This week our City’s Celebrity is Charlotte Algar, a local musician whose EP Lions will be released early next year. Take a little break from studying and find out more about this talented lady and her songs!
Why folk music? And why the guitar and saxophone? As a guitarist and a singer, I think it feels like a very natural way of performing. Everyone learns folk songs from their own culture as children, and that’s what makes this kind of music so emotive. Concentrating on a beautiful melody line with lyrics that really mean something is extremely rewarding, as the response you get from the audience is always personal. Also, as ‘folk’ is such a loose term it gives you a lot of freedom to incorporate other styles, which is always fun. I started playing the tenor saxophone last summer after my first year at university. I found studying Jazz for my degree very interesting and I guess I wanted to do it myself!
Do you base your songs on your own experiences? Sometimes, but I don’t tend to perform those ones. I usually like to take an idea from a poem, film or book and put my own music to it with my own story or an alternate ending.
Every musician has a different technique and process for songwriting. What’s yours? It’s usually best for me to start with a guitar line, embellishing it and perfecting the chord structure, before I sing over it to find a melody that I like. It’s very easy to get stuck in the same sequence, so sometimes I have to leave a song for a week or two before I can look at it objectively again.
Your EP is titled Lions – can you tell us the reason for that and what we can expect from it? The first song on the album is called ‘Lions’, which is about a passage from ‘The Old Man And The Sea’ by Ernest Hemingway. An Old Man on the verge of giving up on life dreams of ‘lions on the shore’, and this image is the focal point of the song. ‘Lions’ was the real starting point of the idea to make an album and to start performing more regularly, so I decided to make it the title. And it also sounds quite snazzy!
What do you hope for your music to achieve? I’m not sure really. I mainly write songs for my own enjoyment and expression. I suppose if other people can listen to my performances and enjoy them as much as I do, then that’s mission accomplished!
Dream location to play a gig? On a boat in Amsterdam!
Dream collaboration? Bon Iver.
Last five played songs on your iPod? Led Zeppelin – ‘Going to California’, Jack Garrett – ‘Worry’, Marvin Gaye – ‘Sweet Thing’, Thin Lizzy – ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ and Debussy – ‘Beau Soir’
One hit song that you wish you had written? Definitely ‘Stairway to Heaven’ by Led Zeppelin, or maybe ‘American Pie’ by Don McLean.
Check out Charlotte on Facebook or Youtube and let us know what you think of her music!