Everything But the Girl on Accidentally Making Their Comeback Record, Fuse

Jonah Krueger
·10 min read
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The post Everything But the Girl on Accidentally Making Their Comeback Record, Fuse appeared first on Consequence.

Making a comeback record can be daunting. As decades pass since a beloved artist’s last release, the weight of expectations might continue to grow. Fortunately, the boundary-pushing pop duo Everything But the Girl – whose first album in 20 years, Fuse, released April 21st – has found a way around all the madness: They denied what they were doing until it was unavoidable.

“We started it in this spirit of we’re not really making an Everything But the Girl album,” vocalist Tracy Thorn tells Consequence. “We’re playing around with doing some music together. If it doesn’t work, we’re never going to tell anyone – and we didn’t tell anyone pretty much until we’d actually finished.”

Thorn, along with her long-time creative partner and husband Ben Watt, took the Voldemort approach, finding it best to keep the notion of what they might be doing unspoken. As Watt tells it, the goal was never to make the long-awaited Everything But the Girl comeback, it was just to exercise some creative intuition.

“It’s something that didn’t really strike us until we got started and then we sort of realized, ‘Oh, my God, it’s becoming Everything But the Girl and we’re not even really trying,’” he says.

And become Everything But the Girl it did. As soon as Thorn’s iconic voice struts over the propulsive electronic beat of Fuse’s first track “Nothing Left To Lose,” you can’t imagine it being anyone other than Everything But the Girl.

The album’s connection to the band’s past runs deeper than surface-level sonics, though. Anyone could attempt to replicate the aesthetic of their most celebrated work, and, in fact, many others have in their two-decade-long absence. It’s the willingness to expand upon what they’ve done before that makes it so quintessentially Everything But the Girl. It sounds like Everything But the Girl because, well, it is, but it’s also intensely modern.

“We were very adamant that we wanted to do something that we hadn’t done before,” Watt explains. “We wanted to experiment with ideas and production techniques that perhaps weren’t even available to us back in the late ‘90s.”

Thorn and Watt are aware of the nostalgic effect that the return of their best-known project will have, but they’re not terribly interested in it. If they thought they were retreading old ground or appealing to the recent interest in ‘90s revivalism, Fuse would have been canned and nobody outside of their household would have ever known of its existence.

As a young act, Everything But the Girl was strictly about moving pop music forward. Just because they’ve gone through a couple of calendars since then doesn’t mean that’s about to change.

Listen to Everything But the Girl’s Fuse below, followed by our full conversation with Tracy Thorn and Ben Watt.

 

Are there any nerves when it comes to releasing the first Everything But the Girl Record in 20 years?

Thorn: We didn’t have any nerves starting it because we started it in this spirit of we’re not really making an Everything But the Girl album. We’re playing around with doing some music together. If it doesn’t work, we’re never going to tell anyone — and we didn’t tell anyone pretty much until we’d actually finished. That was a way of dispelling precisely what you’re talking about, those kinds of nerves, that kind of pressure, getting sucked into other people’s expectations, all that stuff.

So, I think we just tried to kind of trick ourselves, pretend we weren’t really doing it, sidestep the process. When we were back in the thick of our career 20 years ago, you do get into a kind of cycle. You record, you release, you do promo, you go on tour, you write your record. That’s understandable, but it does mean when you start the next project, you are doing it with a weight of expectation around you. I think this experience was just completely different because as I say, we did it just pretending we weren’t even doing it with no commitment to releasing anything unless we actually came up with something that we thought was really worth releasing.

Wyatt: I think we weren’t really doing it for anyone other than ourselves. We didn’t have a record label at the point we started, as Tracy said. We didn’t think about old fans or past albums that we’d made. We just wanted to make a contemporary record and that was the way of looking forward. I think that helps alleviate nerves.

One of the things I love about Fuse is that it sounds like Everything But the Girl, but at the same time it feels very contemporary. How did you strike that balance?

Wyatt: I think we’re blessed in that we have quite identifiable signature sounds within the core of the band. Obviously, the main one is Tracy’s voice. But I think also allied to that is the way that I hear harmony and voicings in chords and the arrangements that I put together. I think that is also very much part of our sound. It’s something that didn’t really strike us until we got started and then we sort of realized, “Oh, my God, it’s becoming Everything But the Girl and we’re not even really trying.” There was just something about that blend that really worked.

