Alice Russell

With DJ Co-op and DJ Hunnicutt • Wednesday, June 25th • 10:00 pm • Pyramid Cabaret • $18 adv./$20 door

Michael Elves: I'm curious – you get pigeonholed into a bunch of different genres: soul, funk, R&B, electronic – do you ever think of yourself in one particular way, or do you think of your music as something sort of 'pan-genre'?

Alice Russell: I find the genre thing – I know it has to be there because I think it's how humans look at everything, whether it be food or art or music; putting things into places. But at the end of the day, to me as a singer, it makes a lot more sense to just have a little go at everything and depending on what the song dictates, to express it in different genres is much more fun and it makes sense 'cause the music's there for everyone in my view. I think every different genre from everywhere around the world is there for every little human person to have a little taste. So it makes a lot more sense to me for most people's music to be a total mish-mash of lots of different styles – I find that a little more fun.

Michael Elves: Is that the type of listener you are – that you take a little bit from all sorts of things when you're listening to music?

Alice Russell: Yeah, I love so many different types of music – totally across the board. And different songs speak to you, do y' know what I mean? From every genre and different artists and if they 'get you there,' they 'get you there' – they hit a nerve.

Michael Elves: It's not always the same genre that resonates.

Alice Russell: No, not at all.

Michael Elves: Are there certain things you've been listening to lately that have really resonated?

Alice Russell: I've been really enjoying the Santogold stuff, just for dance-y fun style; and I love Little Dragon, I'm really digging that and Elmore Judd which he's another English singer-songwriter and I really dug that album. And of course always, as much as you're listening to the new stuff you go back into the old. I've been getting into my Paul Simon, back into that, all those old albums. I love him – I love the lyrics, like "one man's ceiling is another man's floor." I don't know anyone else who gets away with that kind of stuff.

Michael Elves: Now I understand you've got some time in the studio over the next few days – are you working on a follow-up to My Favourite Letters?

Alice Russell: Yeah, we've just got to do a couple more vocals that we're doing tomorrow and Friday to finish it all off and then we should have the album done and dusted.

Michael Elves: So how long have you been working on this album? Considering the gap between albums I don't imagine you've been working on the new one this entire time.

Alice Russell: Yeah… the thing is, when we've been touring we just have a massive chunk of time out, and then you're like, you get a bit waylaid. So the main bit of time, we wrote a lot of the songs a year ago but the actual recording with the band we only did it in a couple of days – we sort of did it all over. We did three takes of each and we've done the same with my vocals, just allowed ourselves to do three takes of everything and try to keep it as live and fresh as possible. But yeah, it's been quite hard with doing gigs because you do, you get waylaid, and it feels like you've been doing it for ages but actually the time you've actually had to do it hasn't been much as you'd like [laughs].

Michael Elves: So when you're limited to three takes does that put a lot of pressure on you to really nail it?

Alice Russell: Um, in a way I think it relieves you because if you really want to over-analyze everything you could just go and go. I've done a couple of albums with other people before where they really chop everything up to the point where the drums, in the end they might as well have programmed the drums and stuff because they've chopped everything up and tried to control everything so much that it takes away the essence of a live performance which I think people still – at least I like to hear definitely on recordings.

Michael Elves: With it taking a year since you wrote the material, have you revisited some of the songs with fresh ears and found yourself wanting to take them in new directions at all?

Alice Russell: We've... yeah. I mean we wrote them all and then quite a lot have ended up sounding quite different. We've slowed a couple down, 'cause we ended up – first of all I wanted to do an acoustic album and then it ended up being we recorded the band and it ended up sounding like a full on 'album' album. But a lot of the songs, listening back to the demos, some of them were completely different. Like one of them sounded like a real indie, almost rock-punk sort of style and it totally changed into a Motown style thing... it's quite fun listening back and some of them you're like "well hold on a minute, why did we change that?" but then I think they just happen quite organically – they end up changing in their own little way.

Download “All Over Now” from Alice Russell's CD My Favourite Letters.

For more of Michael Elves' profile on Alice Russell, pick up this week's issue of Uptown Magazine.