March 2017

Olivia Newton-John and Beth Nielsen Chapman tell Kieran Kennedy about their new album with Amy Sky. Not since Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt united on Trio 30 years ago have three voices harmonised as beautifully and movingly as they do on Olivia Newton-John’s collaboration with Beth Nielsen Chapman and Amy Sky, Liv On. What makes the new album all the more powerful is that every song was crafted by the threesome to bring hope, comfort and healing to those suffering bereavement, battling illness or enduring trauma and grief of any kind. It’s an album that comes from the heart, because all three of the singers have had their share of loss or life-threatening illness, and each knows the special power of music to heal the soul. “The album was really inspired by the loss of my sister three years ago,” says Olivia, who enjoyed a string of country hits in the 1970s, before teaming up with John Travolta for the iconic musical Grease and going on to score poppier hits, such as Physical, in the 1980s. “I wrote a song about her as a way to help me heal from the experience because she died pretty quickly and shockingly,” the Australian songstress continues. “I asked Amy if she would help me finish the song, because we had worked together before on my album Grace And Gratitude. “Amy had just recently lost her mother, and we were talking about the fact that there is very little music for people going through loss and grief. I had the idea of doing an album about it, and we asked Beth if she’d join us, because I thought it would be a great sound with the three of us.” “Olivia called me and it sounded like a perfect fit for me,” says Beth, who has written seven number-one songs, including the Faith Hill smash This Kiss, and Willie Nelson’s Nothing I Can Do About It Now. “I’ve written songs about coming through grief over the course of my career,” continues the singer-songwriter who is also well known for her song Sand And Water – a favourite of Elton John’s – which she wrote following the loss of her first husband to cancer in 1994. “Most of the things that happen to me, I sort of write my way out of it. So I was already dialled in on that.” Beth and Olivia have been close friends since Olivia helped Beth through her treatment and recovery from breast cancer in 2000 – an experience that Olivia herself had been through eight years before. “I met Olivia through Annie Roboff, with whom I wrote This Kiss,” Beth remembers. “I didn’t know her well, but when I was diagnosed, Olivia called me and she was incredible. She totally came by my side. She put me in touch with her doctor and helped me get some questions answered very quickly. She checked in on me, she was incredibly supportive and we became friends through that, immediately.” Raising Awareness Although Beth didn’t know the Canadian singer-songwriter Amy Sky very well before they began writing the songs for Liv On, the project was a bonding experience for the three women Beth now calls “my girl tribe!” “It was wonderful. We got together a few times over the course of a year and would spend two or three days at a time writing, sharing our stories and eating snacks – that was a big part of the process! A lot of our personal emotions went into the songs and we worked very hard on them.” Beth adds: “There’s not a lot of uptempo songs. We felt that when you’re broken up over losing somebody, or in some sort of grief, whether it’s a divorce or some terrible thing in your life, you want something gentle and soothing. “We wanted it to be comforting, and melodic, so you’d be drawn back and want to hear it again.” The album’s title song was inspired by an awareness-raising campaign by the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia, which the superstar had raised funds to build in 2008. “They were using a poster on which they’d highlighted some of the letters of her name to spell Liv On,” Beth explains. “Olivia said, ‘I think that would be a great song title,’ and I said, ‘Are you kidding me? That’s a fantastic song title.’ So we wrote that with the intention of helping to promote the hospital, and we’ve also made a video for the song to help the hospital.” “We’re encouraging people to share their stories online, of living on,” Olivia says of the video. “To encourage someone else who’s going through some kind of loss, whether it’s a loved one or even a pet. And to show you how to cry the tears that you cry and then live on and be grateful for the day. Because the song’s really about life and how lucky we are. That’s how I feel.” The first song on the album is an expression of empathy: My Heart Goes Out To You. Poignant Words Beth recalls how the song came about. “We were having breakfast one day when Amy got a text from a friend of hers, and her friend’s baby had died. We just thought, Aw, there’s zero words to take someone out of that depth of sorrow. And I think it was Olivia who said, ‘The only thing you can really say is my heart goes out to you.’ “We got up from the breakfast table, went to the piano and wrote that song in about 15 minutes.” “Sometimes when people lose somebody, other people don’t know what to say,” Olivia comments. “They don’t have the right words. So this song says it for you. You can give them the album, and the song can express it for you.” As well as the newly written songs, the trio sing a moving vocal arrangement of Do Not Stand At My

