From the beginning, I wanted to make dance music with a human element to it.
BETH ORTONKissing was something I did a lot of. Kissing in a wheat field as the sun begins to set on a summer’s evening, with the haze of that light.
More Beth Orton Quotes
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I didn’t jump a lot of trees because I didn’t like heights. I liked getting a mirror and walking around with it facing the sky. I’d imagine I was walking in the tops of the trees and falling into the sky, or walking up the stairs whilst going down.
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I was born on a pig farm in Norfolk. We grew up in the city called Norwich in Norfolk, then I moved to London when I was thirteen.
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I want it to be more universal than that – like a painter doesn’t have to explain his life story away to justify his painting.
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I was scared of the Bible – it seemed whenever I read it I got bad luck. Then I befriended a couple of Jesus’s disciples and I used to show them modern life – how to run the hot and cold taps and things like that. They seemed alright but it didn’t change my feelings about the Bible jinx.
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Therapy is like telling your nightmares when you’re a kid; they lose their power to hurt and control.
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I don’t believe in trouble. Because I think that trouble is sometimes good, sometimes bad. I’ve been known to be called trouble, which I think is quite a compliment. But I suppose, thinking about it, that my best and worst trouble has always had something to do with a man.
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I get told I’m a confessional songwriter, which gets on my tits because I think of negative connotations attached to the word “confessional”. I don’t like the idea of songwriting being therapy. I don’t want to put myself so directly in the foreground.
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Heaven is what we spend our lives trying to find.
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One time I completely thought I’d turned into a werewolf and was sure I could see hairs sprouting from my face. At those times I’d suddenly go very quiet and not talk to anyone, stunned from the developments, being a werewolf and all.
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To me songwriting is more like redemption. I can extract the poison or the pollen, the essence from a situation and the rest becomes a husk that blows away.
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I get a feeling, on a guitar, and I sort of mess around until something resonates with me, and then I just find that what happens is that a melody comes, and with that, words.
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My dad got me a chemistry book one Christmas and I burnt the garden shed down. I remember there was the most beautiful smell forever after in the remains.
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The way I write, words can means lots of different things.
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I’d say my greatest fear is fear itself.
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I’ve also been writing with my guitarist, Ted Barnes, and he’s amazing. Writing with him has taught me a lot about my own writing process, in the sense that it’s incredably personal to write with someone else from scratch.
BETH ORTON