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La Roux Discusses Her Sci-Fi Album and Sexism In The Music Press

07/30/2014
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(Radio.com) Getting La Roux's new album Trouble in Paradise off the ground turned out to be more challenging than the average sophomore album. Not due to the usual sophomore slump, but thanks to a split between Ms. Elly Jackson and her production partner Ben Langmaid, citing serious creative differences. "Once I started to know what I wanted for the album, I realized that that relationship wasn't the best way forward," Jackson told Billboard. Oh, and some unexpected vocal problems that stopped Jackson from being able to sing in her signature falsetto.

Following La Roux's self-titled debut album, a dance-pop smash, Jackson found a big supporter in Kanye West, who asked her to sing on his smash single "All of the Lights" and the Watch the Throne track "That's My B-h." In the time since her very high-profile entree into music society in 2009, Jackson has been trying to craft the vision for a follow-up. Jackson partnered up with Ian Sherwin, La Roux's engineer for the debut album, and found some sort of paradise on the sophomore La Roux effort.

Radio.com talked to Jackson about how she could never write songs the way Taylor Swift does, latent sexism in the music press and her epic disappointment that the future turned out nothing like sci-fi from the 1970s promised it would.

Radio: You've talked a bit about latent sexism in the press, where people have been asking you about and assuming that you didn't contribute musically to the last La Roux album. Do you think that's a pervasive problem?

Elly: I find that, generally, questions about sexism and feminism are difficult to answer because in the one sense I'd always said in my whole life I'd never experienced sexism, that I'd managed to stay in a lane where it didn't really involve me. I never really had a proper job and then, obviously, in the music industry I think unless you're in a specific part of the music industry, which now I've experienced - if you want to be an engineer or whatever, it's a very male dominated world. But I certainly never felt anything like that.

Then I noticed that, after a while, I'd read interviews or someone would read me an interview that I'd done or I'd hear a rumor. I'd start an interview and someone would say, "So, Ben plays all the parts�" And it put me in a really difficult situation where I'd want to say, "No that's not true," but also not wanting to sound petty at the same time. Nobody really wants to turn around and go, "I did that." It's not a very nice thing to say. You hope that people read up and know the information so you don't have to put your hand up or made to sound arrogant. But it was very strange for me to say, quite blatantly, to people who I was the instrumentalist on the first record and for people to completely ignore it and assume that I could only possibly vocalist and that there was this guy who did everything on the computer and played all the parts. It wasn't easy to read at all, especially when I knew that Ben didn't play and instrument and he would have told anybody, had they asked him, that he didn't play an instrument.

It was very frustrating because it was one of the things I was most proud of off the first record. I feel I'm more an instrumentalist than I am a vocalist, so it was really insulting.

Read the full interview here.

Radio.com is an official news provider for antiMusic.com.
Copyright Radio.com/CBS Local - Excerpted here with permission.

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