Hayley Westenra (11 page)

When we arrived back at the flat, I phoned Mum in New Zealand to tell her about one of the most remarkable evenings of my life. I was on a major high with adrenalin pumping through me, as often happens after I've given a good performance at a big concert. When this happens, it's very fulfilling because I feel that I've made a connection with the audience. It feels as if I've done a good day's work.

As I lay in bed that night, I had trouble sleeping. The events of the preceding few hours were still buzzing through my mind. It had not just been a good day's work: it had been an
extraordinarily
good day's work. And it had been made all the more special because I had gained the approval of Andrew Lloyd Webber, something that had been so important to me for so long.

The perceived wisdom in the music industry is that one of the toughest things for any artist who has had a successful debut album is to create a successful follow-up album. I know that
Pure
was in fact my third professional album, but it was my first for Decca, so that meant that, as far as everyone was concerned, my next album would be considered the follow-up.

Initially, I found the process exciting because I was itching to get back into the recording studio to create something new, since it had been well over eighteen months since I had
recorded
Pure.
One of the drawbacks about having an album that does well in a number of different territories around the world is that the artist has to spend a long time promoting that album, rather than getting on and making a new one.

By this stage, I felt that I had moved up from the level I was at when I recorded
Pure
and I was excited about having the opportunity to prove myself in the studio once again. I had quite a few different ideas for the album and I wanted people to hear my new work and to feel that I had evolved both in terms of my technical ability as a singer and also in terms of my general presence as a performer.

I'm very lucky that my voice is quite versatile and my musical tastes are quite varied. This does throw up some challenges, though, and, when it came to making my second album for Decca, I found it hard to know what musical direction I should be travelling in. That can make the process of creating an album quite a struggle. At that stage, I was still relatively young and I didn't want to restrict myself by finding that I had been put into a box by the music industry as the sort of artist who could do only this, or could never do that. I figured that further down the track I could make some more tightly themed albums.

At the same time, I wanted my new album to sound complete. This was a tricky set of decisions for me and, looking back, I probably should have stuck to my guns a lot more, instead of being pulled in lots of different directions by various record companies around the world, each of whom wanted something slightly different for their particular market. I listened to the opinions of a lot of people about which songs I should be doing. That said, though, in no way do I regard the album as a mistake. If everything you do as an artist is perfect, then you will never grow. This new album was an accurate snapshot of me as a performer at the beginning of 2005.

It's hard enough to choose songs for an album, but another conundrum that any artist has to consider very carefully is the question of what to call an album. I settled on
Odyssey
because, at the outset, I wanted to take the listener on a journey through different countries and through different moods. I, myself, had been on a massive journey all of my own – both literally, in terms of how far I had travelled from home, and also as a singer and a person. I wanted to share some sort of sense of that with the listeners.

Emotionally, my journey had also been something of a roller-coaster ride. By now, I was used to coming off stage on a huge high and having people applauding me. Meeting the fans after the concerts was always a buzz and I was always in great spirits after each concert. Then, I would find myself back in a hotel room, not just in a strange city, but often in a strange country. I would start to miss everyone and would feel isolated. Some days I was exhausted and other days I was full of energy. I've come to realise now that this epitomises the life of an international singer, but when I came to make
Odyssey,
everything had been happening so fast that I'm not sure that I had actually had time to sit down and rationalise this.

I was still discovering and experimenting with lots of different styles of music. I had grown up listening to classical music and, as a child, I had both played and sung some of the better-known parts of the repertoire. But I really didn't know nearly as much about it as I wanted to and I was enjoying discovering new works by people I had never come across before. I was also discovering aspects of folk and pop music that I had never previously encountered. In the period between
Pure
and
Odyssey,
I spent a lot of my time travelling and so had the opportunity to listen to piles of great albums. I love music, full stop. But it was all getting kind of confusing because there were so many different styles that I found exciting and appealing.

When I was growing up back in New Zealand, my
musical influences had included the likes of Andrea Bocelli, Kathleen Battle,
Vanessa Carlton,
Alicia Keyes,
Celine Dion, the boy band
Backstreet Boys, the all-girl group
B*witched and the Norwegian classical-crossover group
Secret Garden. I even enjoyed contemporary classical compilation albums such as my favourite, panpipe-heavy
Moods
album, which I listened to while I was studying.
The Spice Girls were another of my big loves. One afternoon at home, my next-door neighbours, Emma and
Nicola Ritchie, joined Sophie and me in dressing up in denim shorts and little tops so that we could put on a Spice Girls concert. We knew all the words to the songs, although we made up our own moves. I was always Sporty Spice because I looked the most like her with my brown hair, but secretly I always wanted to be Baby Spice – that was always Sophie because she had blonde hair. I guess we were all into the idea of 'girl power', and the Spice Girls were, to an extent, all strong female role models for us young girls. Their ethos centred on the things that girls could achieve. They also recorded the most amazingly catchy songs. So, my CD collection was a pretty eclectic mix. I'm not sure that many other twelve-year-olds in Christchurch had a Spice Girls CD and an album by the soprano Kathleen Battle sitting side by side on a shelf in their bedrooms.

Back then, I was very much into the contemporary pop music of the day. Now, I'm much more interested in the quality of great songwriting, and so I listen to the likes of Stevie Wonder, the Carpenters and
ABBA. I'm really enjoying listening to great songs, and the lyrical content of each track I hear is particularly important to me. When I was younger, I would tune into the music rather than the lyrics. Most of the time, the words didn't really mean anything to me because they were about things that I couldn't really relate to, such as the ups and downs of romantic relationships.

For me,
Benny Andersson and
Björn Ulvaeus, the two men behind Abba, rank as among the best songwriters of all time. They wrote amazing songs, which are still technically brilliant when you deconstruct them. When I started to write my own songs, I would write everything in minor keys. I'm not quite sure why, but I suppose that I must have felt that my music would be more sophisticated if they had a minor sound to them. But then, when I started looking at Abba songs, I realised that they tend to be in major keys. They have very simple, but highly effective, chord patterns and the overall sound is very optimistic. They are still so successful today because they knew how to write songs that people want to listen to.

Because my first album had sold so many copies, songwriters were keen for me to record their music on the follow-up. When you become established, people even begin to write songs with you in mind and send them to you unsolicited. I wanted to sing songs that gave me the chance to say something meaningful, but many of the writers who sent me material had an image of this young girl in their mind. I can imagine the process that they went through.

'What's she going to want to sing about?' they would ask themselves. 'Well, she's still young, so let's make her sing about dolphins and fairies and magical things, instead of anything with real substance.'

One songwriter who didn't do this was
Jeff Franzel. I was very drawn to one of his tracks called
'Never Saw Blue', which was very easy on the ear and was in the same vein as 'Who Painted the Moon Black?' from
Pure.
It had quite a pop sound to it, but I felt that this could be balanced by other tracks on the album. Jeff came to the studio and played it to the team working on the new album and everyone seemed to love it.

'Cool,' I said. 'That's one song down for the album.' Basically, this was how things developed from there onwards, one song at a time.

At the classical end of the spectrum, I felt that I was ready to record some bigger opera pieces such as 'Lascia Ch'io Piangia', Caccini's 'Ave Maria' and
'O Mio Babbino Caro'. These sat very comfortably alongside 'Never Saw Blue' in terms of maintaining the variety of different types of music that had worked so well on
Pure.
I was also determined to record
'Quanta Qualia', a track by the English contemporary classical composer Patrick
Hawes, which I felt was an incredibly atmospheric piece.

Working in the studio is an expensive business, so I tend not actually to record anything until I'm absolutely sure that I like it. I try to filter out as many tracks as possible, generally based on the lyrics and the piano part sent by each of the prospective writers. Usually, I judge any potential track by the way that I feel on my first listen to it. Lyrics are so important to me that, if someone has written a song and the words are too naff, I'll immediately switch off to the track, no matter how strong the melody may be.

