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| SIMPLE GIFTS |
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After a gap of 10 years The King’s Singers have once again made a full a cappella
studio album, featuring sixteen stunning arrangements of classic pop ballads,
spirituals and folksongs.
Each track on this album has earned its place because of its great melody and
coupled with the impeccable style for which the group are justly famous, this album
will delight its huge worldwide fanbase.
The King's Singers incredible blend and tuning goes to ensure that this is probably
the classiest recording of its type in a long time.
"I can’t think of a single fan of The King’s Singers who would not like every single cut on this disc. We expect it to be the creator of many NEW fans as they, too, will not be able to get enough of this superb sound!” --Doug Anderson, Owner DJ Records. THE INSIDE STORY What was so enjoyable about making the first full
light album in 10 years? Many things, but recording at Status Quo founder
Francis Rossi’s house gave the whole thing a lift.
He would occasionally come in to pick up a guitar
or ask David to help with his crossword, and he
was always amazed by what we were up to!
Musically speaking it was fun creating something
that cannot be put together outside of a studio. You’ve talked in the past about going to a studio
and creating something from scratch that hadn’t
been written or rehearsed before you got there. The
Spirit Voices
album has tracks on it like that, for
example. This time around the arrangements were
basically all finished, but did some things change
once you got there? Yes, a little. For example You Can Close Your Eyes
by James Taylor started life as an arrangement
very much like the original song. But having
finished the first version we thought this beautiful
song needed a bigger treatment, and during the
last week of recording we hit upon the idea of making
a second vocal part for it. That part was then
actually the first thing to be recorded. When we
got to the end of the day all we had was a load of
oohs, aahsand
humswhich didn’t amount to very
much. But the following day we sang the top chorus,
and having those second choir supporting parts in our
headphones as we sang the text was very inspiring.
By the end of the day we put the whole thing
together and the studio buzzed with excitement. The album is called Simple Gifts,
which suggests
a kind of spiritual/folk element. What is the concept
of the album - that is to say how does a James
Taylor ballad fit with spirituals and folk songs like
Black is the Color of my True Love’s Hair? We spent a long time trying to decide whether we
should record a pure folk or a pure pop album, and
then gradually the idea dawned that there was
something that combined the elements of both,
and that is melody. A good ballad is really very
much like a folk song, in that it has a strong
melody. We simply chose songs that had beautiful
tunes, whether they were written by King Henry the
Eighth or Sting! We approached it believing there
is no point at which folk songs end and ballads
begin. A good example of that is Valparaiso,a song
none of us knew until Emily Crocker from Hal Leonard
emailed to say she would like an arrangement of
it. She sent an audio file and we were amazed,
because Sting has composed an original melody
which could have come from many years ago. It’s a fine concept, but melody suggests lots of solos.
Is Simple Gifts an album of solos sung to backing? No, but it could easily have been, after what we have
just talked about. A track like Helplessly Hoping,
though, is the kind of song where the accompaniment
is part of what makes the song successful, and to
move away from that would be a mistake. Its strength
is the 3-part melody from Crosby, Stills and Nash.
To try and extract what you think is the tune from
there and arrange it would be weak, so our version is
down as this strong 3-part thread. Then there’s April
Come She Willwritten by Paul Simon, and beautifully
sung by Art Garfunkel, especially on their live Central
Park album. That’s another example where the song
is really not just about a melody, exquisite though
it is. The other big element is the accompanying
riff, which is a ‘melody’ all of its own. Thinking of it
in those terms made the arrangement so much
easier to write. Certainly the expectation from the
listener would be to have the riff start the piece... ...and I’m sure people listening will be able to sing
along immediately. So both those pieces you just
mentioned are basically transcriptions, and the
better for it for the reasons you have just described. Deliberately so, yes. You’ve said that recording in a studio allows you
to do things you can’t do anywhere else. But are
there any draw-backs to it? The studio experience is a two-edged sword, because
you have all this technology at your disposal, yet
you don’t have the benefit of acoustics to give
natural warmth to the sound. You mean it’s difficult to sing in that environment? We were in Status Quo’s drum room, pretty close
up to the microphone, which made it difficult to
sing because every little sound was picked up. Mouth
clicks, pops, breaths, you name it... It was a bit
like singing in a cupboard! What came out in the
end belies the fact that the space was so small. How important is the producer/engineer in the
studio environment? Well, we were really helped by our expert sound
engineer Gregg Jackman, who worked with us on
Good Vibrationsand Spirit Voices - and he did an
excellent job on both of those too. He seems
instinctively to know what sound is right for which
song. You can be in the booth singing your bit on
a track and thinking ‘I’m not feeling so good this
morning, I hope this doesn’t take too long’, then he
calls you into the control room and he’s somehow
brought the sound to life! We co-produced this
album with him, and Robin and I really got into
that side of it. It’s hard to describe the quality of
the sound. It isn’t a reverb. This album has a
newish kind of sound. If you listen to Good
Vibrations
and compare it with this album, the
group sounds much more upfront on Simple Gifts. How long did it take to record the album? We started recording with odd days in October and
November 2007, and finished with 10 days in January
2008. Obviously a day in the studio is not like a
day in a normal acoustic recording session. In the
last week of recording we were putting in twelve
hour days. It takes a lot longer than you might
think to set up the tracks and to get everything in
the right place. And once the singing is finished,
there is mixing to be done. Gregg does a lot of this
as he goes along. We are lucky that Signum, our
record label, doesn’t pressurise us to work too
quickly, because albums like this need a lot of
studio time. The only limits we really had were
with Gregg’s schedule and ours. When it came to
it we were able to work in a relaxed way and if we
produced a 3-minute piece of music at the end of
the day, we were happy! But we got slicker as we
went along, and began to expect to finish two
tracks a day, which was important because we
had a tour to the USA looming, and we also needed
to finish so that the disc could be released in time
for our 40th anniversary concerts in May 2008. Turning to the arrangements: how many of your
arrangements feature on this album? Ten. And how many of those are new for this album? Specifically for the album are Valparaiso,
April
Come She Will, When She Loved Me, and You Can Close
Your Eyes. The latter I discovered by accident. The
first of 2 flights on a US concert day (Feb 6th, 2007)
was late and caused us to miss our connection.
