Interview with Carina Round
By Lisa Coyne

There is such a thing as love at first sight – I fell in love with Carina Round after the first song I saw her play live.  She made her inaugural trip to the States a few months ago, opening up for Snow Patrol.  Prior to the show, a friend told me that she was a cross between Tori Amos and PJ Harvey, who are both musicians that I love. 

I walked into the Paradise that evening just as Carina Round began “Into My Blood,” a track off of her latest CD, The Disconnection -- to say that I was totally blown away would be an understatement.  She had a powerful voice, an incredible stage presence, and indeed, she sounded like a reincarnation of PJ Harvey. 

I bought The Disconnection at the show that night, and spent the next few days on ebay, tracking down her debut record, First Blood Mystery.  This record, though not as polished as The Disconnection, was just as impressive – passionate and very well-written.  Needless to say, I have become a big fan of Carina Round over the past few months, and her style of songwriting has had an impact on my own.

I had the opportunity to chat with Carina Round last week about her life, her thoughts, and her work.

Lisa: Who are some of your major musical influences?

Carina: From an early age, my mother used to play a lot of Led Zeppelin and Neil Young around the house. Also Nina Simone, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Lou Reed and Velvet Underground – things like that.  [Laughs] Obviously, before I was five it was Madonna.

L: Hey that’s OK, I love Madonna too – you have to have love for Madonna.

C: She was the one that kind of made me want to be a singer before I got into a lot of great, great music.

L: She’s so great – she reinvents herself constantly.

C: She does have an amazing talent for reinventing herself.  I think someone who does that recently, though not so much on the pop scene, is Bjork. She kind of does that for every album, which is really admirable – to get your fans used to a certain style, and then just completely twist their minds by going in another direction. I love all that stuff.

L: She has also diversified; she’s done movies and stuff. She keeps herself a bit more closed personally, but as a musician she’s very good at reinventing herself.

C: I think she is absolute genius. She has an amazing ability to spot other talent and use it along side her own mammoth talent. I think that is really admirable – bringing other people into her work, knowing she has an amazing talent and using other people to strengthen it.  She brings out a different side of herself with every album.  It’s brilliant.

L: What was your first gig?  Did you start out on the scene as a solo performer or with a band?

C: I started out solo ‘cause the manager I had at the time didn’t really want to get me into the music industry before I decided where my roots were. I did a lot of gigs around the UK as a solo artist, from the age of about 17 to 21.  In pubs and touring with people, it really was useful to get that experience under my belt.  It was fantastic – it was hard work, and I played in front of some fucking horrible audiences as well, which really made me used to being on stage in front of many different people. It was really useful because when I eventually got together with the band and we did some gigs, I was pretty confident on stage.

L: Did you record your first album after you got together with the band, or was it a solo effort with session artists?

C: I’ve always had a band. I’ve always found it really important from the beginning to collect a group of musicians around me that are really interesting. I was always quite precious about what the music sounded like, so I searched a long time for a band. At first it was just a three piece – me, my bass player Smudge, and a drummer called Marcus Galley, who I eventually had to let go ‘cause he got a girlfriend and was never available. Then I recruited another drummer called John and a guitarist called Tom Livemore who are both absolutely brilliant. I’ve had them with me ever since.

L: What time of day do you feel most inspired to write?

C: I think at nighttime. I heard somewhere that a woman’s brain works better creatively around the moon; maybe it has something to do with that. I think nighttime is definitely the best time to work, and during storms I find it quite intense as well. Yesterday and today, apparently the ozone layer is so fucked up that England is going to start having tropical storms. Which is quite comical considering the UK is really renowned for being a cold and rainy country, but we have had some really warm rain and electrical storms, which I find quite intense and inspiring as well.

L: What is the song “Lacuna” about?

C: I wrote the album [The Disconnection] after I had made some really drastic changes in my life. I had moved out of home for the first time, I had ended quite an intrusive relationship in my life, I was around quite a few depressive people and I kind of made the conscious decision to move away from all that. It is about the hiatus that comes in your life, you feel there is nothing happening and nothing is ever going to happen.  

There are specific lyrics about particular people. There is the one that says: I can think of a few good reasons to get fucked up, you’re just looking for an excuse to call yourself a fuck up. It is just about people that are really comfortable in the drama and the depression they have created for themselves – they don’t want to get out of it because they know that it is comfortable there.  The chorus recognizes that there is something to be said for morbid self-attention, but there is a time when you just gotta realize that you are pretty fucking lucky to be alive. You should just get on with it and go for what you want to get.

L: Do you ever use TV, movies, or politics as an aide to your songwriting, or are all of your songs strictly personal experiences?

C: I kind of tend to write from personal experience, but there have been a few times where I’ve used outside sources for inspiration. I started writing the chorus to "Lacuna" when I was watching Taxi Driver with Robert DeNiro – that is where I got that lyric, something about morbid self-attention. I thought it was really cool.  That line really hit me and it drew other things from me.

I do get inspiration from films and books.  I was reading one of Jeanette Winterson’s books called “Gut Symmetry” a lot when I was writing The Disconnection. A lot of her poetry inspired me.

I tend not to bear in the direction of politics, ‘cause I don’t know a lot about it. It is something that affects so many peoples’ lives in such intense ways. I really feel like I would have to know a lot about that kind of stuff to be voicing my opinion. It does interest me, and it does affect me, but it is not something I would want to write about just yet.

L: As a songwriter, do you find that you can explore more of your personal feelings and emotions through your songs than you can in the day-to-day?

