Hot Press Meets KT Tunstall

KT Tunstall didn’t head for the Arizonan desert expecting to make an album. Having met Americana giant Howe Gelb when they worked on a live Robyn Hitchcock collaboration, they formed an unlikely allegiance and a tentative offer was made. “I’m a pretty formulaic, pop-style writer and Howe is a complete maverick, non-conformist desert punk,” Tunstall says today in her typically forthright manner. It’s an “accidental album”, she notes of newie Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon, her fifth studio album since an appearance on Jools Holland brought her into the public eye in 2004.

“It was really more of an experimental project. Myself and Howe hit it off despite being really disparate musicians. He said, ‘Come and have some fun in this great studio I use in Tuscon’, and I thought, ‘I don’t have any songs’. He’d asked me to come in February, I went out in April, and in that time I’d written nine songs. Out of the blue. I’ll usually write one at a time, but nine songs came all at once.”
When she talks of its predecessor, the sonically ambitious Tiger Suit, she recalls a difficult, creatively searching time. “There was,” she says, “a sensation of needing to try.” In comparison, her fifth would come in bursts. Rather than take inspiration from the Berlin club scene and fancy production techniques, it would be stripped back, emotionally brave and recorded on reel-to-reel.
“I’ve always hated using a computer to record, vocals particularly, because you can fix everything. I respond really well to a bit of pressure. When a tape machine is there, it’s almost like having an audience. You’ve got to get it right because you can’t go around
fixing anything.”
Having provided backing vocals for King Creosote and Jon Hopkins on their recent tour, she decided her voice would take centre-stage. Not only that, the LP’s mortality-obsessed first half, Invisible Empire, would become prescient when her father passed away.
“I recorded those first set of songs in April and then lost my dad in August,” Tunstall recalls. “So many of those songs have a pretty strange, psychic quality to them. There’s a very savant nature to that first half and it was quite freaky when it was becoming obvious that my subconscious was ahead of me. I was tapping into stuff that was gonna happen. Then by the time I went back in November for the second session I was in a completely different place in my life. I’d had a huge, seismic shift on a personal level. That’s why I decided to do it in these two halves. They definitely felt related, it was the same musicians, it was the same place. But I was very different.”
It was around this period that Tunstall also split from her husband of four years, drummer Luke Bullen. The Crescent Moon second0half became about moving on.
“It felt like a rebirth. ‘Feel It All’ is such a medicinal song for me. It heals me when I sing it. I feel strengthened by the song. I don’t listen to the record and hear a morose album, and I also don’t feel like I’m singing on any kind of break-up album or anything like that.”
Over the years, Tunstall had been candid about her relationship, often praising Bullen to the hilt for putting up with the hectic touring life and joking that tabloids weren’t interested in a boring married couple anyway. Is she prepared now for a promotional tour where the majority of the questions focus on
the personal?
“I’ve had a few months to really just recalibrate,” the singer decides after some thought. “I could think about my position in my life, how I relate to myself as a musician. In many ways, it’s the first time I’ve done that since everything happened. It’s felt like a very good, healthy, reassessment. It’s very easy when you’re a musician and you have some success to keep doing the same fucking thing. Keep spouting the same fucking shit. Never sit back and go, ‘Do I think that now? Do I think the same way as I did when I was 25? Do I want the same things as I did when I was 25?’ And of course you don’t. So I’m not worried, but there’s just stuff I’m not going to talk about. I’m happy to talk about myself. Partly why my relationship before was public was because he was in the band. It was very difficult to say, ‘no, I’m not going to be talking about my band member!’”
Remarkably given its subject matter, Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon is not a downbeat work. If anything, it’s a reassuring, hopeful one.
“The record is this very joyful surprise of positivity that’s come out of a whole load of shit. Now I can do things my way.”

Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon is out now.