Beth Orton – No more an orphan girl
When touring obligations for Central Reservation were completed, Orton returned to England, and says she did not step on an airplane for a year. “I needed to stop taking notes, stop taking mental pictures. I needed to just live for a little while and let it pass by, and not try and turn everything into a bloody song.”
Most Saturdays, when she was home in London, Orton would stop at London’s Rough Trade record store. During one visit, the staff pushed at her a copy of Ryan Adams’ solo debut, Heartbreaker.
“I thought it was some old bloke,” she says, adding she had been a fan of Whiskeytown but didn’t realize the connection between Adams and his defunct band. “I thought it was the most beautiful record in years; the way his voice cracks, the way he uses words and the way he plays with words. I found it totally inspiring.”
When she was planning her next album, she told her label she’d love to draft Adams for backup vocals. A request was forwarded, and it turned out Adams was eager to help out. Initially, he contributed vocals to “Concrete Sky”, but it turned into what Orton describes as “this incredible meeting of the minds.”
While they were together, Orton played him an older, leftover song called “Carmella”. Adams instinctively heard something in the sing-song melody and haunting narrative, and added his own guitar and bass to round it out. On top of that, he wrote Orton a song titled “OK”, and teamed with Emmylou Harris to provide backing vocals on Orton’s “God Song”. (All three tunes ended up on Daybreaker.)
“God Song” originated with Orton’s participation in a London tribute concert to musicologist Harry Smith; Orton rewrote the melody to the standard “Frankie & Johnny” and performed it at the show. “Then I just started writing my own words, as well as my own melody. I took it as an I’m-doing-him-wrong rather than him-doing-me-wrong, ’cause it’s more honest,” she says. On the finished version (redubbed “God Song” by a friend of Orton’s), she deliberately slurs the last word of the line “I leave justice to the hands of the lord,” so it sounds like it might be “law.”
Daybreaker was recorded at Ridge Farm, a residential studio in Surrey. Orton and her collaborators completed their work in 17 days, including interruptions for an Easter egg hunt (“I was sticking them up people’s trousers when they weren’t looking,” giggles Orton) and after-hours sojourns to collect locally-grown magic mushrooms.
“They cook a big dinner, and we would drink wine and talk. And it was like a big family table. I love that! And then you go in and record. It is just like, the momentum doesn’t get broken. There is a real focus.”
The track “Anywhere” features a gorgeous horn arrangement by Beck sideman John Birdsong, and she called in the Chemical Brothers to do a subtle remix job on what would prove to be the title song. Altogether, they put down 25 songs (ten made the final cut); Orton says there’s even more songs left over from her stint working with Marr.
“They are miles and miles apart,” she says of her diverse roster of collaborators. “I couldn’t find anything to pull them together, except my record. It is just how my life is, and the people I meet.”
When it all comes together, the results are remarkable, particularly on “Paris Train”, Daybreaker’s leadoff track. Over a restless guitar figure, unsettling string sounds and an insistent locomotive rhythm, Orton sings “Now you’re sitting on a Paris train/Laughing at your own jokes again/Sun splits the trees into beautiful broken light,” and she yearns to “see behind the scenery.”
Orton says the feel of the song might be related to her recent interest in the composer Vangelis’ soundtrack to Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, but the lyrics also have root in reality. “It was a boy who was on a train going from Paris to Denmark. And he was calling me from the train and being a smartass. I got off the phone and started [she sings the melody] doing this manic song about him.”
When she returned to the song, it transformed into her own revelations about the music industry, “and you start seeing behind the scenes. And I don’t really want to see behind the scenes. Sometimes the scenery is circumstance. Sometimes the scenery is the front people put up.”
Orton is quiet for a moment, and then starts anew. “I suppose it is about burnout, relationships that burn out. It’s about how it is, sometimes, when you meet people; you are there just to meet and to burn out really quick….I was also thinking we have a passionate relationship with this earth, that we are burning out. Is that evolution? Or is that destruction? I don’t know. Are these relationships evolutionary or destructive?”
And then a light bulb goes off. “I think there is that theme to the record. I suppose that is actually the theme,” she says, with more than a hint of relief.
Orton believes the titles she has given her work have been weak. “I mean, Best Bit? That’s the most terrible title for anything,” she says of her 1997 EP. Daybreaker sounded like a good idea at the time. It isn’t actually a word, so what does it mean to Orton?
“One time, I was coming back from a friend’s house, and we had been up all night drinking and laughing and talking and listening to records. He gave me a copy of Dusty In Memphis to go home with,” she says of Dusty Springfield’s 1969 classic, which transposed the British pop singer’s moody vocal style (at times echoed in Orton’s sound) to the funky, laid-back groove of the Deep South.
“I put Dusty In Memphis on and listened to it and watched the sun come up. Lovely. It was beautiful. That is a daybreaker, to me. You know, when you are a bit off your nut, the sun is coming out, and you are listening to the most incredible music. That is pure joy to me.
“We used to think music could change the world,” she adds. “But I think it is wonderful to put on a song and have it change your day, have it make everything seem a bit better. That is when music matters. Maybe that’s all we can expect of music.”
ND contributing editor Paul Cantin has previously profiled Wilco, Cowboy Junkies, Oh Susanna and Ron Sexsmith. His daybreaker album is Love’s Forever Changes.