Adaline Interview Part 2: On Inspiration, Song-Writing and Tori
This is part two of a two part interview. Click HERE to read the first half.
After seven years as a musician, Adaline has educated herself in various musical sounds and styles. This past spring, Adaline had the opportunity to see Tori Amos perform at South by Southwest the large (and celebrated) annual music festival in Austin, TX. “I really wanted to see her because I was getting so many comparisons,” says Adaline. “It was the most amazing experience.” She now appreciates the similarities between herself and Amos, but Adaline makes her own comparison to Canadian chanteuse Sarah Slean. “We’re all very passionate in the way we perform and write,” she states, “and that passion is what people sense. We’re very dramatic.” The work of Hannah Georgas and Paisley Jura also come to mind when listening to Adaline’s stirring, impassioned music. There’s a keen sense of musical structure and form wed to a keen curiosity and fierce intelligence, with a generous dollop of feminine charm to boot. And this mix isn’t entirely accidental.
Adaline admits to a taste for channelling the dramatic and what she terms the “theatrical” into her work. This makes sense considering she studied theatre and music at the University of British Columbia.
Another part of this leaning toward drama stems from a bracing honesty about life –as a woman, a daughter, and an artist. Many of Adaline’s songs are stories of confusion, pain, longing, anger, and desire. “Meaningless Meeting” is what she terms “a really a very private song exploring meaningless sexuality and how that affected me.” Her first performance of it wound up on You Tube, which she says was “painful” but she’s since gone on to enjoy performing the song. “There’s more an enjoyment that people are connecting to it now, than a fear of being exposed,” she notes. “When you’re an artist, it’s your job to be exposed.” The honesty in the song has been greeted with plenty of support from female fans who can relate to the song’s theme of the follies of attempting to control intimacy. The repeated, anxious calls of “I am free, I am free” in the song are a false display of bravado belying darker truths around intimacy and self-worth.
Adaline says the brutal honesty that threads through her work is related to a certain outlook on sexuality. “Not like a campy sexuality, but a real sense of being a woman, and experiencing that,” she says. Returning to the Amos comparison, she notes that “Tori has a lot of that [approach to sexuality] in her music.” But Adalinenotes that she may not be as “overt... but I definitely channel sexuality when I write. It’s something very real coming me. I know those compasses well.”
She’s also cuttingly observant about the pressures of image. In the jaunty, nouveau-cabaret pop song Whiter/Straighter, she delivers lines that could be said equally by music industry managers and picky paramours:
Come here, sweetheart
I’m crazy ‘bout your eyes,
But I’m not sold on your smile
Could you cover it up?
I heard somewhere
That there’s a doctor you can see
To fix that up and turn you into something
I want to see…
The relationship between looks and confidence is something Adaline isn’t afraid to back away from even as she layers instruments, including a sexy, mute trumpet and pounding keyboard, with slyly-delivered verses that lead to the soaring, rock-esque chorus that includes lines like “Can I make you see how weak you are / And make you feel the same?” and concludes, chillingly, with the singer cooing, “I’ll be damn sure when you close your eyes / That all you see is me.” The song is a scathing, ironic wink to the pressures both within and without for a young woman in the 21st century. It’s also an interesting example of Adaline’s appeal among younger female fans, many of whom might not hear the same kind of lyrical fire from a popular music environment where brags of sexual prowess, desperation for male validation, and romantic longing tends to dominate the computer-processed landscape.
A unique challenge presented itself when Adaline’s parents came to see her perform live. “My dad was very emotional afterwards,” she remembers. “He saw me, saw what gave me a feeling of life and excitement and that I wasn’t going to quit. I was proud but terrified. The beast was not going to go away. It was going to get bigger.” That “beast” presented its fair share of challenges in terms of Adaline getting into the industry. Ones her parents, though not well-versed in the politics and temptations of the industry, weren’t sure they wanted their daughter being exposed to. “Once they realized there’s more to the music industry than what it was in the 1980s,” she says, referring to famous rock-star excesses. “That it can be legitimate, that there are ways for you to communicate with people, they’re now more than ecstatic in their support.”
Lately, Adaline’s been consciously listening to a diverse array of music, some of which has been fodder for further creative musical explorations. “I have been trying to immerse myself in lots of different music lately,” she confesses, “and yes, I listen to classical still, because it really gives me a sense of who I am. But I’m also into a lot of dance stuff. I’m interested in artists that take the art of dance and add interesting melodic hooks, ones that are able to create stuff people can dance to, and listen to while cleaning their rooms.” It isn’t only trance, house, or other contemporary dance sounds she’s exposed herself to, either. “I’m listening to things like tangos and some kinds of traditional dance music –not just electronica, but other things people dance to, like cha-chas.”
This immersion in beats and rhythms is providing inspiration for the direction of future work and song-writing, though it won’t entirely shape it. “I want my next album to have a sense of that pulse but still want to do the ballads with strings. I don’t want to lose the sense of that, the core of what I like to do.”
Relentless touring over the last year has helped her song-writing because it’s meant being able to use a wider array of instrumentation which has also influenced her song-writing. “I’m using a lot more horns in live performances,” she says excitedly, “and I’m really loving the horns. A lot of my new writing is utilizing them more.”
As if to cap off a whirlwind year, the singer-songwriter is currently a finalist in the Peak Performance Project, which is the largest music grant program in Canadian history. The top three artists will share a total of $275,000 to help with their career development. Winners are to be announced in January 2010.
Until then, the 27-year-old is focusing on more touring and more writing. Much of the material on Famous for Fire was written when Adaline took a solo cruise, along the West Coast. She isn’t sure about choosing that form of inspiration for her next album, but doesn’t rule it out, either. “I love traveling alone,” she admits. “I write best when I get myself out of a city, and I get away from the things that remind [me] of the business aspect. Getting back to a natural environment is probably healthier.”
Learn more about Adaline and listen to her music at the following links:
http://www.myspace.com/adalinesmusic
http://radio3.cbc.ca/bands/adaline
