Tailor is one of the enigmas of the music industry. Helen Herimbi picked the artist’s brain about her new album and more.
TAILOR is centre-stage, swinging her hips. Her band play a slow, sensual groove. You think you know me, she starts singing, then smirks, I got news for you; you don’t.
Throughout the launch for her third album, Trust Part 1, she gives the audience a glimpse of what she’s been going through since her last album, the South African Music Award-nominated, Light, came out in 2014.
It’s a glimpse because while the songs sound amazing and she pours her heart into bending, changing and moulding her voice to suit the mood of the lyrics, she closes her eyes a lot. She’s performing as much for the audience, as she is for herself.
In that way, some of the audience might walk away feeling like they still don’t know the real Tailor. So I sat down with the indie dark pop singer-songwriter in an attempt to dig deeper.
“From the get-go, with management, producers, the process of it all, I had to trust,” she tells me on a hot day at a restaurant in a quiet Joburg suburb.
“But it felt good to let go and just trust. That’s one of the reasons I named the album Trust. I’ve been through such beautiful life-changing moments in the past year that sometimes the only option is to trust that it’s all going to work out.”
Recently, she accompanied Live’s frontman, Ed Kowalcyzk, on his last tour of South Africa. Tailor and Kowalcyzk collaborated on a song called Angels on a Razor, but an even more significant collaboration came with the pairing of Tailor and Zak Loy, who plays guitar for Kowalcyzk’s solo work.
Loy ended up producing the eight-track Trust, which was recorded in Austin, Texas. Tailor remembers: “I didn’t know what Ed’s band set-up was at the time, but obviously, travelling with him and doing the tour with him, Zak and I got along so well. Nothing was forced. It was just this feeling. The way he was playing with Ed on stage was inspiring. I thought, ‘if he’s so good at all of this, he might be a good producer’, and that’s where the whole trust thing comes in.”
The album, which includes an interlude about choosing to swim rather than sink, is very good. Harking back to her stellar 2012 debut, The Dark Horse, Tailor and her band experimented a lot with sounds. She brought in a drummer who uses actual chains to create a vibe for one of the best songs on the album, Avalanche.
That’s the song she seemed the most into at the launch – the one about a lover not knowing or owning her. “I love R&B and soul and blues,” she smiles. “Especially blues. I love that emotional vibe on stage.
“Avalanche is really about how we never really own anyone. It took me a long time to realise that. They are borrowed to us and they are there to teach us something and we are there to teach them something. It’s about being your own person and that being okay.”
On the song, she sings: Every time I hear your voice on the radio/let it be a reminder to let you go. So I ask her if that line refers to a DJ or fellow musician.
She puts her hand up to her mouth and her answer mirrors the tattoo on the side of her palm, which reads: “Light”.
“Let’s just say it is whatever you think it is. As an artist, I don’t want to know what all the songs are about. I want room for the listener to make up their own mind. That’s how I like to listen to songs.
“The magic with my songwriting is the fact that I’m not a literal writer,” she continues. “I use a lot of metaphors. If you look back at my older work, I write lines like: my phone burns down my soul and the wolf keeps running and running we did. So maybe I let them off easily.”
Feeling like I now know Tailor a little bit – and only a little bit – better, I can almost predict the answer to my last question, but I ask anyway. Will there be a part two of Trust? She smiles and, as expected, says: “I have no idea if there will be a part two. We’ll see. To be continued…”
Tailor’s Trust Part 1 is out now.