"I opened a book today, and the first line I read was — I love this, you might not love this, I don't know — but I opened a book today, and the first line was, 'Try to keep the poetry separate,'" Beth Orton says. "I thought, 'that's brilliant! That's brilliant!"
Orton is calling from New York, where she's just arrived in anticipation of her first headlining North American tour in over five years. A warm and absorbing speaker, she answers questions in swooping murmurations of thought, ideas gathering and releasing with great feathery bursts. At the moment, she's considering poetry.
"I thought I knew exactly what [the author] meant," she continues. "But no: I read on and she was literally talking to someone who was divvying up books, putting them into the poetry section."
The misunderstanding is reminiscent of a line in "Forever Young," the flickering centrepiece of Orton's astonishing, self-produced eighth record, Weather Alive. "Am I not your poetry?" she asks her love, searching for the delicate things that live between the written words, between the appointments and obligations and squabbles.
"Sometimes, there isn't room for that kind of thinking in your daily life. You have to be much more straightforward and logical and practical," she says. "When you're in the middle of an argument with your husband, you can't get all that florid. You have to be honest, you have to stay on the straight and narrow."
It's in her music that Orton allows herself to race down deer trails and float on her vast subconscious rivers; Weather Alive is anything but straight and narrow, and the journey to its completion even less so.
The record's gestation was marked by a series of punishing snags — a world-stopping pandemic, ongoing struggles with Crohn's disease and temporal lobe epilepsy, a series of aborted long-distance sessions with an admired producer ("a lovely, lovely guy"), and near-debilitating self-doubt — all compounded when, as the record's delicate skeleton seemed to be collapsing before her, Orton was dropped by her label.
"For me at that point — even though I didn't have a long-term relationship with [the label] — it was still brutal," she says. "Because things were so scary at that point financially and just like, 'Oh, fuck, everything's going down.'"
"The decision [to self-produce] came when I was just like, 'Y'know what? I've come this far and I believe in what's happening, and I believe in these songs,'" she continues. "And I need to know what would happen if I finish this record. I sort of have to know."
What happened was Weather Alive, the most critically celebrated record of Orton's winding, 30-year career. Its nebulous and intuitive shape is another sharp left turn from an artist who's never stayed still long enough to be pinned down.
Despite the glowing reception, Orton says the recording process was largely defined by a tug of war between an unraveling, illuminating freedom and an acute sense of anxiety and doubt — what if this quicksilver brilliance was all in her head?
"Sometimes, I was like, 'I might have truly lost my mind now,'" she says. "This voice would come and go, 'Do you know what you're doing? Like, maybe you've gone mad, I think you might have, maybe you should stop.'"
She continues, "So I met up with [producer and audio engineer Craig Silvey] and I played him what I was doing, expecting him to say, 'Yeah, I should probably take this on now.' And he didn't! He was like, 'Keep going! This is awesome!'"
That confidence boost sent Orton headlong into a state of what she calls "sculpting" — "Editing, editing, I love editing" — with hours upon hours spent mutating these mercurial dispatches into different forms.
"I was quite cavalier with other people's work," she says, laughing. "Like, 'Yeah, let's just do this. Let's take all the drums out, let's put all the drums in.' I could go until I was too tired."
"It got to a point where I physically could do no more. I was done. I was so fucking tired. It was like a car with no brake pads," she says, revving her imaginary engine. "I don't even know if that's the right analogy."
Eventually, Orton (or the universe, or maybe even the record itself, finally pleased with its own form) decided it was time to leave things be. Crucially, magically, Weather Alive is peppered with mistakes — a creaking chair, a cleared throat, a gently flubbed note — evidence of the people who helped guide it into being.
"To this day, there's still bits that I'm like, 'Jesus Christ, I meant to get rid of that,'" Orton says.
Many vocals featured on the record — including Orton's incandescent, slyly hopeful performance on "Fractals" — are guide vocals, originally intended to be heard by no one but Orton and her collaborators.
What's it been like to have those performances run wild in the world? "It's been unbearable," she says, laughing again. "The whole thing was mastered in July of 2021. And it didn't come out until, well — I'm so confused with time as well now — it didn't come out until September 2022. So [I was] just living in the most bizarre state of anxiety, just like, 'Oh fucking hell, oh fucking hell.'"