In our exclusive interview Dolly Parton bares her heart to Eve Barlow. Truly a people’s artist, Dolly Parton’s lyrical inspiration on her latest album, Pure & Simple, is the same as it’s always been. She famously titled the character of the song Jolene after a child with that name at the front of her show. She insists her new guitar-led album highlight Head Over High Heels, which references Adele, is no shrewd attempt at luring the biggest popstar of 2016 into the studio. It’s just about who she uses for make-up inspiration these days. “Ah! Don’t you love that song?” she says. “I was just writing it and I didn’t even mean to [namecheck Adele]. I started singing, ‘Put on ma high heels/Lips painted…’ and I was thinking about painting my eyes up and all of a sudden it just came to me – ‘…my eyes like Adele’. And I thought, ‘Oh I love that line’. All my little nieces, all my girlfriends, everyone’s always trying to paint their eyeliner like Adele, and I thought, ‘What a clever little line for that’. You always hear that saying, ‘I’m head over heels in love.’ Well, for me, it would be ‘head over high heels’. That’s clever, right?” This year Dolly also celebrated her 70th birthday. “Did you say 17?” she jokes. “I heard 17”. Another time-old saying is that age ain’t nothing but a number, and the track I’m Sixteen is testament to that – a song about how she still acts like a teenager in love. It was written about her sister. “She had two terrible marriages, they broke her heart and she was so devoted to both of them. She thought, ‘I’ll never love again’. So down and depressed. All of a sudden she meets this guy, they’ve been through similar stuff, they got together and they are so happy they’re like two little silly kids. I thought, ‘My God, they think they’re 16!’ That’s where I got the inspiration for that.” Feminism When it comes to her stance on feminism – a word she still says makes her feel uncomfortable – Dolly is quick to attest to the important males she’s looked up to throughout her life. “I never think about it like that [men vs women]. Every once in a while I’ll look around and think, ‘Oh my, I’m the only girl in here’. But I just always had what I had to offer. I grew up in a family of six brothers and my dad, my uncles, my grandpas. I was very close to them. I just understand men, I’m comfortable with men, unlike a lot of women. But I’m so, so proud of women – of us.” Even when discussing her former boss Porter Wagoner, who she co-starred with on The Porter Wagoner Show, and wrote I Will Always Love You about after parting ways with him, she’s gracefully measured. “He gave me a wonderful opportunity. I’ll always be grateful for that. He was a country boy and there was that inbred male chauvinist thing in him that a woman’s place is in the home. So when I started, and all of a sudden not only did I write songs but I sang them too, and had business thoughts, we clashed. We still need each other, men and women. We need our boys in their places and we need to be left alone to be in ours to do what we do. I think it’s wonderful that we’ve got to that point where we can be equal. Of course, there’s still a lot of work to do.” Staying Power Parton’s appreciation of men stems from the fact she inherited her acumen from her father, then built her career from it to ensure longevity and real staying power. “My daddy was a real smart person. Daddy was not educated at all but daddy had horse sense – that’s what we call it in the country, they call it street smart in the cities. That innate knowledge of what to do, what not to do, how to bargain, how to barter, my daddy was great at that. So I got my business sense from my dad. My daddy took care of everything, he counted every penny, he needed to know where everything was going, he had to. I learned that early on and I just applied that to my own business.” Parton played the long game and it’s worked. “I knew I didn’t wanna get hick-rich like so many young people do in the business. I didn’t wanna just make a bunch of quick money and then be gone tomorrow. This is a fickle business. You can have one or two hit records, or even just one, and think you’re the biggest star in the world and it never [takes off].” Passing down the generations, her god-daughter Miley Cyrus seems to have picked up some of that horse sense too. Parton doesn’t speak to Miley too regularly but the relationship there is authentic. “Don’t you love her?” she says. “I love Miley. We’ll send little messages back and forth now and then. I think the girl is so talented, so smart. She’s young and when she was going through all her stuff, she was trying to become who she is and that’s been hard for her, to crack through that other glass ceiling – that Hannah Montana entity – to be allowed to be Miley Cyrus. Everybody was so worried about her and I said, ‘Look, I’m not worried about her. I know she may be doing a lot of stuff but she knows what she’s doing. I don’t worry about how far or how high she jumps, she’s gonna land on her feet!’” Artistic Integrity Dolly knows how to fight for artistic integrity, too, having been criticised in the 80s in particular for turning her back on the country scene, and charging ahead into something more mainstream pop. “You have to do what you feel