As I flew home on the plane to New Zealand that Christmas, I listened to dozens of potential songs and, while I was there, I often received CDs in the post from the A&R boss at Decca, Jacky
Schroer. It's her job to help work with artists to develop the repertoire on their albums. She flagged up particular songs and then I would respond with a yes or a no. The songs that I immediately declined were those that I simply didn't like or those that didn't suit my voice. I was really open to as many different ideas as possible, although I seemed to be dogged by dozens of very cheesy offerings.

At home, I sat in my bedroom, blasting out CDs on the stereo that I had won in one of the Talent Quest competitions. I wanted to make sure that I chose songs that grabbed me on the first listen, as there's always a danger of becoming familiar with a song and then finding yourself enjoying it only because you know it so well. It's important that a song should not burn out quickly in listeners' affections once they
have heard it a few times, but the most significant thing has to be the way that a great song hooks someone in on the very first listen.

I was keen to include some of my own songs for
Odyssey,
and I'd been writing on my own, but I was not really at the stage where I was comfortable sharing my creations with all these people and opening myself to criticism. I worked on many of the arrangements on the album, which was a great experience, and I also co-wrote my first track, called
'What You Never Know (Won't Hurt You)', with a great
songwriter called
Stephan Moccio. I wanted to make sure that the track was as good as I hoped it was. So, while I was in New Zealand, I took my Walkman with me to a rock festival called
Big Day Out, which sees visits from bands all over the world. I was sitting at a table with a friend from home called Anita Smith and I asked her to listen to 'What You Never Know (Won't Hurt You)'.

'What do you think of this?' I asked. 'Do you like it or not?'

'Yeah, I do,' she replied.

'Now, you're not just saying that, are you? I need honesty here.'

'I really like it,' she said. And that was good enough for me.

During the same trip back home, together with the rest of my family, I went camping. Again, I took my collection of CDs to listen to while we were staying in the tent.

Now, camping was a big annual event right through our childhoods. Our family holidays usually began with four or five false starts. As we drove to the end of our driveway, the shout would go up from Mum in the front passenger seat, 'We've forgotten the sunhats!' Around we would turn to pick up the absent items. Then, we would get half an hour away and suddenly Mum would say, 'I don't know if I packed enough summer clothes. It's looking quite sunny
now.' Or, 'Sophie's forgotten her sarong. If we don't go back now, we'll have to buy another one.' So, around we would turn again. In the end, it became one of the Westenra family's running jokes. When we finally set off, there was always a horrible seven-hour drive to Golden Bank on the top of New Zealand's South Island.

Dad always drove, with Mum sitting next to him in the front and us three kids squashed into the back. Hitched to the back of the car was our trailer, crammed full with the tent, our bikes and a couple of chilly bins to help keep our food cool.

We tended to go camping in time for New Year's Eve. The plan was to arrive during the day and then to stay up late to see in the New Year. Most families set off around breakfast, so that they could arrive at the campsite in good time, set up their gear and then involve themselves in the festivities. We were never quite as organised as that and would usually arrive under the cover of darkness, which would mean that we would struggle to put up our tent with just the car's headlights and some torches to help us see what we were doing.

Our tent was an ex-demonstration model from a camping store, which we had bought as a Westenra family bargain. When it was finally pitched, the insides quickly took on a home-away-from-home quality, with the amount of paraphernalia that we brought with us growing every year. Mind you, some of the stuff that other campers brought with them, such as portable televisions, always made me wonder why they'd even bothered to go camping in the first place.

We had a little gas stove to cook on, although generally the campsites had kitchens. It became a great social event, as we saw the same families year after year. We had some wonderful times and it was a particularly big adventure when we were small children. Having said that, there were some miserable times, too, when it rained, and we were
forced to trudge out through the mud to visit the toilet in the middle of the night, armed only with a torch and an umbrella. I can remember asking myself why we were there when, not so far away, we had a nice, warm, dry house with our own beds. On balance, though, I wouldn't have swapped those camping experiences with Mum, Dad, Sophie and Isaac for anything else in the world.