s really important to me that I like the people I work with, and I became really good friends with Dan. It really helped – Dan was so good at getting the production just right – adding something without effecting the simplicity of the original song.”
While Warner Chappell provided the push, Rough Trade came up with the record contract. “When we’d finished the album we started sending it to record labels. Rough Trade were the first ones we tried, and they just snapped it up straight away. It was really great, because they are such good guys to work with.”
While Emiliana was busy writing the new album with Mr Dan another opportunity came her way which will surely have kept her concerned publishing company happy – she was asked to write a song for the queen of pop Ms Kylie Minogue. That song was the chart topping hit ‘Slow’. “Miles Leonard [of Parlophone Records] asked me to write it. I still don’t know why, and I don’t think he does either. Me and Dan were in the middle of writing my record and getting a little bit tired. So we said ‘why not’. It was great – we let the disco divas inside us out and made a very different sounding song”.
Having always written for herself in the past how did Emiliana feel handing over one of her creations to another singer? “It was fine with this track. It’s not really my scene – I would never record it, and we were handing it over to an artist I respected. It was great to see the track unfold once it was in the hands of a different team. Plus we quite liked being in the shadows behind the music.”
She may have been in the shadows during her moment of disco chartdom, but Emiliana is very much at the centre of things with the new album. It’s a very personal collection of tracks documenting difficult times, but with a definite positive edge. Her relaxed unstructured approach definitely delivers the goods – though let’s hope Warner Chappell and Rough Trade between them manage to add just a little structure so we don’t have to wait quite so long for Emiliana’s third outing.
Some Emiliana Torrini plugging:
Emiliana Torrini's 'Fisherman's Woman' was released on 31 Jan 2005 on Rough Trade.
chris@unlimitedmedia.co.uk - published feb 2005
