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MELANCHOLY SKY
8 Jan 2012
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THE SINGLES
6 Feb 2012 |
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Video May 28
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| Date |
March 28 |
| Type |
Interview |
| Source |
Vanity Fair Daily |
| Title |
Goldfrapp’s Mellow Gold |
| Country |
USA |
| Journalist/Photographer |
Jim Windolf |
| Text |
Goldfrapp is a British duo comprising singer Alison Goldfrapp and multi-instrumentalist and producer Will Gregory. They’ve just released their fourth album, Seventh Tree.
VF Daily: Has the press exaggerated how mellow the new album is?
Alison Goldfrapp: Um … it is quite mellow. You know, whatever.
You don’t care.
Not really. Even the up tunes are quite sort of joyous. They’re not hard.
You get a lot done in the song “Clowns” with just two verses. It still feels like a big song. How do you do that?
I don’t know. I suppose it’s lyrical in the way the melodies are weaving and … yeah … it’s a simple structure, but complex in the melody. I don’t know how it happened.
That song has some sadness in the lyric about what people will do to themselves to look a certain way.
It’s strange, how it happened like that. It’s not a criticism. It’s just an observation. I was watching a lot of really trashy TV at the time. I suppose it’s that thing where you’re looking at trashy TV going, “Oh, this is awful,” but you can’t stop looking at it.
The atmosphere now is noisy and hectic, with wartime underneath everything. That melody is a nice antidote.
It’s got a melancholiness to it.
Do you and Will write the melodies together? Or do you stick to the words?
We write everything together.
Do you sit in a room where a melody is developing between the two of you?
Sometimes I’ll come in, saying, ‘I’ve got this little melody,’ but mainly it comes out from us jamming together.
Do you play an instrument with him when you do that?
Sometimes I do that. Sometimes I write with my voice—like a melody that will end up being a string line or a bass line or a keyboard line or whatever. A melody’s a melody, whether you sing it or play it.
Do you ever have melodies come into your mind when you’re going for a walk?
Oh, God, yeah, all the time. I always carry something with me that I can record on. Always. A mini recorder in my pocket, or I use my mobile phone. I’ve written a whole song on my mobile phone.
Do you feel like you don’t have to record the good ones, because you’ll remember them no matter what?
No. I always try to record things straight away.
You mentioned Minnie Riperton in another interview, which is a name you don’t hear much anymore. You have in common with her a voice with a really big range.
Well, not as big as hers, unfortunately. I love Minnie Riperton, particularly an album of hers called Come to My Garden.
You kept this album to just 10 tracks. Do you and Will write a lot of songs you end up not using?
Yes. Especially on this album. Because we wanted to do something different from the last album, so it took a while to settle into something that fit the direction we wanted to go in. We just record everything we do and later on we judge it.
It may not make sense anymore to record a long album, with people buying music by the song.
I don’t think about things like that. When you’re writing, you’re writing. You write for writing’s sake.
Halfway through “Little Bird” the melody goes to a different place from where it started, and there’s an image of a crow with mouths for eyes, and you know you’re in Goldfrapp land.
My brain just seems to work like that. |
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