Interview with Paloma Faith

I was lucky enough to sit down with Paloma Faith for an hour and put questions to her that she answered openly and honestly, in her usual beautiful heart-on-her-sleeve style. She is a singer and lyricist that has produced five hugely successful albums and has achieved worldwide recognition. She is an intelligent, insightful woman and makes statements about life and creativity that would benefit us all. She spoke in a way that would guide all artists, not just musicians. Writers, thinkers, visual artists, performers and anyone could learn from her reflections.

Kier
Were you always a creative person, even as a kid, or did it happen later on?

Paloma
I've always been creative. I used to like photography, I was really good at art, I'm really empathetic, which I think is a creative temperament. I've always really liked communicative mediums, so was always good at languages from a young age. Communication, I would say is the main thing that has motivated me.

Kier
So whatever art form.

Paloma
I call them all languages. I found one of the most interesting things that anyone ever said to me was that the medium of expression is completely irrelevant. It's what you're trying to communicate that's important.

Kier
You were brought up in Hackney which was known as a bit of a rough area at the time. How did that impact you as a person and then your music?

Paloma
When I went to secondary school I was very introverted and I learned quite quickly that to survive it I had to figure out a way not to seem like a victim, because introverts often do. So, I developed this sort of quick wit, that I'm now known for, as a defence mechanism. I became a bit of a class clown. Rather than being introverted, I was just always a piss taker. I learned to defend myself with comedy which I think is another language in a way.

But then how it's influenced my music, well, it [London] is obviously a melting pot and I was culturally always surrounded by probably every culture other than English. So musically that had an impact. The music that was playing in my school was a mixture of all world music and bashment, dancehall, Turkish music, Indian music, pop music. I've never felt restricted by genre. I think that's how it's affected me.

I remember when I was about 22, 23 I bought a boyfriend home. He went up to the toilet and my mum was like ‘he's white’. And I was like, ‘yes, he’s white. What?’ And she went, ‘that's not you. What's going on with you? Are you having some sort of breakdown?’ It's just like the opposite of what most people experience which is like, he's black or whatever. Mine was like, ‘he's white. What are you doing? You've lost your mind.’ It didn't last very long. I thought it was funny.

Kier
To seems that being a musician is the best job in the world. I'm sure it has its difficulties, but would you ever have wanted to do anything else? Maybe not creative based?

Paloma
I’ve never been somebody who’s got one ambition but I think what links everything that I've ever done to each other is the fact that they all involve me being looked at, they all involve me being watched. So, acting, singing, I used to be a life drawing model, I've been a magician's assistant, I've been cast in various adverts and things and I think it's all about this idea that I quite enjoy being the subject of voyeurism in a way. I do think if somebody had told me when I was ten that I'd be a singer, that was one of the most least likely things that I seemed like I was going to do.

Kier
It seems like there are lots of artists that have a hit song or hit album, whereas you've created five successful albums over more than ten years. What is it that's let you create quality content for such a long time?

Paloma
I think I'm very truthful and honest in my lyrics about what's actually happening in my life. I never expected to be a commercial artist. When I first started, I was doing these sorts of performance art shows where I sang my songs and they weren't very commercial and I was doing weird things like crying blood tears on stage. I remember the record company saying ‘you can't do that, it's outrageous.’ Then over time I was probably inadvertently moulded a bit and I and I went with it on a journey. I think that initially, when I first started to get into the commercial world, it felt alien to me and also unlikely. It started it off as a bit of an experiment but then I ended up sort of in it.

I think when I was a young art school student, I was quite pretentious and really artsy and whatever. Then, due to a series of personal circumstances that meant I needed money, one of which I became my sister's legal guardian when I was 26 and suddenly, I started saying yes to all these opportunities that were a bit more mainstream and I wasn't blocking it anymore because I just felt that I needed to support us both. Now I love it. I think I've lost a certain sort of insecurity I had. It was probably a snobbery motivated by insecurity when I was younger. Actually, it's a real privilege to be able to be part of an art form that communicates across the board in a non-elitist way. So now I feel really lucky and I wouldn’t change it.

I think when you're doing song writing, it's all about trying to say the most poignant thing in the minimal amount of words. That's quite a difficult thing to learn. There are people who do it amazingly that I really admire and aspire to be like. But then at times I think I've got close to it in my career and those moments feel creatively really amazing. I think that's what commercialism does. If you can speak to widest audience possible about universal truths around the human condition then you've really nailed it. I like and rate obscurity, but I think there's something really amazing about being able to communicate to people from all walks of life in the same one piece of work.

