This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen Magazine #97 (December 2001/January 2002). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.

Eliza Carthy Shock of the New by Pamela Murray Winters

"Oh, I'm not a fiddler anymore." It's hard to tell whether the woman on the other end of the phone, Eliza Carthy, is being serious or playful. She is adept at both states of being, and both are essential to who she is as an artist. In person, you might be clued in by a wry smile, a self-deprecating moue, or a flash in those dark elfin eyes. With just her voice as a guide, you can spot her joke by the smoky, infectious chuckle, sometimes erupting into a guffaw.

No, Carthy hasn't given up the fiddle, or much else, lately. If anything, she's taking on more and more, particularly by carving out a new identity as a pop artist with her Warner Bros. album Angels and Cigarettes. Touring this past summer with a seven-piece band (including herself) at festivals and small clubs, she offered a set list drawing heavily on Angels and with hints of similar new material for future recordings; the only hint of tradition in evidence was the Moog-driven arrangement of "Adieu, Adieu" that appeared on her 1998 album Red Rice.
When asked whether people were averse to her new direction — for there have been rumblings that she should stay in her little folky pigeonhole and not dabble in pop — she said, "I suppose it depends on how into human endeavor you are.
"I haven't stopped doing the traditional music at all. I produced my mum's traditional solo album [Bright Shiny Morning] last year, me and my accordion player have just made an album's worth of traditional music as well, and Waterson:Carthy is scheduled to make another album in October. So as far as I'm concerned, I'm just trying to do a new thing. I've been doing the same job for 12 years! I've fancied learning a new skill. For instance, I fancied seeing whether I could write an album's worth of my own songs, which is something I've never tried to do before."
Carthy thrives on new things. It would be too easy to cite her ever-changing hair color as evidence of her chimerical nature; better to look at her discography, which boasts a surprising number of different lineups for one so young. "I've been making records since I was 17; I've been making, like, two records a year since I was 17. It's very hard to sound the same from one week to the next when you're that age, let alone one album to the next!"
Still, it's a great leap from Waterson:Carthy's a cappella rendition of "The Grey Cock" (learned from her mother, who learned it from a 1960s recording of Mrs. Cecilia Costello) to the full-bore trip-hop of Angels' "Whole" (written with Barnaby Stradling, Sam Thomas, and Carthy beau/bandmate/Peatbog Faerie Ben Ivitsky):

Do you smell my breathing around you,
My body breathing you in
My self and my soul and grace, you are so still
So transient and so mine
If only I could breathe you all the time

"It would be much easier for everybody concerned if I just decided on one style and stuck to it," Carthy acknowledged. "But it doesn't interest me."
The challenge to write an album's worth of songs, for Angels, "ended up being quite hard. There's all kinds of things involved in signing to a major label — all kinds of constraints involved. I was really quite attracted by some of those constraints — by some of the disciplines that you have to go through to record an album of that kind. You have to put yourself under a producer — which, of course, I chose, along with the record label. But you do have to be beholden to him, to a certain extent.
"I can write really very oblique songs, very mysterious songs. And sometimes I need somebody to tell me that they actually don't know what I'm talking about! I need to make a bit more sense, you know, and perhaps have a chorus — that kind of thing. I can write existential poetry until I puke, but it's a good idea to learn how to make things into songs with choruses that people can get a handle on and understand."

This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #97 (Dec. '01/Jan. '02). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.