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TAMAR KAPRELIAN INTERVIEW
Beatweek Magazine
http://www.beatweek.com/music/musicianinterviews/6928-tamar-kaprelian-interview-sinner-or-a-saint-new-day-onerepublic-apologize/
Aug 24 2010
"I've worked eight years on this record," says the twenty-three year
old rising pop star in reference to her new album Sinner or a Saint,
which sees the light of day today. The singer-songwriter with the
unusual name was first thrust into the spotlight with a OneRepublic
cover, but her new material is all hers, and it stretches in more
directions than one might be expecting...
We've reached an era where there are a million different ways you
can get noticed, and yet here you are, you covered a OneRepublic song
and the next thing you know you're hanging out with Ryan Tedder and
making an album?
I was working a couple months on just getting a bunch of material ready
for this EP that I wanted to do, I ended up doing this four song EP,
and my producer said to me when we were finished, "YouTube's really
blowing up, why don't you do a cover of a song that you really like,
put it up on YouTube, see what happens." And I said sure, that's a
great idea. And he was like, "OneRepublic has a great song out right
now, Apologize. I know that you love Ryan Tedder's songwriting, why
don't you just do that and change the key, make it fit with your voice,
do a different little piano thing. It'll take you five minutes."
So I did, not realizing that simultaneously, OneRepublic was holding a
"Do your own cover of apologize and put it on YouTube, and if you win
we'll do an introduction to your video." I had no idea that was going
on. So I did my video, I checked out their YouTube site, saw that they
were doing a contest and thought it was very strange that I had just
done a cover randomly. I posted it up on their page and two weeks later
I got an email from Interscope saying that I won the contest, the band
picked my video, and they were going to do an introduction to it, and
they did. A couple weeks after that I had a meeting with Interscope,
and they told me that they wanted to sign me. So long story short,
although the entire process has taken a little bit longer than that,
it's taken about eight years.
Of all the songs that made it onto the record, what was the first
one that you wrote?
The first song that I wrote actually on this record was a song called
Raw. It's actually my one relationship song on the album. The rest of
the record's really about life experiences and growing up and being
comfortable in your skin and overcoming trouble and being a stronger
person out of a negative situation. Raw was definitely me one angry,
"I don't like men" song. I do like men, but I don't like men in that
song. And then New Day came after that. New Day was the second song
that I wrote for the record.
I heard New Day first, it's an inspirational song, and I thought okay,
I know where this record is going. Then I heard Sinner or a Saint,
and I thought wow, there's a couple of different things going on here.
When you write your own material and when you play an instrument,
you never know where the creative process is going to take you. That's
the beautiful thing about making an album, you get to kind of explore
all areas of your emotions and your personality. Sinner or a Saint,
for example, is a song about having kind of a dual personality and
just having fun with it and playing with the fact that it's okay to be
crazy sometimes (laughs). It's definitely the edgier, kind of sexier
song on the record. But I'm proud of that one.
It's interesting that you didn't put any version of Apologize on this
record. I'm sure some of your earlier fans might have been expecting
you go to back and cover that. Was that something you considered?
I didn't really consider doing that. Maybe it's just something that
I'll do an acoustic version of. I actually never really perform it
live, either. I kind of had a vision of where I wanted this record to
go, and each song kind of flows into the next. Very early on I mapped
out song one through ten and what I kind of wanted each song to mean
to me. I think it's different when you release your first debut album,
you want to make a stamp for yourself.
I like that you've kept your real name. You could have branded
yourself as "Tammy" or something. Did you ever think about that,
or did you always know you wanted to use your real name?
I always knew that I wanted to stay true to it. My name is Armenian.
I'm Armenian and Irish, so I wanted to stay true to my culture and my
heritage, and I'm very proud of it. I was very close to my grandfather
who passed away three or four years ago, and I ended up dedicating
this record to him, and Kaprelian is his last name. So I wanted to
do something in ode to him. And something that he instilled in me is
always stay true to your ground and stay true to who you are. So I
wanted to make sure that I did that.
I keep thinking, how is it that a twenty-three year old pop singer has
a list of influences that are almost uniformly over the age of fifty?
I'm very lucky because my dad is the person who introduced me to
Billy Joel and Sting and Queen and Paul McCartney when I was two. My
dad plays guitar and piano, so he would play these songs to me as a
kid, and I grew up wanting to emulate my dad. I seriously wanted to
be Billy Joel. When I picked up the piano, I was like "I want to be
Billy Joel." His songwriting, his ability to tell stories, I think
it's amazing and I wish more people were doing that now.
