ENCOURAGEMENT from a sibling can be priceless. They may rib you like no-one else can, but they often know your best interests too. Thanks then, are due to Murray Easton, brother of Carla – head girl at TeenCanteen and now, with the release of Impossible Stuff, a bona fide solo artist.
She was that before, though. In 2016 she released Homemade Lemonade, a critically-acclaimed collection of sunny and spirited psychedelic pop.
Easton released the record under the name Ette, a call-out to The Ettes, the 1980s all-girl punk trio from Edinburgh. Now, with Impossible Stuff, she goes by her own name, after a conversation with one of the mentors she worked with at a song-writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada.
“I didn’t tell anyone that I had applied for it because I thought I probably wasn’t going to get it to be honest,” Easton says. “Out of 24 people I was the only person there from Europe, and I had been given a career development bursary from Help Musicians UK to go over and take part in it. But until about two days before it, I nearly pulled out from it because of nerves and lack of confidence.”
She adds: “It was probably my big brother Murray who convinced me. He was like, ‘You need to do this. You don’t want to look back and think: what if?’ And he was right. It changed my life.”
The core of Impossible Stuff was written there – the nostalgic, end-of-the-night song Dreamers On The Run, the gutsy Girl From Before and Lights In The Dark, the electro-heavy dance number released in January this year.
It’s where Easton met Jack White collaborator Fats Kaplin, Mishka Stein of the Patrick Watson Band and Rishi Dhir, the sitarist who leads Montreal pysch-pop band Elephant Stone. Each rejoined Easton when she recorded the album in Montreal with Howard Bilerman, a respected producer who has credits with Arcade Fire, British Sea Power and Leonard Cohen under his belt. The residency included optional one-on-one sessions with veteran songwriters Kim Richey, Jeff Hanna, Don Henry, Matraca Berg, Kevin Welch and Russell deCarle – a bunch whose combined tonnage in record sales could sink a couple of cruise liners.
“I had a session with
Don Henry – not to be confused with Don Henley – right at the end of the residency,” says Easton. “I played him Dreamers On The Run and he said he wished that he’d written it. He said I wasn’t probably allowing myself the time to write my best songs. I thought: ‘That’s fine for you to say! You’ve won Grammys and probably don’t need to go to work every day.’”
She continues: “When I came home I talked it over with my family and asked them if I could move back to the family home in Carluke for six months. That meant I could reduce my work time and have this one, big proper go at writing this album; an album that I have always wanted to write.”
Away from the big city, she kept up the creative momentum of
the residency by spending all her free time working in her homemade studio set-up.
“I just had to go in and turn stuff on rather than having to set everything up, like I usually do in Glasgow,” she says. “I just wanted to sit down at the piano and develop ideas that were on notes of paper and to continue to explore this big sound.”
She adds: “Quite often I get the ideas for melodies in that moment when you’re not fully woken and you’re not asleep. A lot of the lyric content is about lucid dreaming; reality versus fantasy, and I wanted to weave it all together into this big collection.”
Impossible Stuff is big-sounding and big on ambition. If Easton wasn’t confident in her song-writing before, there are ten reasons here for her to be reassured.
“Russell deCarle asked why I used an alias for my first album,” says Easton, who recently helmed Since Yesterday, a one-off show at Leith Theatre as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. Alongside the likes of Kate Lazda from Kid Canaveral and Randolph’s Leap’s Vicki Cole, Easton headed a supergroup playing tracks by “the unsung women pioneers of Scottish pop”, including The McKinleys, His Latest Flame, Strawberry Switchblade and The Ettes themselves.
She continues: “It was that thing of hiding behind another name a bit. Also, the TeenCanteen album had come out the same year and I didn’t want to detract from my team. But Russell was like: ‘If you write your own album, put your own name to it.’ I thought, yes, maybe it’s time to be a bit proud of things.”
October 6, Broadcast, Glasgow, 7pm, £9. Tickets: bit.ly/CarlaBroadcast
October 20, Leith Depot, Edinburgh, time and price TBC.
November 3, Aberfeldy Festival. aberfeldyfestival.com
Impossible Stuff is released on October 5 via Olive Grove Records
www.carlajennifereaston.com
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