Ask her growing legion of fans, however and most will tell you that no one sings a Nielsen Chapman song quite like the lady herself, as with most singer songwriters Beth is especially powerful when bringing the full range of passion and emotion to her lyrics, as only the writer of the song truly can.

Her first album, ‘Hearing It First’ was released by Capitol Records back in 1980, but it wasn’t until her fourth release, 1997’s ‘Sand & Water’ (Warner/Reprise) that people really began to sit up and take notice. The most recent recording is ‘Back to Love’, released in January this year, which has been widely acclaimed as a return to the mainstream pop style that first brought Beth to our attention. Now after a busy year spent largely out on the road, she returns to the UK in September and October for a high profile 16 date tour in support of the new album.

I spoke to the Nashville-based singer songwriter just prior to the tour, to talk about creativity, celebrity, love, life and the pitfalls of being your own boss! I found Beth in good spirits and a very talkative mood, despite the mid-morning Tennessee heat, which she described as “so unbelievably hot you could cook your soup outside on the sidewalk in a bowl!” Well, I mused, had we both been on the same side of the Atlantic rather than either end of a telephone line, that would have sorted out lunch, for sure.

Beth, I referred earlier to the large number of high-profile artists who have recorded your songs. When you first began writing songs professionally, were they targeted at other singers rather than for yourself to record…?

No, I think I’ve always written to follow the song. Even when I first started out, I would write maybe a cowboy song, or something jazzy, or then I would listen to one of my parents records and write a big ballad. So I was experimenting with all different styles and genres and I have a pretty flexible voice, so in certain cases I would sing in a particular character or accent. When I was developing through the years as a teenager or a young adult, you might have heard a demo where I sound completely different from one song to the next – one minute I’m trying to sound like Billie Holiday and the next I sound just like Joni Mitchell. It really wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I started to sing with my speaking voice, which is actually a technique that I teach in my workshops. Instead of singing, I teach how to talk in pitch and rhythm and it’s fascinating when I’m working with young songwriters and their singing is slightly off, I’ll often trick them into singing with their speaking voice and all of a sudden this real voice will shoot out and they’re like, wow, I didn’t know I could do that!

Every once in a while someone will call and say, for example ‘we need you to write a song for Willie Nelson’ in which case I’ll stylise it a bit for that artist, but that is a rare exception. And even a song like ‘This Kiss’ which was a big hit for me via Faith Hill’s recording, I wrote that with Annie Roboff and Robin Lerner and we all just thought we’d written a great song and then hoped that someone would cut it. Then it was about a year and a half before Faith recorded it, so often the songs have been around for a while just waiting for someone to discover them.

Particularly with This Kiss, which was a huge hit worldwide, it doesn’t sound like a Beth Nielsen Chapman song to me now and I know that when I’ve seen you sing it live, there is a definite tongue in cheek element to the performance…?

Yeah, I certainly have a lot of fun with it, you know and sometimes people have asked me if I regret giving it to Faith Hill and I say, no – she did a great job with it and gave it the chance to be a much bigger hit than I could have done. It’s not that I’m too old to sing it, but it’s much more beautiful and fun coming from a twenty or thirty-something; Faith brought out a vibrancy in it, you know?

As if writing and recording songs and performing concerts wasn’t enough, Beth also holds lectures and workshops on the subject. At the beginning of this tour she will run a workshop in the UK for the first time, as she told me:

I have lectured a little in the UK before, but never actually taught a day long workshop over there, so I’m very excited about this. It will be at The Stables in Milton Keynes on September 19th and will take place during the day, covering creativity, song writing and the singing with your speaking voice technique, very similar to the workshops I’ve done in the States. There will be information about this and other workshops on my website.

Pic: Judith Burrows

In these lectures I believe you also talk about the healing power of music, which is an area I find very interesting…

Yes, I do, it’s similar in content to the talk that I give for songwriters who are not necessarily aiming to be professionals, just people who want to reconnect to their own sense of creativity. Or sometimes I’ll be teaching a workshop to a particular group, say, all breast cancer survivors, where I’m gearing the information to say that part of the way they can heal is to start moving into some sort of creativity. Whether singing, writing or painting, anything you hear me say with regards to song writing, you can take and apply it to any area of the arts. It’s a flow, a creative flow – and that may sound slightly mystical, but it’s an amazing reality. You will often hear someone say, I’m not the creative type, my sister’s the one in our family…’ and they almost talk themselves out of the experience. With a lot of people I feel I’m salvaging their own belief system, just helping them to believe again in their own ability. Because it’s impossible for anyone not to be creative, literally everyone breathing has the ability. I have plenty of good tricks to get the audience to see that!

