Beth Orton has one of those starmaker stories that no one would believe if it hadn't been documented in countless magazines, news clips and on her collaborations with electronic wizards William Orbit and the Chemical Brothers. It's one of those tales which has been allocated to legend, since the probability of it happening to some other club-happy former stage actress from Norfolk, England, is about as low as a wheat breeder from Mexico winning the Nobel Peace Prize (which has happened -- but only once). Nevertheless, Orton's discovery is not fiction.

"It was a bit of one of those weird ones, yeah, but um, that's what happened," the lanky singer reticently acquiesces about her first meeting with Orbit. "I didn't think of myself as a singer before then -- I don't suppose I do think of myself as a singer now. It's funny, still. It's like, every time I open my mouth to sing, I'm surprised."

Orton is in New York to announce her addition to this summer's final Lilith Tour, shop around for a few rare records and hit the daytime club scene, which has become popular for those out-of-towners who have the luxury of avoiding work on Monday mornings. Her vague affirmation of the beginnings of her career -- which began incubating after she asked Orbit for a light at a London club and he asked her into his studio -- come in typical Orton form. For a woman who can gracefully and painfully articulate loss, regret and hope in song, her conversational demeanor is less than forthcoming.

"Bloody 'ell!" and "D'ya know wha' I mean?" pepper her every sentence, and any attempt at dipping below the surface are cut down with preemptive, though jocular, verbal blows. Inquiries into the suffering she endures from Crohn's disease -- which has put Orton into the hospital in recent months -- are brushed aside. Questions about her past losses are also glossed over with a pro's tact. "Oh god, that's so boring," she quips when probed about the darker pieces of the Orton puzzle. "Honestly, I haven't suffered any more than anyone else. People suffer all the f---ing time. You turn on the telly, you see genuine suffering. More than any suffering I've ever know. D'ya know wha' I mean? That's all I've got to say on that." Really, she'd rather just talk about her music.

And so would everyone else. When Orton debuted her solo work on 1996's Trailer Park, her fusion of unplugged folk and droning beats caught listeners off-guard. The obvious but unique marriage of acoustic chords with trance-like rhythms gave Orton's raw but honeyed voice an edgy pedestal to rest on, and the songs just spoke for themselves. The year before, her appearance on the Chemical Brothers' 1995 Exit Planet Dust (on the tracks "One Too Many Mornings" and "Alive: Alone"), had brought the chirpings of that languid and lush voice to American ears, but few knew enough about the Chemical Brothers' muse to anticipate her first solo album. By the time Orton set out to record Trailer Park's follow-up, this year's flawless Central Reservation, however, she had the likes of Ben Harper, folk-jazz legend Terry Callier (her hero) and Everything But the Girl's Ben Watt calling her up to contribute, let alone countless fans lining up at stores to purchase her record. When it hit shelves, not a peep was heard from a naysayer, even though many hoped she would stick to the trip-hop melodies that signified her debut. Even without the trickery of trippy beats, Orton's pre-millennial folk was something everyone could love -- and did.

"I didn't think people would go out and buy [the record]," she admits. "I didn't have any expectations like that. I just like playing music with other people a lot. That's my favorite thing, and that's when I'm just so happy." Happy isn't the first adjective that pops to mind when describing Orton's songs, most of which linger around the forlorn corners of the heart. But Orton insists there's a glimmer of hope in her melodies, a shred of universal honesty. "There's a nugget of truth inside me, I don't know what it is, I just know it's there. It's like something solid, you know, inside. You know, like a nugget of something kind of strong, and you just know, however small it gets sometimes, it's still there."

Those nuggets peek through in every song, from the heartfelt "Sweetest Decline" to the admonishing "Pass in Time," and weave each of Orton's songs together. Her incomparable ability to pull the shroud off life's deepest emotions is as much a shock and secret to Orton as it is to her fans. To describe it, she makes subtle references to the violent outbursts America has seen in recent months. "It's interesting how some people pick up a gun, and some people don't. Some people write a song or draw a picture instead. I don't know what the defining moment is in people's lives to make one want to pick up a weapon and one want to write a melody, but there seems to be something going on that's like that," she explains. "Maybe something happens to us, some defining moment happens that makes people do one or the other. Who knows how we make these choices."

HEIDI SHERMAN
(May 28, 1999)