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Joan Armatrading co-headlines this year's Appel Farm Arts & Music Festival

By Jeff Schwachter

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted May. 31, 2007

Joan Armatrading

A songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Joan Armatrading calls England home. In fact, she had a fantastic run of shows there earlier this spring, including a residency at the famous London jazz club Ronnie Scott's and a performance at the Royal Albert Hall, where she debuted material from her new record, Into the Blues. But she always looks forward to traveling across the pond for a U.S. tour.

"I love coming to America," says Armatrading during a recent phone interview. "Whichever country I'm in and they ask me what's my favorite place, I will always say America."

Armatrading brings her U.S. summer tour to its only southern New Jersey/Philadelphia area stop this Saturday at the Appel Farm Arts and Music Festival.

Upon learning that her latest album topped the Billboard Blues Album chart the first week it was out (May 1), and where it still remains, the veteran songsmith, who has influenced artists as diverse as Annie Lennox and Tracy Chapman, acknowledged it was "very cool."

Not that Armatrading strives to please anybody but herself. Over the span of nearly 20 albums, starting with her first, Whatever's For Us, released in 1972, Armatrading has paved a singular and often eclectic career path. Far more recognized in the United Kingdom and Europe than in the States -- she was included in VH1's Top 100 Most Influential Women in Rock and has been nominated for a pair of Grammys -- Armatrading says that anyone familiar with her body of work will appreciate the new record's variations within the blues genre.

"If people know my music, they know that I'm eclectic," she says. "I write in different styles and the blues is one of them."

The tunes she has penned over her 35-year recording career -- from the folk-rock of "Down to Zero" to the poppy title track of her 1980 album, Me Myself I -- reflect this, combing elements of folk, rock, pop, jazz and reggae.

As one might expect from a singular artist such as Armatrading, the tab "blues album" is a slight misnomer.

"Some people might think that it's too far away from the blues," she says of Into the Blues. "I don't think it is, but some people [might think that] because it's not all just 12-bar or something. But I have to do it the way that I do it. I have to."

As on her previous album, Lovers Speak, Armatrading plays most of the instruments on Into the Blues. She says she was wrapped up in a wave of inspiration and didn't want to have to explain the sounds she heard in her head to other musicians.

"I knew I was going to make this blues thing," she says. "It was kind of set in stone. I wasn't thinking of anything else other than doing the blues. I didn't listen to blues stuff just to get into it [though]. I just knew that this was what I was going to do. But I knew that I didn't want to explain -- I just wanted to do it and that's why I recorded it myself."

Throughout her career, Armatrading has been an independent-minded musician. She says that she enjoys the opportunity to get into a studio and bust out an album's worth of tunes, writing them, arranging them and then recording the majority of the parts herself.

"I'm used to being on my own," she says. "I write entirely on my own. I don't involve anybody else in the writing or the arranging process."

For the 56-year-old Armatrading, the new songs came to her quickly, most taking just 10 minutes to get down initially.

"All the songs were really easy [and] quick to write," she says. "They all just absolutely flowed. No effort at all."

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