Beyond The Blues

"Never gonna live down those angel wings,” Birmingham, UK-born-and-raised, Detroit, USA-based singer, songwriter and guitarist Joanne Shaw Taylor laughs, recalling her contribution to The Queen's Diamond Jubilee last June, performing with Annie Lennox on the Eurythmics classic, There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart). Not that she need worry – she pulled off the solo perfectly, albeit without her customary tone due to a pedal malfunction, but more on that later. More importantly, playing something so far from the genre within which Taylor has been carving an enviable international career worked in perfectly, though in no way reflecting, with the way she's perceiving her music right now, as is evident on her latest album, Almost Always Never.

“I think this album is quite different to the previous two [2009's White Sugar and 2010's Diamonds In The Dirt],” Taylor suggests, “in that I did get a bit more time to write for it, so I was able to focus more on the songs. And therefore I think I experimented a bit more, certainly outside the traditional blues box, I suppose, and just tried to focus on writing the best songs I was capable of, really.

“So it's about taking a bit of a gamble and I do think it paid off – I'm personally very happy with the songs and I also think they're quite diverse. There's a lot of different stuff on the album which is tying in nicely together, so that was kind of my main goal was make an album of original songs that show my influences but isn't too derivative, and I do have some very sort of random influences,” she laughs.

A change of producer, from Jim Gaines, who did the first two albums, to Mike McCarthy, whose CV includes albums for acts as diverse as Spoon, Patty Griffin and …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, also had an impact on Taylor's approach to Almost Always Never. As she admits, “This time we decided to go with a non-kind of traditional blues guy. We both have a great love of classic rock.”

Lyrically too, the inspiration behind Almost Always Never was decidedly not that of traditional blues. “It was a bit of a weird one really, lyrically, 'cause I was in a very sort of happy frame of mind. Unlike the first two albums, when I was a bit younger and more angst-ridden,” she chuckles. “I was very content, which I think is a very odd place actually for a songwriter to write a song from. So I just tried to stretch myself really and think of some sort of stories.”

Though she was 23 by the time she released her debut album, Taylor's musical journey got its initial rocket blast when the other half of the Eurythmics, Dave Stewart, heard her playing. Though she was only 16, he was impressed enough to offer her a place in his 'supergroup' of the time, DUP, touring Europe. Now she's sharing stages with the likes of Joe Bonamassa, Candye Kane and, of course, Annie Lennox outside Buckingham Palace.

“That was great fun – it was shocking but quite an experience,” she laughs, commenting on the failure of her fuzz/phase pedal, though it seems that Stevie Wonder, no less, was very impressed by her “clean” guitar tone. “That was really funny 'cause the whole night afterwards I was winding myself up on it – 'God I can't believe the pedal let me down, of all days', and then his drum tech came running up to tell me and I was, like, 'Thank God for that pedal malfunction!'”

Joanne Shaw Taylor will be playing the following dates:

Wednesday 20 February - Brass Monkey, Cronulla NSW
Thursday 21 February - Black Bear Lodge, Fortitude Valley QLD
Friday 22 February - The Basement, Sydney NSW
Saturday 23 February - Kelts Bar, Emu Plains NSW
Saturday 24 February - Beach Hotel, Towradgi NSW