FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: WEA/Warner
Part Seventy: Lianne La Havas
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THERE are a couple of reasons…
PHOTO CREDIT: WEA/Warner
why I am featuring Lianne La Havas in Modern Heroines. The London-born artist is a sensational talent who, I feel, is going to go on to inspire so many other artists. One can argue that she does so already. I am also featuring La Havas, as I have been listening back to her 2020 album, Lianne La Havas. I am going to source a review for that soon too. I think that her eponymous album was a step-up from 2015’s Blood. A broader and stronger listen – though Blood is superb! -, it is an album that ranks alongside the best of 2020. I am surprised it did not top more end-of-year lists when it came to the finest of last year. Regardless, it is an album that marked La Havas out as one of the most inspiring and awe-inspiring artists of our time. There are a few interviews that I want to bring in. Before I do that, AllMusic sat down with Lianne La Havas. This is what they noted:
“Lianne La Havas' previous LP, Blood, almost topped the album chart in the U.K. and was up for a Grammy in the U.S. The singer/songwriter was dissatisfied -- not with its reception but with compromises that left her feeling that it wasn't a pure expression of herself. To name two of them, she had no hand in writing one of the songs, and it was chosen as the second single.
Almost five years to the day Blood was released, La Havas offered this corrective move made with her inner circle -- her band and longtime creative partner Matt Hales -- and a few relative newcomers of her choosing, such as co-producer Beni Giles. Although it was written over the course of a few years, the set covers the trajectory of one relationship and was recorded in concentrated fashion, and it consequently plays out like a complete statement made by a self-contained crew. What's more, La Havas' lithe voice forms a tighter bond with the lyrics, and her gently ringing guitar rarely leaves her hands. The sequencing is nonlinear. It starts around the end, with La Havas waving goodbye and singing of rebirth, and abruptly flashes back to the peak with the rapturous and finely woven "Green Papaya." Down the line, there are moments of persuasion, trepidation, and hard-fought self-realization, from a prime Hi Records-style ballad ("Paper Thin"), to a nuanced hip-hop soul collaboration with Nick Hakim ("Please Don't Make Me Cry"), to a wholly illuminated finale ("Sour Flower"). La Havas makes it all flow and mesh by revisiting each moment like it's the present, using apt metaphors related to plant life and seasonal cycles, and most importantly, by not overselling a single emotion. She and her support don't really work up a sweat. When they almost break one, as on the intimate rustic disco of "Read My Mind" and the vibrating soul-MPB fusion of "Seven Times," they do so with a fluency that recalls Maxwell's BLACKsummers'night and blackSUMMERS'night, like they rehearsed to perfection and cut mostly live. Another highlight of relative intensity is an update of Radiohead's "Weird Fishes." While it might seem contradictory of La Havas to record a cover and place it in the middle of an album self-titled to stress total control, the song has long been in her set list. She seizes it with a more dynamic arrangement and a robust rhythmic overhaul that evokes OK Computer more than In Rainbows. The increasing sense of relief and joy in her voice as she repeats "Hit the bottom and escape" sounds as personal as anything she wrote”.
I am keen to get to some interviews. Last year, there was a lot of interest around La Havas and her extraordinary third studio album. Numéro caught up with her when, by all account, she was right in the middle of a busy period in her life:
“Numéro: You seem pretty busy at the moment, are you moving house?
Lianne La Havas: A guy came with a truck full of vinyl records heading to Germany. This is my new album. I've got to sign a thousand of them! I am just multitasking at the moment! [Laughs.]
Your new album Lianne La Havas was released on July 17th, five years after the sumptuous Blood (2015). Where were you during all that time?
I fell in love, then I had a massive breakup, I have moved house, I turned 30. A lot of things changed in my life and I have grown up. You can hear all of that in my new album. When I first turned 30, I felt the exact same in front of my birthday cake. Then, when I started to grow into it a bit more, I realised that I was really happy to be at this stage of my life. I have a better sense of who I am and what I want to achieve. I definitely got more focus.
Your stage name is made out of your first name Lianne and your father’s surname Vlahavas. Why did you choose to use your stage name as a title for your third album?
This album is the most representative of me now. With the previous ones, I had the feeling that I was developing as I was making them. This one is the result of that evolution.
You have directed and produced Lianne La Havas alone. Why?
I had an amazing time doing my second album Blood, but at the end of it, I felt like I wanted to go deeper with expressing myself, with what I wanted to say and with how I wanted to do music. I love what I did before, but I also feel that I wasn’t completely satisfied. This feeling has inspired the making of my new album. It is very personal work, that I produced myself and create only with my friends and my own band.
