Hayley Westenra by Hayley Westenra

Author:Hayley Westenra
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780753520710
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

ODYSSEY

The perceived wisdom in the music industry is that one of the toughest things for any artist who has had a successful debut album is to create a successful follow-up album. I know that Pure was in fact my third professional album, but it was my first for Decca, so that meant that, as far as everyone was concerned, my next album would be considered the follow-up.

Initially, I found the process exciting because I was itching to get back into the recording studio to create something new, since it had been well over eighteen months since I had recorded Pure. One of the drawbacks about having an album that does well in a number of different territories around the world is that the artist has to spend a long time promoting that album, rather than getting on and making a new one.

By this stage, I felt that I had moved up from the level I was at when I recorded Pure and I was excited about having the opportunity to prove myself in the studio once again. I had quite a few different ideas for the album and I wanted people to hear my new work and to feel that I had evolved both in terms of my technical ability as a singer and also in terms of my general presence as a performer.

I'm very lucky that my voice is quite versatile and my musical tastes are quite varied. This does throw up some challenges, though, and, when it came to making my second album for Decca, I found it hard to know what musical direction I should be travelling in. That can make the process of creating an album quite a struggle. At that stage, I was still relatively young and I didn't want to restrict myself by finding that I had been put into a box by the music industry as the sort of artist who could do only this, or could never do that. I figured that further down the track I could make some more tightly themed albums.

At the same time, I wanted my new album to sound complete. This was a tricky set of decisions for me and, looking back, I probably should have stuck to my guns a lot more, instead of being pulled in lots of different directions by various record companies around the world, each of whom wanted something slightly different for their particular market. I listened to the opinions of a lot of people about which songs I should be doing. That said, though, in no way do I regard the album as a mistake. If everything you do as an artist is perfect, then you will never grow. This new album was an accurate snapshot of me as a performer at the beginning of 2005.

It's hard enough to choose songs for an album, but another conundrum that any artist has to consider very carefully is the question of what to call an album. I settled on Odyssey because, at

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