FEATURE:
Revisiting...
Katie Melua - Album No. 8
__________
I am not sure whether…
I have featured Katie Melua on my blog at all. That is an oversight that needs to be rectified, as she is one of those artists that just wins you over and stays in the heart! Album No. 8 is, as the title says, the eighth studio album by the Georgian-British singer-songwriter. It came out in October 2020. This feature finds me revisiting great albums from the past five years that may have been passed by or are not played as much now as they should be. I am going to come to a couple of positive reviews for the truly brilliant Album No. 8. I am going to start by bringing in an interview from American Songwriter. An artist who was always evolving and delivered something different to, say, 2013’s Ketevan, it is interesting reading how she approached Album No. 8:
“I’m in my old apartment, which I need to rent out, so I had estate agents coming around today,” says singer-songwriter Katie Melua during a Zoom call from London. As she talks about her life and her latest release, Album No. 8 (our review), she smiles often, seeming relaxed and content — even though some of her new songs are about the sorrow she has experienced in recent years.
In particular, Melua wants to highlight “Remind Me to Forget,” a poignant ballad. “This is a song where I actually talked about my own personal story of separating from a seven-year marriage,” she says. “This song taught me how to sensitively talk about the drama of something that happens in your life, and not to over-exaggerate it, not to overdramatize it, not to make it a melodrama, but to accept it. I like that I was able to get the story weaved into it with the right level of facts and sensitivity, and also the beauty of how I view the life that I’m blessed to have.”
For this album specifically, Melua says she focused on writing “a lot of different angles of talking about love.”
“I’ve sung a lot of love songs where I was much younger as an artist and it was about the fairytale version of love,” she says. “But I’ve come to realize love and relationships are really complicated — and I really believe songs can handle it. I really believe people want the truth and all the kind of experiences that I might have as an artist.”
As she works, she says, she seeks to capture “the actual real nuances of human existence.”
“I think that’s what fascinates me,” she adds.
Melua’s maturity and insight came out of her new approach to songwriting. “It’s the first record for me where I spent the last three or four years deep diving into lyric writing, and I did that because it was something that I felt a very strong connection to,” she says. “The words have always mattered to me a great deal. For me, what the words say, what the character of the song is, is really important.”
Melua admits that it took her some time and experience to learn to work in this way, though. “The first few records I released, I was teamed up with a very famous songwriter called Mike Batt, and so he wrote the early hits that I had,” she says. She was just 19 years old when her 2003 debut album, Call Off the Search, was released; it became the biggest-selling album in the U.K. the following year, thanks to Batt-penned singles like the title track and “Closest Thing to Crazy.” He also wrote the single “Nine Million Bicycles” for her equally successful second album, 2005’s Piece by Piece.
With outcomes like these, many artists might have been content to continue performing other people’s songs. Instead, Melua began taking an increasingly prominent role in the writing process. In 2010, she released her fourth album, The House (produced by William Orbit), which contained the hit single “The Flood,” written by Melua with Guy Chambers and Lauren Christy.
“I spent my time growing up with these brilliant musicians that I’ve been in the studio with and I’ve toured with,” Melua says. “I actually really took the time to study and become the best I could be in writing lyrics for songs. I wanted to see how much I could stretch my ability as a storyteller, as a lyricist.”
Melua is continuing this process with Album No. 8. Her co-composers this time were her brother Zurab Melua, bassist Tim Harries, Sam Dixon (Christina Aguilera, Adele) and the album’s producer, Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno, Jon Hopkins, David Holmes). “I would go to them with words and ideas and concepts of songs and musical sketches,” Melua says. She’d spend two or three days co-writing with each collaborator and then “would come away with a final demo and a structure, musically speaking.”
“I (then) would do what I’ve been told is very unusual, which is, I would then go away and spend months working on the words,” Melua says of the next steps in her process. To eliminate outside distractions, she would do things like stay in a countryside cottage for weeks while writing “to really dive deep into what was possible with this record.”
“I realized how much the space and the place where I write matters, so I’ve actually rented an office in Kensington, in an office block,” Melua says. “I have my private office where I go in and I spend my days working on lyrics and the top-line melody”.
There is still snobbery aimed at artists like Katie Melua. People thinking that she is one thing and, when you listen to her albums, you find a very different artist. Someone who is among the finest singer-songwriters there is. Album No. 8 is magnificent, and I am glad that it got a lot of positive reviews. This is what AllMusic said when they sat down with a truly beautiful album:
“Britain's Katie Melua returns to her intimate pop sound with 2020's artfully textured Album No. 8. The album is Melua's first proper studio follow-up to 2013s Ketevan and arrives four years after her majestic holiday collaboration with the Gori Women's Choir, In Winter. While a return to her original alternative pop style, Album No. 8 is nonetheless a creative departure from her past work. Produced by Leo Abrahams, it finds Melua in a deeply introspective mood, crafting lightly experimental songs that evince the influence of '70s Krautrock and more-contemporary indie rock influences. Most noticeable in this tonal shift is a change in Melua's vocals. Known for her warm, brightly resonant vocal style, here she eschews her delicate vibrato for a softer, more diffuse-sounding head voice. While the album was recorded in the wake of the end of her six-year marriage, calling Album No. 8 a breakup record feels reductive. Certainly, Melua explicitly addresses the breakup on the Brian Eno-esque "Remind Me to Forget," singing, "You're so good at hiding/But I always seem to be reminded/Love is change." Although similarly melancholy notions arrive elsewhere, as on the dusky "A Love Like That" and the yearning, post-punk-influenced "Joy," the overall sentiment is one of deep self-reflection and judgment-free musical experimentation. Fuzzy synths, skittering electronic beats, and ghostly guitars pop up throughout the album. She delves into early '80s electro-pop on "English Manner" and sinks into sweetly sad-eyed Regina Spektor balladry on "Heading Home," singing of her adolescence, "I wish I could go back and tell my younger self none of this matters, even though it hurts like hell." Album No. 8 is an intensely personal album that feels like Melua made it for herself first and foremost”.