C: Yeah, I think so – obviously, if I didn’t have songwriting I would get through life somehow.  Maybe I wouldn’t, who knows. I guess in life I am a really emotional person, but I tend to keep my cards close to my chest. I don’t show a lot of people how I am feeling, so a lot of it tends to get held in. Especially if I am angry with somebody, my heart goes really deeply into emotions but my body won’t allow it to show. It’s a way of letting people close to me know who I am, which I guess is why my lyrics are so personal – which is something that could get me in a lot of trouble someday, but it seems that is the only way I find I can write.

I think it’s really important to record a song not long after it has been written so that you can capture it on record the way it’s really meant to be. I think performing it live is something totally different.  Gigs are hit and miss – there are times when you get in the zone and you really hit the moment, and there are times when you just totally fucking fall flat on your face.  That’s the excitement of the gig, and that is why people still go to gigs. When you write a song, it’s really important to try to get into the vibe again when you perform it. That’s why, for me in particular, performing can be very tiring and can take a lot of my energy.  People hear your songs and come to see them, and I think it’s important to try and give them what they expect, performance-wise.

L: You have a really commanding stage presence.  When I saw your show, I felt like I was witnessing a very personal and somewhat passionate moment. Have you ever had to work on your stage presence, or is it something that just comes naturally?

C: I think from when I started gigging, it came really natural to me, ‘cause there was a lot I was trying to say.  Even if I was not saying it in the words, there was a lot I was trying to get out. Just standing by the mic and singing my words was not enough for me – I had to put my body into it as well. I think also a lot of years spent performing on stage has given me a lot of confidence, and made my performance a lot more fluid.  Perhaps that is why it looks so natural – because I have been doing it for so long. I have been performing for nine years now.  I know that is not a long time in the scheme of things, but in that time I’ve done a lot of gigs, and I’ve just gotten used to being on stage. I still get nervous, but there is just a different part of me that comes out on the stage that doesn’t get seen any other time. It’s that emotional monster, I think.

L: All of your songs are intense and deeply personal.  Do you feel like that style of song writing is more like a lifestyle choice where you are constantly in-tune, and with that comes constant insensity?

C:  It doesn’t matter how closed you keep yourself, you can’t escape your emotions – you can try to close yourself up, but I think it is always going to penetrate you and affect you in some way.  I think if you are an emotional person and your choice in life is to be expressive and be a songwriter, that is something innate in you.  

I don’t write every day, which I should do. I tend to go through phases of writing.  I find that it’s at the times when I am at my most vulnerable that I allow myself to write.  I know people that write all the time, and I am really quite envious of them, but I just don’t understand.

L: You have worked with Ryan Adams, and he comes across as being very prolific. How was your collaboration?

C: He is one of them – he is one of those fucking people that writes all the time. He’s unbelievable.

I’m sitting in a dressing room about to go on stage, and he bursts in. I haven’t met this guy before, and he is like a ball of electricity. He just sits down and says, “Let’s write a song.”  I’m just thinking, get the fuck out of my dressing room – I’m about to go on stage. So, he just starts writing this song, and I’m compelled to write it with him. By the time I go on stage, we have this song we’ve written, and we perform it on the same night.

Afterwards, I’m standing there in disbelief thinking, A: how can he have the nuts to just walk into my dressing room and suggest we write a song, and B: we just did it, performed it on the same night – and it’s a really good song.

I started to think that you can force yourself to write, you can enjoy it at the time and you can still come out with something good and worthy. Ryan Adams is amazing. He gave me a lot of confidence in the time that I knew him and was friends with him. He was very complementary – that really helped me with my confidence. He is a really special guy. Really cool and really, really prolific – it’s like he sneezes, and there’s a fucking song.

L: If you were stranded on a desert island, whom would you like to be stranded with?

C: A 21-year-old Lou Reed, maybe.

L: You have been very busy lately, with the new album and the tour. When you have some time off, what are some of your favorite things to do?

C:  I love taking photos. I collect old antique cameras, and I also collect antique suitcases. I like to travel with those. I like to watch movies and listen to music, all that kind of boring stuff. I think my big one at the moment is taking photographs. You can get so much out of seeing mundane stuff and taking a picture of it in a certain way – it looks like something that has been extracted from the world and put on this pedestal.  I have a few friends who are photographers as well. We have this little unspoken group of photographers, which is quite cool.

L:  Do you consider yourself more of a songwriter or a musician?

C: I really go for what is coming out of me emotionally, which is to my detriment, ‘cause a lot of people want to make this work commercially. It really fucking winds them up when I just come in with a ten minute song with perhaps two choruses that you can’t even define as a chorus. I am still going to keep writing these things, ‘cause this is how I feel them.  I don’t really believe in any kind of format.

I think if you are going to make it successfully and be heard on the radio – particularly in America – you’ve got to give them the bait.  Obviously I could spend hours, weeks or years writing a song [like that], but I always try and veer away from the obvious verse-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus-end – it does not inspire me at all. I tried it and I can’t sing that sort of stuff and mean it. It is not where I am coming from.

**

This summer Carina would have been gracing stages across the nation on the Lollapalooza tour, sharing space with such great acts as The Pixies, Modest Mouse, Morrissey, and The Flaming Lips, until Perry Farrell pulled the tour due to poor sales. That’s alright though, because Carina is wasting no time.  She took this time to move to the US for a few years, and has started working on a new record in LA with a new producer.  

Carina is an amazing talent. I’m sure she will be one of those artists who will not only produce many great records, but will also stand the test of time. If you haven’t had a chance to pick up her new record The Disconnection (which is available at your local record store or through this website), you should make it a priority. She is topping my list of new finds for the year.