Dido on Her New Album, Girl Who Got Away, Going on a Pregnant Healthy-Baking Spree, and Her Love of Snowmobiling
By Bennett MarcusEarlier this month, British singer-songwriter Dido returned from her five-year sabbatical (and maternity leave) with her fourth studio album, Girl Who Got Away. VF Daily recently caught up with the 'White Flag' artist about her creative process, her adventures in gluten-free cooking, and her ability to write and record a song in a day. Highlights from our chat:
Vanity Fair: Congratulations on your new album. You've called it a mix of everything you like—dance music, ambient, hip-hop, pop. Is that a different approach than on songs you've written for your previous albums?
Dido: Not really, no. No Angel [released in 1999], especially, was a sort of similar thing. Whenever I write a song, I just want to produce it in the way that's best for the song, and I'll end up referencing all the music I love. And I love tons of different types of music, whether it's dance or dub or hip-hop or ambient music, or pop, or folk. What I enjoy is feeling free to jump around. You know, as long as it's held together with the song. That's how I hold the albums together.
You just mentioned freedom, and you said in a video from the record label that you felt a sense of freedom with this record. Would you expand on that a bit?
Many years had passed and it felt like there wasn't a lot of pressure, in a good way. The record happened really naturally, and I was sort of going about my life, working with people, and writing songs. Working with my brother [Rollo Armstrong], and going back to basics a bit as well, it just felt like a really free and easy process. The third album, I think I was just more concerned with wanting to do something different and change things, and that almost became a more difficult record. Often it's the second one, but for me, I think it was probably the third.
This one is a bit more joyful than the previous album, isn't it?
With me things are never quite as clear-cut as that, and there's always a mixture of dark and light in every song. That's how I like to write songs. The third record was quite a dark record, and it's quite a dark time, and a very emotional record. This one is as well, but in a sort of different way.
The third record is quite an intensely dark record. I didn't really realize until I started performing it live, and thinking, Wow. I was singing some quite dark songs every night. [Laughs] This is what you want from a career: you want to look back and each album is a phase in life, and you pour everything into it, and everything you felt during that time is on that record. What was nice about this most recent one is there's this confidence there from making the third album; I felt more able to follow through on some of the ideas I had, whether they were crazy or not.
Your album before this one was in 2008, but all of your albums have had three to four years in between.
A lot of that is because of touring. I toured for three years, for instance, with No Angel. And I toured for two years after Life for Rent. I would get on the road and then just keep going and going and going. I've never been able to make a record while on tour. I find the headspace quite different. In between each record, as well, I want to have a life, an adventure, and have something to write about.
What is your creative process like when you write?
When I'm writing a song, it's like a blurry picture, and then suddenly I really know what I'm writing about, and it all becomes clear. Unless something's really clear and I really know what I'm writing about, or it's really emotional, I'm probably not going to finish it.
Other days I literally just sit in the studio and write. A huge amount can come out then. It's all in there, and I think if I only waited for those little moments to happen, I don't think I'd get anything on the page. I just do love to sit with my guitar, and I start playing, and then it turns into writing a song. It just always seems to.
When or how do you know when a song is right? Or when it's finished and doesn't need any more tweaking?
The one thing I think I've prided myself on. I feel like I do know that, and I think there's a real art to knowing that. You can go too far, or you can stop not soon enough. But for me, it's when I just want to listen to it over and over again, when it moves me, when I'm definitely O.K. with playing it to my harshest critics. The minute I get to the stage where I really want to play this to people, like family members, that are going to tell you the truth in no uncertain terms, you know.
Do you change your songs for a while, or do you usually nail it fairly quickly after the inspiration for the song comes?
That's always different. A song like 'Thank You' I wrote in five minutes, and then a song like 'White Flag,' I had the chorus for a year before I could finish the verses. It just went round and round in my head, and the picture was just blurry, and then suddenly it got really clear. On this album, too, a song like 'End of Night' was written in a day. Then a song like 'No Freedom' I carried around with me for ages in different versions. I like to record vocals the minute I've written a song, if not when I'm actually writing the song. Like on 'End of Night' I was actually writing it as I was singing it, and I think you get a real rawness to that.
You've had some songs on movie soundtracks, like "127 Hours" and "Sex and the City 2". Do people commission those?
Often that happens. In the case of "127 Hours", that was done for the film. It was a complete shocker when it got nominated for an Oscar. I couldn't believe it. That just came out of the blue. I was just working with A. R. Rahman, and then I think Danny Boyle heard my voice singing something over this track, and then he said, "Would you like to do a song for this film?" And I already knew the story, I had read the book anyway, so I was completely up for it. It was just done in a day, and I thought, Well, that was fun. And then I started getting e-mails a few weeks later, saying, "You've been nominated for an Oscar!" And I was like, What? That was really, like, out of the blue, and brilliant.
Was that a song that took five minutes?
No, that was pretty quick. It was a weekend. I spent a lot of time doing it over the weekend, and then recorded it in, like, 45 minutes, an hour, and that was that, and it was done. And A. R. Rahman, he's one clever guy; you know, I can't really take a whole heap of credit. He's the one that made it work with the film, and I was really happy to just use my voice. It's a whole art to making things like that really work with a film.
When you are not making working, what kinds of things do you like to do?
I like snowmobiling. [Laughs] I have to say, I love doing things that completely take all my brain away from everything. I'm not great at sitting around, because then I'll start thinking of writing another song. If I really want to relax, I actually need to do something that takes all my concentration. Like driving a snowmobile very fast over the snow.
And I actually do love baking. While I was pregnant, I sort of went baking-crazy and... yeah, until my husband stopped me, 'cause it was just getting ridiculous. He feels like he needs to eat it all. He doesn't want it to go to waste. So I was, like, baking cake after cake. There's something really beautiful about baking. It's sort of like, you start with a pile of mush, and you make this amazing thing out of it. I'm very good at slightly strange, alternative, healthy baking. Like I'm always coming up with sugar-free, wheat-free this and that and the other -free recipes, and some of them are absolutely disgusting! Just, some of them go so wrong.
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