A lot of times, when someone looks to the past for influences, they're
kind of an older soul. Even if they're still chronologically young,
they tend to be the type that would rather cuddle up with a good book
than go out partying. Is that accurate about you?
That's so accurate (laughs). Honestly, I would much rather do that
than go out to a club, ever. That's definitely not my scene in any way.
When I got to the last song on your album, I had to look up the word
"aleatory" to find out what it meant.
Aleatory is a song that's basically by chance, and I wanted something
that kind of ended the record on a very positive note. And when you
listen, New Day is the next song, the record turns over and you have
New Day right after Aleatory, I just wanted something that flowed
into New Day beautifully. And eventually, I think I want to take that
instrumental and turn it into a full song, maybe on my next record,
and reintroduce that theme of things sometimes just happen. I feel
like a lot of what I've been through, I can't really explain all
the people that I've met in the past eight years and how one person
introduces you to another person, and things sometimes just happen by
chance. I just thought that would be a great note to end my record on.
The design of your website, where you have to click on whether you're a
"sinner" or a "saint", where did that come from?
I love being able to play with the dual sides of the personality. I
think everybody has a little piece of that in them. It's funny,
because Ryan Tedder listened to the full record, and he was like,
"Tamar, one song is missing off this." He was like, "You are not
exploring your personality as deep as you should." And I'm like wow,
that's a very bold, deep statement. But he was like, "I think you
have two sides of your personality. I think you're either a sinner
or a saint, and you're in between most of the time." And I thought
that's an amazing song idea, that's what we should work on. That's
how the song got its legs. But I love how creative we can be with that
title, and even if you open the booklet, the photo shoot that we did,
there are pictures that sway both ways. I just think we can do a lot
of cool things with it.
Sinner or a Saint is going to be my second single, so it's going to be
amazing to shoot a video for that. The concept of the New Day video was
wearing flowing dresses in a beautiful meadow, and it was definitely
exploring the saintly side of me personally and artistically. The
video that we're gonna do for Sinner or a Saint is gonna be fun and
edgy, and a little more raw.
From: A. Papazian
Beatweek Magazine
http://www.beatweek.com/music/musicianinterviews/6928-tamar-kaprelian-interview-sinner-or-a-saint-new-day-onerepublic-apologize/
Aug 24 2010
"I've worked eight years on this record," says the twenty-three year
old rising pop star in reference to her new album Sinner or a Saint,
which sees the light of day today. The singer-songwriter with the
unusual name was first thrust into the spotlight with a OneRepublic
cover, but her new material is all hers, and it stretches in more
directions than one might be expecting...
We've reached an era where there are a million different ways you
can get noticed, and yet here you are, you covered a OneRepublic song
and the next thing you know you're hanging out with Ryan Tedder and
making an album?
I was working a couple months on just getting a bunch of material ready
for this EP that I wanted to do, I ended up doing this four song EP,
and my producer said to me when we were finished, "YouTube's really
blowing up, why don't you do a cover of a song that you really like,
put it up on YouTube, see what happens." And I said sure, that's a
great idea. And he was like, "OneRepublic has a great song out right
now, Apologize. I know that you love Ryan Tedder's songwriting, why
don't you just do that and change the key, make it fit with your voice,
do a different little piano thing. It'll take you five minutes."
So I did, not realizing that simultaneously, OneRepublic was holding a
"Do your own cover of apologize and put it on YouTube, and if you win
we'll do an introduction to your video." I had no idea that was going
on. So I did my video, I checked out their YouTube site, saw that they
were doing a contest and thought it was very strange that I had just
done a cover randomly. I posted it up on their page and two weeks later
I got an email from Interscope saying that I won the contest, the band
picked my video, and they were going to do an introduction to it, and
they did. A couple weeks after that I had a meeting with Interscope,
and they told me that they wanted to sign me. So long story short,
although the entire process has taken a little bit longer than that,
it's taken about eight years.
Of all the songs that made it onto the record, what was the first
one that you wrote?
The first song that I wrote actually on this record was a song called
Raw. It's actually my one relationship song on the album. The rest of
the record's really about life experiences and growing up and being
comfortable in your skin and overcoming trouble and being a stronger
person out of a negative situation. Raw was definitely me one angry,
"I don't like men" song. I do like men, but I don't like men in that
song. And then New Day came after that. New Day was the second song
that I wrote for the record.
