Iconic British singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading has just released The Weakness In Me - a collection of her song lyrics spanning 50 years.
She chats to Jim Mora about songwriting, confidence and gratitude.
Joan Armatrading Photo: Joan A
Armatrading was seven when she moved with her family to Birmingham from Jamaica. There, she taught herself to sing, play the guitar and play the piano - long before YouTube tutorials were a thing.
Although a shy person, Armatrading says she's always been very confident in her songwriting ability.
"All I did was write the way I felt like writing and played the way I wanted to play."
In order to become good at music or anything else, you need to have strong faith in your own potential, she says.
"Ultimately, when you're writing a song, the person you have to please is yourself. You can't write and think 'well, I hope everybody else is going to like it but I don't. You've got to be the person that you're pleasing the most… it's very important that you know what you're writing and how pleased you are with it or not."
As a black person making music that wasn't "soul or funk or gospel", Armatrading says people didnt quite know what to make of her debut album Whatever's For Us in 1972.
Nevertheless, her career took off in the 1970s and 1980s with hits like 'Love and Affection', 'Me, Myself, I' and 'Drop the Pilot'.
Armatrading says she's always been very happy while singing and sees her job as using her voice to the best of her abilities.
It's brilliant if people identify with her songs, she says, and important not to be "too precious" about how they're interpreted.
"Once you've written a song and you put it to the people, you have to leave people to put their interpretation on it …You can't be too precious. You've got to put it out there and that's it. The baby's grown up, it's left home, left university and now it's earning its own money. You've just got to leave it to do its thing."
Armatrading's songs aren't often about her own experiences but she writes "as if" they are.
"I would be some weird person if I said I want to keep my private life private and then I wrote everything about my private life in a song.
"It's much more interesting to write about other people. I look at situations around me and write about that."
There are a few exceptions, she says, such as 'Me, Myself, I' and any other song which expresses gratitude.
"Any song that has that kind of thing to it is going to be about me. I tend to write that because I feel very blessed and I'm a very positive person."
Armatrading sees herself as having a blend of introverted and extroverted tendencies.
"I'm very introverted when it comes to talking about me but very extroverted when it comes to my songs and how I feel about them and my confidence in my ability to do certain things. It's almost bigheaded. I'm not scared to say I think I'm good at what I do."
Related: 'I'm trying to get to the point where I can say … 'right, that's it, put your pen down, Joan' (Saturday Morning, 2021)
Photo: BMG Music
