Episode 14 – “Bad Woman” – Paloma Faith

[Derek Oswald] (0:07 – 1:03)
Welcome to the AltWire Podcast, your go-to source for in-depth conversations with the brightest stars in music. I’m your host Derek Oswald, and today we have a special guest joining us, Paloma Faith. Paloma is here to share insights about her latest album, The Glorification of Sadness, and we’re excited to have her on the show.

Stay tuned for another great episode of the AltWire Podcast. It’s been a few years since your last release, and there is of course one word that comes to mind for me, and it’s transformation. With the pandemic and everything else that’s transpired in your life, it’s pretty clear from listening to this album that it’s an expression of someone who honestly had to crawl, walk, and lift themselves through darkness.

What has your personal journey been like through the creation of this record?

[Paloma Faith] (1:05 – 2:24)
It’s been therapeutic, I think. I felt very lonely with my feelings, breaking up from a relationship I was in for 10 years and having had two children. In the past, I’ve written quite flippant songs about breakups because I didn’t have kids with them when I was young and they were all a bit screw you.

And I think that there’s something very grave, and it’s got so much more depth because it feels like where we failed, we failed our children in a way. And with social expectation and all of that, it does feel like a failure. So I think it was quite helpful to me to have this to work on, like a welcome distraction and place to put my feelings.

I think quite often in these situations, we can feel very consumed by our own loneliness and feeling of isolation. But it was really amazing to be able to go into the studio every day with friends and emotionally intelligent people and really bash all the walls down and try and get to the root of the feelings of all the stages of guilt which are explored in the album.

[Derek Oswald] (2:25 – 3:04)
Honestly, one of the things that has always frustrated me as a music journalist is how crazily obsessed society is with focusing on the personal lives of those who are in the limelight. One of the most infamous examples that comes to mind is how the public treated and in some cases still continues to treat Taylor Swift. Every time she gets a boyfriend, they’re like, oh, well, how long until this becomes her next album?

It’s kind of BS because you don’t never see men in the music industry go through that. If a man in the music industry dates 20 women in a year, everyone talks about, oh, he’s the ultimate player.

[Paloma Faith] (3:05 – 3:06)
Or an eligible bachelor.

[Derek Oswald] (3:07 – 3:23)
Eligible bachelor, exactly. And if a woman does it, if you’ll pardon the expression, they slut shame her, which I think is absolutely disgusting. What are your thoughts on how society views women in the music industry and in the public light when it comes to relationships and what you’ve gone through personally?

[Paloma Faith] (3:25 – 7:25)
Well, I think it’s appalling, but I also feel like it’s a time where things are shifting. I’m a woman in my 40s with two children who I feel like is having probably my first chance at potentially coming to America to present my music. I’ve been on album six now, and 10 years ago when I tried and the doors felt quite closed, it would have been unheard of me.

I’d be like, I passed it. I can’t do that anymore. Society is progressing because in a sense, the public decide what music they want to listen to and what music speaks to them in a way that maybe they didn’t before.

It was a marketing machine that decided back then. Now, there’s much more freedom to explore, much more acceptance. I do think that’s progressive, but it was difficult for me.

I’ve written about my children in the lyrics, but then somebody interestingly said to me, because I was sheepish about it, I was like, Oh God, people are going to think that I’m invisible because people find mothers invisible socially. You’re not sexual because we don’t see you as that or unless if you are, then you’re a male. Even that’s a derogatory term as if the only things that a woman can do is give birth or have sex.

It was interesting when somebody brought to my attention that actually the kind of mindset and the psychology of country music has always done what I’m doing in this album. You look at Dolly Parton’s songs and she wrote the Parent Teachers Association song and a song called Divorce. We’ve journeyed through country music with female artists that have transcended all of that or called it out or sung songs about it in an empowered way.

But for some reason, it hasn’t really happened in other genres or in popular music, but country is one of the most popular genres globally. It’s so popular. I think there’s progress, but that doesn’t mean that I think the work is done.
Part of what I speak about in the song, Bad Woman, that says I’m not a good girl, I’m a bad woman, it’s all about this. It’s all about saying, I’ve been told so many times that because I don’t adhere to social norms that I’m a bad woman. But who says?

And actually how I think we’re doing as kids, our children are deserving of raising them to be good girls. I sing Bad Woman to my two-year-old every night before she goes to sleep. She asks for it and she goes around telling people, I’m a bad woman and she says it to people and I find it so cute.

But I don’t want to raise little, I’ve got two daughters, I don’t want to raise them to think that they have to behave and do everything that they’re told to do if it goes against what their gut reaction is. You look at stories, it’s getting heavy, but you look at stories nowadays about sexual coercion and you think how much that begins in childhood where we’re forced to kiss our uncle, whoever, goodnight and we don’t want to. And they’re like, don’t be rude, don’t be rude.

And we’re sort of trained to go away, to put away these instinctive feelings of self-preservation and ignore your feelings, ignore your gut instincts and go against it to be good, just to be nice and please people, please society and all of that. So I think that song in particular is meant to be kind of an anthem of the rejection of that. Screw you.

