Well, this seems to be a day of posts aimed at amusing our iron fisted ruler. Here I go…It should probably come as no surprise to those of you who know us, but a significant portion of the time Magnoliasitar and I spend together gets devoted to arguing the relative merits of musicians that only the morbidly obsessed really care about. In that vein we have recently (for reasons too boring to elucidate) found ourselves in an ongoing Isobel Cambell vs. Stuart Murdoch discussion that has no clear end in sight. Isobel was the original cellist and occasional vocalist/song writer for the Stuart fronted Belle & Sebastian through the late 90’s. She left the band under a cloud of acrimony shortly after she and Stuart’s romance dissolved and has since released two solo albums.
Magnoliasitar thinks of Isobel as a promising artist who is still recovering from her time in Stuart Murdoch’s fascist-like dictatorship of a band. I’m not quite so sure she didn’t just ride Murdoch’s coat tails to a level of indie-fame she’ll be exploiting until her looks start to fade.
Anyway, here’s a couple links that seem to go a long way to proving me wrong, though not in the way I would have expected. On, “Ballad of the Broken Seas”, her recently released second album Isobel has (non-intuitively) collaborated with Mark Lanegan – whose (very loud, drug fueled) exploits with both the Screaming Trees and the Queens of the Stone Age seem to have become something of a legend. In the songs posted at the always excellent You Aint No Picasso and My Old Kentucky Blog she certainly seems to be growing, though more as a song writer and producer than as a vocalist.
In this rare interview, she talks with The Scotsman about the new album and her ambitions as a writer.
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