""Now that I've been to Nashville,” Kylie Minogue says with
audible affection, “I understand. It's like some sort of musical
ley-line...”
Golden, Kylie's fourteenth studio album, is the result of an
intensive working trip to the home of Country music, a city whose
influence lingered on long after the pop legend and her team
returned to London to finish the record: “We definitely brought a
bit of Nashville back with us,” she states.
The album is a vibrant hybrid, blending Kylie's familiar
pop-dance sound with an unmistakeable Tennessee twang. It was
Jamie Nelson, Kylie's long-serving A&R man, who first came up
with the concept of incorporating “a Country element” into
Kylie's tried-and-trusted style. That idea sat there for a little
while, with Minogue and her team initially unsure about how to
bring it to life. Then, when Grammy-winning songwriter Amy
Wadge's publisher suggested Kylie should come over to collaborate
in Nashville, a city Kylie had previously never visited,
something clicked. “You know when you're so excited about
something,” she recalls, “that you repeat it an octave higher and
double the decibels? I was like that. 'Nashville?! Yes! Of course
I would!'. I hoped it would help the album to reveal itself. I
thought 'If I don't get it in Nashville, I'm not going to get it
anywhere.""
Kylie's Nashville trip involved working alongside two key
writers, both with homes in the city. One was British-born
songwriter Steve McEwan (whose credits include huge Country hits
for Keith Urban, Kenny Chesney and Carrie Underwood), and the
other was the aforementioned Amy Wadge, another Brit (best known
for her mega-selling work with Ed Sheeran). It was then a truly
international project: Golden was mainly created with
African-German producer Sky Adams and a list of contributors
including Jesse Frasure, Eg White, Jon Green, Biff Stannard,
Samuel Dixon, Danny Shah and Lindsay Rimes, and there's a duet
with English singer Jack Savoretti.
However, the album's agenda-setting lead single Dancing was,
significantly, first demoed with Nathan Chapman, the man who
guided Taylor Swift's transition from Country starlet to Pop
metar. If anyone knows how to mix those two genres, Chapman
does. “Nathan was the only actual Nashvillean I worked with. He's
got a huge studio in his house, which is probably due to his
success with Taylor... there’s plenty of platinum discs of her,
and others on his walls.”
There's something of the spirit of Peggy Lee's Is That All There
Is?, of Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, even
of Liza Minnelli's Cabaret about Dancing, a song which not only
opens the album but sets out its stall, providing a microcosm of
what is to come. “You've got the lyrical edge, that Country feel,
mixed with some sampling of the voice and electronic elements, so
it does what it says on the label. And I love that it's called
'Dancing', it's immediately accessible and seemingly so obvious,
but there’s depth within the song.”
The experience of simply being in Nashville was an overwhelming
one, before Kylie had even arrived. “Once I knew I was going to
Nashville, people talked about the place with such enthusiasm.
They said without doubt I would love it and, I would come back
with songs. They were sending lists of restaurants, coffee shops
and bars. It really was a beautiful and genuine response and it
felt like I was about to have a life changing experience and in a
way, I did.”
It's probably no coincidence, therefore, that every track on
Golden is a Kylie co-write, making it arguably her most personal
album to date. “The end of 2016 was not a good time for me,” she
says, referring to well-documented personal upheavals, “so when I
started working on the album in 2017, it was, in many ways, a
great escape. Making this album was a kind of saviour. I’d been
through some turmoil and was quite fragile when I started work on
it, but being able to express myself in the studio made quick
work of regaining my sense of self. Writing about various aspects
of my life, the highs and lows, with a real sense of knowing and
of truth. And irony. And joy!”
The songwriting process allowed Kylie to get a few things out of
her system. “Initially, she admits, “it was cathartic, but it
also wasn't very good. I think I was writing too literally. But I
reached a point where I was writing about the bigger-picture, and
that was a breakthrough. It made way for songs like Stop Me From
Falling and One Last Kiss. It also meant I had enough distance to
write an autobiographical song, like A Lifetime To Repair, with a
certain a of humour. The countdown in that song:
'Six-five-four-three, too many times...'. I don't know if that
will be a single, but I can just imagine a girl with framed
pictures of past boyfriends, and kind of going 'Oh god, when am I
going to get this right?'”
When she listens back to Golden, Kylie can vividly hear the
Nashville in it. It is, she'll agree, probably the first time
that a Kylie album has sounded like the place it was made. “You
wouldn't normally relate my songs to the cities. Can't Get You
Out Of My Head sounds more like Outer Space than London. But
Shelby ’68, for example, was written in London but it was done
with Nashville in mind. It's about my Dad's car, and my brother
recorded Dad driving it! I don't think I'd have written a number
of the songs, including Shelby ’68 and Radio On without having
had that Nashville experience.”
