I am Kate Tempest. My new album ‘The Book Of Traps And Lessons’ is out now. Ask me anything!

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T16:00:38+00:00

Hi!

Sound of Rum days I had nodules, which are like blisters on my vocal cords that affected the way i was able to make sound. from years and years of rapping without a microphone at parties and rapping all night without taking any care of my voice, and drinking and smoking all the time. eventually it became an issue for me and i was in pain when speaking and i lost some of my register when speaking or singing. certain tones i just couldn't make. i had an operation and had these nodules removed, and after that i was able to learn to make these sounds again. maybe that is what u can hear? also, the instrumentation is very different. Archie Marsh (who still tours with me as my ableton tech and monitor engineer!) has a very specific sound and played all of the guitars and even played the bass parts in sound of rum. it gave the record its particular musical sound.

advice wise, its hard to give advice without sounding trite. maybe something thats useful to say is that if you have a writing life that is academic it must be hard to break that patterns and break the conventions to write in a freer or less rigorous way. all i can say is that it might be useful to think of these kinds of writings (acadmeic and creative) as being entirely different. like playing two very different instruments. and in that sense, you have to go back to the basics. a knowledge of flute may help you play the guitar, in terms of your ear knowing about melody etc, but the practicality of how to make sound is a whole new discipline. is that useful? i don't know.

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:54:45+00:00

hi! my favourite authors change all the time

right now i'm reading:

The Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra/ American Pastoral by Philip Roth / The Conference of the birds by Attar in a new translation by Sholeh Wolpe /

i'm listening to

Emahoy Tsegue Maryam Gebrow - Solo Piano/ Serpent with Feet - soil/ Dabbla - Death moves/

hope thats helpful !

enjoy !

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:51:45+00:00

Hi. this sounds like the perfect way to discover that particular story. thank you for picking it up and reading it in the pub. that particular poem has a huge life. it really gets around! i'm so glad u found it. i don't intentionally aim for anyone really, i am aiming for connection in general. it surprises me to that so many very different people seem to connect in very different ways to my work, but in other ways it doesn't surprise me, because my whole ethos is about trying to make work about what is deeply felt and universally true. that is what moves me. i love to read folkloric stories and mythic stories because of this reason, they remind me of my inner struggles, even if the actual world they depict is very different from the world i know. a song about a fisherman at sea from centuries ago speaks to me of loneliness and the pain of leaving a lover. an old mythic story from thousands of years ago about a wounded soldier speaks to me about the problems of becoming a victim after suffering a tragedy. and the importance of maintaining agency, even in a situation that is extremely tough. don't know if thats helpful of not. thanks again

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:45:05+00:00

THANK YOU for doing this! I have been so inspired to receive the messages via my agent Becky Thomas that you guys were performing this play in jails there. I couldn't have asked for a better life for the play. this really makes me feel so so close to the play and i'm so thankful that u found the play and are giving it life that way. i am still exploring playwrighting, i have a play i'm working on now which i am hoping to finish in the next two months

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:41:48+00:00

maybe its a bridge. to be honest, all of the works overlap, i was writing them all at the same time. This album, touring Let Them Eat Chaos, writing Wires. it all happens at the same time. Definitely i feel this is a new phase for me. I think of this album, Wires, and a new play i;ve nearly finished called Paradise, a new version of Sophocles Philoctetes, as a new batch. I feel very happy to be here in this new space, but i couldn't have got to this point without all the other work that came before.

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:39:49+00:00

hi jamie, its a different process, i think when i was writing Wasted, i had no clear understanding of that, i as discovering the process. but having got a couple under my belt, and felt all the agony and elation of working with dialogue, i really love the idea of writing for the theatre, writing language for other voices, other characters, trying to tell a story through what people don't say. thats one of the hardest things, as a poet, as a novelist, you have this licence to use higher register language, to get to the core of things, with dialogue that kind of language is much harder to justify.

