SONGS OF MYSTERY
CHINA FORBES FROM PINK MARTINI TALKS TO NINA BERTOK ABOUT TIMELESS MUSIC, FORMING CONGA LINES AND BEING THANKFUL TO THE FRENCH.
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t’s music of the world, but it isn’t ‘world music’. It’s the sound of the golden oldies one minute, then something completely fresh and cosmopolitan the next. Only one collective can pull it off and it’s Pink Martini – the ‘little orchestra’ of Portland, Oregon. “The music sounds modern because of the way that we arrange the songs,” explains vocalist and ‘diva next door’, China Forbes. “They are contemporary in the way that they’re written and in the way that the instrumentation is set out, but I think they’re very mysterious at the same time. When you actually listen to the finished songs, I think it’s hard to tell when these songs were written – what time period. There is a timelessness about our music because we put so much attention into creating beautiful melodies and writing romantic lyrics. In my opinion, it’s those two things that actually make a classic, timeless song. You always remember a tuneful song with a great melody and usually the words are about love lost or some romantic topic. We try very hard not to make this into something kitschy. For us it’s serious music played by serious musicians.” Fear not Ms Forbes, the rest of the world is taking Pink Martini very seriously, indeed – France in particular. Nominated for Song Of The Year at the French Victoires de la Musique Awards in 2000, the title track from the band’s debut album Sympathique turned Pink Martini into an overnight success. The three albums that followed – Hang On Little Tomato (2004), Hey Eugene! (2007) and most recently Splendor In The Grass (2009) – have since gone gold in France, Canada, Greece and Turkey. “Splendor… is a bit of a mixture of originals and cover songs. Sometimes we’d start with an original and then we’d add a cover of a song to it, or sometimes we’d just change the lyrics around. We felt quite experimental with that record and it probably was the most ambitious
album that we’d done. We also had some great people willing to work with us and put their stamp on it too, which made it all the more exciting to work on and to listen back to. I think it was as much a pleasure to work with [Mexican singer] Chavela Vargas as it was with [Dandy Warhols’] Courtney Taylor-Taylor; you can’t really choose. The songs are also sung in a lot of different languages, from Italian to French to, of course, English too. There was something very natural about this album coming about.” Drawing influences from some of the most exotic places in the world, Splendor In The Grass also playfully and fearlessly bends genres and melds styles together into one hell of an exquisite sonic cocktail. Forbes claims ‘no fear’ is in many ways the group’s motto. “Over time the band has really evolved significantly. It started off kind of being based on a lot of movie music. The first album had lots of songs from films that set the tone for our style, which is quite eclectic, I believe. We wanted to portray how a soundtrack may feel or how a compilation may sound and the whole band was made up of so many
different musicians with so many different backgrounds, so we really pulled off a variety of sound. Over the years, the band has become a really interesting combination of those sounds.” From jazz, blues and swing, right down to marching band, electro-pop, cabaret and lounge, the main aim here, according to Forbes, is to create music that puts a smile on the faces of all people worldwide. Simple, then. “People are all the same everywhere you go. I think the essence of all people is that they all want to be festive, they all want to be gathered together. People want to be entertained and they want to laugh and sing and dance. There are definitely some places we’ve been to where people are less demonstrative, but I think that’s less about the country in question and more about the venue itself. Concert halls tend to be quiet and reserved. Rock clubs have a lot more energy coming from the crowd and you can get a conga-line.” Pink Martini is a festive affair alright – that’s why American coffee giant Starbucks approached Forbes
OUT OF ORBIT
FOR ONCE, LINKIN PARK ARE TAKING TIME TO CELEBRATE THE RELEASE OF A NEW ALBUM. MIKE SHINODA TELLS DANIELLE O’DONOHUE WHY A THOUSAND SUNS IS DIFFERENT.
Comprising 12 official band members, plus extra musicians as part of the live spectacular, Pink Martini is truly a little ‘orchestra’ in every sense. In Forbes’ words, it’s quite a sight to behold. “Because there’s so many of us, rehearsals are always flying by the seat of our pants,” she laughs. “We do get to rehearse, though, which we mostly get a chance to do when we’re already on the road and during soundchecks. We’ve set a time aside for this week, then from now on rehearsals will just be random because it gets quite hard to get so many people in the same place unless you’re already touring.” WHO Pink Martini WHEN & WHERE Friday, State Theatre; Sunday, Great Southern Blues Festival
Though Linkin Park have always had fairly vocal detractors, they are currently the planet’s biggest alternative rock band whose members can still say they’re under 35. The band’s debut album, Hybrid Theory, has now sold almost 25 million albums (to put this in perspective, ARIA’s sales figures for last year show 30 million albums were sold in Australia in total). Figures like that in the current music industry seem almost impossible, especially with an album like A Thousand Suns. Already Internet talk suggests that fans aren’t entirely happy with the album’s first single, The Catalyst.
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awesome at that. I get in the weeds and get obsessed with little things and go off on tangents for five days.
