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Foo,” she’s spitting venom like a cobra in
defense of female empowerment. Track
three, she morphs into a finger-popping,
bullet-miked R&B diva, while lyrically not-
ing that “conversations test my patience.”
The shambling “Don’t Delete the Kisses”
finds her in chipper ‘60s-girl-group mode;
a chiming “Planet Hunter” puts her up
front but echoey, in classic prog-rock spaci-
ness; The hip-hop-thumping “Sky
Musings pushes her into a whispery, but
becoming spoken-word rap; and her whis-
per graduates to a full-blown banshee
scream on the funky “Formidable Cool.”
Rowsell’s range keeps right on expanding,
into the New Wave perfection of “Space &
Time,” the church-choir reverence of the
conversely steamrolling “St. Purple &
Green,” and the madrigal respect she dis- enced them. “I just waited for life to unfold
so I could have something to write about,
so there was never this sense of panic,” she
says.
Not that the singer likes explaining said
inspirations. Mention to her that certain
words keep recurring on Visions of a Life,
like ‘crash’ and ‘fear,’ and she responds
warily, almost protectively. “I think some-
times when you’re living life at full speed,
you get worried that it’s all going to burn
out, or come crashing down,” she eventu-
ally decides. “Or I guess that’s what I seem
to think. Being in a band is sometimes very,
very high octane, if you will, and some-
times you do crash and burn. And there’s
that old cliché where you come off touring,
go back home, and everything’s the same.
You’re no longer waking up every day in a
plays on the Renaissance-fair-ish fable
“After the Zero Hour.”
Rowsell swears that she and her band-
mates didn’t feel much sophomore pres-
sure. In between albums they’d kept busy
with the one-off, wah-oohed single
“Baby’s Not Made of China,” and the rack-
et-buzzing cut “Ghoster,” which they were
invited to write specifically for the sound-
track to the recent all-girl “Ghostbusters”
reboot. “I haven’t seen it, but I was told we
weren’t even in the movie in the end,” she
sighs, happy to have made the album, at
least. “But it was still cool, in that it was
nice to be asked, and really nice to write
something expressly for an actual script.
We’d never done that before. But I just felt
like I’d come a long way since writing the
first album so I didn’t feel worried about
how I would follow that up. I already felt a
lot older – and a lot better – than I was on
My Love is Cool.”
The artist in her also understood the
often cruel way the music industry works
– that you’ve had an out-of-the-box hit
with your first album, a percentage of your
audience will be prepared to instantly
despise your second, no matter how good
it is. “Or even if they secretly love it,” she
snaps. “And that’s quite nerve-wracking.”
So she refused to set aside any pockets of
time designated for composing, and
instead to keep touring – making
Winterbottom’s rockumentary along the
way – and glean inspirations as she experi- different country, so sometimes it’s quite
hard to come back down to waking up in
your own room every day. And with not
that much, and not having any idea what
your schedule will be or what to do with
yourself. So that can be pretty disconcert-
ing, overall.”
Mention the astral motif sparkling in
some of the material, and Rowsell still isn’t
especially forthcoming. She’s not star-gaz-
ing, or looking upward, she explains –
she’s staring inward instead. “Because
that’s where the most interesting things
are, and I already know how to channel all
the outward things. But writing like I do?
Well, art is a really good way to put your
true