But I see them as, like, scientists of music, and they’ll play something and you’ve never heard it before, and you’ll be like, ‘Ooh, this is weird’. “In no way am I comparing myself to Radiohead,” she warns, “but I’ve always made very anthemic songs – not more anthemic, because there are plenty of anthemic Radiohead songs. But when the topic of her next musical chapter emerges, a bit of self-doubt can be heard in her voice, hinting at the fact that despite having Perry on production duties and the genre blurring evident throughout Roll With Me, she is still striving to do something weirder in the future. There are moments speaking to Bedingfield when she sounds incredibly LA, with her vaguely mid-Atlantic accent and enviable sense of ease, or her references to loving yoga and sunshine. As a result, it feels like a noticeable step up from the albums that came before it. But there’s cohesion there, in its instruments and its confessional lyrics. It isn’t a singular record in terms of genre, pleasurably drifting between pop, R&B, and even, somewhat daringly, reggae. Roll With Me was entirely produced by Linda Perry, the singer-songwriter behind Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” and “Hurt”, Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For?” and a host of modern pop classics. Those experiences have also made her new fourth album feel different.
And honestly I couldn’t say anything about it because I was signed to my label, and I didn’t want to alienate myself with them.” I hated that and felt like maybe my fans felt that I left them? Which was just never. “I sang at the White House for Obama, and my mum was like, ‘I can’t even watch it on the internet’.
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“I would release something in America and then it wouldn’t come back to England,” she recalls, mentioning incredible professional opportunities that the UK didn’t know about. She says the experience was “devastating” and did little to quell the sense that she had turned her back on her native country. But she does reveal that she struggled to be heard when she was starting out – her second and third albums fell prey to music industry “geo-blocking”, she explains, meaning that they were released in different territories at different times, and sometimes not at all, with entirely different track listings and even titles. Bedingfield doesn’t cop to having encountered anything quite as bad as the traumas experienced by her one-time contemporaries Kate Nash or Lily Allen, who were equally young when they had their images shaped and moulded by much-older men and thrust into a world of celebrity and tabloid cruelty. Such success did have its downsides, however. “Unwritten” was even the most played track on US radio in 2006. Bedingfield earned a Grammy nomination, and her music would become a regular presence in romantic comedies, adverts and Grey’s Anatomy.
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“Unwritten”, which would go on to become the theme song for the classic MTV reality show The Hills (a remix has been used for its recent revival), is marvellous, with a gorgeous emotional build that makes you want to rip open the windows and sing it to the skies.Īnd represent she did. “These Words”, “Single” and “Pocketful of Sunshine” are all lovely bits of early-Noughties pop-R&B that almost work as low-key gospel numbers, while the derided “I Wanna Have Your Babies” may be lyrically strange but is also playful and masterfully structured. One of the most frustrating things about listening back to Bedingfield’s early work is how genuinely brilliant a lot of it is, and therefore how boring it was to sneer at it back then. But it is also true that the US treated her music with far more respect than we did here, so why wouldn’t she decide to make it home? She describes LA as a “songwriting mecca”, and a place where “the lyrics really flow” for her. Today, the 37-year-old still has a home in the UK but a mostly permanent base in Los Angeles, where she is married to an American and is the mother of a young son. Her new album, Roll With Me, is her first in nearly a decade. Not for as long as many people in the UK claim that it did, but it was still lengthy. After her initial success, it seemed to all go quiet.
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