Beth Thornley interview

She just might be the epitome of the artist who can’t be classified, as the self titled opening track on her new album Wash U Clean and the mid tempo ballad that follow it manage to take you in two completely different directions before you even get to the eight other songs that follow. Speaking with a faint Alabama accent when she called me from her current home of Los Angeles, Beth Thornley filled me in on why and how her songs are all across the spectrum…

You only have to get two songs into your album to get the sense of breadth of your different song styles. When you’re writing the album, is it just a matter of being in different moods at different times, or do you have to consciously strive to include a bunch of different styles?

At this point I’m actually striving for that. I put everything firmly under the pop umbrella, but I just liked to change moods a lot. It doesn’t even feel like changing styles to me as it feels like changing moods. And the reason I do that is I guess there’s two reasons. First of all I really don’t want to fall into a rut or a trap, and maybe I’m overly worried about it, but if I write a ballad then the next song I write is gonna be up. And if I write something up, then maybe the next song I write is gonna be a tango, and then I’ll go back and write another ballad. I just like to try to force myself to have variety. I just think it’s good for me as a writer. That may or may not make for the most cohesive album for some people, because I know that a lot of people like to put on an album and stay in a mood, and I am actually one of those people, I do enjoy that too. But this record didn’t turn out that way.

So the answer is yeah, I sort of did it but not to make a point or anything, just for my own self. It just helps me as a writer to not just do the same kind of groove or the same kind of thing.

Let’s say you’ve written a ballad and you decide your next song is going to be something up tempo. Is there something you have to do to get yourself into that kind of mindset to then write an up tempo song?

Usually I’ll start with the lyrics, and I’ll see if the lyrics will lend themselves to what I think I’d like to do next, you know? And I don’t try to force things. I do try to see if I can mix it up. But if it’s too much of a stretch, I’ll write two ballads in a row if I feel like it serves the song better. I usually start with a lyrical idea and then I’ll just see where I can push that, and it’s just kind of worked out that I’ve been able to have the variety happen too.

Stereotypically you hear that someone is from Alabama and you think “Oh, they must have listened to country music growing up.” I’m curious what you were actually listening to back in Alabama.

It’s kind of interesting because my parents were musicians themselves. They were classically trained, so when I was growing up, they made me take piano lessons and things. Both my parents were singers, they weren’t instrumentalists. They were both singers, but my dad was a minister of music so he had a church choir. And so we just got a lot of church music and a lot of classical music and sometimes we would listen to a lot of country gospel music, shape note music, quartet gospel kind of thing. So I got a lot of that and it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I started really paying attention to rock and roll. So that was sort of later on down the road, because the other stuff was more what I was living with.

You moved to LA after college. Was that a culture shock?

Yeah, it was like another planet for me. The vegetation was completely different, and the way people are is different, and then of course it’s just crowded and busy and kind of big and kind of intimidating. So it took awhile to get used to it, but I was really excited about the music industry itself and really happy to be where a lot of things were happening.

I’m curious how the accordion came into your repertoire.

It was kind of by accident. My producer Rob, his dad had an accordion in his basement. Rob’s got five older brothers and he’s from Michigan, and believe it or not there’s this huge polka, a lot of kids where Rob grew up took polka lessons and I think it’s because there’s a huge Polish community there.

I know this was a little while back but I saw it on YouTube and I’ve got to ask you how you got involved with the Bowen Beer Bottle Band.

It was just two months ago, it was just in December. Matt Bowen plays in my band. When we extend the band to include an extra guitar player and a violin player, he plays both those instruments. He plays violin, guitar, and we’ve actually thrown in the keyboard every now and then. And so he’s a real versatile player. He‘s played my last three shows with me because my last three shows at Hotel Cafe have been real full big band shows.

I don’t have the fully story, but I think it was his wife that actually had the idea two or three years ago. I could be completely wrong but I think it was a way back and she said “You know, it would be really funny if we ever played Do You Hear What I Hear on beer bottles.” And I think they just sort of lived with that idea for awhile and then just decided “Dammit, this year we’re gonna do it.” And he worked really hard. He invited a bunch of musicians because the only thing you had to do to be able to play the beer bottle was read music, so he invited a bunch of musicians over to his house. Throughout the year he had drunk the beer (laughs), kept the bottles, filled them up, tuned them up, he admitted that he had even gotten a little light headed that day, tuning those bottles. We walked in the door, he handed each of us a bottle, told us what note it was. He had the music on a wall across the room. The music was on sheets of paper that were like four and a half or five feet tall so that we could read it. I don’t even know where he went to have that printed.

We ran it maybe five times and then they turned the camera on, and we did it maybe three more times and then he picked a take for YouTube. And we were only doing it for his family. They were only gonna show it to their family and make it a party for us. And we thought oh, ten people are gonna see this.

He just posted it so his family could see it, and then of course he sent everybody in the Beer Bottle Band a link, and of course we loved it so much we went all of our friends a link and it just went viral. And I woke up on Christmas morning and I turned on CNN and there we were on CNN. It was crazy, but it was so much fun.

You just released the album, you’re promoting it and touring now, are you the type of songwriter that takes a break from writing new songs, or are you writing the next album already in your head?

I only take a break from writing new songs if number one, I don’t have any ideas, and number two, if I’m too busy to do it, because I really enjoy it. So my goal is to write whenever I can, and sometimes when I don’t have an idea I get just super bummed and I’ll go download a movie and watch it instead or something. Right now I’m literally too busy to do it, and that kind of feels good in a different way because I’ve done this long enough now to realize that songwriting and recording and promoting an album is a cyclical thing. So I will get back to the songwriting and be immersed in it and then hopefully I’ll start getting immersed in the studio again, and then I’ll get immersed again in promoting the album. If I can do songwriting while doing all that, it’s good.

Learn more at BethThornley.com • iTunes • MySpace • Facebook • Twitter