KT Tunstall: Slightly More Esoteric

Hi. How are you? Good. How are you doing? Oh, pretty good. Actually, you just caught me at a rather embarrassing moment. I was reading over some of the equipment that you've used. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, you know, I have used the Line 6 but I have never used the Akai E2. Yeah. No, it's good. It's a Headrush. It's the Headrush, exactly. And this is like, sort of your primary instrument. No. I play guitar--it was really just a way of spicing up what was going to be lots of solo gigs. Right. And I'd made the first album and it had this really kind of full band sound in a lot of it and--I was actually literally doing a tour of Scottish coffee shops and I couldn't face doing it with just a guitar. It just felt depressing. And so that--I just was looking--I'd seen people, various people, a kind of leap with their voice or a leap with their guitar but not both. And then when I managed to get a hold of one I figured out that I could pretty much make a drum machine out of it, so that was really cool. And then how long did you go about just you and your machine, so to speak? Well probably for like three months, and then October time was when I got the spot on this TV show called Later... With Jools Holland which is this show--it was a fantastic--the best music show on television in Britain... And Nas, the rapper, pulled out of his spot 24 hours before the show and they called me. The girl who goes scanning for new stuff had come and seen me in rehearsal and asked me if I'd fill the spot. And then that kind of kicked things off big time. I've read a lot about this particular spot and its boost in the arm for you-- Yeah. --which has started this crazy chase, I would imagine or--that's not really the right way of putting that. A ride. A ride, if you will. Yeah. Yeah. And about your new album coming out, Drastic Fantastic, I get the feeling that that is what the title implies. Yeah, it's kind of--it's a bit of a theme for me that goes through the songs from the album, which is about kind of risk taking and what you'll give to get what you want and the warnings you can heed or ignore. A lot of it is just about the journey of getting places really, physically and mentally. Mentally, you said? Physically and mentally. Oh, physically and mentally. You must be physically drained? I am amazed. I feel like a camel of girl-guitar music where I've had 10 years of desperately wanting to progress and find a way of making a record and get into the situation where I can tour and gig. And it's really set me up for a surprising capacity for just long days, late nights, early mornings, and lots of gigs. You said that you have to give a lot to get back in return. Other than the investment of the decade, and then with this rapid ascension over the past, well, three years, what do you feel that you've given that you didn't expect to give? I didn't really appreciate what was going to happen with my time and my life now. I just desperately wish that every week had an extra week attached to it so that I could see the stuff that I keep missing and see the friends that I constantly miss. And sometimes I'm in an amazing place and I'm stuck in a room talking to someone all day.

I was in Tokyo for eight days and basically didn't see anything, but I loved it. It was still incredible. We still had to go and have dinner. But doing all that work in a place like that, you just really hope to yourself that that means that you'll have the opportunity to go back, because I wouldn't be there at all if it weren't for making an album, and people liked it there. So it's kind of paying your dues to the reason why you're right there at all, you know. I was reading something that you said about an upcoming song, "Saving My Face," which was apparently written about a 50-year-old woman who you saw trying to look like a teenager or-- It was actually a documentary on the Discovery Channel. I used to watch a lot of Discovery Channel when I was unemployed. "Saving My Face," was the name of it? No, no. Just it was a documentary about old women having really disturbing amounts of plastic surgery to look very, very young. How do you feel about the consumption of youth culture and the rise in popularity of youth as fame? Yeah, I think it's f***ed up. I think it's really, really, deeply f***ed up. And it seems to be breeding this desire in younger people to get very, very famous and rich in any way they possibly can. And I don't think there's anything--there's nothing wrong with a young person wanting to be famous and rich through doing something that they're passionate about and through doing something that means something to them.

But I flicked on the television--I don't have a television anymore because reality TV just made me sick and I just couldn't--and it's very addictive. I mean, it hooks you in and you just end up watching this s*** for hours. And I was watching other people sleeping wondering if something was going to happen. And I was just kind of like, "God, this is so sad. I need to actually get rid of my television because I hate this so much." The irony being that you're proverbially sleeping, mentally, while watching this. Well this is it. In the '60s, they said, "Television will make us stupid." And I mean, Good Night and Good Luck was a great film on that level, the George Clooney film where it was saying, "If TV is for entertainment, we should burn them all. If it's for entertainment and information, then it's a wonderful thing." But vapid entertainment isn't necessarily very good for you. And I just flicked on the television and some show--who's Bret Michaels? Who is he? Yeah. Was he in a band? He was. Like a suburban band? No. No, no. Well, maybe. A Los Angeles late-'80s hair metal band called Poison. Do you remember what they're called? Poison. Oh, he was in Poison? Yes. Because I didn't know what band--anyway, so I switched it on and it's 12 girls in a house crying because they're worried that they didn't stick their tongue in his mouth quick enough because maybe they'll get voted off and they're trying to win to be his girlfriend. And it's just totally disgusting. It's like watching a--I don't know, like watching a car crash. It's horrendous. It is. And I think the music is just--thankfully it seems to be separating itself now, thankfully, because of the Internet it's very, very easy to get ahold of really, really great music that you may not have been able to find had you not chanced upon the band doing a gig in a bar, you know. And now it's much easier to find really good music.

