I Wrote That: KT Tunstall on 'Suddenly I See'

When KT Tunstall puts out a record, there’s one thing she always aims for: pushing her own musical boundaries.

‘I've always been really excited about every single record I've made,’ she tells M. ‘I don't want to repeat myself. I've always been really proud that I've kept extremely true to my heart and never put out anything that didn't excite me, and that’s sometimes meant leaving the path of what people are expecting to hear.’

KT is reflecting on her career as she’s just been announced as this year’s winner of the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Song Collection with PRS for Music, which has previously been awarded to the likes of Queen, Pulp and KAMILLE. Recognised by The Ivors for her 'exceptional ability as a songwriter' and set to be presented at next week's awards ceremony, the accolade is a fitting celebration of KT’s accomplishments.

‘I think it's always been such a joy and kind of constant surprise that those first years produced two or even three global hits, where I can walk off a plane anywhere in the world and have that dream of people singing your words back to you from a crowd,’ she says. ‘Then to have this acknowledgement of everything I've done since is a huge surprise.’

It’s fitting that KT is winning the award this year as 2024 marks 20 years of her smash debut album Eye to the Telescope. A record that spawned a slew of hit singles (including the empowering Suddenly I See, which earned KT her first Ivor Novello Award in 2006 for Best Song Musically and Lyrically) and sold millions of copies worldwide, it’s a truly timeless LP that puts KT's songwriting front and centre.

'I'd been songwriting for a decade before that happened, as I was 29 when I got my record deal,' she recalls. Initially based in St Andrews in Scotland where she grew up, KT was surrounded by artists like Fence Records, the independent record label and musicians' collective, who were 'phenomenal musicians and quite experimental'.

'As much as I loved being part of that scene, I realised I was definitely more of a mainstream artist,' she says. This realisation prompted both a move to Edinburgh, where she started a music night called Acoustic Extravaganza, and regular trips down to London, where she eventually relocated. Playing at Marylebone's Kashmir Klub was particularly pivotal: 'It was this fantastic environment where only 150 people could fit in this basement. It was free to get in, but you had to pay by keeping your fucking mouth shut and being quiet and listening.'

'I can walk off a plane anywhere in the world and have that dream of people singing your words back to you from a crowd.'

It was here 'that, ultimately, I got discovered', leading KT to pen a record deal with Relentless Records: 'People say you've got your whole life to write your first record, [but] I think everything on Eye to the Telescope had been written within about three or four years.'

KT has recently been looking back on old journals — or 'paper back-up hard drives', as she calls them — from the time she started writing her debut. Filled with early lyrics, they also include reflections on how she was feeling at the time.

'I was really, really lonely: there's so many passages about having to be resilient and not do what I'm told,' she reveals. 'A lot of it is trying to find the self-confidence to keep going when nothing's working, or [when] the deals aren't working. And then when you get the deals, people aren't loving what you're doing.

'I was three weeks into making the first record and I was writing down, "Is it good? It's got to be brilliant, got to make sure it's the best it can be". There was a lot of inward chewing over things to make sure it was as good as it possibly could be.'

Recording Eye to the Telescope in Nam Studios, a 'really tiny little studio in Bradford-on-Avon', some of the album’s best-known songs were latecomers to the party. Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, for example, was written when KT had initially finished making the record.

'I was really bored playing live like Phoebe from Friends playing Smelly Cat at open mic nights,' she remembers. 'I was like, "I really want some rhythm," but I couldn’t afford to pay a band'. Having befriended her label mates Oi Va Voi, a modern folk klezmer cross-over band, KT was lent an Akai loop pedal after a rehearsal by the group's Moshik Kop. Black Horse... then emerged, essentially, from 'just trying to work out how to use that pedal', KT says now.

A major breakout moment for KT came when she performed the aforementioned track on Later... with Jools Holland in 2004.

'One week Nas pulled out of the show and I got the spot. My label boss said, "Play that 'woohoo' song,"' she reminisces, the ‘woohoo’ referencing the vocal riff that features throughout. The track hadn't been included on the initial album tracklist, but once KT played it on Later... 'it just all went mad'.

'The first 10,000 copies of the album have got the Later... audio on it as we didn't have a recording of the song,' she notes. 'It was just one of those incredible, life-changing moments where I'd been trying to get somewhere for 10 years, but it really did feel like it happened overnight.'

Suddenly I See, meanwhile, was written during 'one of the best half-hours of my life'. Created in her basement flat in London, it was a response to her record label saying the 'dreaded sentence: "We don't have enough singles."' Looking at the iconic black-and-white album cover for Patti Smith's Horses, 'I just had this massive epiphany moment,' KT says.

'I realised I'd spent my life up to that point just trying, really trying,' she continues. 'I was looking at this picture and [Patti] was just being. I realised the difference between trying and being, and all the energy that you're using to try and be something.'

'Suddenly I See was written during one of the best half-hours of my life.'

The sun-drenched song is built around a slinky bassline and careening guitars as KT's memorable lyrics cut across the top.

'I think what was so surprising to me was that it was just so positive,' she explains. 'It was such a positive, happy anthem. But the song itself is me writing about an epiphany in real time; it's about realising that I had it a little bit wrong. The song came from a place of really deep frustration and things not clicking or working. It was me questioning, "Am I an artist if people aren't hearing what I'm doing?"'

It’s a question she's now able to answer: 'I really think you are. If you're putting your creative energy into something authentic you absolutely are, whether anyone knows about it or not.'

While these are personal songs to KT, they've also taken on lives of their own. Suddenly I See, for example, reached a whole new audience when it was used on the soundtrack to The Devil Wears Prada ('When I saw it on [the film] you're like, "Oh my God, it can mean something completely different"'). Fans have reached out to KT to tell their personal stories related to the song, from being their anthem to get over a cheating ex to wedding soundtracks: 'I've even had people come up to me who are 20-year-old adults going, "I was born to your song."'

Looking forward to the future, KT is keen to keep pushing her own musicality and experimentation.

‘When I started out, I just thought, “I'm going to be on a tour bus forever; all I want to do is play gigs”. While I still want to play gigs, I realised there's so many other things I want to do,' she says. ‘Where I've ended up now, 20 years later, I'm still really excited about making new material.

'I love the feeling of waking up in the morning and then, by the end of that day, you've made something that didn't exist in the world. It reminds me that the universe is just this infinite, expanding space, but there's always room for something new. There's never not space for that, so there's no excuse not to make it.’

The Ivors 2024 will take place on 23 May at Grosvenor House in London - you can find out more here.