Gwyneth Herbert interview
January 31, 2008
Rich Jevons discusses British singer-songwriter Gwyneth Herbert’s Blue Note album Between Me and the Wardrobe in advance of her show at Leeds College of Music’s The Venue.
How much of your work is autobiographical?
Between Me and the Wardrobe is a particularly personal album and I did it at a time when it was something I really needed to write. Some of them are about me and some of them are loosely autobiographical, the songs take on a life of their own and progress into things that you never thought would be.
They’ve all got a narrative haven’t they?
I really do like stories and if there is one thing that draws all the songs together it’s that they are narrative driven. I’ve always loved words as much as I’ve loved music. I read English at uni so I’ve always been fascinated by stories and the fact that everybody has a story behind them. I love talking to people about their stories.
Slow Down, Brother is somebody’s story a really glamorous Irish lady told me while we were in a bar waiting for people. She was talking about her twin brother and he was in Ireland and fell in with the wrong crowd and had a very hedonistic life and was worrying her by asking for more and more money. He was killed, shot by the IRA.
It’s quite a contrast to Little Girl which has a fondness and innocence to it.
It’s kind of an innocence, but also it’s also got emotional turmoil. It’s about a prospective stepmother breaking up a marriage and her feelings about having a daughter who’s not hers and wanting desperately to be loved by her but realising the implications of the affair she was having.
The Woman Meets the Wiseman seems to be almost Biblical.
That was partly inspired by Sylvia Plath, the different elements of herself and being at a transitional stage of life. Partly feeling divided but partly feeling wise and the ridiculousness if that. Partly feeling like a young girl and getting up to slightly dubious activities. Partly feeling like a young woman with a ticking biological clock. Lots of different selves meeting in a no man’s land. I’d never thought of it as being Biblical but it is in the sense of meeting all these people in a desert and battling it out.
How much compromise is involved in just trying to keep record producers happy?
I think a lot of the time artists are walking a tight-rope because obviously the labels want to make money but still wanting to be true to your art and true to yourself.
There’s a kind if irony in That’s the Kind of Man.
That’s one of the more fun tracks really – a bit of a piss-take basically about these long lists of demands that we invent for ourselves. Expecting somebody to come along and it never really happens. Somebody wrote to me and said that they’d put it on their dating file.
I’ve used Leonard Cohen quite a lot for wooing!
I absolutely love him.
Influences? Joni Mitchell meets Suzanne Vega?
That Joni school of writing really excited me, I grew up listening to that and I love Janis Ian and Regina Spektor. I think right now is the most exciting time to be a song-writer, there are so many good writers out there with everybody drawing upon a massive range of influences and spewing out this genre-defying stuff. With Joni Mitchell again I love the narrative and the delight with words and the unexpected twists and quirks. I grew up listening to Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan.
Someone compared Cohen to David writing the Book of Psalms but he is so modest about what he does.
I remember an interviewer saying his songs were very morose and being very dark and depressing but he said he saw them more as a macabre comic.
You did the whole album in three days?
We didn’t really plan to release it so I just really wanted a snap shot of where we were musically because we’d done so much. We just did it in one room onto analogue tape and just completely live, a lot of them were first-takers. You can hear the creeks and the cracks.
Are you planning more recording?
I’m actually going into the studio next week and I’m recording some French tracks because the albums coming out on Blue Note France.
From the chansons tradition do you like people like Brel?
I absolutely love Brel and there some phenomenal French writers at the moment. I was thinking about writing one [in French] and then doing one cover.
Where do you write?
I write a lot in my head when I’m driving and on the tube.
12 February, The Venue, Leeds College of Music