[Derek Oswald] (7:26 – 8:38)
Yeah. And I don’t think it’s heavy, I think it’s truth. The whole fact of the matter is there’s a famous saying that says, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Think about everything women, people of color, people in the LGBTQ community went through in the last 30, 40 years, just to get to the point where they can start being represented and heard and seen. And now it horrifies me every time to turn on the American television and see just in America, and it’s all over the world now, but especially in America, it’s like we’re going back to the 1950s. But I wanted to go back into talking about your music a little bit, just because there’s so many good things on this record.

One of the things I thought was so awesome for you personally, is you going ahead and recording this entire album, basically kind of in private, you took back your creative journey. How good did it feel as an artist to get your creative freedom back on this album and basically be able to give that finished album and say, this is me, this is my product, you guys don’t have anything to do with this. How did that feel?

[Paloma Faith] (8:39 – 11:11)
Scary. I think it was important because it felt very personal because of the kind of sensitivity of that being such a significant breakup. It was difficult for me to even hear anybody’s opinion on anything because I was like, this is my actual life experience and I can’t even believe that I’m sharing it with you or playing it to you because I don’t really know who you are, aka people in the boardroom.

And this is like the most kind of life-changing experience I’ve had. And I think that probably in hindsight, I had some kind of breakdown surrounding it all in a way that I’ve never experienced because I’ve had a lot of trauma happen to me in my life, but I’ve never felt that I contributed anything. It felt very much like all the bad stuff that’s happened to me, happened to me.

Whereas in this situation, it’s the first time that I feel a combination of stuff happening to me, but also my choices affecting the outcome. So that felt like a really heavy burden. And so to kind of like take ownership of it was important, but also terrifying because I have been kind of brought up in patriarchal structures and to kind of like actively say no to habitual things that come from the structures you’re used to, does feel terrifying because you’re like, what if I do this big brave bold move and then nobody likes it or it falls on its face?

And the kind of difference with this that I’m coming to a situation now in my career where I’ve had six albums, if my record company say to me now, no, we’re not going to fund that for you because we don’t want to spend money on that. I can afford to fund it myself. And I feel like it’s a really luxurious situation to be, but I’ve been doing that.

I’m like, no, I’m going to make this album. I’m going to write these songs and I’m going to fund myself going to be on an American TV show or speak to you. I’m going to pay the flight.

I’m going to go and do this. I’m really going to have independence and just hope it doesn’t fall flat on its face. But I also think that even if it does fall flat on its face, it would still feel good because at least I’ve tried and I’ve done it on my own terms.

[Derek Oswald] (11:12 – 11:43)
And just to kind of wrap things up, because I know we’re getting close to running out of time here, I just want to really ask, because this is the way that I learned about you and I’m sure many others learned about you as well this way. How did it feel to have your song Only Love Can Hurt Like This explode so hugely on TikTok? That was such a viral song on TikTok for the longest time.

How has that type of marketing and TikTok in general changed your career?

[Paloma Faith] (11:44 – 13:56)
It’s unbelievable because when I released the song eight years before it exploded, I was called into a boardroom meeting in the state by a record exec from America. And they asked, this person said to me, we think that this song could break you in America, which could potentially lead to globally. But I’m not going to put any marketing funds behind it unless you reshoot the video.

We can’t have a mixed race relationship on a video. America won’t pay for it. They won’t buy it.

They won’t like it. And I said, well, that’s not me. I refused to reshoot a video with me or the white person because I think that goes against my moral code.

I’m not a racist. And he said, this could be the difference between you breaking America and not breaking America. And I said, I don’t want to break America on those terms.

And whilst he’d flown me out on a business class flight to have this conversation, he put me home on an economy flight to make a point. And then eight years later during lockdown, suddenly the song that they talked about had become viral all across the world, but particularly in North America. Now my streaming numbers in North America are my biggest streaming numbers.

And it’s all because the public now decides and the public don’t care that I was snogging a black man in my video and they shouldn’t in the first place. But it was just this perception idea of the machine of marketing. And it was wrong at the time.

And I’m really glad that it’s still wrong today. And I stuck to my guns because I always will. I can’t be an inauthentic artist.
So I’m really proud of people and I’m proud of TikTok and I’m proud of the way music is being consumed because it’s really decided by the public now and that’s how it should have always been.

[Derek Oswald] (13:57 – 14:11)
Perfect. Well, I do want to thank you so much for joining me today. For everyone listening in, please check out her new album, The Glorification of Sadness, coming out on February 16th.

Thank you so much for wearing your heart on your sleeve today. And I do hope you have a great rest of your day.

[Paloma Faith] (14:12 – 14:13)
You too.

[Derek Oswald] (14:15 – 14:40)
Thank you for tuning in to the AltWire Podcast, your source for engaging conversations with music’s brightest talents. This podcast episode was produced from our studios here in Redding, Pennsylvania and is the official podcast of altwire.net. We appreciate your support and encourage you to subscribe to our podcast on your platform of choice and feel free to share your feedback with us on altwirepodcast.com.

Again, I’m Derek Oswald and thank you for listening.