KT Tunstall Balances Her Song Cycle with ‘NUT’ Focusing the Powers of the Mind (INTERVIEW)

Photo credit: Cortney Armitage

KT Tunstall recently released an album via Blue Elan that has been seven years in the making in the sense that it concludes a trilogy of albums that have spanned some of the most tumultuous and enlightening years of her life. Each album in the trilogy bore the concerns of a particular theme, either Body (WAX) Spirit/Soul (KIN), or Mind. Mind, titled NUT has been the concluding chapter that also took into account the lessons learned in the previous two arcs. Fittingly, this final chapter also introduced some big differences in how Tunstall created the music and took her outside of her comfort zone.

Working alone on the new album during the pandemic, she found herself writing the music first as a first-time experience, and then only able to write the lyrics under a tighter deadline, even allowing things to take shape in the studio with close friend and collaborator Martin Terefe as Producer. Releasing the culmination of the trilogy has also come at a time when Tunstall has had big realizations about her global “local” fanbase and what being part of a community means in music these days. I spoke to her about the context surrounding NUT and why the process of creating the trilogy has been such a self-help exercise with affirming results. 

Hannah Means-Shannon: I’ve noticed that your fan community is very active in support of this release and has been throughout the pandemic period. 

KT Tunstall: It’s such a different world out there anyway in terms of releasing music than when I started that I think people sharing music they love by word of mouth is a great way to go. 

HMS: The building of fan communities and interaction with fans has been particularly high recently. It’s a virtual but real community building.

KTT: I have this feeling that the word “local” in terms of music has totally changed. When I started out playing, the “local” musician was someone who started out playing at their local bar or a few towns around, and gathering some dedicated fans. That’s actually a great way to be a musician. I think that localized thinking as a musician is really interesting. You can’t really compete with 40,000 songs a day, so the online, local community that you have, which is now totally global, are your people. The fact that we can now gather fans from all over the world and having them meet each other is really cool.

HMS: The exciting thing about that is that it shows organic abilities through digital mediums. It’s the human side of things.

KTT: I was an old schooler about it, but over the pandemic, I totally got into Zoom and Patreon. My fan community is very dedicated and are all best friends with each other. They meet each other in various parts of the world. I actually felt really allergic to playing into my phone during the pandemic. I didn’t want to devalue the music because it is a living for people. I don’t agree with giving music away for nothing, since you wouldn’t expect a book or movie or nothing. It’s all well and good if you’re Radiohead, but an artist should get something for all their work. 

I didn’t want to allow Covid to be an excuse to stop monetizing music. I didn’t pour myself into music performance for that reason, but I did pour myself into the communication side of things. I held 70 online raves! We just listened to music, and danced, and talked, and what I realized that the human beings who I was meeting through Patreon were all extremely creative people. We did collage days and percussion lessons and people were decorated their rooms to join the dance parties. 

It really hit home that we’ve fallen into the trap of thinking creativity is only good if it’s monetized and it sells. I fundamentally disagree with that idea. Creativity should be there breathing, eating, and sleeping, and it’s something people need. That was great in reminding me that people love being creative. For the video “Private Eyes”, we got all the Patreon members to film their eyes and they ended up on all these TV screens in the video. 

HMS: I think that’s amazing. Giving people a space where they are given permission to be creative can have massive results. That definitely humanizes fans, even for those of us who go to large shows, and reminds us to think about each other as individuals.

KTT: I love that moment of going to the front of the stage and holding up the mic and getting everyone to sing along. Something unusual about this release, though, is that I haven’t played these songs yet.  

HMS: That’s a rare phenomenon, I think, though some people have found themselves in new territory with that because of the pandemic.

KTT: Every other record, and every other song, would be something that I knew back to front. Also, during that time, I was getting into musical theater and had my head into another job. This is a bizarre situation that I never, ever thought I’d be in!

HMS: I know this is a trilogy, and the first two were probably produced in much more controlled conditions. So I find it really admirable that you allowed to make this third one in a very different way. Was that mainly necessity?

KTT: All of the first two were produced in a much more controlled way. I think the pandemic was just such a transformative time for me, personally. It was the first time in 15 years that I stayed home longer than a month. I loved it. I was very lucky. I was on my own in a brand-new home with a dog, a couch, my bed, and a guitar. I couldn’t get the rest of my stuff because all the storage units were closed. I was living like a kind of fancy monk! I was extremely happy. I think it was the first time in my life when I found true happiness on my own. I really enjoyed not having to go out and not having to perform. 

It allowed me, I think, some processing time to change. I changed my thinking about making music. I thought, “Why not collaborate? Why not trust?” The last thing I wanted to do was make things the same way all the time. I didn’t want to leave a bigger gap between the releases. I was enjoying the constant momentum of doing a trilogy. I remember after making Tiger Suit, it was only six months before the last one, and people were calling it a “comeback”. From a physical and internal point of view, it’s a rollercoaster putting records out. I wanted a project with a much longer arc and it really worked for me. I was able to keep rolling with my relationship with music and with my live stuff. 