I heard New Day first, it's an inspirational song, and I thought okay,
I know where this record is going. Then I heard Sinner or a Saint,
and I thought wow, there's a couple of different things going on here.
When you write your own material and when you play an instrument,
you never know where the creative process is going to take you. That's
the beautiful thing about making an album, you get to kind of explore
all areas of your emotions and your personality. Sinner or a Saint,
for example, is a song about having kind of a dual personality and
just having fun with it and playing with the fact that it's okay to be
crazy sometimes (laughs). It's definitely the edgier, kind of sexier
song on the record. But I'm proud of that one.
It's interesting that you didn't put any version of Apologize on this
record. I'm sure some of your earlier fans might have been expecting
you go to back and cover that. Was that something you considered?
I didn't really consider doing that. Maybe it's just something that
I'll do an acoustic version of. I actually never really perform it
live, either. I kind of had a vision of where I wanted this record to
go, and each song kind of flows into the next. Very early on I mapped
out song one through ten and what I kind of wanted each song to mean
to me. I think it's different when you release your first debut album,
you want to make a stamp for yourself.
I like that you've kept your real name. You could have branded
yourself as "Tammy" or something. Did you ever think about that,
or did you always know you wanted to use your real name?
I always knew that I wanted to stay true to it. My name is Armenian.
I'm Armenian and Irish, so I wanted to stay true to my culture and my
heritage, and I'm very proud of it. I was very close to my grandfather
who passed away three or four years ago, and I ended up dedicating
this record to him, and Kaprelian is his last name. So I wanted to
do something in ode to him. And something that he instilled in me is
always stay true to your ground and stay true to who you are. So I
wanted to make sure that I did that.
I keep thinking, how is it that a twenty-three year old pop singer has
a list of influences that are almost uniformly over the age of fifty?
I'm very lucky because my dad is the person who introduced me to
Billy Joel and Sting and Queen and Paul McCartney when I was two. My
dad plays guitar and piano, so he would play these songs to me as a
kid, and I grew up wanting to emulate my dad. I seriously wanted to
be Billy Joel. When I picked up the piano, I was like "I want to be
Billy Joel." His songwriting, his ability to tell stories, I think
it's amazing and I wish more people were doing that now.
A lot of times, when someone looks to the past for influences, they're
kind of an older soul. Even if they're still chronologically young,
they tend to be the type that would rather cuddle up with a good book
than go out partying. Is that accurate about you?
That's so accurate (laughs). Honestly, I would much rather do that
than go out to a club, ever. That's definitely not my scene in any way.
When I got to the last song on your album, I had to look up the word
"aleatory" to find out what it meant.
Aleatory is a song that's basically by chance, and I wanted something
that kind of ended the record on a very positive note. And when you
listen, New Day is the next song, the record turns over and you have
New Day right after Aleatory, I just wanted something that flowed
into New Day beautifully. And eventually, I think I want to take that
instrumental and turn it into a full song, maybe on my next record,
and reintroduce that theme of things sometimes just happen. I feel
like a lot of what I've been through, I can't really explain all
the people that I've met in the past eight years and how one person
introduces you to another person, and things sometimes just happen by
chance. I just thought that would be a great note to end my record on.
The design of your website, where you have to click on whether you're a
"sinner" or a "saint", where did that come from?
I love being able to play with the dual sides of the personality. I
think everybody has a little piece of that in them. It's funny,
because Ryan Tedder listened to the full record, and he was like,
"Tamar, one song is missing off this." He was like, "You are not
exploring your personality as deep as you should." And I'm like wow,
that's a very bold, deep statement. But he was like, "I think you
have two sides of your personality. I think you're either a sinner
or a saint, and you're in between most of the time." And I thought
that's an amazing song idea, that's what we should work on. That's
how the song got its legs. But I love how creative we can be with that
title, and even if you open the booklet, the photo shoot that we did,
there are pictures that sway both ways. I just think we can do a lot
of cool things with it.
Sinner or a Saint is going to be my second single, so it's going to be
amazing to shoot a video for that. The concept of the New Day video was
wearing flowing dresses in a beautiful meadow, and it was definitely
exploring the saintly side of me personally and artistically. The
video that we're gonna do for Sinner or a Saint is gonna be fun and
edgy, and a little more raw.
From: A. Papazian