She started out as an internet star when her series of webcast gigs in her basement, 21 Nights in Tooting, became a trending phenomenon. She was then signed to a record label, and rose to fame with her hit single, ‘I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker’ in 2006. Tragically Thom’s second album did not match up to the success of the first, and hankered by her label, soon moved on to create her own independent record label, Guardian Angels, to release her third album.
From the back of her boyfriend’s (Joe Bonamassa) tour bus, Sandi Thom chats to us about her newly released third album, Merchants and Thieves, the up and downs in her career and… El Compadre?
Album cover
You’ve just released your third studio album, Merchants and Thieves. Can you tell me a little about it?
It is my first independent record. We recorded it very loosely and in a couple of different studios in England and we had no real agenda for it, which was different from previous records that I made. We just kind of went in and let loose and that was the record we came out with it. It was great because I’d been so boxed in by being on a major label and having to tick all these different boxes and fulfil a certain criteria with the songs that when I actually got given the chance to just make a record on my own, and you know, just be footloose and fancy free. It was good fun. It came to the point where I kind of took it to another level and had an instrumental track on there. That is something I would have never been allowed to do on a major label… Sonically as well it was very organic, it was all live instrumentation, all played at the same time. So it was all about capturing a great cake as opposed to layering up instruments.
Sandi Thom, looking like she might break out into yoga pose, Ustrasana
This album is quite a bluesy departure from your previous records. How come?
It’s not something that is new to me. It’s always been a genre and a style of music that I was brought up with. My dad is a guitar player who is heavily into blues music. It’s not something that I’ve never heard before. It has always been present in my life. My first record was very much my own, that’s how I really did want it to come out. I was very young and innocent and I had been listening to a lot of Joni Mitchell.
You take some of those songs off the record or the second record and when you break it down, you listen to, ‘What If I’m Right’ on the first album. It’s basically like a bo-diddly rhythm.
[Listen to 'What If I'm Right' below.]
And then you’ve got ‘The Devils Beat’ which is a New Orleans /Zydeco beat. All of those things, it’s not off-the-cuff and it’s not apparent blues, but it’s definitely tinged with those styles of music and it’s very present when you get down to it and analyse the songs.
[Check out 'The Devil's Beat' video below.]
With the third record, there was no agenda… Our guitar player is from Chicago, he’s a very blues-influenced guitar player, my drummer is big into the blues… and the songs that we wrote, I mean ‘Maggie McCall’ which is not a blues song, it’s more like Americana country.
And then you’ve got stuff like ‘Let It Stay’, which is really kind of like Otis Redding.
So when we did this whole whirl… Joe (Bonamassa) and I had just been out on the road together, just been on tour and I had been listening to his music, and we had been able to do a gig with BB King. All that stuff had been in my sub-conscious I guess, and when it came to collaborating with him, I wanted it to be like something you could really shred on and really get his licks out.
[Listen to 'This Ol' World' below, a collaboration between Thom and Bonamassa.]
Which is your favourite song on the record?
I think ‘Gold Dust’ was one of my favourites, because it is the first electric guitar solo I ever took on a record. Up until that point, I had never played electric, I had always played acoustic… I was really inspired by watching Joe (Bonamassa), and seeing BB King and Steve Winwood and people like that out on the road, till I learned how to play the electric… One of the people that I was brought up listening to, who I am a massive fan of, is Peter Green. I am a huge Fleetwood Mac fan, and I have been for all my life. For my first ever band I was in when I was 14, I played pretty much their whole back-catalogue. So Peter Green is like, if I could aspire to sound like anybody, I would sound like him in his prime. For me, he was really one of the best guitar players ever. So ‘Gold Dust’ has that real Fleetwood Mac feel. It’s got that ‘Black-Magic-Woman’ feel about it, with a Fleetwood back beat.
My second favourite song on that record is ‘Belly of the Blues’ which is the last song. And that’s quite dark and Floyd-y, and it’s kind of like Zepplin-ish… With that song, my guitar player Randell and Jake who produced it… we were just sitting in my house, that I lived in at the time, and I just sort of splurged out these words from some deep and dark place. Making that record, I got the opportunity to do those things like I could talk and be dark and sinister and creepy and stuff. I mean, when I was with Sony, they wanted me to be the girl next door. They didn’t like songs that were really deep and weird like that. That song, lyrically, was some of the darkest shit I’ve ever written. I felt really liberated by that… it was nice for me to really get to write some really serious haunting lyrics.
You’ve done a cover of ‘House of the Rising Sun’. Why did you cover that particular song?
I played it at a festival called Vintage, which is a British festival. It’s all about vintage music, vintage clothes, and everything vintage. And I got asked to perform… So this was a song I performed at this festival and we were performing with this 20-piece orchestra. It was a big deal. And we did it in the original key because that is what the orchestra rehearsed it in. I didn’t know how it was going to sound. I didn’t rehearse it till the day of the gig. I came in and played it with the orchestra and it sounded great and a lot of people were commenting on the fact that they thought it was a really great performance and that I should go and record a version of it. So I just did. We took half a day and recorded the song.
It was actually when I came register it (the cover version of ‘House of the Rising Sun’) with my publisher that it comes up as ‘traditional’ which means that there is no known author of the song, nobody ever laid claim to being the songwriter. So, it inspired my brother and I to go on this trip to New Orleans. We went on this investigative journey to New Orleans to try and find ‘House of the Rising Sun’. We went to all these places that claimed to be the house of the rising sun and we talked to historians and libraries… And I ended up actually meeting a Eric Burdon in LA while he was recording his record and we interviewed Eric Burdon about the whole origins of the song and where, and what he thinks about who wrote it and what his idea of it is… It’s a really very haunting song which somebody, somewhere wrote that now, centuries later, people still play and sing. We will never know who wrote it , or who that person was, or what they were thinking at the time. It lives on and it still will.
[Check out the Daily Record article about their adventure here.]
Scottish singer meets Scottish actor
Let me throw some random questions at you, and just answer whatever pops into your head.
What song can you listen to a 1000 times and never get sick of?
‘Back in Black’ – ACDC
‘Landslide’ – Fleetwood Mac
What are your top five favourite albums you heard in 2011?
El Camino – Black Keys
21 - Adele
Dust Bowl - Joe Bonamassa
Dirty Little Secret – Dave O’Grady
Let it Roll - George Harrison
If I came to visit you in your hometown, where would you take me?
I would take you to a Mexican place called El Compadre, because they serve the best margaritas, and there’s these three guys that get up and sing together – one plays like a nylon string guitar, (the other) a Spanish guitar and one plays like a double bass, and one plays a mandolin and they sing with this perfect harmony. It’s LA, there is a million places you could go, but El Compadre is the coolest. It’s the coolest place you don’t know about.
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