Creativity to me, is much more than how do I pay the electricity bill, you know. It has supported me, but there is a difference in quality between going to work to earn more income. What I do with my students is take them back to that childlike place, where there’s no expectation of what can I do with it, or will it be successful, because if you fill your head with that stuff you stop the flow right away. And what’s great about it is that creativity is this amazing gift that you can use in so many ways throughout your life. One of my frustrations in life, and believe me I love what I do, as a songwriter and a performer, but this whole year I’ve been touring the UK, Australia, America and now back to the UK in September, which is wonderful, but the person inside me who just wants to paint and sculpt is crying ‘help’, you know! I love to do all those things but like everyone else, my job often gets in the way!

I wonder how many musicians in the past have been constricted by outside pressures to produce or perform, to the detriment of their art...

Absolutely, that is the word, constricted, yeah. But it is also something that you can undo, and when you do, ironically, the un-constricted artist is more likely to write a better song or a bigger hit. So all that worry and pressure doesn’t help you at all, at any level.

Which probably accounts for the trend for people to do-it–themselves, setting up their own record labels to give themselves that extra time and space...

Right, and I’ve done that myself, I’ve had my own label now for several years – but it is a lot of work. Sometimes when I’m on tour and doing a lot of stuff, I refer to the Beth Nielsen Chapman that is the CEO of BNC records as the evil twin! Beth the artist sometimes wants to sleep late and walk around the park and take the day off, but Nielsen Chapman the record company CEO wants her doing press interviews and whatever she can to promote the record. So where I used to fight with the record company, now I am the record company – which means now I have to negotiate with myself to get some time off!

As you say, you’re coming back to the UK in September for a long tour, promoting ‘Back to Love’…

Yeah, I’m very excited about it. I love coming over to play in the UK and I hear rumours that the new album is getting some great airplay on Radio 2, so I’m also really excited about that....

I imagine that the UK in general and Radio 2 in particular have been good to you in the past…

Right, they really have and you know I only wish I could get the guys at Radio 2 to move and open up opposite in America (laughs). They play such a wide range of music, you know, whereas radio tends to be a bit more compartmentalised in the States; but I think people tend to like all different types of music, you have to change radio stations all the time to hear different styles of music around here.

Just before the tour starts, I’m also doing a show on the 17th September at the Mermaid Theatre for Radio 2’s ‘Friday Night is Music Night’ with a full orchestra; it will be my live show, but I don’t usually get to haul around an 82 piece orchestra! I have all of these string parts and orchestration for so many of my songs but it’s not the sort of thing you can do right across a big tour, so this will be a huge treat.

You may not have 82 musicians for the UK tour, but will have a band with you in September…

Yes, I’m going to have a fantastic little group this time, I’ll have Martin Allcock on bass as usual, although he can play pretty much anything I ask musically. Then there are a couple of young artists, both incredible singers, one is named Eilidh Patterson and the other is Ruth Trimble, both from Northern Ireland. They are wonderful songwriters and I’ve just kinda taken them under my wing because I believe they are so talented. So I’m really excited about having some fun with the vocals this time, you’ll hear much more interesting vocal arrangements of my songs.

Will the girls act as support as well?

I’m still not sure about that, there may be another support act, that’s still to be decided. There are a couple of other artists in consideration, but if they don’t open for me the girls will certainly get the chance to sing one of their songs during my set. It’s fun for me to be able to give them some exposure and I know that when people hear them they will love them, you know, people will thank you for exposing them to new talent!

Talking of Martin Allcock, I wanted to ask how you came to work with the Fairport boys…?

Well I met Maart and Simon Nicol at the same time; I was working with Paul Samwell Smith, I think it may have been around 1991, when I came over to record at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey. I don’t believe it is still there now, but it was a gorgeous studio in the countryside and I was producing my record with Frank Filipetti and Paul Samwell Smith. (Beth was recording her second album ‘You Hold The Key’. Sadly Ridge Farm closed its doors as a recording studio at the end of 2002). Paul was just wonderful, he is the master of putting together great studio musicians and there were a couple of songs where he just said, ‘these are the guys you want’ – and they were amazing. There was one particular song we were recording called ‘Dancer to the Drum’, which I’ll be playing on this tour in the fall. There will be a couple of old songs that will get the extra vocal make-over and that’ll be one of them. So we all fell in love with each other and I hadn’t seen them for a few years but then I reconnected with Maart around 2004 when I was playing a show in Manchester, I had him come up onstage and play on a couple of songs and he was just phenomenal. So the next time I came over to tour, he was the first person I called. And with Simon, I’ve been able to perform with him off and on, I had so much fun a few years back when I was asked to play at the Cropredy Festival, which was such a blast. They are dear friends of mine and both legendary musicians, as you know – and Fairport are a phenomenon. They have this amazing fan base, it’s got an intimacy to it, a real sense of community – and you can really feel that at the festival.

