Brighten My Northern Sky: An Interview with Rising Star Katie Melua - Page 2

These songs she sings, though not all written by Melua, are about serious stuff. In her hit, "The Closest Thing to Crazy," she cries,

How can Happiness feel so wrong?
How can misery feel so sweet?

And it goes on:

How can you make me fall apart
Then break my fall with loving lies?

Melua sings it with such intensity that one is hard-pressed to know how this beautiful, sweet, young woman can already speak so convincingly of the complexities and bittersweetness of "situations" that, the late Elliott Smith noted, "get fucked up, then turned around sooner or later..."

Melua explains, "I don't have to have personally lived it to know it, to understand it.." She leans in close when she says this. This is empathy at its finest, so rare in the world these days, and Melua has it in spades.

At thirteen, little Katie Melua wanted nothing less than to effect World Peace, and perhaps, these six years later, she has made her peace and learned a thing or two from living, quite literally, in war zones - soviet Georgia, then Belfast, and later, the UK. As she says, she can see "so many different points of view." Clearly, politics are a big thing with Melua, whose next album will be "more political" (indeed, later that night, she performs a kickass and insightful song about racism, a risque subject for a new star.) Growing up in Belfast and war zones can have this effect - how could she not be interested in politics, when she saw the Cats (the Catholics) and the Penguins (Protestants) in Northern Ireland go at it with such vitriol. It cannot have been an easy life for Melua, yet she's not one to complain. "It just was..."

Still, despite her young age, there is a sorrow here - a kind of beautiful melancholy, much like, in fact, her favorite (and mine, for that matter), Nick Drake, whose music (like Melua's) is by turns optimistic and happy and seemingly free ("Pink Moon"), pleading ("Northern Sky"), but always, always with an underlying note of melancholy. Melua is quick to add that she is not one to "dwell on problems" and there have been no major "psychological issues" in her life.

One worries that this somewhat fragile looking, waifish and wide-eyed young woman who brings to mind Audrey Hepburn and a Georgian Winona Ryder (though this doesn't begin to describe her beauty, of which she is truly unaware, as I can see and is confirmed when I share a quick smoke with Roseanna, who tours with Melua, and raves about how unaffected Katie is) would be chum for the hard driving world of rock 'n' roll and music industry, yet Melua has a groundedness and self-possession that is apparent even during her earlier sound check. Perched on a stool with her guitar, Melua belts out song after song, as an entourage composed of mostly men, older and more experienced, go about adjusting lights, sound, and others - her musicians, who surround her. Yet Katie never hesitates for a slight sound adjustment. She stops midsong and says "More guitar, please," her accent, by now, quite naturally British. Her crew snaps to attention at every request, yet Melua is seemingly unaware and unaffected by the incredible power she commands (and one senses, will continue to).

Article Author: Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti is a published writer in both the United States and Europe. She is widely known for her music commentary, particularly her writings about Bob Dylan about whom she runs a highly-trafficked site. …

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