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."
Despite her exacting schedule, she made sure that her plans for 'My One And Only Thrill' had been painstakingly laid.
"We walked into the studio with all the songs written, which was important because you need to have a good idea about how the record's going to be. You need to have an idea, work it up with the musicians and get the rhythm tracks right. Then you can decide which songs need strings and which ones can live without them. It's an interesting process of stripping down what you're doing to make room for something else, like dividing it in half to make room for the orchestra."
This meant that her band - take a bow Charles Staab (drums), Ken Pendergast (bass), Patrick Hughes (trumpet), and Bryan Rogers (sax) -- often had to play with even more restraint than usual, though thanks to the rapport they've built up during months of performing together, she wouldn't want to go into the studio without them.
"I was saying to them 'you could play all this stuff, but I want you to do absolutely nothing!'" she says, laughing. "But it was great because these are all my guys, and that makes the record special. What makes a record great is to have people around you who are instinctively in your head-space and know what you need for those tunes. These guys have played with me long enough to know that without even thinking. I love travelling with my band so we get a chance to really bond and be together."
Thus, the restraint and economy that the musicians bring to their live performances reappear on the album, but the disc's secret weapon is the addition of Vince Mendoza's orchestral arrangements. As well as being a solo artist and composer, the Connecticut-born Mendoza has excelled himself in collaborations with such musical thoroughbreds as Al Di Meola, Joni Mitchell, Kyle Eastwood and Joe Zawinul, and he even wrote arrangements for Robbie Williams' album Swing When You're Winning. On Melody's album, his arrangements run the gamut from sleek, skipping Brazilian rhythms to slow, brooding dramas. One obvious highlight is Our Love Is Easy, a steamy epic of forbidden love in which Melody's sensual vocal rides over Mendoza's painfully intense string writing. Echoes of Peggy Lee or Frank Sinatra in his Only The Lonely period are probably no accident.
"We were recording at Capitol and Vince was saying 'if you don't start writing happier tunes you're never going to have a career,'" chortles Melody. "He was totally joking! But in a way it was ironic because the sentiment of Our Love Is Easy sounds like everything is great, yet you hear the arrangement and it sounds almost like a funeral procession at the beginning. It has that for very specific reasons, because the song is about a great love and a great love lost. There's a line that goes 'they say the poisoned vine breeds a finer wine', and that's to say the things that are not necessarily offered to you sometimes offer greater promise. Therein lies the irony, that the love you're talking about is beautiful, but it's laid within the knowledge that it's impossible."
The Mendoza magic has also been liberally sprinkled over the album's title track. It's a haunting ballad which seems to hang in space, held aloft by Melody's delicate piano playing and a shimmering mirage of strings. In mid-song, the orchestra veers off on a dramatic detour, spiralling upwards in a vertiginous swirl of sound reminiscent of one of Bernard Herrmann's Hitchcock soundtracks. Also awash in rich, moody strings is the heartfelt reverie of Deep Within The Corners Of My Mind, while the elegant bluesiness of Lover Undercover (a song which she has already been testing on live audiences) has been constructed over long, legato string phrases.
But there are plenty of changes of mood too. A recurring theme of the disc is Melody's infatuation with the music of south America, especially Brazil.
"I love Brazilian music, it's one of my favourite genres," she enthuses. "I love the Stan Getz bossa nova years, I love Getz/Gilberto, Jobim, Caetano Veloso... some amazing music has come from there, and I think it has a sentimentality that's very specific to Brazilian music itself. The voice is soft and hushed, but the lyricism is beautiful and poetic."
Melody's latin leanings are given an outing in If The Stars Were Mine. Constructed from percussion and acoustic guitar, it's a simple but easy-to-hum tune with lyrics painted in bright tropical colours.
"Yeah, it's got that Brazilian feel. Actually that's a song I wrote for the child I'll either eventually have or maybe I'll never have, but children will be around. It's sort of a sweet, tender song for a child. The last verse always kills me, I want to go 'awwwww!' in the middle - 'if the world was mine I'd paint it gold and green, I'd make the oceans orange for a brilliant colour scheme, I'd colour all the mountains make the sky forever blue, so the world would be a painting and I'd live inside with you'. It's super super sweet!"
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.
"She was a sweetheart, a really good woman, and apparently one of the only people in my family that I look like. Anyway when I was little my grandmother made me watch Wizard Of Oz a million times. One day years later I sat down to write and I came across these chords, and I realised it wasn't a song I was going to write but a song that had already been written - Somewhere Over The Rainbow."
In the mysterious way that songwriters have, Melody merged her memories of the song with her passion for Brazilian music, and the results are as refreshing as they're unexpected. Mendoza's sunny, supple arrangement perfectly complements her deliciously relaxed vocal, blowing the cobwebs off the much-loved tune to create a 21st century classic.
"If you're going to do a cover version you have to do something different with it," Melody muses, "otherwise it's like 'why bother?' And there are some songs nobody should ever touch, like One For My Baby by Sinatra -- just let it go, it's been done."
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. Ladies and gents, a star is born.