Diana `n Elvis composed Change My Address ( from
her new album ) in Iceland , according to this
Yorkshire Post feature.
http://www.yorkshiretoday.co.uk/viewart ... sults.aspx
Change of tune as Diana leaves land of the giants
Andrew Vine speaks to singer and pianist Diana Krall,
who has poured out the pain of loss in a new album
that marks a startling change of direction.
HER husky, honeyed voice and sparkling piano playing
have won legions of fans, and she is almost
single-handedly responsible for creating a market for
dozens of fresh young singers exploring classic
material.
Diana Krall ranks alongside Oscar Peterson as Canada's
leading jazz export. Everything she touches turns to
gold – or platinum, when it comes to her best-selling
albums – and she is credited with drawing a whole new
audience into jazz over the past decade with her
highly personal and deeply romantic readings of songs
by the likes of the Gershwins, Cole Porter and Harold
Arlen.
Yet the titans of the classic songwriting tradition
are absent from Krall's new album, The Girl in The
Other Room. In their place are a collection of
powerful originals that tell a story of loss and
personal growth, alongside covers of songs by such
thoughtful artists as Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell.
There is much of Mitchell's confessional style in
Krall's own songs, which were co-written with her
husband, Elvis Costello, whom she married last
Christmas. And if the musical pairing of a
singer-songwriter noted for his anthems of urban angst
like Oliver's Army and I Don't Want to Go to Chelsea
with a performer whose manner can be affectingly
tender sounds unlikely, it works extraordinarily well.
The songs on The Girl in The Other Room were Krall's
way of working out the pain of losing her mother to
cancer. Another loss that rocked her shortly
afterwards was the death of the veteran singer
Rosemary Clooney, a close friend and mentor.
Those losses, and the self-reflection that followed,
are eloquently vocalised on a quartet of songs, Narrow
Daylight, Abandoned Masquerade, I'm Coming Through and
Departure Bay, on which Krall achieves an intensity of
expressiveness unmatched on any of her seven albums
since her debut in 1993. The sense of loss is also
there in the album's solitary standard, a solo
rendition of Matty Malneck and Frank Signorelli's I'll
Never Be the Same.
The songs are more revealing of Krall's own feelings
than anything she has recorded previously, though
there was a touch of dark emotion in her last studio
album, the lush, string-laden The Look of Love, which
went platinum.
But even though her new songs give a peek into her
personality, Krall, 39, remains wary of revealing too
much.
"Everything I've ever done has always meant something
to me personally," she says. "It's just that through
other people's words and music you're not so
vulnerable.
"Look of Love was the preparation for that because I
was choosing songs which were dealing with loss, to
the point that I had to lighten it up with I Remember
You. But then again, I can sort of find death in
anything. If you peel back all the cover images and
the strings and things, there are some pretty deep
tunes, but maybe not so personal as Departure Bay, but
you hope that people can relate to them."
There are no strings on The Girl in The Other Room,
just Krall's working quartet, and the stripped-down
setting points up both her brilliant piano playing and
the poignancy of the material.
Writing songs was a new experience. "I wrote the music
and then Elvis and I talked about what we wanted to
say. I told him stories and wrote pages and pages of
reminiscences, descriptions and images, and he put
them into tighter lyrical form. For Departure Bay, I
wrote down a list of things that I love about home,
things that I realised were different, even exotic,
now that I've been away.
"We were working together, obviously, but sometimes
we'd work while I was on the road and he was in
another part of the world, and it was in different
ways. The Girl in the Other Room is something that I
wrote late at night, and for some reason it just came
to my mind. I just wrote it down, and started writing
other images down. The first song we wrote was that
song,
where we talked about music and lyrics. We were
together then.
"Some of it was like me writing music, and then him
writing lyrics. Narrow Daylight was like that. Change
My Address, I wrote that in France, and then we met in
Iceland, of all places, and finished that song.
"You do what you can do, whether you are together or
you're apart, there are ways. You can tape something."
Krall is conscious that the new songs will come as a
jolt to her audience, which is accustomed to her
performing standards, and does not yet know how they
will go over.
"I'll have to tell you that when I'm on tour. I don't
know. I think you have to be honest with your audience
and if you just sort of stick to something because it
gave you your initial success rather than if that's
the way you feel, well that's fine, but if you don't
you must get on with what you feel is right for you at
the time, and that's what I've always done and you
hope your audience will go with you.
"Some will, some won't. I try not to worry. I know
when we play live, we incorporate everything. It just
makes for a bigger repertoire."
She will not, though, be abandoning the standards.
"That would be tragic. Not for the audience, but for
me, because that's what I do but there is more to sing
about than just romantic things and novelties.
"I like singing Black Crow by Joni Mitchell right now
because that's pretty much how I'm feeling. It's
direct, and it's womanly, it's honesty, I love it.
That's how I feel right now.
"It's not just only singing about relationships, there
are so many thing to sing about. I'm not even pushing
as hard as I could, probably."
The Girl in The Other Room is out now on Verve
Records.
19 April 2004