Rosalie Deighton – 21 Days.
The music industry conjures up its own fair share of extraordinary tales but very few are as salient and memorable as Rosalie Deighton's.
Born in Holland to an Indonesian mother and a British father, Rosalie has been playing music since the age of three and she and her family moved to Barnsley, Yorkshire when she was just eight. The Deighton Family were musicians and already successful practitioners of an eclectic range of bluegrass, Cajun, country and folk with Rosalie and her four brothers and sisters very much part of this musical entourage. Rosalie played spoons, then mandolin, before finally contributing vocals and her own song-writing skills to a repertoire that featured on five albums released on the Green Linnet and Rounder labels. The Deighton Family toured the world but as Rosalie confesses "at the age of thirteen I knew I had to do it on my own". There was a minor diversion as Rosalie and sister Kathleen collaborated with Kate Rusby and Kathryn Roberts (amongst others) to record an album called Intuition in 1993, but by 1995 The Deighton Family groove had come to a graceful end and Rosalie found herself contemplating the possibilities of a glittering future. Which is where this story really begins and truth becomes stranger than fiction.
Unsurprisingly, Rosalie soon signed a recording and development deal with EMI but it should come as no surprise to anyone that the people who signed her to the label didn't stay around long enough to watch her finish making a record. A six month period saw Rosalie writing with a different person every day of the week but nothing ever came of it. In 1998, after Rosalie had successfully freed herself from the shackles that were EMI, she signed a publishing deal with Chrysalis, then, soon afterwards, another new recording contract.
At this point you would have expected the madness to stop but you'd be wrong. At the last count, and over what seemed like an eternity, Rosalie can remember no less than sixteen producers working on her material. It must have seemed like a different lifetime because, with The Deighton Family, she’d helped put records down in two days flat. Now, she was seriously being asked to choose between 22 versions of the same song – with no guarantee that any of them would ever see the light of day. To soften the blow, the record company kept buying her vintage guitars (she now has seven!) when all she really wanted was her record on the shelves. She was told to cancel all forthcoming gigs (''but that's my bread and butter, I've never had a proper job'' she said at the time) in order to maximize exposure around her "imminent" release. Three years later and a quarter of a million pounds down the line, the resultant record "Truth Drug" (how ironic is that?) surfaced in 2001. The reviews were agreeable but Rosalie - who's always been her own sternest critic - claims it had very little to do with her and, further, that she hasn't actually listened to the record since its day of release.
After all that, it’s a great pleasure to report that "21 Days" is an absolute belter. Intimate, powerful, melodic and blunt, "21 Days" (incidentally, the amount of time it took to record) is a return to Rosalie's roots. Essentially New English Folk, it is also the sound of someone hitting the ground running and a record that's so instant and classic, you might think it's been knocking around your house for years. The album opens with "Sing To Me" a song that was actually written after someone asked Rosalie to write something that would break their heart ("Here’s a song to break your heart/But these are only words from someone else's dreams"). It works, of course, as does "Wagon Wheel" (inspired by a squirrel called Bingo!) and the revelatory "Fairweather Friend" although it’s not until "Turn Down The Light" (one of four songs co-written with ex Bible mainman Boo Hewardine – the others being "Sing To Me", "Pilgrim" and "Bruised"), that Rosalie really starts playing with your emotions. Here, she appears to be in the middle of some Plath-esque melodrama where she reveals that she "would rather be lonely than alone".
"21 Days" continues with "Where Do You Go" which is about the little brother Rosalie never had and describes the activity of watching her friend's little boy sleeping – although it was actually inspired by a song her father used to sing to her called "Shall I Wake You From Your Sleep". After this, the worldly "Pilgrim" toys with characterisation ("You're no Jesus/I'm no Mary Magdalene") and "Don't" recalls the sonic timbre of the brilliant but largely forgotten Mary Margaret O'Hara. Rosalie's songwriting heroes comprise all the classic names from Tom Waits to Bob Dylan but among her fellow female artists she does cite the aforementioned Mary Margaret as an inspiration. ''It's the pure, classic singer-songwriter sensibility that really moves me," she says. ''But I'm also a complete sucker for bluegrass music ever since I heard it at all those folk festivals as a child.''
"I wouldn't mind but I spent all this time loving you" confesses Rosalie on the extraordinary "Favour", another heartbroken love song that just about prepares you for "Bruised" where she admits she's not as tough as she thinks she is. Ultimately, title track "21 Days" turns out to be the album's centrepiece if not its coda: a therapist had told Rosalie that we all need 21 days to break a cycle and this just happened to be the amount of time she was due to spend on the road with another artist she almost fell for. Instead of doing so, however, she found herself falling for her best friend and fellow musician Dave Marks who just happened to be on the same tour with her and who correspondingly ended up as co-writer on this very song. The album concludes with "Second Best", a landmark tune that’s anything but.
"21 Days" was produced by Sam Dixon, Jon Kelly and Dave Marks and was released on the Echo label in May 2007. It features a musical range of instruments that includes national steel, slide and twelve string guitars, glockenspiel, mandolin, Hammond organ and melodica. Rosalie is being a little disingenuous when she says, "My own songs tend to dwell on the downside of romance – it's very rare I write an upbeat song'' because "21 Days" is more than that – it is the sound of your heart missing a beat. It is also the record that Rosalie Deighton has threatened to make her whole life and one that you (and, indeed, no doubt her this time around) are going to listen to again and again.
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