Elisa Zoot of
Black Casino And The Ghost turned me on to
Tumblewild I listened and listened and loved.
Gregory Weinkauf Poet, pundit, award-winning writer is way ahead of the curve and has this fantastic piece on
HuffPost Blog
What do you get when you mix a founding member of chart-topping
women's choral group Mediaeval Baebes with a founding member of chart-topping
psychedelic rock band Kula Shaker? It's amazing, and you can hear the results
on When the World
Had Four Corners, the brilliant, brand-new album, just
released, by Tumblewild. The group, currently a duo and set to expand, consists
of married couple Audrey Evans and Alonza Bevan, she of lyrics and lead vocals,
he of bass, guitar, keys, etc.
Alonza and I have met -- once, in L.A.
-- when Alonza was touring with Aqualung (following his work with Johnny Marr
and the Healers), and he had just picked up a tiny baby grand piano for the
child Audrey and he were expecting. A few years later, that's their Lewis on
their new album's cover, posing before the barn-turned-studio the couple have
converted to record, among other things, the latest Kula Shaker album, and of
course Tumblewild's When the World Had Four Corners. I congratulate them
on both the boy and the album, and ask about "Revenge," their new
single and video. Audrey picks up the other line and orchestrates.
"Well, I can
talk about the video," she says to Alonza, "and you can talk about
the song, yeah?"
"I wanted to do a nice, dark, dirty blues number, really," reflects
Alonza, "and Audrey came up with a great lyric. We constructed it in the
studio -- played everything ourselves on that one. We wanted to chuck some
un-bluesy intstruments into the blues soup, like the Indian tamboura, and stuff
like that. And even the approach to the drums was kind of a bit more
voodoo-tribal, as opposed to the blues thing. Musically it was just a big play
on the blues, but mixing up a nice soup."
Audrey chimes in on
the visuals: "Well, we live not far -- we're lucky -- it's not far from an
old steam train line. It's run by amateurs, so they just do it for fun. And you
can pretty much go there and look at whatever you want: you can look at trains,
you can get on a train -- so we turned up there. We had some Scottish friends
over, and our friend Scott had a camera, and we just did it there and
then."
In one day. Not bad! Alonza
laughs: "We got a lot of freebies on that one. Normally it costs quite a
lot to get a steam train in a video."
Audrey and Alonza name-check Bonnie and Clyde
as creative inspirations, which prompts Audrey to share some of her
methodology:
"All the songs we do, I can't sing about myself. Every song
-- it's not a scene -- but it is inspired by something: by a photograph, or by
a book I have read, or by fairy tales. And this one was kind of inspired by Dial
M for Murder -- you
know, the Hitchcock film. So it's got that, but then you add the bluesy kind of
thing to it, so there's a theme to it, a kind of revenge theme.
They both laugh, and
Alonza riffs on "Hell hath no fury..." Then Audrey continues:
"But also, the
album is kind of influenced by the move we made, from London to this remote village in the middle
of the woods, and kind of discovering our surroundings, and living a different
life."
"We feel a bit
like outlaws here -- now that we've left London,"
adds Alonza. I ask if they fade in, or stick out.
"We are 'les Anglais,'"
he concedes. 'Oh: les Anglais.'
They knew -- we hadn't been here more than a day, and we bumped into someone in
another village, a few villages away, and we were chatting, and he said, 'Oh,
you're the English.' And word had already spread. People around here are
super-friendly. That was remarkable, coming from London."
Does Alonza, being Welsh, take umbrage to being called "English"?
"It's funny for
me," he declares, "because I was brought up in England, but my
parents were both Welsh -- and particularly my father, was very
nationalist-Welsh, like they all are, really -- and just had a huge contempt
for the English. It was a real dilemma for me, growing up, you know, within
that English culture, while also having -- they killed our king, you see."
"It's a funny,
schizophrenic thing," continues Alonza. "As Audrey says, I'm only
'Welsh-ish.' When I try to tell her I'm Welsh, she explains that I'm
'Welsh-ish.'"
