Music
15 Oct 13

Great Scott

Ann Scott’s fourth album, Venus To The Sky, sees the Dublin singer leaving behind the songs that make her cry.

Ann Scott is comfortable in her own skin. Four albums into an 11-year career, the Dublin singer is quick to smile, laughs often (mostly at herself) and admits to being “a bit boring”. If gorgeous new album Venus To The Sky is the sound of Scott being boring, we’ll take ennui all day, m’lord.

Most of it was recorded in Dublin’s Sun Studios, but Scott put the vocals down in Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.
“I could have done them here,” she admits with a grin, “but it was a bit of an excuse to go to Chicago.”
The Shellac man’s studio is “a little bit expensive to get to but it’s not that expensive to record in. It’s priced for musicians as opposed to being priced for record companies,” Scott reveals.
It was November 2012 when Ann found herself in the Illinois city, which was gearing up for both Thanksgiving and Christmas and felt “a bit magical... I actually saw one of those guys in a Santa suit with a bell outside a shopping centre: it was like a TV show.”
The singer didn’t have too long for sightseeing or shopping, however, as her whirlwind visit only allowed two days in the studio, “so that was my deadline to finish all the lyrics,” she admits with a wry smile. “I was changing lyrics on the plane the night before. The first day I got there, I was on a high: the second day, I had jetlag and had to finish lyrics. It was so intense but it was exciting too. It’s great that something can make you that excited.”
The weekend in Illinois may have been work-filled, but it was also particularly fruitful, as Scott ended up with some piano tracks in the bag for a fifth album.
“I just thought, ‘I’ve 10 songs on this record that fit together’, and even though I like some of the other ones, I felt that this has a certain mood to it. With [former Frames man] Dave Hingerty on drums, it’s kind of like a drum album, so I didn’t want to start introducing piano songs.”
Hingerty’s drums are a real feature of the album, producing a delightful racket that’s a million miles away from stereotypical introspective singer-songwriter fare.
“It’s definitely turned up, compared to the last album,” Scott admits. “When we were rehearsing first, we started off in a room that was in pretty bad shape and the drums we were using were in pretty bad shape, but the bad shape of the cymbal and the bad shape of the room created this great racket. Then, we were in a posh studio with a posh drum kit-trying to recreate that racket!”
So how would Scott describe the “certain mood” of the album?
“It’s very difficult to describe your own mood sometimes,” she muses. “It’s like looking in a mirror but you’re not really seeing yourself, just a flipped version. I don’t use the word ‘upbeat’ because if I examine it, it’s not really upbeat, but there’s a lot more adrenaline in it and high energy. It’s a bit more exciting. And some of the songs were done for fun, as opposed to because they made me cry. It’s nice to get away from the box of tissues once in a while. It’s great to have it sometimes, though. That’s exactly what you need on a rainy afternoon with your cup of tea, a good moan. But this record is a bit louder and a bit more fun to play.”
Maybe it will finally lead to the end of the one adjective that has continuously been thrown at Scott throughout her career: “quirky”. Does it drive her around the bend?
“Not really,” she avers. “I’m very normal and actually a bit boring. I don’t do anything too extreme. Maybe when I was younger, I was a little quirkier. But in music, I don’t like things to be meat-and-veg.”
Venus... marks over a decade of her status as an independent artist. Rather than make things more difficult, however, the financial meltdown has possibly made it easier for her “because suddenly you’re not the only one who’s broke out of all your friends. If you’re a musician and you’re ploughing a lot into it, you’ve probably been in a recession your whole life, so suddenly everything becomes relatively more affordable, so I don’t mind the recession.”