I agree, especially wandering around the village of Cropredy on the Friday or Saturday morning; it’s like being at a huge party where everyone is on the same wavelength musically…

Absolutely – and that was my experience with Robert Plant too.” (in February this year, Beth sang with Plant at Abbey Road Studios as part of a charity event for Cancer Research.) “He’s still in touch with people from his home-town, he can walk down the street and get a wave and a ‘hey Robert’ from people. It’s a lovely sense of community. He is so down to earth. I was absolutely thrilled to work with him, but I had prepared myself for a big star mentality, yet I didn’t encounter that at all. Just amazing.

I imagine that’s something that Alison Krauss must have found, working with Plant on ‘Raising Sand’…?

Yeah, I know Alison and she is very down to earth, but then she hangs out with all sorts of lofty people (laughs)! Actually that’s often the case, a lot of the artists that I really look up to tend to be those who have kept their feet on the ground. I met Sting one time and he was so accommodating, you know…

I’m not sure everyone gets that from Sting…

Well, the poor guy must get so many people coming at him all the time. But I’ve seen Robert have to pull back too, you know, because everyone has their own agenda and everyone wants a little piece of him – and there’s just not that much to go around, so occasionally he’s simply had to get in the car and drive away.

It is hard, from the fans perspective, to understand what that level of celebrity is really like…

Right. I don’t know if you remember that movie ‘Coalminers Daughter’ – I saw it again the other day and there’s this scene where Loretta Lynn is walking offstage and her fans are just overwhelmed and then one of them grabs a piece of her hair and pulls it right out of her head – ouch. And all the really big stars have had something like that happen to them at some point; although I must say that I haven’t had that, I’ve got some really great fans and none of them have tried to hurt me - yet…!

Your current album, ‘Back to Love’ has received some terrific reviews and many people refer to it as a return to an earlier style, particularly as recent work such as ‘Prism’ have been so very different...

Well there was a record called ‘Hymns’ which was almost entirely in Latin and then ‘Prism’ which came out in 2007, sacred songs recorded in nine different languages across all different cultures. They were both special projects, very different and unusual. In between I put out a record called ‘Look’, which, like Back To Love, was all about love and life. But yes, I think it has seemed like a long time to the new record, especially for my fans who really respond to the Beth Nielsen Chapman love songs. Personally I had a great time making Prism, but it was quite an undertaking and a huge learning curve, researching the languages and getting the pronunciation right, all that work, you know it took about ten years to finish that project.

Anyway, once I felt I had done that thing and put it to one side, I turned to writing the songs for Back to Love and it felt like I was returning to this really comfortable place, it was easy and free and everything just flowed, it was really great fun. I didn’t have the title until the very end of recording and a friend of mine, Alan Rodford who is actually an advertising genius, retired now, I was asking him which song on the record was the title cut. And actually there is no song on the record which is the title, but Alan said to me, “well it just sounds like you’ve gone back to love…” and I just said, yes that’s it! So in that sense it is a return, but I don’t feel that I ever went away from this style of writing - if you came to one of my shows when I was promoting Prism, you would still have heard plenty of my regular love songs.

It has also been pointed out that the sleeve photo for Back to Love is very similar to your first album. Was that a deliberate echo of the past...?

No, but that was so interesting. I was working with Judith Burrows who is a lovely photographer, based in London, and I walked in with my guitar and whatever I happened to be wearing that day and she put a box down in the middle of a completely white area of the studio, and said ‘just sit on the box and play your guitar.’ Which I did and she took a few shots, then we did a bunch of other things. When we got the pictures back, we both agreed very easily on which shot was the one, but it was many months later, after the CD sleeves had been manufactured, that I was talking to someone at a radio station, possibly Bob Harris, who held the two sleeves up side by side and I was shocked at the similarity. And now it’s pointed out it looks so calculated, doesn’t it?

Your career seems to have come full circle, but perhaps ‘Back To Love’ can also be seen as something of a new beginning for the next phase of your career, especially after all the trials of the last few years.

Oh yeah, absolutely. And of course in the middle of making this record I had another little trial, owing to the brain tumour, which was the last thing in the world I could have imagined. And thankfully that turned out fine, but it was quite a scare, you know. It was an amazing week, and to this day, I still look back on it as some kind of dream. I was very lucky that it was caught in time. The tumour wasn’t malignant, it was benign, but it was growing very fast, so even given several more weeks it could have been a much different story, so I really feel like I just dodged a bullet there. I think I’m finally done with traumatic events now!

That positive note seemed like the perfect place to end our conversation. Beth’s life has been beset by a number of personal problems and no little tragedy, all of which have been well documented elsewhere. Originally I wanted to put these to one side and concentrate solely on the music, but of course it is impossible to separate the good from the bad, as those troubled times are an integral influence on Beth’s music and, ultimately, her positive outlook on life. Let’s hope those times are finally behind her, leaving the lady to concentrate on what she does best – writing simply beautiful songs.

Chris Groom