Album review

Keren Ann

Nolita

Paris 

26/11/2004 - 

Keren Ann's fourth solo album, Nolita, features ten intimate musical moments, half whispered, half sung by one of the most international songwriters on planet pop. When it came to writing and composing her new album, the French songstress crossed geographical borders as well as linguistic frontiers, recounting her states of heart and mind in English as well as French. Nolita travels back and forth across the Atlantic, between the U.S. – where Keren Ann was based (during the making of the album) – and France, the first country where the album is released.

Keren Ann is a multi-cultural phenomenon. The Dutch-born singer has adopted France as her homeland, but recently took a temporary break in New York to record her new album, Nolita. In reality, Keren Ann has one single passport which defies the traditional format and comes in the form of a large black case capable of transporting all sorts of guitars, from rare pedigree breeds à la Fender and Rickenbacker to voluptuously curved acoustic instruments and folk beauties strummed by the likes of Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and Suzanne Vega. Whereas last time round Keren Ann skipped across the Atlantic with her Stratocaster to tour her last album, Not going anywhere, this time she headed State-wards with a simple acoustic guitar to promote her latest offering, Nolita, live unplugged.

On Nolita Keren Ann plays down the wah-wah pedal and other special effects in favour of a softer, mellower sound. Harmonica and violin join forces on a song like Chelsea Burns, proving that the Franco-Dutch star has more than one string to her bow when it comes to performing her intimate, melancholy-tinged ballads. Written from the guts and aimed straight at the heart, Keren Ann's dreamy songs are pure musical gems honed to perfection by a prolific songwriter who, once she starts composing, forgets all sense of time and place. Night and day Keren Ann sat in front of the mike in the New York studio she used to record Nolita, proffering her urgent half-whispered, half-murmured vocals and crafting her moody musical arrangements. "I guess I'm attracted to melancholy," the singer muses reflectively, "That's the mood that always comes upon me when I'm writing music." And this mood is faithful reflected on Nolita, an extraordinarily melodic album which veers between rock, folk, pop with an occasional hint of country (the album was recorded in America, after all).

Musical polyglot

Keren Ann willingly cites her musical sources, reeling off a list of female singers she claims may have played an unconscious role when she was composing Nolita. "I found myself listening to Carole King as much as Françoise Hardy because I love the melancholy that emanates from their music. But the language a song’s written in makes no difference to the way I listen to it. I get the same pleasure out of it in both languages. OK, so there was maybe a period in my life when I was a bit more drawn to songs written in French. After all, I did learn to read In French and I also studied in France."

Keren Ann, a veritable polyglot in the music world, admits that these days she writes "more instinctively" in English. But she has no illusion that this made her pass for a native English-speaker at the recent shows she performed at small, low-key venues across the States. "In the United States or South Korea, people consider me to be a French singer," she says, "And that's OK with me. After all, I’ve been living in France for twenty years now!Having said that, though, I don’t feel I need to be any particular nationality to make music. I'm someone who can never stay put and live in one place. I actually have Russian, Dutch, Israeli and Indonesian relatives, but that has nothing to do with the music I listen to. I appreciate all kinds of music, from Irish folk to Brazilian sounds. But I think it’s true to say that the fact my ancestors come from such diverse backgrounds has obviously had some bearing on who I am and what I do. They’ve influenced my personality, which means they’ve also influenced the way I write, too."

This natural organic way of soaking up influences has played a part in the songwriting style of Keren Ann's four albums and the way in which collaborations with other artists have come about. "Writing material for an album is generally very solitary work," says Keren Ann, "You’re cut off from other people and totally disconnected from the outside world. So it’s absolutely great to make an album with someone else, because it gives you a totally different view on your own music. At the end of the day, when you work alone, you always end up hating everything you’ve done!” Keren Ann's desire for outside input led her to record the track For you and I with Bardi Johansson, from the Icelandic band Bang Gang. Keren Ann and Johansson had already worked together on the album Lady and Bird). "Why did I work with Bardi?" Keren Ann asks, "For the pure and simple reason he happened to drop in to see me in the studio one day and we ended up spending a couple of days together. That gave us the opportunity to record the song together."

Keren Ann's collaboration with French singer-songwriter Doriand, who co-wrote Midi dans le salon de la duchesse, was an equally chance happening. "The song was inspired by this wonderful line by Doriand I came across one day. The line was: ‘My youth is like a couple who still love one another even after all those years.’ After that, I ended up contacting Doriand and asking to spend an afternoon with him so we could work on the lyrics and music for a song together. But the idea for the collaboration was really sparked by that line which just blew me away."

With Keren Ann's inspiration can come from striking the right musical chord or picking up on the perfect poetic line, but it can also flow from an acute sense of place. Song of Alice, the closing track on Nolita (narrated by New York film director Sean Gullette) is a sort of personal ode to the Big Apple. "I really felt an urge to get back to New York to record the songs I wrote over there," Keren Ann explains, "After all, the songs are directly linked to what I experienced living over there – and still experience today for that matter! The connection I feel to New York is very similar to the connection I feel to Brussels, Reykjavik or Paris." If the world is a global village, Keren Ann, the most international of pop, rock'n'folk 'chanteuses' has her place everywhere!

Keren Ann Nolita(Capitol/EMI) 2004

David  Glaser

Translation : Julie  Street