"This
would have come a lot sooner, but I had a baby, and I wanted to focus on being
a mum for awhile," Minnie Driver says of Ask Me to Dance, her third
Rounder/Zöe album, and her first new release since 2007.
In a
musical career that's run concurrently with her endeavors as one of her
generation's most acclaimed and in-demand actresses, Minnie Driver has
consistently demonstrated an organic, distinctive set of talents that have been
honed through a lifetime of music-making.
Ask Me
to Dance marks another notable landmark in Driver's creative evolution. Where her first two albums, 2004's Everything
I've Got In My Pocket and 2007's Seastories, focused on her own vivid
songwriting, Ask Me to Dance finds the artist interpreting a selection of
compositions by some of her favorite songwriters, demonstrating the breadth of
her musical interests while showcasing her substantial interpretive skills.
Driver
lends her warmly expressive voice to an impressively diverse set of songs,
underlining her talent as a song stylist as well as her deeply personal
engagement with the material. She
submerges herself in the bittersweet vibe of "Waltz #2" by Elliott
Smith, whom Driver befriended when both were in the early stages of their
respective careers, and brings a jazzy lilt to The Cure's "Close To
Me." While her readings of Neil
Young's "Tell Me Why," John Prine's "Speed Of The Sound Of
Loneliness," and Neil Finn's "Better Be Home Soon" cut straight
to the emotional heart of those songs, she reinvents the Killers' "Human" as an affecting country
ballad, reworks the swinging Sinatra standard "Fly Me To The Moon" as
a stark, moody ballad, and recasts Stevie Wonder's "Master Blaster"
as a pensive, introspective mood piece.
"This
is something that I've always wanted to do," Driver says of the covers
project. "Every single song on it
has enormous resonance for me, for one reason or another. It's called Ask Me to Dance because a lot of
it is my entire teenage experience of standing at the side of a dark dance
hall, just willing someone to ask me to dance.
Some of these songs are the ones that helped me through being a
teenager.
"But
it wasn't just about going back to the past," she continues. "The point was to choose songs that I
felt a real connection to, and then metabolizing the song and seeing how I
could bring something new to it. It was
much harder than I thought it would be, and it was quite a challenge to try to
turn these songs into something new, and to find myself in them in a way that
would also be meaningful to other people."
London-born
Amelia Fiona Driver spent much of her early childhood in Barbados, until her
parents separated and sent her back to England to attend boarding school. As a teenager, she began singing and playing
guitar in London jazz clubs, while earning her degree in drama from the
Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art.
By the time she reached her 20s, she was acting regularly on British TV,
while singing with the jazz group Puff, Rocks and Brown.
"I
don't know if I actually did the whole Malcolm Gladwell thing of playing for
10,000 hours, but I felt like I did," Driver recalls. "I had planned to make music my primary
thing, but then I got offered a film and it all went off in a different
direction. At the time, I thought that I
was ready to take on the music industry, but I don't think that I really
was. I had to grow up enough to have
something to say."
Although
her band won a development deal with Island Records, Driver temporarily put her
musical passions on hold when her acting career took off, first with her
breakout role in Circle of Friends in 1995, and subsequently with high-profile
turns in such films as GoldenEye, Big Night, Grosse Pointe Blank, Sleepers and
Good Will Hunting. Her work in the
latter film earned Driver her first Academy Award nomination, along with a
London Film Critics' Circle Award for British Supporting Actress of the Year.
As her
acting career gained momentum, Driver found time to continue writing songs,
gravitating towards a rootsy folk-pop sound that she unveiled with the release
of 2004's Everything I've Got in My Pocket and refined on 2007's
Seastories. Both albums received
considerable critical acclaim and won Driver a substantial fan base.
Driver
was hardly idle in the seven years separating Seastories and Ask Me to
Dance. In addition to raising her
now-five-year-old son, she won wide acclaim for the FX TV series The Riches,
for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award as Best
Lead Actress. She also starred in the
2010 BBC series The Deep, and appeared in the feature films Conviction and
Barney's Version, for which she won a Genie Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Most
recently, Driver starred in the television movie “Return to Zero,” a
devastating true story of a couple’s attempts to navigate their way through a
pregnancy filled with doubt, grief and trepidation. Driver was nominated for a
2014 Critics’ Choice Television Award, as well as a 2014 Primetime Emmy Award
on behalf of her performance in the film. She's also currently one of the stars
of the NBC series About A Boy, which will premiere its Second Season on
Tuesday, October 14th at 9:30PM.
Driver
recorded Ask Me to Dance with noted producer Marc "Doc" Dauer, who
also produced her first two albums, and legendary engineer Jim Scott, who
worked on Seastories, along with many of the same musicians who played on her
prior releases.
"I
really like the continuity of working with the same people," Driver
states. "To me, that's a lot more
interesting to me than the idea of going to France to make a record with
Phoenix or going to North Africa to work on some world beats. I'm more interested in finding my own groove,
and I like where I'm at with these guys, because there's a shorthand and a
communication that's developed over time.
This time, we were all in the room together, and it just felt so good
and so positive. I gave a little speech
every time we started a new song, letting them know what the song meant to me,
and they got it."
Having
ended her extended recording hiatus, Minnie Driver is returning to music with a
renewed passion. She's also looking
forward to return to playing live, and planning to work around About A Boy's
shooting schedule to bring Ask Me to Dance to life on stage.
"Everyone's
journey is different, and there's a million different ways of doing it,"
she reflects. "With my first
record, because I had been waiting for such a long time to do it, I felt such a
need to prove myself. And then people
actually listened and realized that it wasn't a self-aggrandizing trainwreck,
so now I don't feel like I have quite so much to prove. But music is still very important to me, and
I feel like I'm still learning and still growing.
"You
can't talk people into believing that you're good at something," Driver
concludes. "You just have to show
them, and then you just have to keep doing it and keep getting better at it,
and let the work speak for itself."
Ask Me To Dance will be released on October 7, 2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment