Joan Armatrading

SLUG: Well first of all, you consider yourself mostly a songwriter, but most of your fans really like your voice. 

Joan Armatrading: I think, you know I started to write when I was about 14 and I started to write because my mom bought a piano and put it in the front room. She thought it was a good piece of furniture and I just started to play it. I was playing my little tunes and my words to my little tunes and really enjoyed that. I didn’t start off by trying to sing other people’s songs. I didn’t start off by trying to learn other people’s songs, I started off straight away by writing my own music. And that is the strongest thing in me. The singing is a way of expressing what I’m writing. So even when I made my first record I thought this will be great because what will happen is I’ll write this first record, everybody will hear these songs and they’ll think what a wonderful songwriter when I sing these songs, but that’s not how it works. You know, as you say, people heard my voice and really liked my voice. They heard my voice, I was the singer. But for me I was always the songwriter. And people will say to me now, they will say well you know you’d sing this and this and this song really well, why don’t you sing this or do you want to sing with somebody else, do you want to do a duet and all that stuff. Well those things never really entered my head because I still think of myself as a songwriter. If I was a singer I would be thinking that. I would be thinking it would be great to do a duet with whoever or sing that person’s song that they’ve written. But because I’m writing them, I’m more interested in people singing my songs, you know. Like Melissa Etheridge did a version of one of my songs called the “Weakness in Me” and she just did it solo on piano. It’s one of the best versions of one of my songs that anybody has done. It’s really nice to hear that. It’s great. 

SLUG: Do you think people are shocked by how good of a guitar player you are? 

JA: I think that people sometimes don’t realize that I play. I mean I can actually remember somebody saying to me, they saw me on stage and they could hear all this guitar playing happening, they were looking at the guitars and they were thinking how on earth is he doing that, because his fingers aren’t moving in the right way? But it didn’t occur to them to look over at me. You know because that’s not what you know the girl doesn’t play those. They’re trying to figure out how the guitarist could be playing like that and not doing the right moves. 

SLUG: So did you find that when you first started recording your own songs that your producers wanted someone else to play your guitar for you? 

JA: Well, no. My very first record, my first producer was Gus Dudgeon, and he at the time was Elton John‘s producer. He did a lot of albums with Elton John, “Yellow Brick Road”, “Capt. Fantastic”, he did “Rocket Man”. Really good music with Elton and he was my first producer. He was very encouraging and he realized that I knew what I wanted and he realized that I was a good player. So on my first album I played a lot of guitar, I played a lot of piano, I played a harmonium thing, which is a piano-y auditory thing. He was very encouraging and I was able to … because right from when I started to write I knew the sort of arrangements that I wanted to hear, I knew the sort of thing I wanted to hear on the songs. Obviously I had to be sort of nurtured cause it would be the first song, I was in a recording studio. But he was very encouraging, he didn’t sort of try and squash ideas that I had by saying, “Well you know I’m the producer and I know what I’m doing.” So I was able to really develop, how did I lose myself there? 

SLUG: We were talking about guitar playing and whether they were going to let you record your own. 

JA: Oh, that’s right. I’m still on the same track. So he was very encouraging. Then I worked … with my second album I worked with a producer that I don’t particularly … I didn’t sort of really get on with very much.

SLUG: For which album? 

JA: That was Back to the Night, who would have been the sort of person who would try to get somebody else to do the guitar playing and try and you know…Then I worked with GIyn Johns and again he was very encouraging. So it sort of went backwards and forward like that. So sometimes you would have somebody who was very encouraging, sometimes you would have somebody who’d say, “Well let’s get somebody.” And I finally realized that’s what was happening when I made this record. Cause when I made this record, co-produced it with David Tickle and David played the demos and he said, “Oh wow, who’s playing the guitar?” And I said, “Me.” And he said, “Oh wow.” Then we get to the record and he says, “Oh, we’ve got to get a guitarist.” I thought “Oh, okay.” So we get this guitarist and I’m sitting out with the guitarist and I say, “Okay, I’m going to play this, when I play this you play that.” Sort of this is how it goes and then for the rest of the album I’m the person playing on the album right? For the rest of the album there was no mention of this other guitarist. And I think it was seeing that, David suddenly realized… Joan is playing the guitar. And that is actually something that I used to think I was talking myself out of playing my guitar on records. Because on some of the records I hardly played and that is actually what was happening. The producer…

SLUG: Was a sort of …

JA: Yeah, but I would always attribute it to me talking myself out of it, but it wasn’t me. It was a bit of both. Sometimes when you’re making a record you want to just sit and listen in the control room and make sure it’s all going the way it is supposed to go and then not give yourself enough time when it comes to your turn to play and whatever.