Your album appears as a long ballad, with both extended tracks such as Sour Flower and Weird Fishes – the last one being inspired by Radiohead’s song – and moments of pause such as Out of Your Mind (interlude)…
I knew that I wanted ten songs on the album, but I didn’t know yet that I wanted it to be one story with a beginning, a middle and an end. That happened during the process of making it – I knew exactly where each song would come in the track listing and I wanted each song to embody a specific subject matter. For instance, the track Sour Flower deals with self-love and self-care. Therefore, I imagined a long ending with a positive sounding in order to represent the ongoing work that I have done on myself. The interlude marks the exact middle point of the album. It is meant to represent the unravelling from the happy first half to the difficult middle and second half. I also wanted to use my voice in different ways, to play with sounds and textures.
How did you forge this captivating soul that is so peculiar to your music?
Well, I have been playing music since I was a child. I used to sit with my key board and just play. I have made my first song when I was 11, out of some basic chords and basic lyrics. It was called Little Things and it was something about the little things that you never throw away. It was really crappy! [Laughs.] It wasn’t until I turned 18 and learnt how to play the guitar, that I started to take song writing a bit more seriously. Lauryn Hill still remains a great inspiration – I still have her MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 (2002) album with me. I have also found many guitar players on YouTube when I was learning how to play, such as the jazz guitarist Emily Remler. She is the reason why I love to play.
You also had a chance to meet and become friend with some of the greatest musicians. Amongst Prince and Stevie Wonder, which meeting was the most unexpected?
It is impossible to choose between Prince and Stevie Wonder! I had never imagined I would be able to sit with one or the other. Fortunately, I didn’t meet them at the same time, otherwise I would have probably fainted! [Laughs.] They surely are the greatest musicians that have ever lived. I was incredibly lucky to have known them, especially to have spent some much personal time with Prince. If they have one thing in common, it is the way they committed to their music. Both worked so hard to write the best songs they could ever write, sing and perform them to perfection. I never gave up on music thanks to them.
You started your career pretty young, at the age of 21, as you signed with Warner Record in 2010. An industry that wasn’t as diverse as today ten years ago. How did you evolve in that environment?
I don’t think I was the only non-white artist on my label, but I was definitely the only one my age. I didn’t meet the stereotypical traditional R’n’B singer: I was navigating between genres. Nobody knew where to place me because I was also playing the guitar and I had afro hair. I didn’t really realise it at the time, but as I went through my career, particularly making my second album, I noticed various things that were happening and that didn’t feel quite right”.
There is something sort of under the radar regarding Lianne La Havas. She is a tremendous and accomplished artist - though there are people who might not be aware of her. To me, she is a hugely powerful woman who, as I mentioned, will go on to influence so many others. Lianne La Havas is an album that everyone needs to be aware of. The Guardian spoke with La Havas last year. It has been a fascinating career rise for the thirty-two-year-old:
“She’s sort of famous, La Havas: plenty of people won’t have heard of her; she hasn’t had a this-is-who-I-am smash hit. But within music, she’s seen as the real deal. Her first album, Is Your Love Big Enough?, went to No 4 in 2012 and was nominated for the Mercury prize. Her second, Blood, written in Jamaica (her mum is Jamaican, her dad, Greek) came out in 2015 and went to No 2. Big stars noticed her from the start. Stevie Wonder called her after going to see her play live and sang “Is Your Love Big Enough” on to her answer machine. After her debut appearance on BBC’s Later…, Bon Iver asked her to support them on tour, and after that, she supported Alicia Keys and Coldplay. Now, Erykah Badu responds to all her Instagram messages. Most notably, Prince became her friend after he saw her songs on the internet; in 2014, he decided to host a press conference and play live in La Havas’s actual house! (She made him tea. He took it with honey, no milk.)
But she also attracted less positive attention, in 2016, when she was 25, for a tweet she put out about the Brits. There was a hashtag, BritsSoWhite, objecting to the lack of nominations that year for artists of colour, and La Havas, with her mixed racial heritage, didn’t really agree with it. She tweeted: “Do not include me with this horrible horrible hashtag”, and then, when people questioned this, replied that she thought the hashtag was “racist and unfounded”. This caused a huge upset, and La Havas apologised and retreated.
