SARAH MOULE – Stormy Emotions & The Lyrics Of Fran Landesman by Nick Lea
With the release of her fifth album, Stormy Emotions, vocalist Sarah Moule once again catapults us into the word of Fran Landesman and Simon Wallace in a set of songs that explore the themes of time and love, and seeming so fitting in the turbulent times we have been living.
In doing so, Sarah also reminds us just what a fine singer she is, as if much of this wonderful combination of music and lyrics were written just for her.
It was therefore a real pleasure to catch up with Sarah and talk to her about her new album, and some of the other projects she is involved in.
Can you tell us about your new album, and why did you choose to explore the themes of Time and Love?
We probably ran through 30 or more songs and the 12 that we finally chose all seemed to have the themes of Time and Love running through them. We didn’t consciously set out with those themes in mind but the songs we were drawn to just happened to be about them.
This is the first album since your debut on Linn Records, It’s A Nice Thought released in 2002, to feature only the songs written by Fran and Simon. Was this a conscious decision not to include any standards or work by other composers?
By the time we had narrowed it down to 12 songs we felt we had an album’s worth of songs that sat well together so we just didn’t need any other material really. There is a sense of symmetry in this collection too with Simon and Fran’s first and last songs last and first on the album. The title track dates right back to the start of their partnership and my relationship with both of them so to me that reinforces the themes of Time and Love again.
Over the course of five albums, you have recorded forty five songs written by Fran and Simon, and all sound as if they could have been written especially for you. As a singer you must feel you are in a privileged position to be the first to hear and record these wonderful songs?
I know I’m really lucky to have been able to introduce so many songs from this body of work. I guess it was fortuitous that I was looking for contemporary songs with attitude in the jazz idiom when I met Simon who soon afterwards began writing exactly that with Fran. They wanted to get the songs out there and I wanted to sing them.
I was just starting out really. I hadn’t done any gigs except as a backing singer when I met Simon. I was so nervous of singing in public that I didn’t even want to sing in front of him, which was awkward as we were supposed to be recording a couple of jazz songs for a demo. We recorded Rogers and Hart’s It Never Entered My Mind and the Richard Rogers song The Sweetest Sounds.
Simon and Fran’s songs provide fantastic material to work with as a singer and are in many ways responsible for the way I’ve developed as an interpreter of lyrics – so many miniature worlds and unusual characters to bring to life in 3.5 minutes. I immediately loved Simon’s tunes, the modernity of the subject matter and Fran’s turn of phrase. I started to sing on my first regular gig at the Café Boheme gig in Soho – which Jim Mullen referred to as ‘character building’ when he depped for my regular guitarist Mark Johns.
I feel a responsibility to present the songs honestly on record and I try to sing them in a way that helps reveal the multiple layers of meaning which is very much part of Fran’s style as a lyricist. The song ‘After The Fall’, for instance, refers to the Fall of Man at the same time as being about a personal crisis. When we were recording it, I was thinking about a friend of mine and the difficulties he had got himself into. It’s a challenge to reveal as much as possible when I’m singing these songs as you have to hold all the meanings in your mind simultaneously.
Being married to the composer inevitably has a bearing on the process. I have to live with Simon so I don’t want to record a version that he hates. The lyric is really important to me. Fran’s verbal dexterity and ability to address serious subjects with wit and flair have always appealed but the tunes are just as important, and it’s always the melodic and harmonic twists that trigger the tears when I’m learning the ballads.
Sarah & Simon The closing track on the album, ‘Stormy Emotions’, is a beautiful duet between you and Simon, and this paired down and intimate setting suits the song so well. Have you considered perhaps doing more songs with just voice and piano?
Yes, we’ve just begun work on a collection of songs by various writers, including a couple of deep catalogue uncovered Ellington gems. I love the space that piano and voice can create and how you can suspend time in that silence. I’m looking forward to throwing myself into that project once the new album is out there.
We’ve recently started doing a livestream every Sunday evening too which is really good fun and puts us in contact with other music lovers all over the world. I guess that’s a rare advantage of our current online life.
Recorded in 2020 with all the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, how did you manage to overcome the challenges in recording an album and interacting with other musicians?
We recorded live with both rhythm sections just in the nick of time before the March 2020 lockdown during which Simon employed his digital skills honed over the years creating soundtracks for television shows like Ab Fab and French & Saunders. In the summer lull we got together in a socially distanced fashion of course with Mark Lockheart. It was especially nice to see him and have him on the album. I think having a project to work on really helped during all the lockdowns. When we’d finished recording we started making videos for the project so it filled up a lot of the last year.
All your albums have a common thread in the music of Fran and Simon, but also are very different in terms of concept and sound. For example, the use of the Japanese Shakuhachi on A Lazy Kind Of Love, and the further exploration of this wonderful instrument along with bass clarinet on Songs For The Floating World. How do you bring these concepts to life, and is it the songs that dictate the theme and instrumentation used?
