Diana Krall album has a pop sound - but don't accuse her of leaving jazz behind
Singer revisits songs from her teenage years on an album that marks a departure from the jazz standards that made her name
For their summer holiday a couple of years ago, Canadian singer Diana Krall and her husband, English rock musician Elvis Costello, stayed with their twin sons at their secluded cabin on Vancouver Island.
They'd taken with them The Beatles in Mono box set and every evening, after the children had gone to bed, they'd light candles, eat a home-cooked dinner and listen to a different Beatles record.
"We'd talk about it … what was happening here and happening there," she recalls.
Those conversations and explorations are one of several inspirations for Krall to depart, temporarily, from her more usual jazz repertoire.
For her latest album, Wallflower, which was released earlier this month, she teamed up with 16-time Grammy Award-winning musician and producer David Foster (who has worked with Celine Dion, Michael Bublé and Westlife, and is one of the judges on Asia's Got Talent starting next month) to create an album of pop songs, mostly remembered from her teenage years.
"Those were days when you waited to be able to afford a record, or waited until it came on the radio," she says, remembering hanging out with friends at Ski Hill on Vancouver Island, on the west coast of Canada, with Peter Frampton posters on her bedroom wall, listening to as much music as she could get hold of. Those albums included Jim Croce's 1972 Operator, about trying to locate a former lover who has moved to LA with the singer's best friend; the Carpenters' song Superstar, about a lonely groupie in love with a pop singer; and the Eagles ballad Desperado, about a cowboy who is going down the wrong track in his life.