Many of us came to know Scottish blues-pop star KT Tunstall from her concert announcements in the back of UK music magazines. She wore a sexy black tank-top with rainbow suspenders. She was still hungry then, still relatively unknown, not too far removed from her days of busking. This, of course, was before Katharine McPhee gave America ‘McPheever’ with her sizzling rendition of Eye to the Telescope’s “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree,” and “Suddenly I See” became ubiquitous over myriad other TV and film soundtrack inclusions, The Devil Wears Prada chief among them.

As the arc of stardom goes, before long everything changed, and Tunstall went on to sell 3.5 million copies of Telescope around the world; rocketing herself to fame, fortune, awards, Live Aid and the pressures that can come along with success. And then there was the tiny matter of the follow-up record so soon after wrapping up the Telescope album and tour cycle.

“The important thing for me after the experience with the first one was to make something that I really loved and something that I was really happy to spend a lot of time playing, and the most important thing for me was to try and progress. So, trying to do that while being pretty worn out to start out with was very difficult indeed,” Tunstall says during a recent phone interview.

Her Telescope life became what she considers a “comic book,” always dashing from one place to the next, and being in high demand, which would frame the idea for her “tongue in cheek” Drastic Fantastic album cover.

“You get on a plane from Tokyo to New York and you arrive five minutes before you took off 13 hours later. It’s just impossible and life is just very intense, and very extreme and it’s a constant triumph or peril, it’s up to me, and it just felt like it was a very appropriate name for where I’m at right now.”

Thankfully, a gift from her record label, presented to her after winning Best British Female Solo Artist at the Brit Awards – a gorgeous 1975 White Gretsch Falcon – provided much needed inspiration to the exhausted Scot, and was the impetus for the electric, rocked-up sound on Fantastic. And while Tunstall considers the guitar “the singularly most fabulous present I’ve ever been given in my life,” it also pushed her to grow as an artist by playing lead electric guitar, even though she admits to feeling like an “alien” in the studio.

“I kind of feel a bit like a 14-year-old boy really getting excited about playing electric again and finding out how I want things to sound, learning to play in different ways, [and] realizing that playing electric on stage you’re like, ‘okay, so that’s how Pete Townsend does that thing.’”

Fantastic initially took shape one Friday when Tunstall was in the studio with producer Steve Osbourne, tinkering with “Little Favors,” a tune written about “teenage lust” when she was 17. Originally a ballad, the recording of Acoustic Extravanza tweaked the song into its true modern nature. Many of the tunes on Fantastic would end up being a mix of old and new, because, as Tunstall laments, the “prolific nature” of her songwriting “has been pretty annihilated by the success” and due to the demands of recording, did not have time to let the muses come naturally. Of “Little Favors,” “we did 15 minutes per instrument and it really set this benchmark for how things could sound and really pushed the envelope in terms of tempo and style and just kind of impulsivity towards handling the songs that we hadn’t tried recording before,” Tunstall remembers.

When looking for topical inspirations, she didn’t have to look farther than her immediate vicinity. The drummer for her band, Luke Bullen, happens to be her boyfriend, and a particularly bothersome row between them inspired what Tunstall considers the “most vulnerable” song on the album, “Some Day Soon,” and the dancehall music scene of Northwest London where she lives, gave groove and pathos to lead single “Hold On.”

“The lyrics kind of hark back to a brilliant, old Bob Marley tune called “Judge Not,” [that says] judge not before you judge yourself, judge not before you’re ready for judgment, and that’s really the idea is just to avoid going like don’t shit on everyone else before you’ve had a look in the mirror.”

One element of the releasing an album that excites Tunstall, as pressured as she may have been to put it out, is the opportunity to promote Global Cool, an environmental campaign that works with the entertainment industry and educational sectors, of which she was a founding figure.

“The first album was offset through tree planting, so Eye to the Telescope has about 6,000 trees growing in Scotland, which is lovely. But there’s an inherent problem with tree planting, the main one being that when the trees die or get cut down it’s all released again so it is just storage. And so with this album I got the advice and learned as much as I could and decided that I’ll invest in developing companies building infrastructure on renewable energy sources. It’s just trying to put my house in order basically and it makes me feel good.”

Looking forward to a “Dylan-esque” experience for the upcoming tour in support of Fantastic, Tunstall wants “to get on the tour bus and not come back.”

“I was looking at the list of songs [for Fantastic] and playing around with some words and they all kind of talked of journeys and what you risk to get what you want and, warnings and gambling and it just sounded like a kind of approach to life really in that how drastic will you go to find your fantastic plateau that you’re trying to climb to.”

http://www.kttunstall.com

–Carrie Alison, Photos by Perou