Nerina Pallot on how pregnancy influenced her new album
"Mark Savage: Did motherhood affect your lyrics?
Nerina Pallot: There's a song called History Boys that I would never have written if I hadn't become a mother, because it changed my perception of the world.
MS: That song is talking about casualties of war. "All these ghosts / Sons of mothers."
NP: I was four months pregnant, and watching footage of fallen soldiers coming home at Wootton Bassett and it just… [pauses] I suddenly related to those boys as people's kids. And I couldn't stop weeping, because I thought, "gosh, I'm having a little boy and maybe one day he'll want to become a soldier, and I might have to deal with something as horrid as that."
MS: You can feel the emotion in your vocal...
NP: I was trying to be political without being political. On a human level, regardless of whether a particular war is wrong or right, there's a human sadness and tragedy at the heart of it. And that's what I was trying to describe in the song - loss. The senseless loss of young lives.
MS: There's a thematic link between that song and your first big single Everybody's Gone To War. Has your viewpoint changed at all?
I haven't thought about that - but I suppose, on a personal level, I feel less angry, more sad.
It's quite easy to be angry in music, because you just turn everything up. But real sadness - sadness that isn't cloying or sentimental - is the hardest thing to convey.
I really wanted people to be moved and thoughtful at the same time."
/Mark Savage/