Advertisement
After spending the last fifteen months of her life on tour supporting her debut album, No Angel, Dido is ready to go home and work on the next one. The pop chanteuse's last show, at New York's Roseland Ballroom on Aug. 21, means she can finally pack it up and go back to London. "I'm so looking forward to that," she says. "I haven't unpacked my bag in a year and a half. I need to put things back in the cupboards for a few months."
No Angel came out quietly over a year ago, and it wasn't
until recently that Dido saw her profile increase. Though the WB
teen alien drama Roswell selected her "Here With Me" as
its theme song, her album barely made a dent on the charts until
Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP
-- which samples her song "Thank You" on "Stan" -- came out this
summer.
"I figured [Eminem's] next album would be pretty huge," she says.
"I mean, I'd be stupid if I didn't. But it certainly didn't cross
my mind that he would be this big. It definitely helped.
It means people can identify with me on a whole different level.
But it's not just the hype. It's a whole string of things added
together. Touring for as long as I did, that was already having an
effect. Add Roswell, add Eminem, and that gives people
something to talk about."
Though she could easily continue to ride the crest of Eminem's
wave, Dido is more eager to put the finishing touches on songs
she's writing for her sophomore album, a few of which she's already
started playing live. One is typically sweet, she says, and she's
toying with calling it "Do You Have a Little Time?" Another, "Don't
Leave Home," is more chilling, she says, describing it as a
portrayal of drug addiction from the point of view of the drug,
which takes on the persona of an obsessive, possessive lover. "It's
like, the drug is speaking to you," she explains, "and it's saying,
'You don't need any other friends, you don't need anything but
me.'"
"I'm just trying them out live at the moment. If people start
leaving, then I'll know," she laughs. "I've been recording them on
a 24-track, to get some live tracks. But I want to get in the
studio. I want to finish them. I'm being pretty careful about that,
though, because I don't want [the songs] to end up all over the
Internet. It'll kill me. I would be so severely angry. I've heard
horror stories about that happening, like to Madonna
, and that ruins it . . . If someone takes an unfinished
demo from the studio and puts it up on the Internet, I'll kill
them."
JENNIFER VINEYARD
(August 19, 2000)