Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
“Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” and “Suddenly I See” made her a household name.
This Sunday, KT Tunstall is a one-woman band at State Theatre in Falls Church, Virginia.
“I love doing my solo show,” Tunstall told WTOP. “It’s just me with all of my crazy gadgets so that I sound like a band, even though it’s really just me on stage. … It’s really simple and it’s really cool. It’s called a loop pedal. Basically you’ve got a little box at your feet and two buttons. The left button records and the right button stops recording and it plays.”
Her tangible musicianship was recently challenged by losing hearing in one ear.
“I lost my hearing on my left side, which hasn’t come back,” Tunstall said. “I’ve had Tinnitus and a little top-end hearing loss for 10 years. … I woke up on the tour bus one morning, took my ear plugs out and was like, ‘Whoa, there’s no difference.’ … Everything sounded super tinny. … It took three months and my brain and body just recalibrated.”
Her younger brother, Dan, was born fully deaf, received a cochlear implant at age 23.
“He can’t hear in either ear,” Tunstall said. “We’re not biologically related, so it’s not hereditary. … When I told my brother, Dan, about it, he played this little violin like, ‘Poor you. You can only hear in one ear,’ because being totally deaf is … not even comparable.”
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1975, she was adopted by school teacher Rosemarie Tunstall and physics lecturer David Tunstall of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. However, her first memories are of California where her dad took sabbatical at UCLA.
“It was a really interesting melting pot of family,” Tunstall said. “I was definitely the black sheep when it came to music … because my parents were very academic. … They didn’t know where me and my older brother were from, we were both adopted, so they didn’t know what our talents would be. They were very sensitive to that and let us try anything.”
After discovering a love of music, she began busking around Scotland and London.
“It was very bohemian,” Tunstall said. “It was basically just a super lo-fi life where you didn’t have new clothes or go to restaurants or take vacations. It was just hand-to-mouth scrapping by and loving being a musician. I really loved that life. Even though it was frugal and there wasn’t spare money, I really enjoyed it. I felt very alive. It felt very present.”
She got a scholarship to do her senior year of high school in a “super posh” boarding school called Kent School in Connecticut and began busking around Burlington, Vermont.
“Playing on the street really teaches you that it’s your job to engage an audience,” Tunstall said. “I get kind of worked up when I see buskers playing on the street with an amp turned up to 11. … You’ve got to be good enough to make people stop and listen.”
After earning her B.A. in drama & music in 1996 at Royal Holloway, University of London, she eventually signed with British label Relentless Records at age 29. The name of her debut album “Eye to the Telescope” (2004) was inspired by father’s physics lab.
“He would get us up in the middle of the night if there was something astral happening,” Tunstall said. “We would all in our pajamas just bail into the car. I remember seeing Halley’s Comet through the telescope. He had the keys to the observatory and I was 8 years old like, ‘What the hell? There’s stuff in the sky?’ … I always enjoyed that feeling.”
The album included “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” with its “woo hoo” refrain. She performed it live with a guitar, tambourine and loop pedal on BBC’s “Later…with Jools Holland,” but she only had 24 hours to prepare when filling in for the rapper Nas.
“I had to jump in a van, get down to London,” Tunstall said. “The other artists on that show were Anita Baker, Jackson Browne and The Cure! … My label boss said, ‘Play that weird horse song, the ‘woo hoo’ song.’ … I played it and it went crazy! … The first 10,000 copies are really valuable because … they’ve got the live recording from that show.”
The album also featured “Suddenly I See” in tribute to punk-rock pioneer Patti Smith.
“The whole song is about the Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of Patti Smith on the cover of ‘Horses,'” Tunstall said. “I was just sitting in my basement apartment in London listening to ‘Gloria’ and looking at this album cover. … It was just this gaze from Patti … almost challenging me with that gaze going, ‘Who are you? What are you bringing to the table?'”
The album won her Best British Female Artist at the BRIT Awards and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. “Black Horse” was covered on “American Idol” and “Suddenly I See” was featured in the film “The Devil Wears Prada.”
She continued to evolve across albums like “Drastic Fantastic” (2007), “Tiger Suit” (2010) and “Invisible Empire / Crescent Moon” (2013) before embarking on a trilogy of albums tackling themes of the soul, body and mind. “Kin” (2016) explored the soul, “Wax” (2018) explored the body and a third album will explore the mind later this year.
“The trilogy is like my own self-help book,” Tunstall said. “It’s been very therapeutic.”
Through it all, she remains amazed at all the experiences, from playing Times Square on New Year’s Eve to performing at the White House Correspondents Dinner next month.
“It’s so cool when you have these amazing songs that just take you on these adventures,” Tunstall said. “They are now taking me on adventures. I wrote it and it doesn’t belong to me anymore and they’re like Rudolph pulling the sleigh. I’m like, ‘Where are we going?'”
Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
