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Some of them were very deliberate choices, like “Are You Experienced?” That was the first song we cut. We did it at Electric Ladyland [studios]. The spoken-word part is really Jimi’s lyrics from “Moon, Turn the Tides.” I chose [Tears for Fears’] “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” really for the lyrics. I was in a café and just feeling so frustrated and aghast at the news and what’s happening in our world, whether it’s just corporate globalization and just the greed of pharmaceutical companies, what’s happening in Iraq. And this song comes on, and it was just like a little answer. And I felt that song, just a little pop song, says in the sentence exactly what is systemically wrong with our world because about one percent of our population is ruling our world instead of the people.
With “Gloria,” you spent a couple of years with it before recording it, and it became as much your song as Van Morrison’s.
Yeah, but also I have to say that you can’t really do that with most songs [anymore], because artists won’t give you the licensing. I developed [a version of] the Prince song “When Doves Cry” and put a biblical verse in the middle of it, and he blocked it. He made me take off the Bible verse, and the Hendrix Foundation does not allow you to put your own poetry on a Jimi Hendrix song. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to do that, and I actually had to pull songs off records and hold up release dates of records because an artist didn’t want poetry on their song, which is their right. So I didn’t want to screw around with that on this record, because it’s painful. You know, you work really hard on a song and you invest in it and embellish it – whether it’s from the Bible or one’s own poetry – and it just winds up in a can somewhere like some old Orson Welles movie. So I just decided on this record to remain as true to the artist’s lyrical conception as possible.
What biblical verse was that?
It was from the “Song of Solomon,” where she says something like: “Oh my love, my dove, I wait for you.” It was really quite beautiful, there was nothing compromising to it. I mean, Prince writes great songs, and I chose to do this song because he wrote such a beautiful song, but it’s really his right, so I don’t want to criticize another artist to exercise their right.
So on this record my aim wasn’t to develop my own poetry. My aim was to take songs that had either beautiful or relevant lyrics and make the lyrics very articulate and make them so people can hear them. I have danced to “Gimme Shelter” a thousand times and was never totally aware of the potency of that song lyrically. I knew it was a great song, but the fire of that song is so overwhelming that I never even thought about the lyrics. So my agenda was to be very attentive to each artist’s lyrics.
Who are your inspirations as a singer? You have a very unique style.
I never really had aspirations of being a singer. I liked to perform, but I grew up in a time where everybody sang on the streets in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and most of my friends sang better than me. We just all sang really to amuse ourselves, and I can’t say where I got my singing voice from because I still don’t really understand it. I know who influenced me as a performer, whether it was Lotte Lenya or Nina Simone and Darlene Love. I study Maria Callas all the time. I guess what I learn from other singers isn’t really vocal technique, because I’m totally unschooled, but I do learn how to deliver the inner narrative of the song emotionally or to tell a story.
Grace Slick was a really big inspiration. She delivered something revolutionary poetically, with strength that was really beyond gender, and she made a big impression on me. But I never thought of singing. When I first started performing I was doing poetry, and I fell into chanting and then a little bit of singing. It just happened organically. But I didn’t know anything about singing when I did Horses. I was just singing from the seat of my pants.
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