But at the same time, we were very adamant that we wanted to do something that we hadn’t done before in some ways. We wanted to experiment with ideas and production techniques that perhaps weren’t even available to us back in the late ’90s. For example, things like some of the vocal production things that we’ve done on Tracy’s voice on this record, where we’ve warped it and disfigured it in places. That’s really come with much more recent sort of plugins for vocal manipulation. You’ve heard it in the hands of Kendrick Lamar and Frank Ocean for years, but for us, it’s become more sophisticated as a production tool. That was exciting, to take something that was supposedly as sacred as Tracy’s voice and to actually at times on the record bend it and warp it and give it a different tonality. So that along with trying to find some fresh beats and some fresh sounds, that was very much where we were going while still retaining those kinds of signature elements.

Obviously, there’s a certain element of nostalgia for fans when an artist makes a “comeback record.” Is that nostalgia something you embrace or try to avoid?

Thorn: I think we do kind of try and avoid it, but we’re realistic. We understand that we come with a long history behind us, and we understand that if we do an interview, obviously, we can’t talk as though we’re in a new band. We’ve made a lot of records so we know it’s part of the story. I really think that as artists, you have to not be weighed down by it. It drags you back and it’s not creative, really, as a state of mind. I think you have to keep reminding yourself that your fans might sometimes feel nostalgic, and music you made a long time ago, goes very deep with them. But if they respect you as an artist and you’re making a new record, then you have to feel confident as the artist that you have the right to just make something new. You just kind of go, “Look, we’re the ones in charge. We’re the ones making the decisions. If you guys like it, that’s brilliant.” I don’t know, I just feel it’s something you have to try and shake off.

None of us live our lives with a constant sense of what we were doing 20 years ago, or feeling like it’s weighing on us. Most of us live and we strive nowadays to live very much in the moment, to be present in our lives as they’re taking place right now. Both of us believe quite strongly in that. I think in life, as well as in your art, we’ve both been striving to fully experience what we’re doing right now.

Wyatt: I do think pop music, for want of a better phrase, does suffer from a sort of comparative talk. People are often looking back into a golden age, that happened about 20 years ago. Bands are described as being part this band, part that band. Very few people are allowed to break out and become themselves. There are chains that are hung around you sometimes. I’m always really jealous of jazz artists, because playing something new every night, improvising is just the name of the game in jazz. You’re expected to constantly look forward. No one expects you to revisit an old album. You can imagine if Miles Davis was expected to play Kind of Blue note for note at the Beacon Theater or something or Royal Festival Hall to celebrate the anniversary of its release. It’s unthinkable.

It’s very common in rock, this looking back, reviving the past, fetishizing it in some way. I think one of the things we were very lucky with this album was we just agreed we wanted to make a studio project. We weren’t going to go on tour. We didn’t have to jump on the Heritage Trail. We didn’t have to play the old stuff. We just wanted to make a new record and I think that’s quite liberating.

Thorn: Yeah, yeah, that’s quite freeing.

I love that jazz comparison. Because why would you even want to see Kind of Blue performed like that?

Wyatt: A lot of people would, that’s the point! There’s a lot of promoters who would happily put on that show, I’m sure you know, and it’s very hard to turn it down. If you are a band whose biggest hit was 35 years ago, and now all five members are bumping along the bottom, two of them are working in a coffee shop and one of them’s got mortgage problems and their promoter comes along and says, “Hey, do you want to play that album? You had a hit with 35-40 years ago, we could put 2000 people in a theater for it.” You’re not going to say n o. I can see why it works, you know?

So, we have to ask. Is it going to be another 20 years before we hear from you guys again?

Thorn: Yeah, we’ll come back in our eighties [laughs]. As I said, we are trying to kind of appreciate this moment without rushing through it and thinking on to the next project. The nature of the way this project is unfolding, I think we’re both very aware that we can’t do this again. Coming back in 20 years is not something we can do again, so it does feel like quite a unique experience. I do feel like we have to accept it, trying to appreciate all the good things that that means, whether we make more music again in the future. We might do it but even so, it won’t be this kind of moment in time. We can’t do this again.

Wyatt: So we’ll come back in two years’ time.

Thorn: Oh not again!

Wyatt: People will say, “Oh what? Haven’t they just made one?”

Everything But the Girl on Accidentally Making Their Comeback Record, Fuse
Jonah Krueger

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