But unfortunately all of that stuff is totally in people's faces and there's shows where people are getting--I mean, there's a show apparently where people get plastic surgery to look like their favorite star. It's like Make My Face or something like that. I don't know what it's called. But I think it's deeply twisted, a lot of what's happening, and TV companies don't seem to have any standards at all about what they're pumping out to young people who are watching the stuff. Sorry, that was a diatribe. No, it was fantastic. I couldn't agree more. And the reason I even asked the question in the first place was that the topic, something that's been sticking in my head as I travel I've noticed increasingly that I don't see older women reading anymore on airplanes. Oh, really? It's all magazines. Like glamour magazines. Yes, exactly. And I mean, like, I read a statistic that--I don't know how they quantify it but basically if you read these magazines--to be honest, I read Vogue. I really like Vogue. It's got amazing fashion stuff in it and it's a very beautifully put-together magazine. However, if you read these glossy women's magazines, and are a woman, and apparently if you look at images for longer than, say, five seconds, in general you're left feeling inadequate and you have a general sense of low self-confidence after reading something like that and kind of pouring over it.

And that's so sad because, I mean, I don't know any guys who want to go out with a shoelace, with big boobs. I don't know anyone who likes that. All the guys I know like going out with girls who look like women. So it's very twisted that women are being bombarded with the idea that this is what women should look like when actually--and of course there's gay women who are looking good for other women, but it seems to be a very female-centric thing that's going on. Obviously now we've gotten a taste for your views on certain subjects. How do you manage to incorporate your views of this into your music without slapping the face or the hand that feeds you or slapping--yeah, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, well, interesting because part of the reason that I've had success in America is because of American Idol, Katharine McPhee singing my song in the final. And so when I got that e-mail I was like, slapping my head just going, "Oh, no. I don't need this but I do need this," because I really--my dream is to be able to tour America in a bus with a band and play shows. That's what I want to do with my life, and not just America but the rest of the world as well.

But I'd be very disappointed if I wasn't able to do that in America as well because it's really an important place for me musically. It's where I had my first band, where I went to see my first gigs and where I did a lot of my early writing when I was in my late teens. And I just think America is an amazing volcano of incredible music.

And so I get this e-mail to me going, "Katharine McPhee is one of the finalists on American Idol and would like to do your 'Black Horse and a Cherry Tree.'" And I was like, "Oh, God, how am I going to get away with this one," because what I didn't realize at the time is that 40 million people watch the show. And I would be a total idiot to say no but at the same time I didn't want to be a complete hypocrite. I would just have to live with Bill Hicks spitting in my face, "Kill yourself."

And so I am--I had to really think about what was the problem that I had with these shows. And I basically sat there and then thought about it and realized that the major problem I have is that it's completely controlled, that these kids have to sign contracts when they're in the queue lining up to audition. They're told what to say. They're told how to sing. They're told how to act. They're told how to behave. They're told exactly everything that they're doing wrong.

And I just think that's terrible. And it's a factory, it's not creative on any level at all and it's not intelligent on any level at all. It's some bloke who wears his trousers too high shouting at children and making them feel like s*** in front of a national audience. And I thought, well, the one thing that stands out for me in the situation is that certainly no one on that show told Katharine McPhee to sing my song because no one f***ing knew it. And I'm sure everyone around her would be going, "Now why don't you do 'Brown-eyed Girl' by Van Morrison, Katharine. That's a great song."

And she did something that just felt like--and I owed her the creative control on her part that she did something she wanted, which I very rarely see on a show like that. And I thought, "OK. Well go for it. It's going to do me some favors," and she's doing something she wants and I appreciate that on a show like that and it completely altered the course of my career. So I'm glad I did it and I'm grateful to her that she picked me out. When you say it altered the course of your career, was it a dramatic shift? It was, yeah. I mean, having your song played to 40 million people is going to do something when I'd been very, very strongly supported by Triple-A Radio and I was playing to 500 or 600 people at gigs and they were great, enthusiastic, really wicked audiences. But after that--I mean, there was a few things that happened at once but that was definitely a major deal and particular through iTunes there was a very prominent spike when that happened insofar as people downloading my song. So you were able to, as you said, reach 40 million viewers. And similarly, there's an event that you're involved with, Live Earth. Maybe you could tell me a little bit about that and your involvement in that. Yeah, the environmental cause has been really, really important and very close to my heart for a long time. And when I brought Eye to the Telescope out I carbon-neutralized that from day one by paying some of the proceeds of the profits that I got from the album towards planting trees. And so Eye to the Telescope has a 6,000-strong forest up in Scotland, which is wonderful. But tree planting in the last four years has kind of--it's been highlighted that it's not necessarily the best way to contribute to solving a problem with the money from the album. I think because, you know, biodiversity has got to be the right stuff getting planted in the right areas and it's storage rather than actually trying to change things.

