KT Tunstall

This event is part of Perth Festival Of The Arts.

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Way out in the desert KT Tunstall found herself. There she was, in cactus-country, Arizona, far from the adoptive London scene that provided the backdrop to four albums, 4 million sales, one Ivor Novello and one Brit Award, and further still from the Scottish folk heartland that had nurtured her. She was working with Giant Sand frontman Howe Gelb; maverick, desert punk spirit, a storied musician and producer. In Tucson’s Wavelab Studios, the pair were recording a set of songs that had bloomed into life, almost without Tunstall knowing it, and that foreshadowed two momentous events that would make summer 2012 a turning point in the 37-year-old singer/songwriter’s life.

“I’d always had this yearning to crack open my ribcage and be able to let everything out,” she reflects. She had attempted it through her personal journal writing, but had never had the confidence – the unselfconsciousness – to do it in song. “And then last year led to it all happening without even trying anymore,” says Tunstall. She’s referring to the death of her dad last August, then, the following month, her split from her musician husband. “But you know, the first half of the record was written before any of that happened, so there is a kind of weird savant quality to it.”

The result: an album of two halves, both temporally and physically. Invisible Empire//Crescent Moon straddles either end of 2012, the year KT Tunstall’s world was rocked from its axis before settling on a new emotional orientation. Each was recorded in Arizona, and both are swaddled with atmosphere, poignancy and, yes, hurt – but, also, hope. One, oddly, prefigures the losses that were to come; the other, beautifully, captures a new, reinvigorated state of being in the aftermath. Together, they combine to create the album of Kate Victoria Tunstall’s life.

Tickets cost £30, to book call 01738 621031