Beth Orton Quotes
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When I first started writing, a friend said I should be careful because I'm letting people know how to reach right in and play with my workings. And they do!
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I love the water more than anything. I'm not very good at sunbathing - I get really bored. I love swimming and I love being like a fish and getting in the sea and just - I don't know, it feels right.
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I just like the child's nightmares and therapy, once an experience has found the light of day I'm no longer under its spell, I'm free to tell it. I hope in telling honestly I can in some way help other people to do so also.
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The husk could be some useless bloke or losing myself and changing my DNA with bottomless grief.
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My dad got me a chemistry book one Christmas and I burnt the garden shed down. I remember there was the most beautiful smell forever after in the remains.
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I'm not comfortable holidaying in other people's poverty.
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The way I write, words can means lots of different things.
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When I'm on a roll nothing makes me happier or feel more satisfied, like plugging in, life makes sense.
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One time I completely thought I'd turned into a werewolf and was sure I could see hairs sprouting from my face. At those times I'd suddenly go very quiet and not talk to anyone, stunned from the developments, being a werewolf and all.
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To me songwriting is more like redemption. I can extract the poison or the pollen, the essence from a situation and the rest becomes a husk that blows away.
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I want it to be more universal than that - like a painter doesn't have to explain his life story away to justify his painting.
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I was born on a pig farm in Norfolk. We grew up in the city called Norwich in Norfolk, then I moved to London when I was thirteen.
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Therapy is like telling your nightmares when you're a kid; they lose their power to hurt and control.
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I don't read music; I taught myself guitar.
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I was scared of the Bible - it seemed whenever I read it I got bad luck. Then I befriended a couple of Jesus's disciples and I used to show them modern life - how to run the hot and cold taps and things like that. They seemed alright but it didn't change my feelings about the Bible jinx.
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I've also been writing with my guitarist, Ted Barnes, and he's amazing. Writing with him has taught me a lot about my own writing process, in the sense that it's incredably personal to write with someone else from scratch.
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The upside to smoking is that you get to be social. I was looking for a light when I bumped into Ben Harper's manager. A couple of days later, Ben and I were in the studio.
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I get told I'm a confessional songwriter, which gets on my tits because I think of negative connotations attached to the word "confessional". I don't like the idea of songwriting being therapy. I don't want to put myself so directly in the foreground.
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At about the age of ten, my friends and I discovered the joys of sitting in graveyards drinking merrydown cider and kissing and stealing our elder siblings' records.
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I don't believe in trouble. Because I think that trouble is sometimes good, sometimes bad. I've been known to be called trouble, which I think is quite a compliment. But I suppose, thinking about it, that my best and worst trouble has always had something to do with a man.
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Even when I haven't had money, I found money to travel. It's a luxury that's a kind of necessity, I think.
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Kissing was something I did a lot of. Kissing in a wheat field as the sun begins to set on a summer's evening, with the haze of that light.
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From the beginning, I wanted to make dance music with a human element to it.
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I didn't jump a lot of trees because I didn't like heights. I liked getting a mirror and walking around with it facing the sky. I'd imagine I was walking in the tops of the trees and falling into the sky, or walking up the stairs whilst going down.
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When I was really young I used to collect frog spawn. I made a pond out of an old sink and I loved to spend hours watching the frogs grow.
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Norfolk is not on the way to anywhere, you don't stop off on the way somewhere else - it's an end in itself. You have to want to go there; it's an effort.
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My manager said the next best inspiration to heartbreak is travel, and it's true.
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Heaven is what we spend our lives trying to find.
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I have a friend who says the best boyfriends are ones with intimidating, good-looking older brothers. The boyfriends try harder because they're so insecure. Maybe I'm the female equivalent.
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We're all like little ants who scurry around with the materials that are at hand right now. Each generation finds new materials. Its just evolution, isn't it?
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