Carla J. Easton on I Think That I Might Love You
As she gears up to release her fifth solo album, I Think That I Might Love You, we talk the past, present and future with Carla J. Easton
Carla J. Easton has a lot going on. She is babysitting guinea pigs – Pancake and Waffle – and they can be a handful. There’s also the small matter of her fifth studio album, a PhD, an upcoming UK tour, and the continuing reverberations from her groundbreaking documentary about Scottish girl groups, Since Yesterday.
The new album, I Think That I Might Love You, sees Easton swap keyboards for guitars. It’s also perhaps her most personal work to date, with its roots in a spontaneous trip Stateside, as Easton explains. “In 2023 I went to Nashville – what my pals called a 'fuck it flight' – don’t worry about the cost, just go. And I hung out with Kim Richey, a songwriter I’d met five years earlier, going to Third Man Records and The Bluebird Cafe. So, we’d get up in the morning, make a pot of coffee, pick up a guitar, and you start writing, and all of a sudden I’ve got 48 demos. All of this stuff that had just been bubbling under the surface.
“When I picked up the guitar, it was almost like falling in love with songwriting all over again. And it was almost an accidental album. I was so busy doing the documentary, and focused on platforming other people’s stories, that I kind of forgot about my own creativity.”
There’s a mythology about the guitar as a kind of armour for performers, a wall that can shield them from the audience. Yet on this record, the opposite seems to have happened. “When you don’t know the rules, you don’t care about breaking the rules," Easton says. "I only knew a handful of chords on the guitar. But if you know three chords you can write a song. There’s an innocence in a lot of the songs because I don’t know as much as I would with the keyboards. I couldn’t dress it up. I couldn’t make it sound cleverer than it was. And of course, all the bands in Since Yesterday – they were learning as they went along.”
The new album was recorded at the legendary Chem19 studios in Glasgow, under the watchful eye of Grammy Award-winning engineer Howard Bilerman. “We set up camp there for a week, and we’d do three or four takes and that was it. It was an old school approach to recording a record. You were never sure if you were going to end up with something or just have a week-long whitey in the studio! The record has really ended up as a diary entry. It sounds exactly how it sounded at that moment: the musicians, in that environment, with those songs.”
Throughout her career, from early forays with Futuristic Retro Champions and TeenCanteen, her solo work to her band Poster Paints, and her involvement with the Hen Hoose collective, Easton has moved from being influenced by older generations, to finding herself cited as an inspiration by up-and-coming acts. And it feels like there’s a new generation of artists coming through in Scotland at the moment. Perhaps not quite developed enough to be called a 'scene' yet, but there is definitely something there.
Easton agrees: “If you take the likes of The Cords, Radhika, Supersun, Fatale and Angel Face, it does feel like something is happening. And it reminds me of when I started Futuristic Retro Champions. We weren’t waiting for an invitation; we made our own scene. Our first ever gig was in my flat! Why would you wait? I like being independent, and I like not having to stick to one formula.”
It's an attitude to life that has seen Easton moving from recording studio to the halls of academia as she works on her PhD. “There was so much that was uncovered as part of making Since Yesterday, 40 hours of material. So, there’s a lot of history there. There has to be a way of preserving this for future generations of artists and musicians, which is what the PhD is all about. So, it’s an archive, but it’s a living archive. It’s not so much about the past; I’ve done that with Since Yesterday. But what about the future?”
Back in the present, it’s time to focus on the new album. “I’m really excited because it’s my first UK tour since 2019. But it’s balancing the tour, the PhD, the costs… this is 20 years of me making music! So, it feels quite significant. And a lot of people have said they think this is my best album yet. And that’s interesting, because I’m thinking about the living archive idea, and maybe pulling out some of my own shoeboxes of old lyrics and setlists. And nothing is in isolation, everything leads up to a point. And you don’t know what happens next, right? So, you just have to enjoy it.”
I Think That I Might Love You is released on 8 May via Ernest Jennings Recording Co. and Fika Recordings; Carla J. Easton plays The Rum Shack, Glasgow, 29 May; Beat Generator Live!, Dundee, 2 Oct; Indie Pop All-Dayer, Edinburgh, 3 Oct