Kier
When you write your music, do you often think about the listener and how they're going to hear it? Or do you mostly think about it as just purely telling your story?

Paloma
I feel like what appeals to people the most is two things. They want to feel like they know something personal about you, so you've got to pull yourself into it, but then they want to feel like your experience translates or articulates their experience. They want to feel like you understood them and they understood you. A two way thing, rather than it being one sided. I think it’s the essence of truth.

Kier
Can you talk me through the process of how you create one of your songs? Also working alongside the other musicians as well.

Paloma
It's always different. Because I don't play any instruments I always work with musicians. I'm writing all the time so quite often I have thoughts or I hear something that triggers a thought and I will save clips of things or notes. I keep notes all the time. I write ideas down all day. Often show up to a studio with a musician and I'll have a feeling that morning, could be something very current like I'll say, ‘I've been feeling like this this morning, I need to get it down’ or it's an idea that I've been exploring for a period of time. I'll go in with an idea, tell everyone my life story, over share, and then people are like ‘let's translate that into music’.

It's like a combination of therapy and there's a bit of channelling. There's an element of it that you feel at times like you're just the messenger. I don't always feel very in control of what happens. It's always different which is why I think it's quite holy because my process is about not just me. It's about the collaborative and everyone's soul pours into each output and then it becomes bigger than us as individuals.

Kier
Something that I'm always impressed by when I listen to your music is the variety of genres and styles. Is that something that’s intentional when you're writing a song or just happens during the process?

Paloma
I think that I just have a feeling and then I go with it. But I do worry about that as being a negative thing because I look at all these popular artists that are doing better than me and they all seem to put the same album out over and over and over again. I think maybe that's why I'm going wrong but I just get bored.

Kier
I wouldn't say that you were going wrong. I think that makes it a lot more interesting for the listeners having something different every time. I don't want to hear the same thing over and over again.

Paloma
Most of the world does though don't they? Keep buying it.

Kier
For your most recent album, Infinite Things, you engineered it yourself. What was that like and did that change how you felt about the music?

Paloma
I think it's the best vocal production of any album I've done. Not because I'm better than everyone else, because I didn't do anything except hit record, but because I was on my own. I let loose in a way that I don't when somebody's staring at me. There's an intimacy to it which I think comes across in the way I'm singing. I guess symbolically it was good because it made me think a lot about obstacles we give ourselves. I always thought, oh, I can't do this. Like, I can't play an instrument, I can't record myself. But in a situation like Lockdown, when we were forced to learn new things, I realised that all of my own obstacles and probably continue to be, are actually just that. They're not real. Then I just think what else am I not doing that I could be doing, that I think I couldn't do?

Kier
In your songs, it always seems that you draw upon personal experiences. Does that have any effect on the people around you at all?

Paloma
People get worried, yes. I think you have to be careful. You can say whatever you like in a song but once you're in the interview setting, people are asking you details, you have to be careful and at times I'm not. So yeah, people don't like it. It affects my relationships because obviously that's what I speak about a lot. My last album, Infinite Things, we were still together when I wrote it and now we're not it's sort of glaringly obvious that's what I was writing about, wanting to get out of it. I think that if he listens to it now, he probably thinks ‘fucking hell. She was telling me. I didn't even think it was coming.’ Tip for anybody who becomes my lover, listen to the music.

Kier
With so many people listening to your music and you writing about your life, does that make you ever feel exposed?

Paloma
To some degree, but I also think it's interpretive. I think once I’ve used my experience to channel into a piece of work, and it's out in the world, it becomes its own thing that's separate from me in some way.

Paloma

I remember quite a while ago a friend of mine was suicidal and she had good reason to be, if I'm honest. She came to me, she'd had her stomach pumped from trying to overdose, and I basically said to her ‘do me a favour, get on the plane, go to another part of the world and completely reinvent yourself. And if after two years you still want to kill yourself, then do it.’ She was quite shocked and so were other people that knew I'd said it. They thought it was an irresponsible thing to say, but I felt like I had confidence in knowing that that would give her an idea that there's more than one possibility. So she did. She got on a plane, she went to Washington DC, and she changed from being a PR person to train to be a pastry chef. She had this life change and she was an amazing baker. Then she called me one day and was like, ‘I don't want to kill myself and I think I'm happier than I've ever been.’

Kier
That's amazing.

Paloma
Yeah but I think I was so worried she might do it. But obviously I wouldn't blame myself. I think that it's really affected my view of the world and what I'm capable of and what's possible, which is pretty much anything. The whole of your life is a research project. It doesn't matter whether you feel like you're wearing the right hat or in the right shoes at any one time. It gives you this feeling of freedom.