To be honest, with the first record in this trilogy about Soul, it was like a phoenix rising out of the ashes of my life. I had gotten divorced, my dad had died, and I’d moved to a different continent. Then I made the record. With the second one, I went deaf in the middle of making it, and lost my hearing, so I was thinking, “What the fuck is going to happen when I make an album about Mind”? Then, the pandemic happened and everyone lost their minds. It actually felt like an amazing opportunity to have it as part of the story. The trilogy is a seven-year picture of existence. It’s a seven-year soundtrack of my life that unexpectedly straddled some extraordinary shit that I did not see coming. But I was all for accepting that in as part of what I was doing.

HMS: Have you always been okay with observing yourself as the kind of subject, or test subject, for your songs? Some people are more reserved when it comes to songwriting.

KTT: This, for sure, is my self-help trilogy. There’s no doubt about that. This trilogy, really, is the advent of a more adult ability to observe and share. Invisible Empire//Crescent Moon, which came just before the trilogy, is my breakdown record. It’s a heroine’s journey hitting the bottom. I’m very proud of the record but that was an extremely hard time. Tiger Suit, when I listen back to, has observant songwriting but I can tell that I’d reached some disassociation. I wasn’t sharing very much of myself on that record. But when my life turned upside down, I had the realization that, as John Lennon said, “Our job is not to tell people how to feel. It’s to tell them how we feel.” 

HMS: That’s a great quote.

KTT: Instructive songwriting is really super fucking annoying. I’m listening to music to feel, and the best way to help someone feel is to tell them how you’re feeling. That then gives them permission. I’m really glad that the Mind topic was last because it’s the coldest subject when you’re thinking about Soul, Body, and Mind. It’s the calculating, computer-like part of it. It was great for this record to be informed by the other two, though, and I think this album was maybe the most emotional of all of them.

HMS: The songs are very emotional here and I do feel like they carry a lot of emotional load. But one thing that I really appreciated is that you clearly don’t identify your whole self with any one of these three things, Body, Mind, and Soul. Otherwise you can’t be a whole person.

KTT: No, you can’t. I tackled a lot of personal subjects during the pandemic because I had time to. Thank god for Zoom therapy. It was awesome. But I was going through a lot of journal practice and not wanting to repeat the problems that I’ve had in the past. One of the things I came up with was a three-part journal entry, where you would write your reaction to certain problems just from the Soul, or the Body, or the Mind. 

What is my body telling me? What is my mind telling me? What does my observant soul think of this situation? The answers were really varied. The mind would be saying, “We know exactly what to do.” That would be totally wrong. The body would be freaking out saying, “We feel terrible.” And the soul would be saying, “It’s going to be fine, just wait. Be uncomfortable for a while and see what happens. Shut up!” 

HMS: That’s incredible. How did you decide what to listen to or prioritize?

KTT: You do want to protect yourself from terrible situations, so your body and mind are being defensive for your safety. But the soul is just watching. I found that really making sure that none of them were running wild meant I could come up with a better approach.

HMS: I feel like in modern society, we tend to prioritize mind over all the others, or perhaps body, and then that one function wreaks havoc in our lives and we wonder why.

KTT: It wreaks havoc. It’s a lack of discipline. There’s a massive lack of discipline when you look at social media, for instance. You get a knee-jerk need to write and respond, without an reflection about what you’re saying. There’s no buffer. But that’s what I think Soul is, I think that’s the buffer. It takes a breath and says, “Let me think about that for a minute. Do I really want to say that in public?” 

HMS: So when you were writing these songs, you knew that you were writing for this album, and you knew that your subject was Mind. Did your creativity obey that mandate?

KTT: No! Absolutely not! That was another very strange thing, which is that I wrote all the music first, which I’ve never, ever done. All the music was coming, and I had absolutely nothing to say. I couldn’t write lyrics for myself. I was writing lyrics for the musical I was working on just fine. But when it came to what I wanted to say for my record, I had absolutely nothing. 

I didn’t think of it as writer’s block because I think that’s a bit arrogant. Why the fuck should you have that on tap? Why should you expect your creative mind to provide you with the goods whenever you want them? For me, it’s an incredible, mysterious, inexplicable well of valuable gems, and I have no idea how it works. I would be hard pressed, really, to tell someone how to write a song, because I don’t know how to tell someone to write lyrics that are meaningful to them. For me, it’s an innate thing, and it’s like a lightning bolt strikes me in the brain that just comes out. It’s like remembering something rather than creating. 

If I can’t write something, it’s on me. Maybe I haven’t put enough in. So I need to go and feed that by going for a walk, watching a movie, or talking to someone. Don’t sit there staring at a piece of paper. I was in this situation at home during the pandemic and I felt extremely obsessed with the news, so I didn’t feel like I could write lyrics at that time. But I’m much better under pressure, so once I knew that I was going to be going over to London to do the vocals, then I was able to get things down on paper. Some stuff also happened in the studio, which is also unusual for me. It’s usually all finished before I go into the studio. But it all came out great. It was extremely meaningful, and tender, and honest. I was very pleased with the songs in the end.

HMS: The vocals and lyrics sound very intuitive, more soul-like, even. 

KTT: That’s something that I learned through all this, not to think of the mind and brain as a little computer. It’s a little being, but it just needs training, like a puppy. And the biggest lesson, personally, is love for oneself. And in some ways, that is the brain, and training the brain not to feed you a negative diatribe.  

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