Pearl Aday: Interview

Phone interview with Pearl Aday

By Aniruddh "Andrew" Bansal

March 23rd 2010, Los Angeles CA

Andrew: How excited are you for your first headlining tour coming up?
Pearl: I'm really excited about this tour! We haven't been out on the road in a while since we went out opening for Velvet Revolver and Meat Loaf back in the UK and Germany. We've been doing some shows in LA. We did the Jimmy Kimmel show. But it was time we got the album out in the US, and it's coming to Europe in May. So it's time for us to get out there and start playing live! I just love it and I can't wait. I'm really, really excited about it.

Andrew: Tell me a little bit about some of the recent major gigs that you've done that helped build up to the album release and this tour.
Pearl: The album [Little Immaculate White Fox] was released in the US and Canada on January 19th. On January 18th we played at the House of Blues in Los Angeles on the Sunset Strip. It was a great show and a great venue. The next day the album came out and on the 21st we did Jimmy Kimmel Live. Usually they only allow musical guests to do one song, but we asked and they let us do three. We actually did our first featured song and then they allowed us to play out over the closing credits with the second song. They let us play a third song which wasn't aired on the show but they posted it on their website. That was really great and it was a huge opportunity. After that, mainly we've been trying to get this tour together in the US and finally get out to States, to places where people are buying the album and those that haven't seen us yet. The show at the Club Nokia with the Ray Manzarek band [October 6th 2009] was a lot of fun. I had a really good time doing that. We did that one acoustically. We got amazing feedbacks from people on doing those songs acoustically. So recently when we went into the studio, we recorded those acoustic versions. That came out great and we are kind of sitting through that and editing it now. That's going to come out possibly as an EP. But it's really good to know that those songs are strong enough to translate acoustically.

Andrew: According to a press release, the songs on your debut album are 'as original as they are familiar'. What exactly is the original part and what's the familiar one?
Pearl: I think when the person wrote that, what it meant by familiar was it feels comfortable to the listener. May be its something they want to hear. It's familiar in the sense that it is rock and roll. It is almost like when you walk into place that you've never been but it automatically feels like home. It gives you a vibe like 'Wow, this is really familiar and comfortable to me. This is really good and I like it'.

Andrew: For this album, I believe you wrote the lyrics for the songs and the music was done by Jim Wilson and Marcus Blake. Tell me about how the writing process went.
Pearl: Jim and Marcus are from Mother Superior basically. They are a trio so they have a drummer. Those guys write all the songs and I've been a huge fan of them since forever. When I started working with them, basically how it worked was they would call me up and tell me that they have an idea for a song, or a melody, or a riff or something like that. So I would go over to their place when they still lived together and it was really simple, nothing fancy. They would sit down on the floor in the living room and play it for me. I recorded it on a little tape recorder I had. We would extract the main melody and chorus then I would go home and start plugging lyrics into the music that they played. So it's a pretty bare bones process for us. It fell into place really easily. We all fitted on the same plane and worked really well together. We get where each other is coming from. But for all the songs it was music first and then I plugged the words in.

Andrew: What kind of an impact did it have on the album the fact that you are Meat Loaf's daughter?
Pearl: It didn't have any impact on my writing or singing. If anything having to do with my dad as far as having an influence is may be during the shows that I grew up watching him perform. I learned a lot from him about performance, specially when I worked for him singing in his band for nine years touring around the world. So he influences me every time I perform in that sense, but in terms of writing the album, the songs or anything like that, there was no negative influence. May be positive because of some of the experiences I was able to absorb through my life. I've just been in and around the music business for my entire life. That's familiar to me, the process of making an album, because I've watched my dad do it a million times.

Andrew: I read the story behind the lyrics for 'Broken White'. Does every song have a unique story of its own?
Pearl: I guess so. Its funny with writing because sometimes you'd start off thinking you are writing about one thing and as you go through writing it, it'll change or once you get to the end and you go back to read it, you go 'Oh that's what it was about!' So it's usually double edged. The song 'Rock Child' is definitely about me, growing up, sort of what just we talked about in terms of my dad being who he is, watching him perform. It's about me growing up in that atmosphere. There's a line in it that says, "I've been a little girl living center stage, I've been sleeping in a guitar case." I took that from my childhood because I actually used to do that. In recording studio that my dad used to work in when I was a baby, my mom would put a blanket and a pillow in an open guitar case and I would take a nap in it. So there are things like that. I always like to take artistic license with anything that I do. I don't want it always to be just about me all the time. I want to be able to sing my songs and write down my words. One thing my dad always says and I agree to it is, the song belongs to everybody. He didn't want to tell a story of what a certain song might be about, because he wants people to be able to take that song and wrap their own lives and story around it. Then it becomes more personal and you can own it. Everybody can own it and make it special for themselves. You must have songs that you just love and they mean something special and personal to you. It might necessarily be, and probably isn't what the guy or woman who wrote it was thinking when they wrote it. But for you its different and that makes it heavy for you.

Andrew: The album has been well received in the US so far. Has it made up your mind for doing more albums in the near future?
Pearl: Of course, yeah. I've only begun. This is just the first. Me, Jim Wilson, Marcus Blake and my other guitar player wrote the song 'Anything', the song on which Jerry Cantrell played. We've already started writing new stuff for the next time we go on tour. So yeah, this is really just the beginning.

Andrew: Where else are you planning to take this tour?
Pearl: We do the US in April and May. Then in the summer we'll be in the UK and Europe. We'll be headlining some club shows and we'll be doing some festival shows over there like 'High Voltage', 'Sonisphere' and hopefully 'Sweden Rocks'. They are all sort of in their rostering right now so we'll have those dates up soon hopefully.

Andrew: The hard/Southern Rock, Rock N Roll kind of music is mostly absent in today's world. Do you agree and does that make your album stand out more?
Pearl: I agree with you. It's definitely missing. I think that is why people are really enjoying it, not only because it's a good album and the songs are really strong, but also the style of it is missing. People miss it and I think a lot of people don't even realize that they miss it because it has been gone for so long. Nobody has really been doing that kind of music for a long time since the Black Crowes were doing it with 'Shake Your Money Maker' and 'The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion' albums. Who's really doing that anymore? I think we are.

Andrew: Scott Ian and Jerry Cantrell played on your album. Can we expect any guest appearances on the upcoming tour?
Pearl: I don't know, they might show up. We've got a lot of friends in the different cities in the US and of course you never know in festival gigs. If they are there, we'll definitely invite them to come up and play. Also the festivals in the UK and Europe are full of bands, so it's possible. We don't have any plans for that but spontaneity is a sweet thing!

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