It is good to see Katie Melua’s Album No. 8 got a lot of press. Most of the reviews were very positive. This is an album that anyone can come to fresh and take something away from. Riff Magazine spent a lot of time getting to the bottom of a terrific album. I was not aware of what Melua had already achieved as an artist when Album No. 8 came out! She is one of the most successful artists of her generation:
“Only two British female artists have reached the top 10 in U.K. album charts seven consecutive times. There’s Kate Bush, and then there’s Katie Melua, whose catalog has been certified 56-times-platinum around the world but remains a relative unknown in the United States. The singer-songwriter—who was born in the nation of Georgia before immigrating to Belfast, Northern Ireland with her family—broke through with her 2003 debut, Call Off the Search, and never really slowed down. And on Album No. 8, Melua continues her streak of intricately told stories set atop sophisticated and nuanced compositions by producer and collaborator Leo Abrahams.
As on albums past, Melua’s songs are neither pop nor folk. There are orchestral flourishes—courtesy of the Georgian Philharmonic Orchestra—but that doesn’t push the arrangement into “orchestral pop” territory. There are many jazzy touches—Melua has said she was entranced by the music of Brad Mehldau as she was writing, and her delivery recalls Norah Jones here—yet the songs never lose their leisurely pace or strong narrative.
Then there’s lyrical component of Album No. 8, which Katie Melua took so seriously that even though she was already a graduate of London’s acclaimed BRIT School (think Amy Winehouse and Adele), she enrolled to a short fiction course at a writing academy in London. She was determined to compose a compelling narrative that didn’t stick to the standard tropes of love (or the dismantling of love) all on her own. Around the same time, her seven-year marriage to motorcycle racer James Toseland was coming to an end. But Melua, who’s said the two still have a strong friendship, had no interest in writing about past mistakes or looking for Mr. Right.
“I think we’ve given love too much airtime,” she sings on penultimate track “Airtime,” a slow, jazzy lounge tune that you could imagine Melua singing with a martini in hand. “Turn it down/ Too much love is all around.” The strings swell toward the end of the song, yet they don’t mask the acoustic guitar that keeps the song out of any one box.
A lack of hate should not be confused with a lack of hurt or hope. Melua addresses disappointment and her attempts to move on at various points from opener “A Love Like That” (“It’s a burning fire/ It’ll be a wreck/ A bitter dream/ That makes you beg/ It falls like rain/ It turns to dust/ How’d you make a love like that last?”) to closer “Remind Me To Forget” (“The leaves remind me to forget… And now the birds go from two to one.”)
The former song poses a question as old as time: How do you keep the fire alive? It begins with fluttering strings that could easily go in the direction of “Flight of the Valkyries” before quickly swelling into a Laurel Canyon number that will perk up ’70s AM gold listeners. The latter is a meditative number anchored by deep bass plucking, violins, alongside acoustic and slide guitar.
There’s a beguiling nature to Melua’s voice on “English Manner,” a song that is supposedly about a love triangle yet leaves plenty open to interpretation. The mid-tempo arrangement—none of these songs are faster than mid-tempo but that doesn’t meant they’re not adventurous—has several mood shifts, from happy-go-lucky to menacing. There’s a beautiful, foreboding symphonic bridge that locks everything into place and sets the bar for the rest of the album.
Melua reminisces about life in Georgia and the city of Tbilisi, where she grew up, on “Voices In The Night” and “Heading Home.” Leaving the Mountain,” meanwhile, was inspired by a trip that Melua and her father took to the Caucasus mountains by the Black Sea.
“Voices in the Night” begins as a full-on jazz number with some wind instruments (clarinet and possibly a saxophone) weaving in and out. An electric guitar and an organ add an R&B element, and the strings are never far away. “Maybe I Dreamt It” slices a fine line between orchestral jazz and Americana—think Bill Frisell producing Carrie Rodriguez. She wrote the song, about influential German choreographer Pina Bausch, with her brother, Zurab.
The contributions of Leo Abrahams (who’s worked with Brian Eno, Jarvis Cocker and Paul Simon) should not be overstated. He was both a collaborator, completing the majority of the musical arrangements after Katie Melua finished writing lyrics, and producer—calling her back into the studio after everything was already done to record one last take of each song. It was these last takes that made it onto Album No. 8. He’s said his goal was to write the music as if it was a Greek chorus to Melua’s vocals.
Much of Melua’s songwriting process on this album had a cerebral tact. She began by reading Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles Volume 1” and looking up every song he mentioned in the book. From there she explored the work of Chicago jazz and soul guitarist Terry Callier, jazz composer Ramsey Lewis, French singer-songwriter Francoise Hardy, soul songwriter Charles Stepney, composer John Barry, Cole Porter and the previously mentioned Brad Mehldau.
How much of that deep dive made it into the record isn’t immediately clear, but the variance of these 10 tracks will seep into your psyche if you’re open to it. Melua avoids the percussive punch of artists like Florence and the Machine, who’ve crossed over in the U.S. But what it misses in lung-strength it makes up in its nuance”.
Melua did release an acoustic version of the album in 2021. Go and check that out if you can. A top ten album here in the U.K., I think that Album No. 8 is one of the best albums of 2020. In a very tough year when the pandemic was beginning, it must have been frustrating for Katie Melua to have released this wonderful album and not being able to take it out to the people! As such, maybe it did not get as much notice and spread as it warranted. Go and listen to Album No. 8 if you get the chance, because it is up there with Katie Melua’s…
VERY best work.