"Yeah, a little
bit of Welsh," laughs Audrey, returning to their change in environs.
"It was amusing to come to the country -- we had that kind of romantic
ideal of like, oh, lovely walks, meadows -- but we didn't think of, you know,
basic things, like plumbing and heating."
"Heating's a problem," admits Alonza. "Nothing to do with the
album, but yeah, it's true: They don't have buttons here, or like a little dial
you turn up when it gets cold, you just turn it, and it gets warmer? You kind
of have to cut wood. You have to work for your warmth."
The work has paid off. When the World Had Four Corners is terrific, already one of the great
albums this year. We discuss a few tracks, and I ask if that's Lewis' baby-baby
grand on the delicate "Elevator Girl."
"No, that would
be cool, wouldn't it?" responds Alonza. "It's actually very
out-of-tune, that piano. That's a little glockenspiel -- it's something that
Audrey rescued from an old school. It's sad, a lot of the music education of
the early years is changing, so they're chucking out all those old little
Fisher Price bells, and glockenspiels, and things like that -- but they sound great,
they record great." He cites a Serge Gainsbourg inspiration (Hammond organ, et al) --
and lo! there's "Bonnie and Clyde"
again. Consistent, these two.
Audrey brings the
backstory: "It's inspired by a Robert Frank photograph called 'Elevator
Girl.' This girl, that's her job -- that's all she does, she's pushing buttons,
and no one sees her. That photo takes that kind of loneliness, and it spoke to
me -- so I decided to write a song about it."
Detailing another: "'Lucinda' -- that song was inspired by a
book called Water for Elephants (by
Sara Gruen) -- they did a film afterwards -- and it's a story about a fat lady
in the circus, and the man telling the story -- and that spoke to me -- how
they used to 'red-light' people: they used to chuck them off the train!"
Audrey shares her
appreciation for Edward Hopper, then turns to a haunting, standout track.
"'Sweet Bones' is actually 'The Grasshopper and the Ant,'" she says,
and asks if I know what it is. (Pleasingly, I do: Aesop's fable.) "It's my
favorite of Aesop's fables, and it used to terrify me as a kid! I thought, 'I
really want to be an ant! But I know that I'm a grasshopper at heart.'
Actually, I think I married a grasshopper."
The two share a good
chuckle. I ask how Alonza and Audrey -- the bass-man and the Baebe -- manage to
merge their estimable talents.
"We have very
different musical tastes, to start with," explains Audrey. "And being
husband and wife, it's weird to work with your husband. I just want to laugh
all the time, or I just want to throw hissy-fits -- it's one or the other. But
sometimes for me it just works. And I think the will of both of us wanting to
do something, and enjoying each other's company, and respecting each other --
like each other's paths, where we come from." She laughs, "But like,
when you started bringing the Hammond
organ out--"
Alonza rejoins,
amused, "You hated it. You hated everything. Anything new I would try, you
hated it."
Audrey clarifies:
"No! I want to keep things all simplistic -- like, fewer instruments -- I'm
a big fan of letting a song breathe. So those were kind of our fighting points:
Alonza always wanted to add another thing on. But then, it just worked: we do
enjoying doing stuff together. And we do have a mutual love of blues music, or
traditional kind of American folk music. And so for that it jelled, it kind of
worked."
"Kind of" is an understatement. When the World Had Four Corners is rich and rewarding, an album of
gems. We close with Audrey and Alonza weighing in on the art form itself:
"I'm a huge
music fan," notes Audrey. "I think I prefer even listening to music
to singing or playing myself. But I just can't see my life without music. I
guess it's like a natural progression -- I like other things: I love
photography, and there's other art forms I love. But music -- I was bathed in
it, I guess, from an early age."
"Music, it's
true," enthuses Alonza, "of all the art forms, it's the one that
spoke to me the most -- the one that kind of moved you the most -- I guess when
you're younger it's something that you just connect with -- more than you would
with a piece of art, or even the movies or something. It becomes a soundtrack
to your life. It's what you project onto the world."
Photos courtesy of Tumblewild
