| by Susan Moll
 Aboard
“Paris Train,” a long and rapturous
kiss of a song — and the opener of her
new outing, Daybreaker (Heavenly/Astralwerks)
— Beth Orton hurtles toward an unknown
destination shrouded in sensuous darkness. She
peers out the window at the trees splayed black
against the celestial flux in the heavens —
an image you might find in a novel by one of
the dead white European males whose works are
too un-P.C. to appreciate nowadays. Her warbly
mezzo-soprano, anchored to earth by quiet strength,
quakes with hand-trembling vulnerability. Strings
rise and fall in the background, propelling
the song ahead with a heady urgency. Not all
of the stars racing to burn out have done so
— a few have migrated to her eyes and
made themselves at home. Orton turns to her
unidentified traveling companion, whom she’s
gently chided for laughing at his own jokes:
“This was inevitable,” she sighs,
sinking into blissful repose. This was inevitable.
The angels Beth Orton summoned to Earth, so
pleadingly, two full-lengths and an EP ago,
have finally landed. “Yeah, I did make
this record predominately in love,” she
says, breaking into giggles. “Yeah, yeah.
It’s true, actually. Nice! That makes
sense. But anyway ....” She vainly grapples
for composure, still chortling. “I’m
a little embarrassed. I’ve never made
a record when I’ve been really in love.
No, I don’t think I have.”
Orton’s jovial, albeit “a
bit drifty” after a weekend sojourn through
France, which, though delightful, was no “Paris
Train.” “I had to drive in France,
which was really scary. I was driving down these
roads with sheer drops to one side and then
lunatics driving from the other. It was a bit
of a mad weekend — when you’re doing
something really heavy like driving and you
nearly die about five times, you feel a bit
drained.”
Say what you want about the proverbial
French joie de vivre — there’s a
certain brand of effervescent charm only the
rural English have, and Orton has it. Even though
the trip left her tired, she brims with vivacity.
Even when her talk turns to bollocks and bullshit,
her Norwich lilt has an air of refinement. With
her heart-shaped face, limpid blue-green eyes
and alabaster coloring she could easily pass
for a Merchant Ivory heroine — one who,
of course, stands a reedy six feet tall, snips
her red hair into an impish pixie shag, wields
an electric six-string and speaks with cheeky
wit. She veers from contemplative to mischievous
in a minute’s time, never short of a whipsmart
retort or a bitingly funny aside, and has an
endearing habit of letting her thoughts spill
out before she’s had a chance to organize
them. Hardly what you’d expect from the
troubadour who, just a few years ago, sang of
being “just alive enough to die.”
Most perceive her as a wan granola-girl folkie
with the occasional trip-hop leaning and a leaden
heart. But is she really?
“I don’t know,”
Orton says, barely containing a laugh. “Fuck
it!”
Evidently not. “To be this
quiet girl — it’s so weird, this
image that I’ve got,” she ponders.
“My friends are just like, ‘Who’
is that that they’re talking about in
the newspaper, ‘cause it’s not you!’
Now it’s unusual to people for me to be
who I am. Can you imagine that? It’s sort
of like this identity that’s grown the
past six years. And sometimes it’s confused
me quite a lot, like, ‘Is that what people
want me to be?’ I’m not, like, a
Catholic, but there’s a purity to what
I do. And it’s quite a strange feeling.
You can get lost in identities that people put
on you, can’t you? But then, does it matter?
Who gives a fuck? I’ll just do what I
do anyway. I do sense that sometimes I disappoint
people when they meet me. They want to meet
this kind of ... deep sort of person.”
She sighs. “Oh, well.”
In many ways Central Reservation
was a record born under a bad sign, clouded
by depression and Orton’s fragile health.
Daybreaker, meanwhile, was created amidst bonds
old and new, flecked with omens and talismans
and buried treasure. At the moment, though,
they’re boxed away, as Orton’s preparing
to relocate from one side of London to another.
“Where do you start when you go about
moving?” she wonders aloud. “It
feels like everything’s moving in on me
— it suddenly has become really strange
to be here. Do you know that feeling? It’s
a very good time to get it out, to get rid.
I feel like making these records is like that.
It was like a cleansing, making this record,
I think. There’s some magic in that, I
suppose. There’s definitely a sense of,
like, always letting go, of always cutting stuff
away.”
Which is all residue from her
Daybreaker mindset. “After Central Reservation,”
Orton recalls, “I was all filled up with
songs and ‘What makes a good lyric? What
doesn’t make a good lyric? What’s
a good melody? What isn’t a good melody?’