Orton's distorted relationship with time — caused partly by her complex partial seizures, which result in spells of disorientation and memory loss — is woven throughout Weather Alive, pulling the record into a place where the past, present and future spill into one another, staining daily life with memory and visions of tomorrow.
"I was already having issues with time and place and memory and all sorts of things," she says. "Feeling very dislocated and isolated in many ways due to my health and stuff, before I went into making the record."
She continues, "So when it turned into lockdown, for me, it was like I fell into time. Like suddenly I was in step with the world."
The neurological impacts of life suddenly shrinking and slowing — let alone the impact of catching COVID itself — are yet to be fully understood. Orton spends much of Weather Alive exploring the phenomena on her own fantastical and inscrutable terms, reflections from someone who'd been living in time's dissolve long before the rest of us joined her.
"And now it's true to say, I keep forgetting what year I'm in," she says. "I'm like, hang on, did that happen this year? I thought that happened last year! It's just one big amorphous blur that just rolls into the next. And here we are."
Weather Alive embraces this melt, a soundtrack to The Persistence of Memory; Dalí's melting clocks recast as pattering drums and peals of opalescent saxophone. The record despairs in many things, but not in the face of this newfound timelessness; instead, Orton treats the between state as an opportunity to open new doors and turn on new lights.
"I just think it's really beautiful how it's all come unraveled," she says. "Unfortunately, we're all kind of packing it back in and just getting back on with life now. It's just a bit like, what happened? That was really beautiful as well, sometimes. Except for when we all got really poor and scared and lost our jobs."
The beauty of that gradual alignment — the journey of discovery that Orton felt as the world came to meet her at her own pace — ended abruptly when Orton hit the road, opening for Alanis Morissette on a string of European and UK shows earlier this year.
She describes these massive shows — "Playing for 20,000 people, with the most amazing sound system and lights and the whole nine yards" — as a "quick fix," an opportunity to recover financially after a shaky few years and a glitzy buoy in a world where smaller tours are cancelled left and right. It also revealed, to Orton's chagrin, her sudden inability to relate to those around her — that perhaps she wasn't as aligned with the world as she'd come to believe.
"I was really like, 'Man, I've found some wisdom here. I'm like, on a roll.' And then I went on the Alanis Morissette tour, and it was the first time I'd been around fucking people, other than my kids and my husband," she says. "And I was like, 'Oh, Jesus, I'm a total freak. I don't know how to manage myself.'"
She continues, "My emotions are everywhere. I've not reached that kind of Zen mastery that I thought I had in the little mountain at the end of my garden shed."
While she may not have quite reached a state of Zen, Orton says she still feels like she's come out the other side — of the pandemic, of Weather Alive, of decades spent trying to understand herself and her place — with a more holistic comprehension of her inner world.
"I do think I got to know some of myself better," she says. "I've been doing some Lacanian therapy for a couple of years, when I initially started writing [Weather Alive]."
Orton's therapy worked in the realm of lucid dreaming, an attempt to recognize and deconstruct the patterns of projection that shape our lives; if everything and everyone is simply a projection of ourselves, how can we expect to engage with the world as it really is?
"When you have a dream, they're like, 'Oh, you're the house, you're the door, you're the kettle, you're everything — you're every person in it,'" she says, an idea that she explores with a wondrous solemnity on "Fractals." "And in the daytime it's like that too, you know? You go everywhere, and everything's a projection or transference. We're all just kind of seeing versions of ourselves in everything."
She continues, "It's just this huge ego move. And it's like, how to deconstruct that? And I suppose the verses [of 'Fractals'] are that voice, that internal monologue of self doubt and questioning, and, 'Well, I did this so why didn't that happen?' It's these bargaining chips that we carry around in our head, like, 'If I do X, then Y will certainly happen.' And it doesn't, y'know? It doesn't work like that, until you see who you are and until you deal with who you are."
The making of Weather Alive resisted those bargaining chips, seemingly hell-bent on existing on its particular and untameable terms. As she tells it, it pushed Orton to shed her preconceptions of what the record was meant to be, of what was supposed to happen at this stage of her life and artistic practice. Ultimately, Weather Alive (and the hard-won communion she now feels in sharing it with the world) settled her, allowed her to begin seeing things for what they truly are. Or gave her the tools to begin trying, anyway.
"When I write songs, I feel like it's a meditation. When I write songs ... it's like a dream mind," she says. "I can understand things from songs that I couldn't put into words — or understand — otherwise.
