KT Tunstall
THE EYES HAVE IT
K. T. Tunstall Debuts with the Dazzling Eye to the Telescope
Just about every time an artist -- not a bubble-pop phenom, but a dyed-in-the-wool musician -- is hailed as an overnight success, you know that a hard slog preceded that sudden rise. That's the case with 30-year-old Scottish singer-songwriter K. T. Tunstall, whose major-label debut, Eye to the Telescope, rocketed to the top of the British charts upon its release and has rapidly earned her a cult following on this side of the Atlantic. While Tunstall's songs are rooted in troubadour tradition, she's anything but a traditionalist in their expression, veering into Tom Waits territory as easily as she does electro-folk blues. Tunstall put her Telescope under the microscope for Barnes & Noble.com's David Sprague.
Barnes & Noble.com: Have you always been a musically oriented person?
K. T. Tunstall: Not at all. I didn't listen to music, my parents didn't listen to music, my friends weren't mad for music. There were no gigs -- no bands came to where I lived 'cause we lived sort in the sticks next to the sea in Scotland. I'd always just had a fascination with playing instruments. That was where my love of music started. And I was in a local theater group, so I loved performing. And then at 16 I was sort of really woken up by this bunch of guys called the Fence Collective, quite eccentric folk musicians who really lived by hook or by crook and didn't work because they wanted to play. They would go down to a pub and barter -- play a show to get dinner -- and that appealed to me.
B&N.com: Did writing songs come easily to you?
KT: It always did. What I think the challenge has been is finding my voice. It would be naïve to say that a 20-year-old hasn't got the experience to write songs, because at 20, I'd been through a gamut of things -- I'd traveled throughout Europe, I'd spent a year in America, I'd had my heart broken -- but the difference is, and why I'm relieved things worked out in the time frame they did, is that I had an extra ten years to think about what I wanted to make. It's so easy to be derivative and accidentally plagiarize people that you love. It's been a great progression, discovering I don't want to sing perfectly. I'd had classical training on piano and flute and went in search of perfection, sonically, and now I've found that doesn't appeal to me.
B&N.com: Was it at all difficult to move from a group setting to being a solo artist?
KT: Being the boss of it is great. I was in bands for a long time, and a lot of my energy was taken up by playing mother and playing diplomat, trying to just make everybody equal. At the end of the day, I was just going, "Hang on a minute. I'm booking all the gigs, I'm phoning all the people to try to get them to come, I'm writing all this stuff, I'm fronting the band." The other guys weren't crazy into it at the time, and the time came where I was just like, "I'm gonna just try this on my own." And it was a complete rebirth of what I did because I realized how heavily influenced I was by other people's tastes.
B&N.com: So how did your tastes change?
KT: I was very heavily into programmed, digital stuff. I was into Lamb -- a great, great dance band. And when I broke away from [my] band, I went down to London with the idea that I was going to do vocals over this crazy, crazy trip-hop digital beats. Within two or three months, I heard Hunky Dory by David Bowie and that changed me in one way, and I realized what I actually wanted was to have an E Street Band -- individuals, not session musicians.
B&N.com: Throughout the album, there's a great deal of imagery rooted in nature. Is that a byproduct of your upbringing in a rural area?
KT: Growing up in such a stunning landscape is inevitably going to have an effect on you, whether you rebel or whether you embrace, because it's so striking. I lived on this rugged, rugged coastline with the North Sea hammering at the cliffs, and the weather changes literally every half hour. My parents met as rock climbers, so they're absolute outdoors fiends, and we were constantly up hills and under canvas and camping and tramping around. They're very fond memories and something I still love to do.
B&N.com: Does that play into "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree"?
KT: In a way. I was traveling in Greece as a teenager, and for those who haven't been to Greece, it's absolutely covered in olive groves -- stunted, gnarly little bonsai-type trees. And I was driving on a moped and a huge black stallion had pulled away from its stake and was just going nuts in this tiny, tiny, hobbit-like forest. It was just such a powerful image, this enormous beast let loose and going wild in a fairy-tale wood of tiny trees.
B&N.com: So what do those elements represent in the song?
KT: The song itself is really about going through the process of making the first album. It was a very strange experience and a very steep learning curve. For the previous 10 or 15 years, I'd been completely my own boss -- when you play a gig, you just play your new song, the new song is always your favorite. And here I was having to make an album of stuff that's never gonna go away. I was being asked to make these huge decisions, so really the song is just about learning to listen to your guts again. There's actually very few times in our lives now when we have to do that.
February 2006
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