And it froze me for a couple of months. It was
lucky ‘cause it was when I met my boyfriend
and fell in love, and all that malarkey happened.
Sometimes downtime and not doing anything is
as important as doing loads of stuff. Just thinking
it through, but not all the time, mulling it
through and not worrying about it, and letting
it go for a while. I did a bit of that before
I started going into this record, and that was
a really good thing to do. It was quite scary
as well, not holding on too tight and just going,
‘Okay, what will be, will be.’”
Not only did Daybreaker lead to
more collaborations with Ben Watt, the Chemical
Brothers (who worked the decks on the eerie
title track), and Johnny Marr, it reunited Orton
with the crew with whom she made Trailer Park
and Central Reservation: multi-instrumentalist
Ted Barnes, bassist Ali Friend, pianist Sean
Read, and drummer Will Blanchard. “Continuity’s
quite an important thing,” she confides.
“I like to feel I don’t just jump
around from person to person — there’s
a bond between the musicians. Arrangement-wise
we were sort of mucking, me and Ted and Will
and Ali and Sean, pretty much all mucking. Nothing
was really like a headfuck, and I think sometimes
if it’s like that, it’s not meant
to be to a certain degree. A lot of that goes
on. Songs sort of like come forward and then
run back. Little fuckers: ‘Hey! Come back!’”
Case in point: Orton's cover of
Shuggie Otis’ “Aht Uh Mi Hed,”
which lay dormant for six years before inspiring
“Anywhere.” “When it came
time to mixing it, no one was inspired to mix
it,” she explains, “and I must admit
I was going off the tube tracks a little bit
by that point. The song of “Anywhere”
was really good, and the music to “Aht
Uh Mi Hed” was really good. And I thought,
‘Why don’t I try singing “Anywhere”
over that music?’ It wasn’t exactly
Shuggie Otis -- it was like the bass and the
drums of a million songs that sounded like that.”
Prior to that, “I couldn’t do it
‘cause I couldn’t get into his headspace,
y’know?” she says. “It’s
funny, six years later I can hear what he’s
saying, not ‘cause I’ve listened
to it so many times -- I mean, that may have
helped -- but obviously because I was ready
to.” She pauses. “I don’t
mean to sound like a hippie.”
After delving into her back catalog
for “Carmella” and “Concrete
Sky,” Orton approached Emmylou Harris
with the mournful “God Song.” “I
met her when I toured in America, the first
tour I did,” Orton recalls. “On
the last night of the Lilith tour — it
was the first one of those — I gave her
a necklace. I went to see her play this year
in London, and I went to see her before she
went on, and she was wearing the necklace as
a bracelet! As I’d left my house, I had
this last-minute thought, like, ‘Fuck!
I’m going to take her “God Song”
and see what she thinks of it.’ And then
when I saw she was wearing that, I was like,
‘I’m going to ask her to fucking
**sing** on it! That’s an omen.’
So I played it to her and she loved it, and
she did.”
If ever there was an appropriately
titled album, it’s Daybreaker. Gone is
the girl with the weather-beaten soul who shouldered
a shattering pain. A newly confident, increasingly
surefooted Orton is slowly emerging. “It’s
a fucking mad one, isn’t it, all this
creative stuff,” she muses. “You
don’t really know where it comes from,
and there’s no hot and cold, on and off.
It is or it isn’t. It’s really unquantifiable
and strange and lovely. And I love it. The songs
that I’m writing now since I finished
the record are more lucid and clear and flowing
than they’ve ever been. I feel like I
know what way to go next, d’ya know what
I mean? What fits right, what feels right, what
really is, and what isn’t.”
Toward the end of Central Reservation, Orton
vowed not to waste a single second living in
hell like it was some kind of heaven —
a promise she’s made good on. “I
don’t want to just depress people,”
she confesses. “But then again, that’s
bullshit. I want what I do to matter, ultimately
— really matter. And I know that the politics
have gone from music and my music isn’t
exactly the most political music, let’s
be honest. But I think that music can still
move and touch people in the
same way, always has. It’s like this savior,
this little thing I can do that gives me so
much pleasure and grounds me. Like this weekend,
I’d get high and then I’d sit on
this balcony -- I love sitting on balconies
and playing guitar. I fucking don’t know
what it is about being high-up and just playing
to the sky. I just love that.”
As if there’s anything better
in the world to begin with. “There isn’t,
though!” she exclaims, laughing. “There
really isn’t.”
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