"What a funny old life. I mean, we all know. It's bizarre to be alive."
Orton is calling from New York, where she's just arrived in anticipation of her first headlining North American tour in over five years. A warm and absorbing speaker, she answers questions in swooping murmurations of thought, ideas gathering and releasing with great feathery bursts. At the moment, she's considering poetry.
"I thought I knew exactly what [the author] meant," she continues. "But no: I read on and she was literally talking to someone who was divvying up books, putting them into the poetry section."
The misunderstanding is reminiscent of a line in "Forever Young," the flickering centrepiece of Orton's astonishing, self-produced eighth record, Weather Alive. "Am I not your poetry?" she asks her love, searching for the delicate things that live between the written words, between the appointments and obligations and squabbles.
"Sometimes, there isn't room for that kind of thinking in your daily life. You have to be much more straightforward and logical and practical," she says. "When you're in the middle of an argument with your husband, you can't get all that florid. You have to be honest, you have to stay on the straight and narrow."
It's in her music that Orton allows herself to race down deer trails and float on her vast subconscious rivers; Weather Alive is anything but straight and narrow, and the journey to its completion even less so.
The record's gestation was marked by a series of punishing snags — a world-stopping pandemic, ongoing struggles with Crohn's disease and temporal lobe epilepsy, a series of aborted long-distance sessions with an admired producer ("a lovely, lovely guy"), and near-debilitating self-doubt — all compounded when, as the record's delicate skeleton seemed to be collapsing before her, Orton was dropped by her label.
"For me at that point — even though I didn't have a long-term relationship with [the label] — it was still brutal," she says. "Because things were so scary at that point financially and just like, 'Oh, fuck, everything's going down.'"
"The decision [to self-produce] came when I was just like, 'Y'know what? I've come this far and I believe in what's happening, and I believe in these songs,'" she continues. "And I need to know what would happen if I finish this record. I sort of have to know."
What happened was Weather Alive, the most critically celebrated record of Orton's winding, 30-year career. Its nebulous and intuitive shape is another sharp left turn from an artist who's never stayed still long enough to be pinned down.
Despite the glowing reception, Orton says the recording process was largely defined by a tug of war between an unraveling, illuminating freedom and an acute sense of anxiety and doubt — what if this quicksilver brilliance was all in her head?
"Sometimes, I was like, 'I might have truly lost my mind now,'" she says. "This voice would come and go, 'Do you know what you're doing? Like, maybe you've gone mad, I think you might have, maybe you should stop.'"
She continues, "So I met up with [producer and audio engineer Craig Silvey] and I played him what I was doing, expecting him to say, 'Yeah, I should probably take this on now.' And he didn't! He was like, 'Keep going! This is awesome!'"
That confidence boost sent Orton headlong into a state of what she calls "sculpting" — "Editing, editing, I love editing" — with hours upon hours spent mutating these mercurial dispatches into different forms.
"I was quite cavalier with other people's work," she says, laughing. "Like, 'Yeah, let's just do this. Let's take all the drums out, let's put all the drums in.' I could go until I was too tired."
"It got to a point where I physically could do no more. I was done. I was so fucking tired. It was like a car with no brake pads," she says, revving her imaginary engine. "I don't even know if that's the right analogy."
Eventually, Orton (or the universe, or maybe even the record itself, finally pleased with its own form) decided it was time to leave things be. Crucially, magically, Weather Alive is peppered with mistakes — a creaking chair, a cleared throat, a gently flubbed note — evidence of the people who helped guide it into being.
"To this day, there's still bits that I'm like, 'Jesus Christ, I meant to get rid of that,'" Orton says.
Many vocals featured on the record — including Orton's incandescent, slyly hopeful performance on "Fractals" — are guide vocals, originally intended to be heard by no one but Orton and her collaborators.
What's it been like to have those performances run wild in the world? "It's been unbearable," she says, laughing again. "The whole thing was mastered in July of 2021. And it didn't come out until, well — I'm so confused with time as well now — it didn't come out until September 2022. So [I was] just living in the most bizarre state of anxiety, just like, 'Oh fucking hell, oh fucking hell.'"
Orton's distorted relationship with time — caused partly by her complex partial seizures, which result in spells of disorientation and memory loss — is woven throughout Weather Alive, pulling the record into a place where the past, present and future spill into one another, staining daily life with memory and visions of tomorrow.
