Shaznay Lewis turns the page with new album.

Shaznay Lewis found fame in the late nineties as founder-member and lead songwriter of All Saints. She recorded her debut solo album, Open, in 2004 before stepping away from the limelight to focus on songwriting and raising children. This week she releases her long–awaited second album, Pages.

“I didn’t plan on doing a record now,” she says, explaining that the initial recording session was only ever intended to yield one song: “Missiles”, which set the mood for the whole album. “I knew I wanted it to be quite cinematic, I knew I wanted it to be lush and to have strings. I was just excited to explore all those ideas that I had, and how I wanted it to sound.” Once the rest of the tracks had been recorded, Lewis revisited “Missiles”, adding the intro that now kicks off Pages in exactly the way she had hoped. “It felt right for that to be the first song on the record.”

The second track, “Pick You Up”, features Self Esteem, and the album sees Lewis working with an impressive line-up of performers, writers and producers: Shola Ama and General Levy feature on the latest single to be taken from Pages, “Good Mourning”, while the two previous singles, “Miracle” and “Kiss of Life”, were the result of a collaboration with writer/producer team Emily Phillips and Ant Whiting. Other co-writers and producers on the album include Ben Cullum, Johan Hugo, Moyses Dos Santos, Charlie Stacey and Michael Angelo, who produced “Tears to the Floor”. “That song took quite a few visits. When I first wrote that song, I don’t even think I fully committed. He worked on it for a while, and once he sent the track back a lot more developed, I then got into it a lot more, went back and finished it properly.” It was also the first track to be sent to award-winning French sound engineer Manon Grandjean, to see if she would be a good fit for the rest of the album. “She’s the first female mixer I’ve ever worked with. She’s amazing – she absolutely smashed it.”

“I was growing up in a house where my parents played a lot of reggae. This is, I think, the beauty of growing up as a British child from a Caribbean home because musically there were so many influences”

— Lewis

“Tears to the Floor” is one of several songs on the album which Lewis has deliberately taken more up-tempo than her usual style. “I don’t think I’ve done that before, where I’ve written a heartbreak song but over a dancefloor track.” Another is the eighties-inflected “Got to Let Go”, produced by Jez Ashurst. “I love eighties music, but at the time I was really inspired by a Coldplay song, ‘Higher Power’, which I think is quite eighties itself. That was probably the inspiration of that song, in terms of where I felt comfortable for an up-tempo song to sit.” The pop obsessions she remembers from her childhood – Peter Gabriel, Go West, the Top Gun soundtrack (“I played that thing until it burnt out!”) – blended with family influences to create her musical lineage. “I’d listen to the radio, and I would pretend to be the radio host. I would introduce the songs and then would record whatever songs were being played on the radio. And obviously, I was growing up in a house where my parents played a lot of reggae. This is, I think, the beauty of growing up as a British child from a Caribbean home because musically there were so many influences.”

Having spent much of her career writing songs for other people to perform, Lewis is accustomed to tailoring her music to the artist. “If I work with other people, my approach is always to make that song theirs. I’ve never written a song and they’ve just kind of gone in and sung it: it’s usually drawing things out from them as well, because it’s theirs at the end of the day and they’re going to be the one singing it.” Working on Pages, she found it liberating to be composing purely for herself. “It’s the first time not having to think of anything other than the song. I didn’t have to think about how I was going to write it to complement voices, or think about what I could say – because being in a band, I became very mindful of it not just my story being told, there’s four other people singing it so there are so many different things that need to relate to everybody across the board. This was the first time ever in a thirty-year career where I could go in and it just be about the song first and foremost, which I think allowed for the chance to do some really good songwriting.”

When Lewis made Open, she had to deal with the pressure put on a first solo album after leaving a chart-topping, award-winning group like All Saints. “I really felt the expectation to be as good as that success, which was quite daunting actually, quite hard.” Pages has been a completely different experience – with no label or management to answer to while it was being recorded, Lewis was free to steer the album wherever she wanted it to go. “This time around there were no expectations. I went out on a limb completely by myself to make this record. I worked with everybody by myself. Creatively, I was the most excited I’ve been in a long time. It was a very freeing experience. I just found that every session I went into with everybody on this record, I was really excited to see what we came up with. By the time I finished that record, it just felt right.” And while even Lewis sometimes can’t believe that she left a twenty-year gap between the two albums, she’s confident that this is the right record at the right time. “I’ve got to continue enjoying the way that I’m doing it because that will always make everything else make sense. It will show – the results will show.”

Pages is out May 17th.

Author: Rachel Goodyear