On 8 October 2012, Beth Hart released her new album ‘Bang Bang Boom Boom’, the follow-up to ‘Don’t Explain’, her stunning 2011 collaboration with Joe Bonamassa. Featuring eleven stunning blues, jazz and soul influenced tracks, penned by Beth Hart, ‘Bang Bang Boom Boom’ is a life-changing record for the West Coast born singer, songwriter and musician. All of her life experiences, both positive and negative have come together for this career defining album.
The eleven original songs on this new collection, recorded live by Kevin Shirley, give Beth’s eclectic influences free rein, spinning from Spirit Of God’s brassy gospel to the sparse Thru The Window Of My Mind, with her first-ever piano solo on Swing My Thing Back Around, and an impossibly tender vocal on the Billie Holiday-flavoured Baddest Blues.
It’s that voice. When Beth Hart sings, clocks stop, hearts dance and neck-hair tingles. And when she tells her rollercoaster story, in a West Coast drawl that could distil whisky at fifty paces, it’s every bit as compelling. “There was definitely difficult stuff,” she reflects, “but there was incredible stuff as well. I wouldn’t change any of it, because you bring your experiences to the music.”
Picture the scene. It’s midnight in the mid-’70s, and in a slumbering Los Angeles family home, four-year-old Beth Hart is about to cause her first musical disturbance. “There was this commercial for pianos on TV,” she recalls, “and the music was Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. So in the middle of the night, I got up and played part of that song on the piano. My mother, father and all the other kids came out and they gave me so much love and attention, I knew right away this little ham had to have it. So I always knew I wanted to do it. I just knew…”
Her passion never wavered, but the road to Hart’s stunning new album, Bang Bang Boom Boom, was far from a smooth ride, and you hear every bump in her unflinching lyrics and soulful delivery. “I never thought I’d be a singer,” she says. “I thought I’d be a classical pianist or cellist, go to Juilliard. When I did start singing, I took opera lessons and my teacher was wonderful, but one day she goes, ‘Beth, I don’t think classical is for you, because you like to do your own thing with the music’. That’s when I started putting singing to my own music.”
QUELLE: DS/ www.bethhart.com
