“When I started this, I learned pretty quickly that when you rely on people too much, they can let you down. I said to myself, ‘Who’s the only person you can truly rely on to work their ass off?’ and the answer was, ‘me.’ So I just worked my ass off and didn’t give up.”
This DIY approach was indispensable as singer-songwriter Olivia Broadfield tried to find an audience for her music, a goal she’s gone a long way toward reaching with the July 14 release of her debut album, Eyes Wide Open, on Vagrant Records. But her spirited independence has served her well at least as far back as age 13, when she taught herself how to play guitar. And when she started the local acoustic showcase where she still performs. And when she figured out how to use the home studio she set up (complete with improvised sound booth) in a spare room.
And it surely paid off when her song “Don’t Cry” – also the first single from Eyes Wide Open – was downloaded 7,000 times after it was heard on an episode of MTV’s “The Real World.” “I was totally blown away by that,” she confesses, adding, “I owe a lot to the people at the show for liking the random British girl who contacted them through MySpace!”
The random British girl whose shimmering electro-pop struck a chord with viewers of “The Real World” prizes simplicity in her music, but her lyrics find her frequently ruminating on life’s complications. Asked about the nursery rhyme woven into “Don’t Cry” – Clap hands, daddy comes/ With a pocket full of plums – Olivia ventures: “Sometimes you just want to be a kid again and not have to worry about anything, not care what you look like, not care if you fall over and everyone sees you. Kids act completely mental all the time and no one even seems to notice. For better or worse, when you grow up, life becomes complicated.”
Olivia’s own childhood was spent in Leicestershire, in the heart of England. She began piano lessons at age six. Some of her natural abilities may have been passed down from her maternal grandfather, who played saxophone in the swing-era British Army band and later took up the violin. When he was in his 80s, Olivia taught him how to play guitar.
She’d taught herself to play via chord charts in music books and in her early teen years started writing “angsty” songs. Olivia describes these early efforts as “bad music and bad words over A minor and E minor, all very whiny and depressing.” She was a fan of Motown and soul artists, as well as classic singer-songwriters like Carole King and James Taylor, which she realizes in retrospect was because of their songs’ strong melodies. For the same reason, she’s a fan of more “shameless pop music” than she cares to admit.
After briefly studying Latin at the University of Warwick, she pursued music composition at Coventry University, where she feared the other students were well beyond her. “Everyone had very professional-sounding CDs. I had something on tape I’d recorded in my bedroom. At one point you could hear my mum in the background calling me in for dinner,” she recounts.
As graduation drew near, she began to wonder how she’d make a living from music. “I knew if I got a proper job, that would be the end of it,” Olivia reveals. “So I just did every music-related thing I could think of and avoided the nine-to-five situation.” One of those things was a weekly music night called Live In Your Living Room she started with a college friend. She also booked talent for a local festival and six months after graduation, was offered a position teaching songwriting at Coventry that found her lecturing students who’d been her classmates.
Olivia’s performance profile got a boost when she opened for KT Tunstall. By then, though, she was moving away from the guitar-centered format that had begun to earn her acclaim. This was largely due to the influence of Frou Frou’s landmark 2002 album, Details. “It was so different, and I found it really inspiring. I fell in love with the warmth of electronica,” she attests. She scarcely could have imagined that Frou Frou’s Guy Sigsworth would become a fan of hers. The celebrated producer – who’s worked with Madonna, Britney Spears and former Frou Frou mate Imogen Heap – recently remarked: “Some singers strike a pose. Some make attention-seeking songs out of gossip-column inanities. Olivia takes you inside her head, and what a wonderful place it is.”
Frou Frou’s example was practical as well as creatively motivational. “It made me think that if I had my own studio, I could make all kinds of interesting music without having to rely on a band,” Olivia reveals. So in 2006, she rented a cottage and outfitted her spare room with a piano, keyboards, a Mac, a mixing desk and some mikes. But there was one problem: Her computer was so loud that she couldn’t record vocals in the room. Her solution? “I took a really giant Hula Hoop and some duvets and suspended this weird kind of floating ghost marshmallow creature from the ceiling in the middle of the room. I’d get in there and it was really frickin’ hot and there wasn’t a lot of air, but I could just manage to make it through a song.”
The first song born in the floating ghost marshmallow creature-equipped studio was “Hang On.” It provided Olivia with confirmation of her new musical direction. “In the past, when I’d begin working on a song, I’d sit down with my guitar and come up with a melody. Now, I could start off with a beat or a lush keyboard patch or a fun little monosynth bit. After all those years playing guitar, it was refreshing to be able to make so much sound. I wrote ‘Hang On’ and thought, ‘THIS IS IT.’”
She wrote five other songs in short order and, not completely convinced that anyone would want to hear an entire album of her work, thought they might find a place on television or in films. “I started typing ‘music supervisor’ and ‘music publisher’ into Google to see whom I could find,” she relates. “I’d spend three hours trying to track down one contact – I’m a bit of a psycho when it comes to stuff like that. I sent these e-mails that said something like, ‘Hi. I write music. Here’s one of my songs. Do you like it?” When someone wrote back, “Yes, we do like it,” Olivia says she fell on the floor in shock.
In addition to the appearance of “Don’t Cry” on “The Real World,” Olivia’s music has been placed on “The Hills,” among other TV shows, and in films including “The Eye,” starring Jessica Alba. The video for “Silence,” meanwhile, landed in VH1’s Hot 20. And “Indescribable” won the Project Rising Stars contest sponsored by Lincoln/Filmaka, which saw the video previewed during the 2009 Grammy Awards.
Along the way, it occurred to Olivia that perhaps someone would want to hear an entire album of her songs after all. In fact, when she released Eyes Wide Open on her own Cherry Bang label, it shot to 3 on the iTunes electronic chart.
She’s quick to mention the contributions of people she considers her creative family – the roll call includes her co-producer, Josh Crocker, video director Kurt Nishimura, her publisher, PigFACTORY, and the folks at Vagrant Records – all of whom have played a significant role in her success. Olivia entitled the album “Eyes Wide Open” in part because she believes in “being open to everything, to opportunity, to possibility” and after years of doing it herself … to collaboration.
