MUDPIES UTD. Blog for good music

"The music starts the songs." A conversation with Jamie Cullum

• This interview was taken by me last autumn for WIENER magazine. Here is the original version, on the occasion of Jamie Cullum's concert in Vienna next Sunday. For all the Austrians out there, we're giving away two tickets for the show at Austria Center Vienna, it's completely sold out. Just visit the WIENER Facebook page at www.facebook.com/wiener.online (Courtesy of WIENER magazine, Austria).
• Mudpies Utd.: Congratulations to the new album, I really love it. I noticed that most of the songs were written by you and Ben [Jamie's brother] this time around. Why did it take so long for you to make an album where about 80 or 90% are your own composition rather than covers?
• Jamie Cullum: I guess it didn’t take long in the sense that I spent all those 2 years working on the album. I think when I was finished touring „Catching Tales“ I wanted to take some time off to let my mind become a little bit more fertile. I needed to process all the things that happened to me in the last 2 years, because it had been such a crazy time for me, after "Twentysomething" and "Catching Tales". I hadn’t really sat back and thought it out. I wanted my brain to feel the need to make music and wanting to make something as relevant and good as this. I’m really proud of it and I think what happened is: I wrote about 30 or 40 songs, but I wasn’t writing them for an album, I was just … I wasn’t thinking: “Oh, will this work for the new album, is it Jazz enough or is it Pop enough. I put all of this aside. And after that year off, I started to think about the album properly. I started recording last summer, but we couldn’t make it on time so Universal couldn’t put it out before Christmas, so they said: “Can we wait until next year?” – and I was really annoyed about it…
• Mudpies Utd.: So that explains why there has been a four year break?
• Jamie Cullum: Yeah, that’s right. So by the time we finished I had written another 3-4 songs and we added those songs as well. So that was it, really.
• Mudpies Utd.: And did you ever write than many songs before for another album, say for “Catching Tales”?
• Jamie Cullum: I don’t know, I was always tend to write quite a lot, I guess, so I wrote at least 20 for Catching Tales – but again, it’s about finding the right balance between writing for a new album and just writing, because writing is just something that you do. Writing should be a free exercise, and not thinking “oh, this could be track 1, or track 2”, you know what I mean? And that’s the kind of creativity you need.
• Mudpies Utd.: But still, whenever I listened to your earlier albums “Twentysomething” or “Catching Tales”, I always enjoyed your own songs more than the covers. I mean, of course there were the classics, but there were also things like Jeff Buckley and I always wondered: How come that all those amazing songs by Jamie Cullum himself... why are there only 5 or 6 on them on the record? Do you think you needed to do the classics to become publicly known? Because, as I see it, in the last 20 years, mainstream Jazz has not been around, really. Do you think you needed to do the classics that people would actually notice you?
• Jamie: I think it was quite natural for me because I had such a background in playing Jazz and being a Jazz musician. As a Jazz musician, part of the education is learning the classics and pulling them apart. Anyone who starts with Jazz has to start with Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong. It’s like English Literature and reading Shakespeare. And in order to do the classics properly you need as much information and as much talent to successfully interpret songs, and I don’t see a big difference in energy or power in interpreting a song. I did an interview with Elton John once, he interviewed me for the magazine INTERVIEW in the US, the Andy Warhol magazine. And he said to me that he thinks that it’s really important, that the interpretation of the songs behind it all. He said not many people do it these days, and certainly not many people do it well, and he said “You have a real talent for songwriting and you have a real talent for interpreting, so don’t forget that that’s an art form as well.” I thought it was quite amazing to come from Elton John.
• Mudpies Utd.: Tell me about the songs that you wrote with your brother Ben, there’s a lot of Electro Jazz this time, can you tell me how these songs cam along?
• Jamie: I think they were partly done in my year off. We started a new band which was like a – I guess – beat electronic band mixed with Jazz. We did a gig at an Electronic festival and we wrote a bunch of songs for that, purely for our amusement, and obviously some of that flowed into what I was doing here. So we pulled some of the songs that were from those sessions into this project and we did what we normally do. We live next door to each other so, we’d have a cup of tea, we’d sit around and play a bit of Jazz. The music starts the songs, I guess.
• Mudpies Utd.: Tel me about the Cole Porter song. You worked with the Count Basie Orchestra, how did that happen? I mean, it must have been amazing for you to work with such a brilliant orchestra?
