Theres a certain beauty and the beast quality to the greatest male/female singer/songwriter duos Consider Jane Birkin, the well-heeled toast of 60s society, hooking up with Serge Gainsbourg, the filthy Gallic singer/songwriters ever-present gauze of Gauloise smoke irreversibly clouding her reputation. Or theres Nancy Sinatra, the golden daughter of the Chairman Of The Board, whose career was rescued from its early doldrums thanks to the intervention of producer Lee Hazlewood, who injected a gravely, cynical tone that gave Nancys subsequent records a disquieting, idiosyncratic charm. And so it is with Ballad Of The Broken Seas, an album length collaboration between Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan.Theres a similar sense of contrast, between Isobels aching, pristine chill of a vocal, and Lanegans wounded, regret-stewed burr. Their musical backpages could hardly be more different; Isobel found her initial fame playing cello and singing with deftly-melodic Glaswegian indie collective Belle & Sebastian, before branching off for the lushly-orchestrated melancholia of her Gentle Waves for two LPs, and releasing her debut solo album, the acclaimed Amorino, in 2003. Lanegan, on the other hand, sang for Screaming Trees, perhaps the greatest and most underrated of all the grunge bands, until their dissolution in 2000, since when he has juggled the solo career he began while still in the Trees, and a unique role as occasional frontman of Queens Of The Stoneage. The sweet, folksy girl and the grizzled rawk guy; a classic cocktail, perhaps, but the roles are inverted, in this case.Its weird, begins Isobel, as much as Nancy Sinatra was an influence on this album, as an artist I identify much more with Lee Hazlewood, or with Serge Gainsbourg over Jane Birkin. Im writing most of the songs, Im producing the music, she laughs, Im in the Serge/Lee role, and Mark Lanegan is my own personal Jane or Nancy, which is a thought that amuses me greatly! I had things I wanted to say, from a male perspective, in these songs, and its good to have a male voice to sing them for me.And what a voice In the songs that make up Ballad Of The Broken Seas, Lanegan sounds, by turns, haunted, shipwrecked, exultant, lost. Isobel, similarly, draws the drama out of these songs with poise and subtlety, singing cautious hope and damned hopelessness as the lyrics demand. Together, the voices complete each other, the songs dialogues as much as duets. The partnership began as Isobel was working on Time Is Just The Same, an EP she released shortly after Amorino, in 2004. The title track featured Eugene Kelly, formerly of The Vaselines and Captain America/Eugenius, on guest vocals, but Kellys voice was too high to sing his lines on Why Does My Head Hurt So, one of the EPs other songs. Isobels boyfriend at the time played her one of Lanegans justly-lauded solo album, and Campbell knew shed found the voice for the song.
After sending the song to Lanegans label, the singer contacted Campbell while he was working on his 2004 Mark Lanegan Band album, Bubblegum, singing the song down the phone to her on their first conversation. They finally met when Queens Of The Stone Age played Glasgows Barrowlands that Summer, and met again when he played Scotland with his Mark Lanegan Band a couple of months later. Speeding across Glasgow in the back of someones car, Lanegan suggested they record an album together. And I thought, yeah, we should, remembers Isobel. If he hadnt suggested it, I wouldnt have taken the idea seriously. But he did. We began an email conversation, Id send him ideas and hed send some back. He was so encouraging, so it was easy. I just felt like I wanted to do something good.Isobel produced the album, and wrote most of the songs, except for "Revolver," for which Lanegan wrote the lyrics and melody and Isobel arranged the strings, and "Its Hard To Kill A Bad Thing," which Isobels guitarist Jim McCulloch wrote. Mark and Isobel discussed Sinatra and Hazlewood, Birkin and Gainsbourg, but when it came time to write and record the music, Isobel was entirely besotted with the elemental soul of Johnny Cashs American Recordings, specifically the Solitary Man and The Man Comes Around volumes. I just became obsessed with those records, Isobel remembers. They sound so great, so natural and so strong. I remembered telling Mark, when we began, that I wanted to record something classic sounding and timeless. It helped, having such a unique voice to work with. I used those Johnny Cash CDs as reference while we were recording, to show the engineer what I was after. Nancy and Lees Some Velvet Morning was a huge influence too, she admits, For the contrast of the voices, for that production - its like dustbowl Americana, but really weird and psychedelic. The songs of Ballad Of The Broken Seas sprawl across this very canvas Isobel was imagining, songs of betrayal and loss, of a near-cinematic richness, an exquisitely detailed high drama in love with the romance of melancholy. Theres an atmosphere of loss, of transience, Isobel muses, The melancholy we can all have, as humans. But its magnified, made larger than life, like some kind of Brothers Grimm fantasy, with added weirdness and heightened drama. Dreamy, beautiful, with bitterness sluicing around its insides like the dregs of a bottle of wine, Ballad Of The Broken Seas is a remarkable record. Lend it your ear, and it will steal your heart.
