With her debut album ‘Worrisome Heart’, Melody Gardot displayed her instinctive gift for transforming the traditions of jazz and blues with her personal kiss of life. But even her most ardent admirers will be amazed at the giant creative leap forward she has taken with the follow-up, ‘My One And Only Thrill’. Mixing latin rhythms, finger-snapping blues and deep, smouldering torch songs, it’s an album that seems to have been shaped from several lifetimes of love, loss and longing, though of course she’s still only in her early twenties. But the rapturous reception accorded to Worrisome Heart by fans and critics meant that she suddenly found her life moving at triple speed, as Melody and her band bounced between gigs, hotels and airports as demand blossomed across several continents.
“We were touring for nine months, though sometimes I’d have a week off if I was lucky,” she explains, in between bites of sushi. “But I never really had time off because I was making the new record in between touring. That was daunting, but it was awesome too because it gave me the opportunity to work and think, and work and think again, so I could reflect back rather than having to make constant snap decisions. It was interesting to do it that way, for sure.”
Echoes of childhood – her own this time – recur in her version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow, a song which has been recorded by many artists but never in Gardot’s singular latin-flavoured style. She attributes her rediscovery of the piece to having spent a lot of time with her grandmother (“she was eastern European, she was a mix but mostly Polish”), who used to look after her while her single mother went out to work.
A year ago, much of the discussion about Melody Gardot centred on the way she’d recovered from a terrible road accident and had used music as a therapeutic lifeline. But with My One And Only Thrill, the sole topics of conversation are going to be her musicianship, her songwriting and her astonishing artistic growth. The background story will always remain however;
It was only after an automobile accident while riding her bicycle home that the path Gardot set out on began to change. Struck suddenly by a vehicle, she suffered multiple pelvic fractures, spinal, nerve and head injuries. Several of the effects have left their marks in various ways such as requiring Gardot to carry a cane and sport shaded glasses to combat residual photosensitivity.
Since Gardot had dabbled in music the past, during a follow up visit one day, her doctor suggested she try music therapy as a means for recovery. Specifically, he believed it would help her with her cognitive problems as music has been known to help repair neuropathways in the brain after severe trauma. However, her doctor can't have imagined the far-reaching consequences. While still unable to walk, Melody began writing and recording songs on a portable multitrack recorder at her bedside.
"I started recording the songs as a way to remember what I'd done; I had really bad short-term memory problems," she explains. "At the end of the day I couldn't remember the beginning".
These songs she wrote during her recuperation were released as a six-song EP called Some Lessons: The Bedroom Sessions. After hearing it, one critic commented that it was "a trick of alchemy that awful pain and uncertainty can give rise to such bold and striking music."
Gardot's presence both lyrically and musically lend themselves to someone far beyond her years, yet she had her first introduction to the world of music only a short while ago when she earned some spare cash by playing in piano bars. She was just 16.
"Music wasn't something I thought I'd wind up doing," she admits. "I played on Fridays and Saturdays, for four hours a night. I wasn't your typical player though because I only played music that I liked. A mix of things old and new, I played everything from the Mamas & The Papas to Duke Ellington to Radiohead."
Melody Gardot understands the value of subtlety and understatement. It's what helped to make her debut album, `Worrisome Heart' and now this gorgeous melodious and poetiv ‘My One And Only Thrill’ sound simultaneously familiar, yet utterly surprising. For Melody, music is something that helps her relax, meditate, and look inwards. "I gravitate towards soothing music, often genres that are soft and somewhat unassuming. Music can do wonders for your spirit especially when it's the kind that calms you."
