Sing Along With Sing Sing andI

Mon 7th Nov, 2005 in Features

Sing Sing is a British duet made up of songstresses Lisa O’Neill and Emma Anderson who are set to release their second full length release after years in a label wasteland. After years of struggling to record and finally accomplishing it through donations from fans and a response that gave these ballsy women the extra incentive to get their music out there. FasterLouder spoke with Emma Anderson about the new album Sing Sing and I.

The Sing Sing sound is very lyrical and melodic with real and relatable lyrics. Indie-pop sounds with a sweet yet somehow gritty ambience, Sing Sing has persevered through tough times to make the exact album they had in mind, without any colouring of the struggle they went through to make it.

How did the new album come about, how did you go about sitting down and working out how the album would sound after the trouble you went through to get it out? “Well basically it has been a labour of love because it’s our second album and our first album came out in Australia in 2001 and we had a lot of trouble with labels around that time, not just the label it came out on in here and in Australia, but the label in America and… kind of after all of that stuff calmed down and the first album stuff we were like, ‘Well what are we going to do?” Because we didn’t have a label anywhere so we kind of thought well, do we have enough fans to make this thing work if we did it ourselves and we kind of figured out that we probably did, so we made an EP to sell off our online shop, which we funded through our own personal money and we thought if we could make enough money off this we can make an album, and it worked luckily! We got the money and we funded it all ourselves. Musically its kind of similar to the first album but it’s a bit darker, edgier I think. It’s a great feeling just to keep going.”

Fans were so eager to have another album from Sing Sing that not only did they buy the EP, Lisa and Emma received donations for their cause. “We thought we would raise enough money from the EP to fund the album and we exceeded all our expectations because people were sending cheques for 100 pounds and we were stunned, oh my God!”

Imagine the validation from that, the boosted confidence support. Emma started a band in her college years called The Baby Machines that turned into Lush, a melodic pop band that had hits world but ended sadly, with the suicide of drummer Chris Acland in 1996. Emma found herself with a batch of songs and no-one to sing them and through acquaintances she found Lisa and they started the collaboration that is Sing Sing. They released the full length The Joy of Sing Sing in 2001 and toured heavily on the back of it before the dramas of getting the second album recorded began. ”After all the machinations from the first album where we were kind of left and quite down about it all, financially we were in the red and it was kind of great to strip away the music industry side of it and see that there are people out there, there are fans that want to hear the second album so it was worth doing that.”

Did the frustration of the of the first album influence the kind of album that Sing Sing and I is? “I don’t think so. I think a lot of the pain of that had passed. Lisa and I knew what we wanted to do with this album. The first album is a lot of keyboards and samples and it was quite pretty… and we wanted to strip it down a bit and that’s what we did, I think this album is a lot more natural sounding and I think we kind of had the idea from start to finish and Mark [Van Hoen] who has produced all of our albums fell in with that as well. We’re pretty pleased with the results and for doing it ourselves and considering the first album was done but rather a big label, actually. I don’t think that it sounds a hell of a lot different really, its pretty consistent which is pretty good I think.”

So how do you and Lisa go about writing an album, do you both write things separately and bring them together? “Yeah, absolutely. It’s kind of weird that Lisa and I will write quite bare bones songs really and then bring them into Mark and we tend to fill it out when we’re with him. We throw ideas around which is great and come up with it, which is very different from the last band I was in which was Lush. It was very much I would write my songs, I wrote all the parts and this is your part and this is what you’ll be playing and it was very much regimented and no room for people to actually put their stamp on it but this way is more creative, I suppose. Its hard at first though because it is really hard to let go, you know but its good.”

So what’s on the cards for the next 12 months? “Well Lisa is having a baby in February which means we can’t tour or anything like that but what we’re actually doing is the album is about to come out in Australia and New Zealand through Chatterbox and we’re about to sign an American licensing deal and we’re actually going to out the album out properly in this country with distribution and iTunes because at the moment it is only available through our website so its just getting out there properly, which is great because we’ve gone from not having a record deal at all to being distributed properly around the world. Its kind of a triumph really.”

So no tour? “We were actually talking about that before with Lisa being pregnant we get this call saying “Do you want to come down to Australia and perform at the Big Day Out” and Lisa goes “Bloody typical, I’m pregnant so I can’t go out. I’d love to go to Australia so maybe next year or the year after.”  

Sing Sing and I is a great album and a tribute to these women’s tenacity.