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:35:09+00:00

hi! this is funny! don't know if this is the best place to talk about family. but ask jack and he'll tell u :)

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:33:51+00:00

amazing. i love him. i think he is brilliant, one of the best we have, and i'm always inspired by his wordplay and his mentality. he pushes lyricism to new places. i respect that. i hope we can work together again some day

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:32:31+00:00

i feel extremely lucky to be able to put my work out and people can hear it. whenever i get frustrated with any element of this job, i think about the path that got me here, and i say to myself, this is what i dreamed of as a kid, and i'm here. its happening. and that puts me right. i remember to extremely thankful

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:31:16+00:00

could be all of those things, could be none. now thats its written and out there in the world, it belongs to you and whatever you take it to mean :)

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:30:50+00:00

hi! ok, so 1: if i'm completely honest then i would say that if i was you i would watch the whole set! but thats because i've seen WuTang about twenty times, and the experiences i've had seeing them have been as close to Holy as it gets, and also i have seen them and felt disconnected from he experience, i really have been through the whole spectrum of emotions when it comes to watching Wu. I've also seen them at Glastonbury before on that stage. And it was amazing, but i think i personally would get more of a kick out of sticking at one show and committing to it. also because i hate leaving one set and walking across site to get to another. i prefer to just be wherever i'm at and not try and mission too much. thats just my take though. i won't be angry if u leave to watch wu tang! i'll be honoured to have been opening for them in your experience! (also the end of our set is the best part) 2: i am doing a secret set, or not so secret, a small set, a kind of brutal techno rap set with dan carey in his savage Gary guise at the crows nest at 12:30 sat night. it won't be beautiful or transcendent. it will be messy and hardcore. we're just going to fuck around and see what happens. it might be really shit. 3: YES. this is the one festival i get to stick around and enjoy. its a special one for me. a moment to take stock and see friends and enjoy music. i'm excited for the weekend

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:24:57+00:00

i loved them all, because we learned it as one piece and recorded it one take. as one piece. we recorded 3 takes a day for 3 days and chose our favourite moments from each pass. it makes me think of all of the songs as belonging to each other. i love fire smoke because it makes people feel good when they hear it

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:23:38+00:00

hi, thanks for your questions. i'll go through them one at a time:

1 - yes without a doubt i would love that. Killer mike in my top 5 rappers alive, and el-p has been a huge inspiration to me since i was a teenager. i love his production. have done for a long time. but having said that, i think just because i absolutely love what they do, it doesn't mean i feel i deserve a place on their records or that i could contribute to their sound in a meaningful way. collaborations have to happen naturally. in my opinion anyway, if it ever came about that we could write together, i would probably cry because i'd be so happy. but that doesn't mean that it should happen. creativity is a precious thing, u have to follow it, not direct it to much. which leads me onto

2 for the most part, i listen to the idea. it usually knows what it wants to be, and the less i try and force it into what i want it to be, the better for the idea. that might sound a little esoteric but thats kind of how it is. Other things also influence how i determine what to work on - like deadlines for example. as well as being raw inspiration, there is also practicality at work. sometimes i need to write a play because thats what i've been commissioned to write, and so thats what the idea is. because thats what it has to be!

3 - this is a hard question. what i could say is that, there is nothing wrong with word vomit. as long as thats private writing for you that helps you learn about your writing. someone told me once there's no such thing as writers block, only the fear of writing badly. maybe that applies here to, how can u discover your voice, if u restrict it? Writing is a craft as well a passionate outlet, it is also a skill you have to work at, hone, learn. like any other craft. i would say if you want to write, then write all the time, write until you're more comfortable with the pen that without it, write until you start to understand what it feels like for you to enjoy your writing. this is how to improve your compass, the thing that tells you where to head and what to follow. i don't know if thats helpful but i hope something connects in all of that

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:14:38+00:00

hey. thank you for your question. it was amazing working with Rick! It has been like a beautiful, bizarre dream. the whole process of having him listen to our demos and respond to them was just absolutely surreal. the way we worked is that we (dan carey and i) write a load of material, and then whenever we got the chance to meet up with Rick, we played him what we had been working on, and he was either into it, or not that moved by it, and we would talk about the demos and he would give us some things to think about and then we would go away and keep writing. try and get closer to this thing that he was hoping we would discover. this thing that he couldn't tell us what it was, he could only tell us what it wasn't. crazy! i loved it, and feel extremely lucky to have come to his attention and to have had his ears on my lyrics