SLUG: Two of my favorite albums of yours, aside from this one, are Show Some Emotion and the self titled one and somehow to me those two sound very similar to this last one. I’m just wondering if you noticed that or if you feel that? 

JA: I’d go along with that. I think that the Joan Armatrading album, and the Show Some Emotion are very similar to this sound-wise and some arrangement wise and everything.

SLUG: So do you feel like you’ve maybe come full circle creative wise? 

JA: No, not quite full circle, because I think I’ve moved on from those records as well. Certainly playing wise and arrangement wise I’m much further ahead than I was on those albums. But there is an infinity, there is a link. 

SLUG: Right. The difference for this one and I tried very carefully to find out if any of the other albums you did were what you considered very personal and a lot of the times you’ve went out of your way to say, “No, these are not personal.” But this one is very personal for you. What made that switch? 

JA: Well on all the albums without exception there are personal songs but the majority of the songs on the album are not personal. The majority of the songs are written from observation and I write them in a very personal way of looking at people I know and writing about that situation. On this album the majority of the songs are personal. They are about things that have affected me, people that I’ve met, that you know, that had some sort of impact on me. It was about things that I’d like to … romantic notions … (laughter)…and of course the most personal song would be the one that I wrote for my mom. 

SLUG: And I think you said that she was your greatest influence. 

JA: Well, she is, you know. As I said, she bought the piano, put it in the room and when I got my first guitar I saw it in a pawn shop and it cost three pounds and I said, “Can I have it?” She said no, she didn’t have the money, but she had two pounds and if the woman would swap the two pounds for the guitar I could have it and that’s how I got my first guitar, which I’ve still got. And you know, the two things that I play and write on and am very close to she helped me … she got basically. 

SLUG: So what’s your absolute first music memory? 

JA: My absolute first music memory, the absolute first music memory, I think it’s probably going to be this woman in England called Gracie Fields, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of her. 

SLUG: I don’t think so. 

JA: And there’s a song called “Little Donkey”. Well that’s not the song. On the flip side of that song, and it was a record that my mom bought, on the flip side of that song was a song called “The Carefree Heart” and it’s about a bird. And it says, “Beware, beware the carefree heart, he’s apt to upset your apple cart with his (whistling), (laughter) and that’s the first thing I can really probably remember. I can’t go back…I can’t really remember. 

SLUG: One of the other things I really liked about the album is that the sounds are very simple, but then when you look at what went into it it seems that it was very complicated to make. 

JA: I don’t think of it as complicated but then that’s only because I’m the one that’s doing it and so I know it. But the arrangements of what I did, the sounds, I mean I obviously knew the sort of sounds–the very simple sort of sound that I wanted. But David is the soundsmith. David is the guy who really knows how to make something sound incredible and clear and where to place it you know. In terms of whether you’re going to have a stereo piano or a guitar in the last minute whatever on the right, you know. This guy really knows that side of it. So the sound, sound part of it you could really credit David with. 

SLUG: And you got to work with the Memphis Horns and Kronos Quartet. 

JA: Yeah, the Kronos Quartet, I’m a big fan of the Kronos Quartet, and when I wrote that … that’s the sort of stuff I listen to when I’m at home … and so when I wrote I knew I wanted them to be on that song. And when I wrote the songs the Memphis Horn are on … when I did my demos, cause I demo everything myself and I play everything. I play all the arrangements so that when it comes for the musicians to hear the song, they hear the complete song. So when I did my songs, my demos, I put horns on them. They sounded like the Memphis Horns so I thought, oh, yep, get the Memphis Horns. 

Read more from the SLUG archives here:
Waterdog Interview: November 1995
Feature Band: HAZE