RumerThere was a hit song around late last summer, with a wonderfully Karen Carpenter-ish feel to it, that quickly propelled it into Radio Two's prestigious Record of the Week slot. That song, Slow, a meltingly sensuous song about unrequited love, was by Rumer, whose hotly-anticipated album Seasons of My Soul is out on November 1, 2010..
Despite her star-studded CV, it took Rumer ten years of doing every sort of day job before she got her big break, "waitress, barmaid, deli girl, hotel chambermaid, popcorn seller, teacher, promoter, hairdresser..." lists the singer in her promotional biog. In fact, Rumer went more or less directly from serving coffee to singing before Burt Bacharach. As she explains, when she got the invitation to visit Bacharach, "what was incredible about it was that I'd just got signed, so it wasn't long before that, that I was working behind the counter making cappuccinos. It was a very dramatic thing because I hadn't even started working at the record company, hadn't even begun this journey and the first thing that I did was meet Burt Bacharach."
Out in California, Rumer says "I just stood at the piano and I really felt like I was in the inner sanctum, you know, I'm at the piano and there are pictures of all his family on the piano, it was very, very intense, I couldn't believe it really."
The meeting lasted just an hour, she explains, "He just wanted me to sing through some songs he was working on with Steven Sater, who's a lyricist who wrote a musical called Spring Awakening. We just sang through some stuff and had a conversation. He's very no nonsense, he's very straight to the point, hasn't got time for anything except beauty. If he lived another hundred years, he's still got so much music in him, so much to give. His passion is unwavering, you can feel that you're in the room with probably the greatest living composer of the 20th century. It was a great honour."
"I love Burt Bacharach and Hal David because they did tracks with the most fantastic singers - Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, Dionne Warwick, Jackie DeShannon, Sandie Shaw, Aretha Franklin. These were the singers that I adore and songs that I adore."
Indeed, Aretha is the title of Rumer's next single from Seasons of My Soul, a homage to her teen heroine sung in an Aretha-style idiom. I ask Rumer which other music stars she would like to meet, "I'd love to meet Aretha Franklin, I'd love to meet Joni Mitchell, I'd love to meet Quincy Jones, love to meet Carole King," she says.
Incredibly, plumb in the middle of her decade of struggle, Rumer actually spent quite a chunk of time with another music star: "Carly Simon was wonderful and I spent six weeks with her family in Martha's Vineyard; I did some shows with her and I sang backing vocals.
"That was around 2005, that was when I really didn't have any support and I was just a singer-songwriter on the circuit, and Ben Taylor (Carly Simon's son) had invited me over with a few other musicians to do a little review show."
"She was very encouraging, I can't remember anything she said specifically. I just loved her, you know, I loved her spirit and her vulnerability, and her strength and her sophistication. She was so sophisticated, very into poetry and literature, very socially aware, always campaigning for something or doing charity events, and was strong and feminine, like a lioness one moment and a little girl the next. Really dazzling."
Both Bacharach and Simon are from a musical era that is the wellspring for Rumer's own Seventies-inspired sound, "I think it's because it's straightforward storytelling, the Seventies were a great time for music, a great time for that wide-screen production as well, like the Eagles. I love Linda Ronstadt, Bread. I just think the music was so good then. All the music and all the albums that I love are from that era. I hope I'm not doing anything that sort of sounds Seventies, but I hope it reminds people of how good music was or how the quality of the music was in the Seventies."
However, the young singer readily acknowledges a whole pantheon of Seventies singers, saying "It makes me cry just thinking about Karen Carpenter and how brilliant she was. I love Laura Nyro so much, you can hear her influence on 'Am I Forgiven?', there's definitely a Laura shuffle going on there. Judy Sill, who I love so much because she is again influenced by hymns, for me I love all that exalting sort of religious, vivid imagery that she conjures up with her lyric and her melodies... it's spiritual music, and I think there's a spiritual element to what I'm doing, probably because for me singing was always normal because we were always singing at church, singing at school, singing at home, we were always singing, it was such a normal thing to do. We were a bit like the Von Trapp family."
Rumer, the youngest of seven siblings, was born in Pakistan in 1979, and though appearing at the tail-end of the decade that has provided such a rich resource for her, she explains "what was really interesting was that my family, my parents and my six older siblings had been living around the world in remote colonies since 1963. My dad and my mum moved to Australia in 1962 as £10 Poms. They were the first £10 Poms to get off the plane, and they lived in Western Australia, which needed developing, where my dad was an engineer; then they lived in Tasmania, then Africa.
"We were quite tribal in a way, because we had no influence, which was quite strange." More unusually still, she says, "we didn't really have any music, that's the truth. It was generally made up. Whatever filtered through was probably the Beatles, Cat Stevens, the Carpenters, you know, very little got through during that time."
Returning to the UK, Rumer fell in love with old Hollywood musicals, another influence that can be heard in the cinematic chords that surge through some of the songs on Seasons of My Soul.
"I'm always chasing rainbows", sings Rumer when I ask her which show tunes she loves best, "I loved Judy Garland singing that, I loved anything Judy Garland sang really. Very soon I got all the tapes of her singing, her Carnegie Hall stuff. I liked all the Jerome Kerr stuff, I liked Gershwin, I loved anything from the Sound of Music, anything that gave a whole atmosphere. There's a fantastic film called Ziegfeld Girl as well, with Hedy Lamarr and Judy Garland and Lana Turner."
I put it to her that her own story is quite cinematic, and she agrees, "it is like a Cinderella story. I just don't want to turn into a pumpkin at midnight!"
With the Elton John gig coming up on October 28, 2010 at London’s Roundhouse, and several more projects in the pipeline, somehow I don't think there's any danger of that.
Rumer's debut album ‘Seasons Of My Soul’ came out on November 1, 2010. For more info, please visit www.rumer.co.uk.