• Jamie: Yes, it was one of the most amazing things. The CBO saw me play in Paris. We were at the same party of some magazine and they booked me to do a solo show and then the CBO to play a full kind of big band show. And they saw me play and they loved what I was doing…
• Mudpies Utd.: So they actually approached you?
• Jamie (excited): Yeah! We actually just wanted to do a gig together, and then I was doing this album and I had this idea of doing “Just One Of Those Things” and I thought, well, let’s do it with the CBO. And before I know it I was flying over to NY and we recorded in the Bennett Studios in New Jersey.
• Mudpies Utd.: And is it actually recorded live?
• Jamie: We basically set up in a theatre in New Jersey and played 3 songs; the second take is actually on the record.
• Mudpies Utd.: There are two or three songs that made me think: Why did he do it? I.e. you covered Rihanna’s “Don’t Stop The Music” and Michael Jackson was involved in the song as well. Did you do it to do a tribute to Michael Jackson, because it was so popular and played so much during the last year? You’ve got all these amazing arrangements and there is so much diversity, and then this song comes up and you think: Ok? Interesting…
• Jamie: It’s each to their own, obviously. It’s funny, because that’s the track where people mostly get hoocked when they listen to the record – and they want to talk about it. As a Jazz musician, I feel it’s important to take songs and pull them apart and mess with people’s expectations. People would hear a song like that and think: ‘Oh, it’s just a Charts song, it’s on the radio’
• Mudpies Utd.: …and people will recognize it…
• Jamie: …and people will recognize it. But it’s more about improvising and doing something different with it. I was on the dance floor in a night club, I was dancing with my friends, and I suddenly heard this song, and I thought: Oh, this is cool, I loved it when I heard it. And before I knew it I was singing it all the time, it got underneath my fingers at the piano and I wanted to mix it with a slightly darker, acid jazzy chord. I also thought that the lyrics were really sexy. It’s a great entry point with the music I’m doing. Doing things like this… I can’t quite explain it, it feels very similar to writing a song, because it takes a lot of inspiration and excitement to do something like this. It’s really … obviously in your mind you separated the two things with the covers and the originals, but to me: When I successfully do a cover, they live in the same universe, they don’t seem like a separate thing.
• Mudpies Utd.: So it’s not more important for you to do your own thing than doing the classics?
• Jamie: Yes, that’s it. It’s part of the Jazz tradition, it’s part of the art form it’s certainly a part of my identity. Sometimes the balance between the two things is important, sometimes there are more originals and sometimes there are more covers. It depends on how I feel in the studio, really.
• Mudpies Utd.: And it’s really up to you, there is no label guy sitting there saying: You know, we’re not sure if this will sell and we need you to do some popular songs, to ask boldly?
• Jamie: I was hoping you’d know the answer to that question. No, it doesn’t work like that. It wouldn’t be interesting to me to do an album with someone else telling you what to do. There would be no reason for me to do that.
• Mudpies Utd.: Pretty much all of your songs are about love and easy things, do you have any intention to do more political lyrics for instance. Are we ever going to see more serious lyrics by Jamie Cullum?
• Jamie: I think there’s something serious in some of these songs, they are certainly more serious than I have been before. I rather wanted that version of “If I Ruled The World”… part of the power of this song are the very optimistic lyrics, but very dark and gloomy arrangements. That was definitely ment to be, if you want to call it that, a political statement. Also “Wheels” is a little darker, with the lyrics being “The wheels are falling off the world”. It’s about where we are in this universe. I would argue that there is that element already to the record.
• Mudpies Utd.: Do you think it’s important for musicians to do that?
• Jamie: It depends what you want to write about – you should never behold of what people expect musicians to do…
• Mudpies Utd.: No, that’s not what I meant, but as a public figure you do undeniably have a certain influence and if you’re popular people will listen to what you have to say.
• Jamie: Yes, I kind of see the responsibility in that as well. I think this particular album was very much written in a state for me of big personal change in my life and my circumstances, and that was the thing that really characterized it.
• Mudpies Utd.: May I asked what kind of change?
• Well, falling out of love in a big catastrophic way, and falling back in love in an extraordinary hard and brilliant way. Between those two poles, we have a record.
• Mudpies Utd.: How long did it actually take to finish the record?
• Jamie: In total it took about 3 or 4 months. We finished it in April.
• Mudpies Utd.: Are you looking forward to the tour?
• Jamie: Oh! Touring is the pot of at the end of the rainbow for me. I think it’s what I do best, actually, playing live. And let me say, I’m really happy that you like the album so much. I shall be walking around, telling everybody.