Four-and-a-half years later – a couple of weeks ago – she issued a lengthy statement on Twitter and Instagram supporting the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement: “For those who had doubts about what side I’m on, no need to doubt, and for those who always knew… BLACK LIVES MATTER.” (“You love to see the growth” was one response.) She also mentioned that she’s reading Afua Hirsch’s book Brit(ish). When we talk about this, she says: “I was crying within the first few pages, and I’ve never cried at a book.” (Actually, I notice that she talks about crying quite a lot. One of her new songs is called Please Don’t Make Me Cry. La Havas might seem calm, but she’s brimful of emotion.)
La Havas is 30 now, and her third album, while not exactly world-weary, is not innocent. It’s called Lianne La Havas, and has more of a live feel than her previous two LPs. Her guitar is light and picky, tropicalia-style summery. The subject matter is, mostly, love (falling in it, falling out of it, finding love for yourself). Among the 10 tracks is an interesting cover of Radiohead’s Weird Fishes, which she’s been playing live; and one that, unusually for her, came all in a rush, in two days, Seven Times. (“That song just sounds like me, like what I want to sound like, and I love the chords and the sass and the attitude of it. It’s my favourite.”) Overall, it’s a gorgeous summer listen, a warm-night-with-the-windows-open mood with songs that tuck themselves inside you like almost-remembered dreams.
When she writes, whether on guitar by herself, or with others, using piano, the songs she keeps are those that don’t come too easily. “It’s like there’s something about a song that I can’t remember,” she says. “And I really want to remember, so I want to hear it more… You could write a song and you know the logical chords to go to, but it’s the ones where you think: ‘Oh, what was that thing I just did?’ Those are the ones I’m looking for.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Hollie Fernando
The album has taken her some time to make. The first release from the album, Bittersweet, was actually started in 2014, at the end of writing Blood (it’s a cool assessment of a previous relationship); and the second, Paper Thin, was begun in 2016. It was sparked by a FaceTime conversation she had with a different boyfriend (then new, now ex).
“It was a difficult conversation and I was just falling in love,” she says. “At the beginning, you definitely want to do it, but you’re getting to know the other person a bit more and then you see what gives them pain for the first time. And that basically happened on FaceTime. There are certain types of people that tend to keep their pain to themselves and try to defuse it with something else, like humour.”
At school, her group of friends “was a bit of a mixture. There were Indian girls, Jamaicans, Africans, white girls. We had a crew that was not quite anything. I was the only mixed one, interestingly. Also, they acknowledged me as mixed. And my mum was like: ‘You’re mixed.’ My mum is a dark-skinned black woman, so she was like: ‘You’re mixed because your dad is white.’ I was like: ‘OK, cool. Fact.’”
She did have a bit of trouble with her hair, she says: “It was a big old problem in my life.” Her mum’s family, being Jamaican, always wanted to straighten it; her dad had no idea how to look after it. Without siblings, La Havas herself didn’t know either, until she met another mixed-race girl, who explained what techniques and products to use. “And then I found YouTube,” she says. “God bless YouTube.”
She also learned guitar from YouTube, when she was 18. Before then, at seven, her dad bought her a keyboard and she started singing to herself and enjoying it. But it was a private joy, not for others. At 13, she sang in public and started acknowledging music as a force in her life. She had posters of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Missy Elliott, Busta Rhymes, Eminem on her bedroom wall. She loved Jill Scott, India Arie. When she was 18, her dad introduced her to the guitar. He was a musician himself – his instrument was the accordion – and his brother was a classical guitarist. Her “cool jazz” friends from the Brit School showed her some chords. La Havas found the guitar opened up a new way for her to write songs”.
I am going to finish off soon. Before then, I want to mention a recent NME article. It does seem that Lianne La Havas is working on material for a fourth album. In terms of direction, she is taking her music to new places:
“Lianne La Havas has spoken about getting to work on her next album, which she says is already being characterised by a “fun” and “cheerful” vibe. Watch our video interview above.
The London artist was speaking to NME last night (May 11) on the red carpet at the BRIT Awards 2021, where she was nominated for British Female Solo Artist.
“I’m already starting to work on new stuff because my album came out like a year ago now,” she said about her plans. “So I’m there, mentally, now.”
Asked about what sort of musical direction her new material is taking, La Havas said: “All I can say is that it’s very fun at the moment. It’s turning out really cheerful, which I like. I feel like I got all of my angst out on this most recent album [‘Lianne La Havas’], and now it’s time to have a laugh”.
I shall leave it there. We will hear more from the remarkable Lianne La Havas in time. I feel her music will continue to evolve and change course. One of the finest singers and songwriters in the world, there is no doubt that La Havas is going to join the pantheon of legends very soon. It was a pleasure to include her…
IN this Modern Heroines feature.