"I was already having issues with time and place and memory and all sorts of things," she says. "Feeling very dislocated and isolated in many ways due to my health and stuff, before I went into making the record."
She continues, "So when it turned into lockdown, for me, it was like I fell into time. Like suddenly I was in step with the world."
The neurological impacts of life suddenly shrinking and slowing — let alone the impact of catching COVID itself — are yet to be fully understood. Orton spends much of Weather Alive exploring the phenomena on her own fantastical and inscrutable terms, reflections from someone who'd been living in time's dissolve long before the rest of us joined her.
"And now it's true to say, I keep forgetting what year I'm in," she says. "I'm like, hang on, did that happen this year? I thought that happened last year! It's just one big amorphous blur that just rolls into the next. And here we are."
Weather Alive embraces this melt, a soundtrack to The Persistence of Memory; Dalí's melting clocks recast as pattering drums and peals of opalescent saxophone. The record despairs in many things, but not in the face of this newfound timelessness; instead, Orton treats the between state as an opportunity to open new doors and turn on new lights.
"I just think it's really beautiful how it's all come unraveled," she says. "Unfortunately, we're all kind of packing it back in and just getting back on with life now. It's just a bit like, what happened? That was really beautiful as well, sometimes. Except for when we all got really poor and scared and lost our jobs."
The beauty of that gradual alignment — the journey of discovery that Orton felt as the world came to meet her at her own pace — ended abruptly when Orton hit the road, opening for Alanis Morissette on a string of European and UK shows earlier this year.
She describes these massive shows — "Playing for 20,000 people, with the most amazing sound system and lights and the whole nine yards" — as a "quick fix," an opportunity to recover financially after a shaky few years and a glitzy buoy in a world where smaller tours are cancelled left and right. It also revealed, to Orton's chagrin, her sudden inability to relate to those around her — that perhaps she wasn't as aligned with the world as she'd come to believe.
"I was really like, 'Man, I've found some wisdom here. I'm like, on a roll.' And then I went on the Alanis Morissette tour, and it was the first time I'd been around fucking people, other than my kids and my husband," she says. "And I was like, 'Oh, Jesus, I'm a total freak. I don't know how to manage myself.'"
She continues, "My emotions are everywhere. I've not reached that kind of Zen mastery that I thought I had in the little mountain at the end of my garden shed."
While she may not have quite reached a state of Zen, Orton says she still feels like she's come out the other side — of the pandemic, of Weather Alive, of decades spent trying to understand herself and her place — with a more holistic comprehension of her inner world.
"I do think I got to know some of myself better," she says. "I've been doing some Lacanian therapy for a couple of years, when I initially started writing [Weather Alive]."
Orton's therapy worked in the realm of lucid dreaming, an attempt to recognize and deconstruct the patterns of projection that shape our lives; if everything and everyone is simply a projection of ourselves, how can we expect to engage with the world as it really is?
"When you have a dream, they're like, 'Oh, you're the house, you're the door, you're the kettle, you're everything — you're every person in it,'" she says, an idea that she explores with a wondrous solemnity on "Fractals." "And in the daytime it's like that too, you know? You go everywhere, and everything's a projection or transference. We're all just kind of seeing versions of ourselves in everything."
She continues, "It's just this huge ego move. And it's like, how to deconstruct that? And I suppose the verses [of 'Fractals'] are that voice, that internal monologue of self doubt and questioning, and, 'Well, I did this so why didn't that happen?' It's these bargaining chips that we carry around in our head, like, 'If I do X, then Y will certainly happen.' And it doesn't, y'know? It doesn't work like that, until you see who you are and until you deal with who you are."
The making of Weather Alive resisted those bargaining chips, seemingly hell-bent on existing on its particular and untameable terms. As she tells it, it pushed Orton to shed her preconceptions of what the record was meant to be, of what was supposed to happen at this stage of her life and artistic practice. Ultimately, Weather Alive (and the hard-won communion she now feels in sharing it with the world) settled her, allowed her to begin seeing things for what they truly are. Or gave her the tools to begin trying, anyway.
"When I write songs, I feel like it's a meditation. When I write songs ... it's like a dream mind," she says. "I can understand things from songs that I couldn't put into words — or understand — otherwise.
"What a funny old life. I mean, we all know. It's bizarre to be alive."