Catching Up With... Lady Sovereign

On New Year's Eve of 2007, Lady Sovereign towered onscreen over a million people in Times Square. The giant billboard image would dwarf anyone, but Louise Harman's five-foot one-inch frame and soft, childlike face looked especially odd next to the mammoth projection, despite the young emcee's larger-than-life swagger. The 21-year old was on tour with Gwen Stefani and had just signed to Jay-Z's label, Def-Jam, so that 60-foot billboard could easily be called the high point of her career. And it was, but it was also beginning of an emotional breakdown.

Exhausted from after-parties and interviews, the British rapper was coming unhinged. In 2008, she left Def Jam and went back to her Chalk Hill home, where she began working feverishly on a collection of songs and decided to form her own label through EMI, affectionally titled Midget Records. Her DIY efforts led to Jigsaw, which comes out April 7 and chronicles Harman's bleak year. The album works out a new level of complexity for the self-proclaimed midget, whose witty lyrics about a range of subjects, from heartbreak to hamburgers, are as textured as her sampled beats. Paste caught up with Lady Sovereign amidst a brief tour across the states.

Paste: You’ve done quite a few interviews today.

Lady Sovereign: Yeah, a few. Quite a few, actually, but I’ve been able to tolerate it.

Paste: That’s one of the reasons you left Def Jam, right? Just too much press, not enough time to devote to your music…

Lady Sovereign: Yeah, it was too much. It spoiled me. It’s just that it makes you a bit crazy after a while. But so far the amount of press has been all right. Everything in moderation.

Paste: You're on tour now. How's it going?

Lady Sovereign: Good. I’ve been here for a week, and I’ve got one more show tonight in L.A. You know, the whole point of these shows is just to stick my head in the door again and say hi, just stick my head in and say hello a bit.

Paste: You’ve been doing smaller venues, this time around; The Echo is no Times Square. Are you enjoying that?

Lady Sovereign: Yeah, definitely, I like the really small shows sometimes. It’s been quite a while since I’ve done, like, a 200-capacity show. But you know, either way I get people moving. It’s what I do; I really know how to work a crowd. And the tours have been nice this time around, ‘cause I just have a bit more time. Before, with Def Jam, I didn’t have time to be creative really, and that’s what was getting me down in the end. Come the end of the Gwen Stefani tour, when I was doing all these frickin' after parties, I just felt like, ‘cause I didn’t have anything new offer, I was disappointing people and letting them down a bit, and that let me down.

Paste: You wrote Jigsaw after a pretty harsh breakup too?

Lady Sovereign: Yeah, that took its toll on me a bit. I sung about it; I was going to be really mean about it and write a very harsh song, but I didn’t. Love is one of those things that can make you do anything and it made me sing a little bit.

Paste: Yeah, you’re singing a lot more on Jigsaw, rather than rapping.

Lady Sovereign: It’s just what came out really; I’m pretty unpredictable to my own mind so if I think to sing, I’ll sing, and if I feel it to rap, I’ll rap. It’s not the best singing in the world, but it works. And if it works, I’d rather do that than going off and collaborating with people. I’ll just do it myself.

Paste: In "Guitar," you have a line; “So I turned off the lights, and I tried to write, but only bullshit left my mind.” How do you write? Do you literally sit in your room with all the lights off, concentrating intensely?

Lady Sovereign: [laughs] What? What an odd question. No, I don’t sit in the dark and turn off all the lights. I don’t traditionally sit and write things on paper. I more prefer to sit and listen to music intensely, like get stoned when I listen to music and then, like, write in my head. But that song is about writers block, and trying to get something right. A lot of my stuff is improv; it stays in my head and then I sort of pull it out when I get into the studio.

Paste: Do you have any ideas brewing now for upcoming songs?

Lady Sovereign: Well, it’s hard to say right now. I have a few ideas brewing in my head right now. Gosh knows what my next album is going to sound like. I definitely want to produce a lot of that shit ‘cause I make beats and stuff at home that I never really show anyone, but I think I’m pretty good at it, you know? Ha, I guess I sold that third album just now before it’s
even made.

Paste: Yeah, I think you just rolled out a press kit. What music are you listening to right now?

Lady Sovereign: I’m just trying to listen to all sorts of stuff. I literally have everything on my laptop; I’m such a music junkie. But I’m really compulsive with music, if I haven’t got it I need it, I just have to have it, which is really bad with iTunes, 'cause it's literally one click away, so I spend so much more money than if I had to get up and walk to a record store. It’s the one thing I can’t live without. I need that shit.

Paste: You talk a lot about food in Jigsaw, and you even have a song about food as foreplay ("Food Play"). What are some of your favorite foods?

Lady Sovereign: Do you know what, I like a good roast chicken dinner. Roast chicken with all the trimmings, done in the English way, though, not the American way, just, like, with brown gravy, ‘cause yours is white. What the hell? White gravy? That’s so wrong; that’s like the wrongest sounding thing ever.

Paste: We have brown gravy here; we put it on turkeys. We only put the white stuff on biscuits.

Lady Sovereign: Yeah, but a biscuit is a different thing for us too. A biscuit is a cookie, and who wants gravy on a cookie? But you're right, I do talk a lot about food in my songs. Well, when I’ve got the munchies after a spiff its like, fuck, let's eat. Food is my best friend; I could literally eat the whole house.

Paste: Did you eat a lot when you were stressed on the Gwen Stefani tour?

Lady Sovereign: No, in fact, I don’t eat when I'm stressed. I wish I did; it's purely a pleasure thing.