Jenny Sturgeon and Boo Hewerdine’s new Outliers album is a beautiful celebration of spontaneity and space, blending strong songwriting with acoustic arrangements and subtle electronics. We met to find out more.
It is clear from listening to Outliers that the musical relationship between Jenny Sturgeon and Boo Hewerdine is strong, so it’s no surprise to hear that they have known each other for a little while. “I ran these songwriting workshops in Moniack Mohr, which is near Inverness,” Boo begins. “This was in 2016 and Jenny came along and was so good. I’ve met lots of people through my workshops, but I thought Jenny was pretty special, so we stayed in touch and during lockdown, one of us suggested we do something.”
Interestingly, the ideas Boo put across during his workshops were all but ignored during the initial meetings. “We’d meet about once a fortnight, just for an hour and try to write something and it was so easy in a really good way,” he continues. “We were both able to go with quite big ideas, but the other thing we talked about was ignoring all of the stuff I had talked about in those workshops. So, the songs aren’t proper shapes, or don’t do what songs are supposed to do; it was exciting breaking these rules.”
The album is very successful in using acoustic and electronic sound elements and blending them together in such a way as to frame the songs delicately and imaginatively. “We didn’t even consider the sound at the beginning,” Jenny explains. “There was no plan except to try and write songs together. We would meet up and write a song and one of us would take the lead on recording the guitars or keys and the vocals and send it to the other. Then we would just pass it backwards and forwards until we thought it was done. It was that lovely process of knowing that I’m handing it over and I’m up for him doing whatever he wants with this thing we’ve created together.”
Inevitably, as the project gathered momentum, its sound began to properly form and the creative process took a clearer shape. “The first few songs that we wrote were the more acoustic ones,” Jenny says. “But then we were getting further into lockdown and more bored, so we started exploring some of those electronic sounds.” “We both enjoyed electronica and acoustic music, so we thought marrying them together might sound quite fresh,” Boo adds. “We also discovered that we had a mutual admiration for the band A Winged Victory for the Sullen (listen to their Reflections Playlist for KLOF Mag). It’s all instrumental music and they mix natural sounds with electronica. I took my son to see them and it was just so amazing; we both love them, so that was in our minds a bit. But the other thing that Jenny brought to it was found sounds, like the song thrush she recorded and the sea and wind chimes. The whole thing was a bit like having a toybox.”
When it came to the actual songwriting, the process was organic, with the pair bouncing ideas off of each other in a Zoom room. “We had made a decision not to chat about it beforehand,” Jenny tells us. “We would catch up for five or ten minutes on what we had been doing, which was largely not much, because it was lockdown. So it was whatever came out of the conversation, like something one of us had read, a conversation with somebody else or even just a couple of words that were said. It was good going into it blind and with no preconceived ideas.” “The song that shows that the best is No Words,” Boo continues. “Jenny came in one day and said ‘I’ve got nothing today, I’ve got no words’ and I just said ‘well then let’s do that’. The song is about when you’ve been alone all day and not spoken to anyone and the first time you hear your voice is a strange sensation. So even when we had nothing, we got something, which is why it feels so fresh to me.”
The word fresh occurs regularly throughout our chat, but it feels appropriate; the album’s sound is calm and clean, with very few accompanying musicians. “We decided early on that once we had decided a song was finished, we would send it off to Boo’s good friend Chris Pepper at Saltwell Studio,” Jenny says. “He was instrumental,” Boo continues. “He didn’t change anything on there, but he transformed the songs and we were amazed each time we got one back. It was our work but he somehow made it all the more beautiful. There is a cellist on one song, which is lovely, but we felt after that that we were okay just the two of us.”
There is a quietly experimental strand running through the music too, not least on songs like the beautiful Indigo, which is built on a field recording from 1974. “I had this idea for a piece of music, so that’s how it started,” Boo explains. “We thought maybe it was a lovely instrumental, but then Jenny had this genius idea.” “Boo sent the track to me and said he felt it needed something,” Jenny says. “I had been working on a project for the National Library of Scotland, researching these sound historical interviews from Shetland related to plants. I was thinking about it and just dragged this file in and placed it on the track and it worked! It’s Jean and Christine Morrison talking about lichen on roofs and you can even hear the ticking grandfather clock in the background; there’s something about that atmosphere that fits really well.” When we met, Jenny and Boo had, the evening before, began playing the songs live and were buzzing with the performance and the audience’s engagement. “It was really nice last night,” Boo says. “Jenny talked about the song [Indigo] and we played it and the first person at the merch stand asked if it was on the album. It’s a really unusual track, but somebody got it, which was great. And it feels like the nub of the record, with one part pushing the electronic sound and the other being really old; that became a thing for us. I was amazed at how emotional it felt last night when it pumped out of the speakers and people getting something you’ve done is an amazing feeling. This record is the most naturally evolving project I’ve ever been involved with. It was just about ideas and it was really thrilling to find somebody to go with ideas without second guessing anything.”
Listen and order – https://hudsonrecords.ffm.to/outliers
Listen to Jenny and Boo’s playlist for KLOF Mag here.
Also, join Jenny, Boo, Andy Bell of Hudson Records and producer Chris Pepper as they listen to ‘Outliers’ in its entirety, discussing how it was written, recorded and arranged.