Rumer is back with her third album Into Colour, a set of new songs that are chicken soup for the soul after her struggle with depression and the stresses of success and fame. She talks to Alan Corr about finding love and new colours
“Have I found god? No but if you’re depressed, you’ll believe in anything.”
Rumer is talking about Reach Out, one of the most deeply personal songs on Into Colour, her new album of deeply personal songs.
“That’s what that song is about - when it gets bad, god does appear. There is a lot of god on the record but god is very personal - people have their own relationship with a higher power, everyone has their own interpretation so yes, it’s god but it’s no necessarily a Christian god - whatever it is, it’s that power you imagine as a human being that you feel might help you.”
Rumer is Sarah Joyce, the Anglo-Irish-Pakistani singer who emerged several years ago in a post-Adele haze with a warm Bacharach sound and a voice that purred with all the effortless beauty of Karen Carpenter.
Her debut album, Seasons of The Soul, became a sleeper hit, sold a million copies worldwide and positioned Rumer in a certain low level of fame which she was to recoil from.
Two years ago she took stock with Boys Don’t Cry, a collection of covers showing off her vintage influences with faultless renditions of songs by Gilbert O'Sullivan and Jimmy Webb and a particularly pointed version of Clifford T Ward’s Home Thoughts From Abroad.
But Rumer, who had already experienced many personal upheavals, wasn’t quite ready for the success. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, the impact of sudden fame led to her well-documented struggle with depression, which culminated in the final Boys Don’t Cry sessions. She likens this time to “the end of Hamlet”.
When she couldn’t find, or at least invoke, god, she went to an army bootcamp. “Yep! It was to get better - I had to come off this medication,” she says chirpily. “That was a bit daft . . . I shouldn’t really talk about that. I was trying to recover from stress and I was trying to use exercise to come off my bipolar medication which was very, very heavy so I used exercise as a way to get me off the drugs and the ex-soldiers who ran it were very kind to me and they helped me get better.”
The title of Into Colour alone opens up a new chapter for Rumer. She’s made gradual changes over the past few years. She has parted company with Steve Brown, the arranger and composer who helped mint her updated Bacharach sound and who in a previous life was Glen Ponder, the long-suffering band leader on Steve Coogan’s brilliant spoof chatshow Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge.
Rumer's new partner, both musically and romantically is Rob Shirakbari, long-time musical director to Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick. They’re engaged to be married and they “kinda” live in small-town Arkansas. “Yeehaw!” hollers Rumer. “Yeah, it’s lovely and peaceful and quiet and it’s like going back in time - everyone has chequebooks, I had to get used to writing cheques again and everyone says ‘have a great daaaay!’. There are about 100 churches in one small town. It’s crazy and they all have guns.”
Almost tempting fate, Rumer also lived in a trailer in the Laurel Canyon to dream up Into Colour, securing her ladies of the canyon credentials. But she is as ever cautious and, to delve into the Joni songbook again, she feels ambivalent about getting back into stoking the star-making machinery of the popular song.
In fact, her single, the gorgeous disco meets Philly soul of Dangerous, is as much about re-entering the industry fray as it is about falling in love.
“The sheer prospect just felt dangerous to me,” Rumer says. “I had so much resistance to going back into writing and performing publicly again that I realised I wasn’t going to be able to break through it until I literally wrote a song about the resistance itself. We worked it into a love song, and the emotion just felt naturally disco in theme.
“I don’t enjoy the machine so this time around I’m focusing on the human connection, getting out there playing for people and making sure the album is as good as possible. I let the machine do their job and I’ll do mine.”
And what about the dangers of falling in love? “Love and relationships are very beautiful things and they’re up and down and around,” Rumer says. “Falling in love comes and goes but I am in love, I am very happy. I am very happy to be able to travel with Rob and a lot of the love is on the record too. You can hear that on a lot of the new songs.”
There is an overall feeling that these new songs are a real balm for the soul and mark a new dawn for Rumer. She talks about the “real people” in the world - doctors, nurses, and teachers - and she calls new song You Make The World a Better Place “an anti-celebrity song” that pays tribute to the people who really make the world work.
“God yes! The real people, amazing people every day! Most people are lovely people, they’re kind and good and they’d do everything for you and that’s really what the world’s mad of which is what is so mad because the world is controlled by a very small percentage of nutters, people who are not very intelligent but there are more people who are wonderful, giving and kind and good.”
Musically, Into Colour drifts in and out of the realm of easy-listening with its warm, honeyed sound. It all floats by in a cloud of seventies Soma, a hazy summer’s day when it is forever 1974 and even on the phone, Rumer seems faraway and almost dreamy – answering my questions with good manners but also with a slight detachment. Not so much stoking the star-making machinery as patting it absent-mindedly.
There is one song and subject that does rouse Rumer to passion. On new song Play Your Guitar, she calls for musicians and artists to defend themselves against the relentless pressures and blandishments of commerce. The song breaks outs of Into Colour’s caramel smoothness and lights up with what might technically be called some tasty guitar licks of a Larry Carlton vintage.
“The guy who played on that song is actually from my home town of New Forest,” says Rumer. “Darren Hudson is his name and we used his work on some of the tracks on the new album that were actually recordings of him playing in his bedroom which I think is really cool.
“That song is a call to arms and it is the most important song for me on the album. We can’t give up because we can’t let our culture become homogenised by the money people who have no soul. Let’s not let the world become dead behind the eyes because of money and greed and all that crap and vanity and celebrity shit. We have to keep artistry alive and that means we have to encourage each other as much as we can in the musical community to help.”
To this end, she’s set up her own record label Night Owl to develop new projects and she supports Taylor Swift’s recent decision to remove her entire back catalogue from Spotify.
It all suggests that Rumer really does long for a simpler time, that she really wants to be one of those ladies of the canyon. In fact new song, Pizza and Pinball gently decries our enslavement to technology but by far the most touching moment on Into Colour is Butterfly, a song about the miscarriage Rumer suffered during the making of the album.
She has turned a personal tragedy into something beautiful. “I actually didn’t want to put that song on the album, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that because it’s very personal. I thought it was something we’d just do and it would never see the light of day but then I thought there might be somebody who might appreciate it . . . ”
Into Colour is out now on Atlantic Records. Rumer plays The Academy, Dublin on February 18 2015. Tickets available from ticketmaster.ie priced €25.00 including booking fee
Alan Corr @corralan
