KT begins a new chapter in career ahead of Birmingham's Symphony Hall show
She was born in Scotland but is now based in Los Angeles.
KT Tunstall emerged with her 2004 debut Eye To The Telescope (ETTT) and soon after won a BRIT Award, an Ivor Novello Award and earned Grammy and Mercury Prize nominations.
Since then her music has figured prominently in film and television and she will headline Birmingham's Symphony Hall tonight as part of a major UK tour.
She is on the road with KIN, her new album.
Two years ago, Tunstall thought she was done with music. Not done as in she'd never again play guitar or sing, but done playing professionally, at least for the foreseeable future. "As an artist I feel like I died," she says. "I didn't want to do it anymore."
It had been 10 years since she'd released her multi-platinum debut, ETTT, and 20-something years since she started playing gigs as a teenager back home in St Andrews, Scotland.
She'd lived a decade in obscurity and a decade in the brightest of limelights, releasing three more critically acclaimed albums – Drastic Fantastic (2007), Tiger Suit (2010), and Invisible Empire / Crescent Moon (2013) – and playing everywhere from the rooftops of splashy Las Vegas hotels to Giant's Stadium in New Jersey.
She'd been nominated for a Grammy, won a BRIT and the Ivor Novello, and seen her songs used everywhere from opening credits of The Devil Wears Prada to Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign theme. She'd had a good run, Tunstall thought, but it was time to take a serious time out. "I was utterly burnt out," she says. So the singer put her stuff in storage, sold all of her property in the UK, and started again, at what felt like the ends of an entirely different earth, in a little house in Venice Beach, California.
The music that Tunstall has written since moving to California is, she says, the most impassioned and inspired of her life.
A new full-length album is, in spirit, the follow-up to her debut. A edge-of-your-seat, psychedelic rock record rooted in classic songwriting, but infused with the sense of wonder.
But first up, a little teaser of what's to come: Golden State, a four-song EP out this June including a remix of Evil Eye by critically acclaimed UK band Django Django.
The opening track, it was the first song that came to her since going on hiatus. "It was just a little seed," the singer remembers. She'd been rehearsing for a string of low-key gigs where she'd be performing some of her back catalogue, the first shows since the relatively formal, seated gigs she'd given last time she was on tour. "It was a vibrant up-tempo high-octane gig, after so long of not playing that kind of show," she recalls.
Something got shaken loose.
Tunstall enthuses, nearly out of breath: "This feels like the beginning of the second chapter of my career."
By Andy Richardson