The latter, she says, is “about music being the one to save
you.” Throwing herself into the making of the record, she says,
crystallised that idea. “If there's one love that will always be
there for you, it's music. Well, it is for me, anyway.” That
song, in particular, carries nostalgic echoes of the golden age
of Country, as heard through Medium Wave transistors and tinny
home stereos in the distant past. Like any child of the
Seventies, Kylie had a basic grounding in Country music, mainly
absorbed from older family members. “My Step-Grandher was born
in Kentucky and though he lived most of his adult life in
Australia, he never stopped listening to his beloved Country
artists.” If there's any classic Country singer whose imprint can
be heard on Golden, it's Dolly Parton.
Kylie saw Dolly live for the first time at the end of 2016, at
the Hollywood . “It was like seeing the light,” she beams.
“It was incredible. Everyone, whether they know it or not, is a
Dolly Parton fan. When I was in Nashville, I did pick up a
T-shirt that said 'What Would Dolly Do?' Maybe that should be my
mantra.” And, whether consciously or otherwise, there's a timbre
and trill to Kylie's vocals on Radio On that is distinctly
Parton-esque. “My delivery is quite different on this album,” she
says. “A lot of things are 'sung' less. The first time I did that
was with Where The Wild Roses Grow. On the day I met Nick Cave,
when I recorded my vocals, he said 'Just sing it less. Talk it
through, tell the story.' This album wasn't quite to that
extreme, but a lot of the songs were done in fewer takes, to just
capture the moment and keep imperfections that add to the song. I
remember on my last album, a lot of producers were trying to take
out literally every vibrato they heard. And that's not natural to
my voice. I mean, I can make myself sound like a robot, but it's
nice to sound like a human!”
Working within the Country genre also gave Kylie permission to
write in the Nashville vernacular. “Because we were going there,
I wasn't afraid to have lines like ‘When he’s fallen off the
wagon we’d still dance to our favourite slow song', ‘Ten sheets
to the wind, I was all confused’, ‘I’ll take the ride if it’s
your rodeo’. The challenge of bringing a Country element to the
album made the process feel very fresh to me, kind of like
starting over. I started to look at writing a different way,
singing a different way.”
Kylie Minogue will, it's cely believable, turn 50 this year.
This looming milestone is partly behind the album's title, and
title track. “I had this line that I wanted to use: 'We're not
young, we're not old, we're golden' because I'm asked so often
about being my age in this industry. This year, I'll be 50. And I
get it, I get the interest, but I don't know how to answer it.
And that line, for my personal satisfaction, says it as
succinctly as possible. We can’t be anyone else, we can’t be
younger or older than we are, we can only be ourselves. We're
golden. And the album title, Golden, reflects all of this. I
liked the idea of everyone being golden, shining in their own
way. The sun shines in daylight, the moon shines in darkness.
Wherever we are in life, we are still golden.”
One of the album's shiniest moments is Raining Glitter, an
exuberant banger which ventures closest to Kylie's traditional
dance-pop comfort zone. “Eg White, who is one of the producers
and writers and a great character, was talking about disco one
day. I said 'I love disco, but you know the brief.' We needed to
be going down the Country lane, so to speak. But we managed to
bring them both together. When I wrote it, I was thinking about
the Jacksons video for Can You Feel It where they're sprinkling
glitter over everyone. And I think there's a Donna Summer record
that's got that feel to it. I think that's my job: I basically
leave a trail of glitter after every show I do anyway.”
Kylie is looking forward to the challenge of incorporating the
Golden material into her live shows. “Mixing these songs in with
my existing catalogue is going to be fun. And it could be fun to
do some of those songs with just a guitar. It'll make my acoustic
set interesting...”
Her incredibly loyal fans – to whom one Golden song, Sincerely
Yours, is intended as “a love letter” – will, she believes, have
no problem with her latest stylistic shift. “My audience have
been with me on the journey, so I shouldn't be afraid that they
won't come with me on this part. I've had fun with it, and I'm
sure they will too.”
The time spent making Golden has, Kylie says, been a time of
creative and personal renewal. “I've met some amazing people,
truly inspiring writers and musicians. My passion for music has
never gone away, but it's got bigger and stronger.” And if
there's an overriding theme to the record, it is one of
acceptance. “We’re all human and it’s OK to make mistakes, get it
wrong, to want to run, to want to belong, to love, to dream. To
be ourselves.”
“I was able to both lose and find myself whilst making this
album.”