The process of putting any collection of songs together is always an organic one. Themes always seem to emerge from the song choices rather than being imposed upon them. Similarly with musicians we look for people who are sympathetic to the material and then explore musical ideas that emerge during rehearsals and gigs. We’ve been working with Mick Hutton (double bass) and Paul Robinson (drums) for over twenty years and even though this is the first time in the studio with Neville Malcolm (double bass) and Rod Youngs (drums) we’ve done some wonderful gigs with them over the last few years.
On Songs From The Floating World Tim Hodgkinson (from Henry Cow) was in our studio with fellow bass clarinetist Yori Silver recording free form poetry and music and we traded the studio fee for a couple of hours of them recording the bass clarinet parts that Simon wrote for them.
The shakuhachi on A Lazy Kind Of Love and Songs From The Floating World is played by a wonderful musician called Clive Bell whom Simon met many years ago when he was writing music for the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra for the then king’s 60th birthday. Clive plays an extraordinary range of instruments but his speciality is the shakuhachi which he studied for several years in Tokyo. Another guest on Songs From The Floating World was the fabulous violinist Warren Zielinski, who led The John Wilson Orchestra which I sang with in the 1990s.
Simon Wallace & Fran Landesman Fran and Simon’s song writing partnership goes back to 1994 and continued until her passing in 2011. In this time their output was prolific. Can you tell us a bit how they met and how their writing partnership began?
Simon was booked to play piano at an Aids Benefit at The Pizza On The Park with Claire Martin. Part of the deal involved playing for the other ‘turns’ – Fenella Fielding, Simon’s longtime friend and colleague Gill Manly and Fran Landesman. In the week leading up to the show his answering machine was jammed with repeated messages from the seductive bass baritone of Fenella and an increasingly irate New Yorker – Fran. When he eventually went round to Fran’s house in Islington to rehearse Fran presented Simon with the lyric for Stormy Emotions as he was leaving. While driving home he had to stop the car and write down the tune. For the next 18 years Fran and Simon got together every week to thrash out their latest song. They ended up writing about 300 of them. I’ve so far recorded 45. Ian Shaw was the first person to release one of their songs, Living In Overdrive, closely followed by Nicki Leighton Thomas whose Candid album Forbidden Games was all Landesman/Wallace. Ian Shaw and Simon recorded a beautiful tribute album to Fran, A Ghost In Every Bar, not long after she passed away. In the US Susannah McCorkle, Bob Dorough and most recently Amanda McBroom have all recorded their songs. Shows written by Simon and Fran were produced in New York, Edinburgh, Gdansk, and in London by the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
You have also recently recorded an EP with fellow vocalist, Esther Bennett, The Songs Of Duncan Lamont. Can you tell us about your involvement and contribution to the project?
Simon and I can’t remember exactly when we met Duncan Lamont but he was a friend for many years. We had always said we’d get together and record some of his songs with him. We eventually did that and recorded and videoed three brand new songs and his ‘hit’ I Told You So. We had another recording date with him in our studio in the diary, but sadly he died the week before.
Sarah Moule & Fran Landesman As well as your work dedicated to the songs of Fran and Simon, you also have other projects that you are currently working with, such as Songs For Scarlet Women, and Fever! The Life And Loves Of Peggy Lee. Can you tell us a little more about some of your other ongoing projects?
Those two shows were put together for rural touring which I did regularly round the country for five years in all sorts of venues including theatres, arts centres and far flung village halls. We also toured a collection of songs associated with Ella Fitzgerald during her centenary year and a collection of Ellington and Strayhorn songs which we are still touring (pandemic permitting) in the jazz clubs with the full band, featuring David Bitelli on sax and clarinet. Songs For Scarlet Women is about the Femme Fatale as a much maligned archetype of which I’m particularly fond. So far I’ve done about 45 performances of that and we have plans to develop it as a multimedia show. A lot of the songs from the last album are included in the Femmes show.
Before you started singing professionally you were on a completely different path having studied French Literature. How did you become interested in jazz, and who would you have influenced you?
The only thing I knew I wanted to do when I left university was join a band. I’d started listening to Billie Holiday, Rickie Lee Jones and Jeri Southern but hadn’t really delved into jazz much further. I applied for singing jobs through the Melody Maker but with absolutely no experience no one would have me as a backing singer. So I started recording songs for would be songwriters and got together with an artist and guitarist in a band that never gigged. My first live performance was with a soul band doing backing vox and realised immediately that I wanted to be at the front of the stage. I travelled for a year and then met Tim Garland who suggested I go and see Claire Martin to ‘get some dirt in my voice’, as I was moaning about its sweetness. I took lessons with Claire and started learning about jazz, first coming under the spell of Monk, then Ellington, while listening to lots of singers – Carmen McRae, Shirley Horn, Anita O’Day, Dianne Reeves, Ella, Sassy, Cassandra Wilson. Claire introduced me to Simon and I guess she is therefore responsible for everything from then on really.
And plans for the future. Are there more songs by Fran and Simon that you are intending to record for future releases?
Yes, there’s a stack of unrecorded songs by Si and Fran that we’re slowly working our way through.
Click on the album cover to read our review
 |