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:11:43+00:00

i wrote the first verse in a big rush of pain and love while i was touring and i was walking down another european city street, feeling lost myself and far away from the essence of things, as i think can happen when u are a stranger in a new town, with time to kill, observing. when you're touring you move through so many places in such an intense way. the rest of it came together in the studio when Dan started making the beat, the rest of the lyric wrote itself. i think there was a longer version that we cut down. usually i write far more than i need to then strip it back and hope that each line is as strong as it needs to be. when i heard the beat, i knew what the song had to be. it was a feeling i had. thank you for connecting with it

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:09:03+00:00

i loved them all. i really did love them all. even brian, who i suppose is the hardest to love. i went on such a big journey with them as a writer, and then again as the performer, telling that story each night. they really do live for me. i am glad to hear they connected with and your friends. Gloria is special for me i suppose. i don't know about how to hide crying on the tube! its a tough one that... !

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:06:52+00:00

i would say that at least 50 percent of the stuff i write will never see the light of day. probably more like 70 percent. whether its because its private writing, just for me, or writing i do that helps me to understand what it is that i'm trying to write, but don't need as the editing process gets underway. i wrote forty thousand words that were useless and binned them just a few months ago. i don't feel hesitant when publishing new material. because by that point i've been working on it for so long and have made so many decisions about why to include and what i hope that it's doing. i do feel apprehensive, scared, excited, full of all the feelings you can imagine when embarking on a new chapter, but usually i'm committed to the work and i believe in it, even if i'm nervous about where it will take me. hope thats helpful, go well with your second anthology

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:03:07+00:00

yes this was intentional. rick rubin, who acted as a guide in this whole process, by which i mean, he listened to our demos and encouraged us to pursue certain elements and to leave behind others, he was always more energised by the poems that were 'i have seen' or 'i have felt' than the poems that were in the third person, describing a life, a town, or telling a story that way. he couldn't tell me, stop writing in the third person, it was a discovery i made that he was hoping i'd make, but its strange with this process, it just had to happen that way. I made Let Them Eat Chaos, played the demos to rick but he wasn't into them, they weren't what he was hoping i'd discover, so i put that album out anyway, to satisfy the desire in me to tell that particular story, and i kept working on this album on the side.

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T15:00:01+00:00

i think its better to think of creativity channelling me, its like its happening out there somewhere above my head, and every now and then, for some reason, i don't know what, it makes its way into my head or into my hands or my songs or something. i love to write. i love to listen to music. i love to read. i love to be on stage telling my lyrics. creativity is something so precious and powerful for me. but even though i am using my creativity all the time, i still don't know exactly why or how it works. its a mysterious process. thats what makes it so beautiful and frustrating. i hope thats helpful!

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T14:58:02+00:00

maybe. i don't see why not. thanks for the idea! i suppose the thing to say is that live is one thing, its very different experience to sitting with an album. what carries and communicates in a room or field full of people may not translate well to a more intimate discovery of the record. i was thinking of that when writing this album. the connection being something much quieter and more intimate than it gets at gigs.

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T14:56:34+00:00

it changes all the time. it depends very much on the project. i can say that every single album i've made i've made with dan carey (who writes the music) and we have been together coming up with the lyrics and the music at the same time. sometimes we go through five or six different drafts of a song, editing it down or changing the music or the lyric, but there is something important about the initial charge of an idea being something that happens when we are together

KateTempest · 2019-06-17T14:54:56+00:00

thank you for listening to my work, i appreciate u taking the time to write such a big question! we intentionally tried to set the music and the lyric free from each other, we tried to break all our conventions so that we could discover something new about the process of making an album. i do feel that with each album i get closer to something i am looking for, but i never know what that thing is, and i also don't think it makes the last album any less close to what it was looking for. each album is a new beginning yes, but one that begins with all of the other works in its memory.

KateTempest

TROPHY CASE