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34 Music Week 28.09.12 INTERVIEWMATTHALES HALES BREAKS LOOSE


Aqualung musician Matt Hales may well scratch his head about how he’s come to this – living in Los Angeles and penning hits for the likes of Leona Lewis and Paloma Faith. After all, he once thought such an existence would turn his stomach


SONGWRITING  BY PAUL WILLIAMS


A


bout the last thing on Aqualung mastermind Matt Hales’ mind a few years ago was writing songs with and for


other people. In fact, the very thought of it turned his stomach. “I was extremely suspicious of the whole world


of collaborative writing and even production,” he tells Music Week. “I was very territorial about it. I didn’t want to do it and I wanted to keep control of everything.” But life can be, well, strange and beautiful and


Hales talks to us not from his previous home of Lewisham but a sunny Los Angeles where his growing demand as a songwriter for others has included co-writes for Leona Lewis, Paloma Faith and Lianne La Havas, including eight on her Barclaycard Mercury Prize-nominated Is Your Love Big Enough?. He also produced the Warner Bros-issued album. “It’s nuts. It’s basically wrong,” Hales says of his


new life with his family in California. “It’s the kind of thing people say and don’t normally do but most days I do have a second of, I don’t actually pinch myself, but I have that sensation: how has this happened? Why am I here? Why am I living in the sunshine and why I am getting to do these wonderful things all the time?” As he tries to make sense of it all in this


Talking Heads fashion, Hales might well reflect that it was his own lack of interest that previously stood in the way of this whole new career path unfolding for him. The creator of five Aqualung albums and a


string of hit singles, including Strange And Beautiful and Brighter Than Sunshine, reveals that he was “always a bit annoying” to his record company by repeatedly turning down collaboration requests. Then when he decided to


ABOVE Hales apace: Matt Hales’ songwriting career has gathered pace since first working with Lianne La Havas. Now the pair are working on a song for Beyoncé


ease off the touring so he could start to have some quality time with his young children he began to reassess matters. “In the end I said to my manager, ‘Next time


someone asks I suppose I’ll say yes and we will see what happens’ and then I just got very lucky because the first call that came in was about some 19-year-old girl called Lianne [La Havas] and it was like with the right people around her she could be the next Billie Holiday. I was expecting it to be, ‘Can you try to write a hit for someone from a TV show?’ “That proposition sounded like something


“Why am I here? Why am I living in the


sunshine and why I am getting to do these wonderful things all the time?” MATT HALES


really exciting. It could be fulfilling and that was the first one and it was crazy. It was three-and-a- half years ago and that was the first time I met Lianne. That was the first time she had ever written with anyone and the first time I had ever really written with anyone.” It made him realise opening up his writing


talents could be just as rewarding creatively as anything he would make for himself under the Aqualung moniker. “[Lianne’s] obviously brilliant and it was


completely creative and it wasn’t cynical in any way and it wasn’t horrible and it wasn’t embarrassing, it was just good and I was really proud what we made and excited,” says Hales, who is published by District Music through Kobalt. “In one session it showed me it was possible for it to be a rewarding and good experience and then I went from there really.” Since then his writing assignments have


included Leona Lewis, Jason Mraz and Paloma Faith whom he collaborated with on Just Be (with Greg Wells) on her RCA album Fall To Grace. “She’s not shy,” he says of Faith. “She’s very


open and she’s always worked that way from the very beginning of her career as an artist so she just flies on that. She’s an artist in the general sense.” Hales is presently finishing an album he has co-


written and penned with a Dutch artist called Laura Jensen, which he says is coming out next year, and for which he notes they “ended up in a friendly Bjork land which is a totally different feeling from Lianne records”. He is also producing a new UK artist called Daley “who could possibly be the British D’Angelo if such a thing could ever exist”. But most exciting of all is Hales and La Havas


were last week planning to sit down while she was in LA for promotion to try to write something for Beyoncé. He reveals: “Beyoncé’s people got in touch to


say would Lianne and I like to write a song for her which, of course, may or may not happen but it was like, ‘That would be fun.’ We’re going to write another Lianne song and if it happens to work for Beyoncé that would be unbelievable because she’s the queen of the universe.” In the midst of all this he is also working on a


sixth Aqualung album. “Extremely gently I suppose is the correct answer,” he says about its progress. “I know my label would quite like something to happen, but I’ve just been following along with this very enjoyable little ride.” And “this little ride” has taught him he no


longer needs to make his own recordings to be satisfied creatively. “The most remarkable thing for me is I thought I would have needed to have my own sort of private music-making, artistic space to nourish me and replenish me after the hideous business of working with other people,” he says. “That’s just turned out to be wrong. The nourishment has come as I’ve gone. I’ve been lucky I’ve worked with exceptional artists and been really challenged and really motivated and inspired by those collaborations. The paradox effect of that is I’m not so hungry to make my own music as I was because I’ve felt I’ve been making my own music all year. I just haven’t been singing it.”


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