Features
The Long Blondes
By Ben LaMothe
May 13, 2008, 11:14

Falsetto For Ya
The Long Blondes

If you were asked to name off a few of the most influential musical acts ever, who would you include? The Beatles? Probably. Jimi Hendrix? Definitely. The Rolling Stones? No doubt. How about the Bee Gees? Maybe. For Kate Jackson, front woman of the English art-rock band The Long Blondes, it’s a no-brainer. Reached at her hotel room in Cologne, Germany, Jackson talked about the great influence the Bee Gees had on the recording of their new album, Couples, and why she’s afraid to read postings in fan forums.

I don’t know how much you read album reviews, but the ones I’ve seen have been pretty polarizing.
(Laughs) Yeah, I kind of expected that. I don’t think everyone is going to love it because we haven’t written another “Once and Never Again.” We tried to write an album that is completely different. Partly because we’ve moved on as a band. Our musical influences are kind of all changing.

What were those changing influences?
This is really cliché, but we were listening to the Bee Gees a lot. They’re so well known and such a part of pop culture that you don’t take much notice of them, a bit like The Beatles or The Stones. [With] the Bee Gees, we kind of listened to them really carefully and deconstructed them. Their melodies and their drumbeats and how they make their songs — we really kind of analyzed that. I was sort of listening to focus on the vocals a lot, trying to be more careful and conscious when I was singing, trying to add some tone or variation to my voice. So I think that was kind of really obvious and comes through on songs like “Century” and “Too Clever by Half.” It’s all stuff I never would have dared to do on the first record, doing a falsetto voice.

That came up in the fan forum. They love your falsetto, yet nobody was sure how it was going to go over live, but you seem to be pulling it off pretty well.
Aww … good. I don’t really read the forum, mostly because I’m scared that they’re saying something awful. But I’m glad they’re saying nice things about that.  | RDW
The Long Blondes • 5/23 • Magic Stick

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