And then so with this new album instead of trees it's going to be financial support towards encouraging developing countries to use renewable energy sources. So instead of going to India and China, "You can't do that. It's going to hurt us," while we're sitting on our pots of money and at least we're saying, "Look, we've learned that this is bulls*** and you shouldn't do it. So let's help you financially," and that's the best invitation really.

But I run on biodiesel fuel and I've got this wicked new thing where people pay an extra dollar on top of their ticket price about, "I carbon-neutralize your journey to my gig," because that's kind of where most of the output is coming from is the gig. And so it was just really important to me to be part of something that was pushing that awareness and celebrating something that everybody could get together and potentially solve.

And I don't know if it is solvable but it's definitely worth trying. And I think that over and above the environmental thing, it's a very, very valid cause to try and get some kind of global respect happening because I think once people realize that we do stuff and it affects people in China and people in India affect us. I think that the world really needs that anyway regardless of a climate crisis. Yeah. I wish that what we could do is take the proceeds from things like this and use it to fight fire with fire, to lobby against large corporations. Yeah. I mean, it's really odd because we think that we live in this democratic society that just doesn't really wash anymore and it's very, very difficult to trust anybody because major corporate business is making a lot of political decisions these days and they're swaying a lot of the political decisions. And it's really scary. So I think that a bit of collective consciousness would definitely help. Yeah. I mean, I think it's imperative to bring, as you said, these issues to the light of anyone that will listen, specifically people who come to hear music. At the same time, it's a little disheartening I think to look at the Web site for, say, Live Earth and notice that their primary sponsor is Chevrolet. Really? Yeah. That's funny. I mean, there's definitely some sort of hypocrisy there and-- Oh, yeah. I mean--the problem is that we've built our cities on a bad foundation and there's no way we can't be hypocritical. I'm in America. I flew here. I can't pretend I didn't fly here. So it's actually just trying to work with what we've got rather--I think it's really important for people not to just kick people in the balls constantly for doing things wrong and, "Look, but you've done that." It's like, "Yeah, but you're trying to do something good." And I think that with this it's impossible not to be hypocritical but effort is good. Well, we've been talking for a while now. I'd like to just ask a couple simple questions about your album. So what would you say are the primary differences in the recording process and the material from your last album into this new one? Well Steve Osborne and I realized after making the last album that I can't sing without playing my guitar at the same time. I just sound like a different singer entirely and not as good. So we had to just accept that I had to play and sing at the same time.

The album has definitely gotten an injection of three years of touring with a band--there's a lot more up-tempo stuff and a lot more electric guitar and I think there's more spirit of what we do on stage. But I hadn't toured live when I made the first one so it kind of makes sense. But I think definitely what I've done this time around is much closer to what I do in front in of an audience on stage.

And I think it's slightly more esoteric, this album, than the first one because the first one I wanted--you know, I'd been listening to Carole King's Tapestry and I love the fact that it was so increasive and so inviting and so friendly and I really appreciated that about her album and I thought that that would be a really wicked way to start... I really related to how she put herself across in that record. I aspired to that, and then with this one I've definitely gone off on tangents a little bit and slightly quirkier subject material--I kind of broke out a little bit. Quirky as in abstractions? Well no, as in plastic surgery. I've wouldn't have written about that on the last one. But there's also a couple of character songs in there, which I didn't do on the first one. Has the success that you've received doing things like late-night television, massive media appearances, etcetera, how do you think that that has affected your writing? It's totally decimated it. I haven't got any time to write and it's really frustrating... I have to adapt to what's going on because I like what's going on but I don't like the fact that it's made writing really difficult because for the first record all my songs I'd write them in half an hour at the most and I kind of realized that I needed the years of space and time either side of the half an hour and I just don't have that anymore. So I've got to just keep coming back to a song and try and build it and try and build it. And sometimes you haven't got the same materials as you started with to build it and so it can sound a bit disjointed. So it definitely takes a lot more work.

But it's more focused, definitely, when I'm not panicking about not being able to write because I know that if I had some time to myself then I would and I'm still writing songs but they're just [not] coming as thick and fast as they did. But yeah, I mean, I'm sure there will be time. This album I'm really, really over the moon with the songs that I've got on it and I plan to make sure that I take some time out to do a bit more writing for the next one. Well that's it. Cool. And I sincerely appreciate your time. Yeah. I really enjoyed talking to you. It was great. Good. Thanks a lot. Yeah, absolutely. And you take care.