In the Nikka time

Given that your average rock star doesn’t really do mornings, Nikka Costa is remarkably chirpy as she faces the start of another day of press interviews at some ungodly hour of the West Coast morning. You’ll probably be aware of Costa through her ubiquitous ‘Like A Feather’single, a Prince-style staccato funk number backed by a memorable video. It’s been followed by Everybody Got Their Something, an album that draws on thirty years of rock, soul and funk to create a dazzlingly eclectic whole.

Amongst the album’s obvious soul influences are more rock orientated moments, seemingly taking their more cue from the heavy blues of the sixties and seventies than more modern sounds.

“A huge, huge influence”, agrees the singer. “It all stems from the blues anyway. That’s where soul and rock kind of meet. I was a big Led Zeppelin fan, a big AC/DC fan, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, all that kind of stuff.”

No surprise when you listen to her vocal performance throughout the album or even remember the video, where the American comes across as a mixture Janis Joplin and a preening, female Robert Plant. But surely we’re coming full circle, back to a time when the lines between black and white music are being blurred, a trend that Costa finds exciting.

“Rock kids are listening to hip-hop, hip-hop kids are listening to rock and so on,” she obvserves. “That’s one of the main reasons why I made a record that was so diverse, because I didn’t feel it was necessary to pick one mood and go with that. Everyone I know listens to lots of different kinds of things.”

How easy is it for an artist who wants to mix and match her genres, given the industry’s seemingly pathological desire to pigeon hole its musicians?

“I think that the music industry is still trying to label people, in radio especially,” she reflects. “They’re so addicted to their formats. There are artists that break the mould and open the door for people like myself. The more people who stick to their guns and don’t formularise themselves, the bigger chance that it will become accepted.”

Wise words, somewhat spoilt by her insistence that the great trailblazer was none other than, well, Lenny Kravitz. She does salvage some cred by adding, “oh, and Radiohead of course! The pioneers of non-conformist music.”

Given her grounding in soul, can she see any of the current crop of singers having the same effect that Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin had?

“I think there are some really great singers, I guess it’s yet to be determined whose going to have that staying power and that effect on people. I don’t know if anyone will be like that anymore because the times had a lot to do with it, everything the artists were going through and the world was going through. They had this whole cultural change going on.”

So, is it harder to be inspired in the 21st century?

“It’s become so much about the image, the video, marketing. There’s so much money pumped into the business side of it that it’s quite hard for artists to stay inspired amongst all the marketing plans and remixes and radio play lists.”

It being hard to have avoided the massive fly posters of the scantily clad singer currently adorning virtually every billboard in Dublin, Costa herself would appear to be no stranger to the hype machine. So, how does she deal with it?

“When I’m being creative I try not to have any business discussions going on around me. I’ll also find time to get filled in about what’s going on because I don’t want to be blind to that side or be afraid of it, that can be a big mistake as well. You have to take one hat off and put another one on and try to find a balance… do some yoga in-between.”

Everybody Got Their Something by Nikka Costa is in the shops now