Paul suggested we hire cars and drive from
Washington DC to State College Pennsylvania.
Half way along the 4-hour journey we stopped at a
Starbucks in the middle of nowhere to get coffee
and change drivers, and I noticed a new Carly
Simon disc for sale called
Into White
which had
this song by her ex-husband James Taylor as one
of its tracks. We continued our long drive and put
the CD on, and as soon as I heard You
Can Close
Your Eyes
I knew I had to arrange it for the group.
Of the other songs The Water is Wide
was done
before I joined the group, and was originally a
4-part arrangement. In 1995 I expanded it, and it was
the first arrangement of mine the group performed.
I followed that up with The Turtle Doveand
I Love my
Love, so they are not new but haven’t been recorded
before. We all admire the skill of Billy Joel, and
have been singing
She’s Always a Womansince Chris
joined. It always goes down very well, especially as
it features his lovely velvet voice. How do you pick pieces - what has to click in
your head to think ‘Yes that would make a great arrangement’? What really does it for me is if I like the song. I
arrange music far better if I like it, as the ideas
come very quickly. It doesn’t have to be a song
which when hearing the original you think ‘Ah that
as it stands would sound good as a King’s Singers
song’, it’s better when you feel something fresh
can be added to the song. Well let’s take an example - When She Loved Me.
How did that Disney song enter your conscience? I had already done a Disney song from the original
Toy Story movie - I Will Go Sailing No More, and
what inspired that was David’s performance of
Texas Girl at the Funeral of her Father
which is
also by Randy Newman and on the Good Vibrations
album. There is something very poignant about a
countertenor singing a sad song. When She Loved
Me is sung by a girl in the movie - Jessie the cowgirl
- but she is talking about her female owner, so it
does work as a male lead. My children have the
movies on DVD and love them, but it was actually
Stephen who suggested When She Loved Me
specifically. We were expecting to record I Will Go
Sailing No More,but Steve said ‘What about that
other one..?’ and I knew immediately which one I
would prefer. We were in Holland at the time and I
went straight to the piano and did the introduction.
The rest of it was easy because it’s basically
close to how it is on the movie soundtrack, with a
few extra spicy chords thrown in. Can you put into words a stylistic difference
between you, Bob Chilcott and Peter Knight - the
other two arrangers on this album? There is much more of a similarity between me
and Bob Chilcott. Peter Knight wrote for the group
in the early ‘70s, and his style is very much to do
with textures. He writes some advanced chords,
and has a beautiful harmonic structure to his
arrangements. They are real classics and the two
we have got on the album - Swing Low, Sweet
Chariot and You are the New Dayare good examples
of his style. Bob works more on the ostinato principle.
He’ll get a pattern, like in Greensleeves, Steal Away
or The Gift to be Simple
on top of which the tune
sits. I was in the group with him for 3 years and
learnt a lot from him in terms of arranging. I Love my Love
has an ostinato doesn’t it? Yes, exactly, and I arranged that while Bob was in
the group, looking over my shoulder! The album is coming out in The King’s Singers
40th anniversary year. Is it a good birthday gift? Is
it representative of the group now? It makes a great birthday gift to our fans, but isn’t
representative of everything we do now. The variety
of our repertoire comes across more fully in our
recent Byrd to Beatles DVD. Over the last few years
we have recorded many classical albums so we all
thought it was time to redress the balance. These
songs are going to enter the repertoire and refresh
the close harmony section of concerts and the
content of masterclasses that we give, because
the music will be published in a Hal Leonard book
in the autumn of 2008. And so before long you will be enjoying groups
from around the world singing these songs to you! Yes, and perhaps we’ll even be singing with them!
We love performing You are the New Day
with the second choir part, and the James Taylor song
should work well like that too. Further information on The King’s Singers can be found at www.kingssingers.com Simple Gifts Track listing |