Ward Thomas prove that there’s still magic in the country music business, writes Steve Faragher. If there’s one thing about country music that delights me, it’s that talent will out, and honesty will prevail. It’s like the American Dream, only real. If you’re super-talented, super-nice (and ambitious enough), then the gods of Nashville will smile on you. Don’t believe me? Too cynical to accept that? Step forward the case for the defence: Ward Thomas. It’s incredible to believe that, in 2012, two completely unknown 18-year-old twin sisters from rural Hampshire were writing an album, while completing their A-levels, that would reach Number 9 in the UK album charts and launch an international career that, just four years later, would see them being a successful headline act at festivals across the country and releasing (for Sony Music no less) one of the most eagerly anticipated country music albums of 2016. What’s even harder to believe is that, having just talked to them, I can honestly tell you that there is no meanness, no brattishness to this pair. What they are, though, is a lot more grown up from the heady days of their debut. “We worked first on Cartwheels about two years ago. That was the first song we wrote. That lead us in the direction of this second album. We decided to call the second album Cartwheels because when we played that song live on our tours in the UK it was a moment in the set when we realised this was the kind of music we wanted to be making, the kind of sound we were heading for. The reaction from the audience was really special as well. There’s a pause in the song during which you could have heard a pin drop. I watched the faces of fans, women mostly, and knew they felt the vulnerability of the lyrics. It was a magical moment.” It’s Lizzy (the blonde one, the press release tells me) talking to me on the phone from their tour car in Ireland. The signal keeps breaking up, but her sincerity is clear. Catherine’s also in the car, but on the other line, though sometimes she clearly leans over and interjects. “The first album, we wrote when we were a lot younger. We’re at a different stage in our lives. We wrote Cartwheels from our experiences and from stories we heard. It’s all about the experiences that people go through in their early 20s.” Apparently, Ward Thomas were always Nashville-bound, and it was all kicked off by their Canadian cousins: “Cousins from Canada came over and lived with us for a while when we were younger, and introduced us to all sorts of country music, but particularly the Dixie Chicks. The Dixie Chicks were the reason we got into writing songs and doing music. They were our biggest influence, and still are. We love everything about them.” So, heavily influenced by The Dixie Chicks, and doing their A-levels, they decided to write a hit album… “Our first album was a very unexpected hit for us, it was so exciting. We started writing it at school. The day after our very last A-level exam, we were flying off to Nashville to record the album. “I didn’t do very well in my last exam,” Lizzy adds. “I was too busy thinking about Nashville. All our friends were doing gap years or thinking about going to university, but not us. We knew exactly what we wanted to do, and we thought we could do all that other stuff later on. It’s great for us on tour, as all our friends are at university and so everywhere we go we’ve got someone to stay with – it’s very useful. We get to see them a lot.” That independently released first album, From Where We Stand, written at school and recorded in Nashville, sold more than 25,000 copies. The sisters went on to play two UK tours, including gigs at London’s O2 arena and Hyde Park along the way. But now they’re older, and with a second album and a seriously major record deal come different sorts of expectations, and a definite change in direction. Do Ward Thomas agree with Eric Church that there are no genres in music any more? “For this album, I think we’re very country-influenced harmony-wise, but there is lots of crossover and that’s great because it’s just a whole lot of music mixing in together. Country as a genre has a big meaning to it and it always has had: back in the day Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn sang very heartfelt, emotional country music, Willie Nelson too, and it goes from there to Miranda Lambert and Eric Church, Kacey Musgraves, Taylor Swift – all very different kinds of music. All the songs have stories and they’re very authentic, and they all have real music; very live instrumentation, very honest. You might say that Adele has some country influences because her music’s very storytelling and honest. That’s what they all have in common.” So, how does their songwriting process work? “We co-wrote a lot for this album with two girls. Jessica Sharman’s from the UK too and Rebekah Powell is from Nashville [she’s the Nashville-bred daughter of revered hit-maker Monty Powell], and we met Rebekah in Nashville and we had a really great connection with them both. Four girls in their early 20s going into a room and pouring their hearts out, sometimes with a bottle of wine for the late-night writing sessions. “Catherine had ‘guilty flowers’, that phrase, in her head and we were talking about how it was a great title for a song, and we got into a writing room with Shelly McErlaine of Alisha’s Attic and Ben Adams from A1 and then we created the stories and the concept for that song with them. Other times, we might start with a melody and create from that, it’s different every time.” The girls have just finished a summer of festivals across