Beth Orton Takes the First-Ever HT Questionnaire
The esteemed British singer-songwriter on the most radicalizing moment of her life, wanting to be a criminologist, and a mysterious recent meeting with Kate Bush.
The HT Questionnaire is where our favorite artists reveal their true selves by answering a series of searching, thoughtful, and sometimes random questions.
Beth Orton taught me how to be heartbroken. I was 17, with a tendency to fall for girls who didn’t feel the same way. Like so many high school kids learning how to articulate their inner life, I turned to music. The Smashing Pumpkins helped me air out some angst, and U2 turned my little dramas into grand operas of emotion. But it was Orton who gave me some much-needed perspective with her wistful 1999 folk-pop album, Central Reservation. Her voice, craggy and creaky and tender, seemed well-acquainted with a melancholy I could barely fathom. And her lyrics entered my mind as Zen koans from someone who’d been there and cried about that—and came out on the other side better for it. When she lilted, “Everything and nothing is as sacred as we’d want it to be,” the idea rearranged my teenage psyche: Disappointments are inevitable, but I can decide what to do with them.
Ever since then, I’ve looked to Orton’s music for guidance and solace. After some years in the music-industry wilderness, including a spell where she considered quitting music altogether, she made a mighty return with 2022’s Weather Alive, her first self-produced album. A fog of art-rock, jazz, and soul, it felt like the record she had waited her entire life to make. The just-released follow-up, The Ground Above, flows with the same gauzy gorgeousness, as if the whole record were recorded on the edge of a pristine lake during the mistiest morning hours.
At 55, she’s still doling out wisdom you can use. On “Waiting,” alongside a quietly joyous ’70s soul groove, she sings a line that makes me smile knowingly every time I hear it: “I was going to write a gratitude list/Just got to work out my resentment to it.” Talking about the song via video from her garden shed-turned-home studio in London, she explains how it pokes fun at the way we’re always waiting for the right moment to really live as life keeps passing us by. “You can get stuck in resentment, but you might as well fucking work out what you’re grateful for and get on with it,” she says.
I ask Orton what she’s grateful for at this point in her life. “My kids and my family, abso-fucking-lutely,” she starts. “I’m grateful for my music too. I did a lot of sabotaging when I was younger, and it was the right thing to do, because I got successful in a way that I was not comfortable with, and I didn’t have the support system in place to handle it. It all went a bit tits up, and I thought I’d messed up forever. But I’m very grateful to have had the desperation that I’ve had in the last 10 years of going through difficulties and using music as a way to make sense of it. It was a very personal... um… I don’t want to use the word ‘journey’ because I hate it—endeavor. I was like, I’m just gonna keep making music, because I love making music.”
For all of the heady gravitas of her music, Orton is a lighthearted, sidewinding conversationalist. She uses silly voices to make fun of her own nerdiness. When circling a bigger point, she sometimes stammers, charmingly. She’s effortlessly wise, spilling out timeless observations like, “Songs are a way of gently holding memories in amber.” She’s also dryly funny. Talking about one happily nostalgic line from the new album—“We laughed so hard we nearly pissed ourselves”—she quips, “It’s quite a difficult lyric to sing when you’re getting on a bit, because it just sounds like you’ve got incontinence.” All of it is part of her ongoing poem of perseverance.
Below, Orton gamely tackles a series of questions, some more irreverent than others, for our new HT Questionnaire feature.
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