“We have a bad habit of just moving from one thing to the next. We made a point this time to really stop that. So many great things have happened with the band and I feel like we need to slow down a little bit and just appreciate the small moments. We had a little party this week here in LA. We had dinner at Brad’s house one night. We had lunch at my house. We’ve done little things; just get together with the six guys or our families and celebrate it.”
“This is the format – we meet every week, with or without Rick, six guys on Mondays and we review what’s changed in the songs. Sometimes it’s a little bit and sometimes it’s a tonne. And the reason we do it is because we do tend to come up with a lot of ideas and we always want to make sure we compare the old one to the new one and that we don’t accidently let something… a wrong turn sneak into one of our songs.”
Though Linkin Park lead singer Chester Bennington has always been the more public face of Linkin Park, it is Shinoda who leads the band in the studio. On A Thousand Suns, he shares a production credit with super producer Rick Rubin, but it was Shinoda with his sleeves rolled up taking care of the day-to-day recording. “[Rubin] knows that we need to obsess over our songs for a while in order to move them forward, and then when we’re ready to have him come in, then he comes in and he gives us the big picture-like feedback. And he’s
This time around the band were coming up with ideas far different to the usual Linkin Park sound, not just because guitars share album space with synths and keyboards, or that tribal beats sit alongside the band’s DJ Joe Hahn’s scratching or important speeches from the last century punctuate the music. A Thousand Suns is an intriguing beast because it is an album that must be listened to from start to finish to fully appreciate the scope of it. While tracks bleed into one another with no obvious start or end points, there are also whole rhythm
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Having also recorded three concerts with the Oregon Symphony earlier this year, Forbes claims the band is planning to release a live orchestral album sometime in 2011. “It all started with France, because that’s where we first became popular so we will always be thankful to them. Everybody else caught on after them. We were new and totally independent, releasing an album [Sympathique] on our own label and the French jumped on it. Actually, that song even got featured on a commercial for Citroen cars there. Now, quite a few years later, we’re probably equally as popular in America because of that exposure we got internationally at first.”
some exotic flavours. It gives you energy. It makes you smarter. It makes you stronger. Let’s shoot for that.”
ecently in LA the six members of Linkin Park sat down to a dinner at guitarist Brad Delson’s house. Though it’s not a rare thing for the members to be getting together, it’s one of the first times in a 14-year career the band has marked an achievement by taking time out of their busy schedule for a moment of reflection. The milestone the band was celebrating was the imminent release of their fourth studio album, A Thousand Suns. It’s been three years since previous long-player, Minutes To Midnight, came out and a lot has changed in the Linkin Park world. Celebrating the release date of an album is just the beginning. “We have had a bad habit of not celebrating things like album releases and single releases, finishing records and ends of tours and things like that,” multi-instrumentalist Mike Shinoda explains.
and bandleader/pianist Thomas Lauderdale to record a full-length album of holiday tracks. “We just finished making the holiday album, it’s going to be called Joy To The World. It’s an album full of songs in lots of different languages and celebrating lots of different holidays from around the world. It’s really beautiful. That will be our next album; we’re looking at a release date around November. Starbucks basically asked us to do a song for one of their holiday compilations, which we did. Then they asked us again to do another one, so we made two tracks for them. They came back again and said they really loved what we did with those two and would we be interested to do a full-length album. So, really, they commissioned us to do the album but it’s not being released by them, it’s just going to be sold in their stores.”
patterns that are repeated and lyrics that are sung or phrased a particular way in one song and re-appear elsewhere on the album and given new meaning. “When we started working on this album,” Shinoda explains, “we sat down in a room over a year ago and started talking about, just really casually, it came up in conversation, ‘What kind of album would you be happy with at the end of this process? What characteristics would it have?’ And one of the things I really loved, one of the ideas that Phoenix [David Farrell, bass] threw out that really stuck with me was that he was saying how at the time there’s a lot of junk food music out there. And I think it’s true right now; I think it’s been true for a long time. “He likened it to candy or sweets, you know? It’s fun to eat once in a while and when you have it you should definitely enjoy it, but it’s not substance and if you eat too much of it you have a stomach ache and your teeth rot out. So he was saying if music is like food, then let’s make an album that has substance, that’s got
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Shinoda’s aware that A Thousand Suns is a much less accessible listen than Hybrid Theory and may take some Linkin Park fans a while to get used to. “We used to buy a record on vinyl and drop the needle and you’d listen to the whole thing and we miss that a little bit. There’s just something so fulfilling about hearing an artist’s vision in its whole. I love that you had a favourite song at one time and then a few months later you had a different favourite song. Or even you listen to the album and you kind of don’t like it and then a few weeks later you find yourself kind of curious about it again and then you start to pick up on things that you didn’t like the first time because they were not what you wanted or not what you expected. But the more you listened to them you kind of realised even though that’s not the reason I bought this or the reason I got into it now, I’m kind of thinking that’s kind of interesting.” Four albums and 14 years into their career, it is a different Linkin Park that has emerged from the studio this time around. The album they have created is a milestone and that is definitely something worth celebrating. WHO Linkin Park WHAT A Thousand Suns (Warner) WHEN & WHERE Saturday 11 December, Acer Arena