About Simple Soul

In the past, Eddi Reader has often described singing as her vehicle for escape - "My ride out of a place or situation where I didn't want to be"; a means of emotional retreat dating back to her childhood in Glasgow, on a housing scheme rife with gang and sectarian violence. With the release of her bewitching new album Simple Soul, however, her new-found maturity and assurance as a songwriter, added to her already uncontested status as one of Britain's most sublimely gifted vocal interpreters, signals a fertile shift in Eddi's relationship with the music that has always sustained her.

"Music before was a way of hiding from things, right from when I was a little girl," she says. "I used to hide a lot - behind the costumes I'd dress up in with Fairground Attraction, then behind the big glasses I wore, they stayed on for a while. Whereas now I'm just kind of baring it all, emotionally, and I felt right from the very beginning with this album that I wanted to resist all kinds of dependency on other people. I wanted to express myself as fully and honestly as I could, and it felt like a bit of a cheat to hide behind other people's songs. I don't feel I have anything to prove to anybody any more, I just feel like presenting whatever it is I do to the planet and leaving it at that. So music for me now is a way of engaging with things rather than escaping from them, and through that I'm finding a serenity I've been seeking for a long time."

That underlying serenity is one of Simple Soul's most potently alluring qualities, paradoxically enabling Eddi to transport the listener to the extremes of love and longing, desolation and dreamy rapture. With ten of the eleven tracks written or co-written by Eddi and her longtime musical partner Boo Hewerdine, she sees the album as the clearest and most immediate expression of her musical vision to date. "I come from a background where language was important, but a fairly primitive and passionate language, all about emotion rather than words. And that's where my voice comes from originally, too; it was very much emotional content first, lyrics second, and so for a long time I just sang, I didn't dare represent any ideas I might have lyrically. Finding Boo as a partner has allowed me to understand the language better, helped me learn those techniques and start believing in my ability to express what's in my head."

Buoyed by this hard-won confidence, Eddi describes her current attitude to both writing and performing as a subtle balance between naked intimacy and objective distance. "My approach to an audience or a listener now is very much, 'Hello, I'm right here, and I want to tell you how I'm feeling about being human in the 21st century - about being 40, being a woman and a mother, someone who has dumped and been dumped; all my fears and anger and jealousy and so on, but hopefully from a position of having stepped back a bit from those feelings in order to understand them better. Because I think through music we can all reach a place which is to do with the essence of being human, which isn't to do with the shopping and renewing the tax disc and signing on at the dole, but something much more real and beautiful that connects us at a deeper level."

That something, of course, isn't always easy to hang on to, as the album's opening track, "Wolves" (as in the line "Keeping the wolves from the door"), acknowledges. "That song is specifically about the pressures of the daily grind, the fear that this is all there is," Eddi explains. "You can get so wrapped up in that kind of stuff that it becomes very hard to stand back from it and realise that it isn't everything, it isn't all that you are. What we're about is so much more than that, which is something I'm still trying to learn and put into practice in my own life." While Eddi may no longer feel the need she once did to escape through music, the wider urge to escape life's mundanities and complexities, be it on an actual or a spiritual level, is a sentiment she explores in two more songs on Simple Soul, "Prodigal Daughter" and "Eden".

"'Prodigal Daughter' is a very apt song for me," she says, "because I've felt for ten years or more that I've been away from home, living in London but not really knowing where my home is. I've been feeling more and more that I'd like to move back to Glasgow, or settle somewhere else out of London, but it's just such a huge task - finding a house, getting the kids into school and so on, and that song is about longing for someone to sort it all out for me, in the face of knowing I have to do it all myself. 'Eden' was one I wrote on my own in the house late one night, it just came out quite spontaneously, and I didn't really understand it at first. What I was dealing with was feeling that we all need to find our own paradise, the paradise that's here, and basically I was pleading with a God, or a higher power, or whatever you want to call it, to just come down and say, 'Here you are - never mind all the hard work, all the karma stuff, never mind free will: just have it', so it's a sort of wish-fulfilment thing, really."

As its name suggests, the album's title track, with its delicate acoustic and slide-guitar backing, aspires to a kind of transcendent purity far removed from the struggles articulated elsewhere. "Boo came in with a couple of lines he'd written - 'When I was weary I'd close my eyes/If I had a simple soul', and then we worked through the rest of the song together, but I just thought, that's fantastic, that's exactly right: if I'm tired I'll sleep; if I'm hungry I'll eat; if it's hard, let it go; it takes a child to see the beauty - because it's really difficult, once we get caught up in the world as adults, to remember what that childlike state was like, but that's what that song's trying to do; it's about returning to that simple, peaceful place."

The rest of the songs on Simple Soul reveal a similarly insightful talent for pinpointing aspects of the contemporary human condition - isolation and loneliness in "Footsteps Fall", the pains of modern masculinity in "Adam", the impact of a parent's death in "I Felt A Soul Love Through Me". According to Eddi herself, however, perhaps the most directly personal track is "The Girl Who Fell In Love With the Moon", which closes the album. "I love that song because it expresses my sense that there's more to life and the cosmos than just this five-sensory world we inhabit," she explains. "I also really identify with the title, because I feel it's a bit like me - the dreamer, the one that got lost, this girl who just looked at the sky and was gone; I like thinking that's me."

Stylistically, Simple Soul is a silkily seamless, category-defying blend of acoustic pop, jazz, folk and country influences, interwoven in spacious, beautifully wrought arrangements which perfectly highlight Eddi's magically expressive, luminously nuanced vocals. "My aim when I'm singing is to free myself of all the ego and bullshit, to get rid of my personality, to some extent; shed a few skins," she says. "I want to feel like Billie Holiday did when she was singing "My Man"; I want to feel as ageless and timeless as God, and so when I'm making an album I've never been able to get to grips with all that kind of music-business calculation - 'Is it too this, is it too that, is it like this other thing, what label's it on, is it to do with her age, her sex, her tit-size?' I'm interested in how it makes people feel - if it makes you feel good, keep on listening; if it makes you feel shite, then listen to something else."

An album of outstanding eloquence, grace, empathy and wisdom, Simple Soul will leave you feeling not merely good, but positively healed and uplifted.