Source: Musician
Author: Peter Cronin
Date: 21 April 1991.
British singer looks for her soul
"Tanita, can you lighten up a bit?" the director of VH-1's "Top Twenty-One Video Countdown" is trying to shake some ad-libs out of his celebrity hostess, British-based singer-songwriter Tanita Tikaram, and she's giving it her best shot on Everybody's Angel, her third album, the diminutive 21-year-old lightens up on the pop hooks and does the tighten-up on her songs with a more R&B feel and a new live approach to recording. "I'd been listening to Van Morrison's His Band and the Street Choir," Tikaram says, "and I very much wanted to capture that warmth." Her identification with the Irish bard isn't surprising; Tikaram's associations, both professional and musical, are rife with former Morrison cronies. Still, this VH-1 celebrity hostess stuff may take some getting used to. "That was a new experience for me," she laughs afterward. "I didn't know any of the songs."
Tikaram's been way too busy in the past few years to keep up with other people's hit records. The well-traveled child of a diplomat (her mother's from Malaya and her father's from Fiji), Tikaram cut her musical teeth on the British Forces radio she heard growing up in Münster, Germany. "Their '50s and '60s oldies shows were an illicit pleasure for my brother and me," Tikaram recalls," and because it was Forces radio they'd play a lot of heart-tugging, housewifey music: Anne Murray, Crystal Gayle, Don Willlams - I'm afraid I still have a weakness for that kind of stuff"
That romantic strain runs deep through "Only the Ones We love," the drowsy opening cut from Everybody's Angel, a record that reflects 'Tikaram's newfound sense of roots. "It's easy to get preoccupied with the idea that there is this ideal place, especially if you don't feel culturally that you belong somewhere," she says. "I now think that you're much more rooted in the family and friends you have - the people around you rather than any particular place."
From the start Tikaram has had a knack for surrounding herself with the right people. In 1988 she hooked up with Rod Argent, late of the Zombies, and former Van Morrison drummer Peter Van Hooke. Acting as co-producers, the pair took the inexperienced singer into the studio to record her smash debut Ancient Heart, first laying down her voice and guitar to a click track, then creating the record's lush soundscape with layers of synthesizer, bass and drum machine: a recording method Tikaram has been growing away from as she reaches back to the music she heard as a kid for inspiration.
"I'd been listening to a lot of these collections with people like Otis Redding and Sam Cooke, and I realized that most of these '60s soul singers weren't particularly loud, they just knew how to control their voices." Throughout her new record Tikaram puts that lesson to good use, coaxing wide-ranging dynamics out of her extraordinary voice - from the breathy pleading of "This Story in Me" to the lusty crooning of "Hot Pork Sandwiches," a song as much about sex as food.
Everybody's Angel was recorded mostly live over a period of two weeks at Bearsville Studios in upstate New York. "I think the new album was a bit scary for Rod and Peter because they hadn't recorded this way in a long time," she explains. Tikaram found the warm sound she was looking for and walked away with her first co-production credit "I was obsessed with this record; I was writing much more direct, in-and-out songs and I wanted the recording process to reflect that."
Her first two releases went to the top of the charts and sold millions in places like Germany, Austria, Finland, Norway and Turkey, as well as in England. The question remains whether the more straightforward musical presentation of Everybody's Angel will make Tikaram's abstruse lyrics digestible to this country's format-driven, fast-food radio. "I've certainly found that people like to live with my records," she says. "You really need time to have a relationship with an album I feel very happy that some people over here like what I do, but it's like saying I want, I want, I want. I'm not sure that I haven't got enough already.
"I find that people put their own experience into my songs. There may he one line that sort of taps them on the shoulder and makes them think. That's what this voice is for."