KT Tunstall’s Latest CD, Drastic Fantastic

The music industry has a term to describe KT Tunstall’s platinum debut album, Eye to the Telescope. It’s referred to as a “slow grower,” a record that builds an audience over time rather than in the superheated rush of instantaneous marketability. Eye to the Telescope grew slowly, no doubt of that.

When the album landed in the UK late in 2004, it rippled the British charts, entering at #73 and hovering in that vicinity for awhile. After Tunstall’s performance of “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” the following year on Later With Jools Holland, England took proper notice of the Scottish folk/pop rocker and pushed her album to #3, earning her a 2005 nomination for the prestigious Mercury Prize.

The unexpected by-product of Telescope’s latent success was an interest in releasing the album in the US, which had barely been discussed previously. Almost predictably, the album simmered with the same kind of slow burn here, garnering some college and Triple A radio play for “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” and “Suddenly I See.” In the States, television once again played a major role in raising Tunstall’s profile, but the exposure took a slightly different route, as “Cherry Tree” was utilized to promote various programs (the WB’s cancelled-on-arrival Pepper Dennis, for one) and “Suddenly I See” was tapped as the exit soundtrack for ousted female contestants on So You Think You Can Dance. But Tunstall’s biggest American television moment came through one of her songs… but not her voice.

“A major thing that happened was our dear friend Katharine McPhee singing ‘Black Horse’ on American Idol,” says Tunstall with a husky laugh. “It’s significant when 40 million people heard my song. It was a hard decision for me, because I’ve never been polite about reality pop shows—I hate them—but that’s because I’m a musician. But Katharine McPhee had asked if she could sing the song, and I thought, ‘I’d be a total idiot to say no to this.’ I wanted to work out what problem I had with it, and it came down to the fact that it’s so controlled and manipulated. What Katharine did was take a song that she liked, that no one would have advised her to sing because no one knew it, and I really appreciated that show of her personality on a fairly bland canvas. So I thought was cool, and I was really glad I found a way to justify it.”

McPhee’s rendition of “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” transformed the song into a sensation and made Tunstall a rising star for the second time on the same album. In virtually no time, Tunstall was in demand for television appearances and her tour card filled just as rapidly, a trend that has continued unabated for the past year; most recently she was a featured artist on the Live Earth concert and Suzanne Vega brought Tunstall in as a vocal arranger on her new album. In fact, with all this activity, it might have seemed difficult for Tunstall to concentrate on the next logical phase in her career, namely the all important sophomore album to follow the platinum success of Eye to the Telescope. Pressure, anyone?

“To be honest, it’s not really got to me, that side of stuff,” says Tunstall easily. “I think partly because I haven’t had the kind of time to have the hindsight to absorb what’s happened. The whole three and a half million nonsense doesn’t mean that much to me. I mean it’s important to me, but logically it doesn’t make much sense. Thankfully I haven’t got the mathematical capacity to feel that pressure, which is a great relief.”

One of the reasons that Tunstall was relatively relaxed about creating what eventually became Drastic Fantastic, her second proper album (she released the solo Acoustic Extravaganza last year) was that she had begun thinking about it while still in the throes of creating Telescope.

“The seeds were planted for this record making the first record,” says Tunstall. “When I’d first gone to London I wanted to be a digital beat combo, and over a couple of years of thinking about what I wanted to do with the first album, it dawned on me—after listening to Carole King’s Tapestry quite a lot—what a wonderful way to introduce yourself as a recording artist, to do this meaningful, emotional, but on the whole really joyous record. I felt that represented the core of what I’m about, so I wanted to keep it simple and intimate and keep to the traditional subject matter.”

As the Telescope sessions progressed, Tunstall accumulated songs that didn’t fit the tone she was establishing for her debut. Some of them, like “Saving My Face,” sounded more like big pop songs for a band atmosphere, so they were shelved. As she began to revisit some of them during the Drastic Fantastic sessions, Tunstall used “Saving My Face” as the sonic standard for what she wanted to achieve, but also had twinges of songwriting guilt for using older material.

“I remember having a problem with that. I felt like I was gravedigging,” she says. “I’d written some new stuff, but I hadn’t really had the time to develop the songs properly. I really didn’t want to put out an album of old material.”

In response, Tunstall revisited the songs in significant ways, changing arrangements and song structures, retaining the core qualities that distinguished Telescope while broadening her scope and challenging herself artistically.

“There were some really great progressions on old ideas, which was very exciting for me,” says Tunstall. “Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s not good. Besides, they’re songs that I always wished I could put on an album. It’s just making sure they go on the right one now.”

When it came to christening Drastic Fantastic, Tunstall went back to an epiphany she’d had on an airplane just after wrapping the album sessions and it seemed too appropriate to ignore.

“I keep a journal; I’ve kept them for years, it’s like my second memory,” says Tunstall. “I was writing my thoughts on the album and it just arrived and I thought, ‘That sounds great.’ I’d also just seen Sin City, and I was completely blown away and I’ve since become addicted to the books. Then I got into X-Men and reading those, and [Drastic Fantastic] just seemed like a really great comic book and my life has felt like a really great comic book. I keep meeting these fantastic comic characters. We meet Elton John at a soundcheck, and you’re like, ‘You’re not real; you’re a comic book character and your comic’s better than my comic.’”

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