Stoked PR

This time, it’s personal.  Natasha Bedingfield’s third album, ‘Strip Me’, sees her baring her soul as never before. It’s an album that’s brave, bold and bursting with great, unashamedly pop tunes. “I’ve been doing this for several years now, so there’s more confidence,” she says. “I don’t feel I have to hide who I am any more, or apologise for it.”

A lot has happened since you saw her last, much of it in the USA, where her second album, ‘Pocket Full of Sunshine’, continued the massive success of her debut ‘Unwritten’. She has met (and married) her soulmate, seen her record sales soar past the 14 million mark, and has written some 50 songs in the past two years, working with an impressive list of A-list collaborators.

But first, the romance. Natasha was introduced to film-maker Matt Robinson by a mutual friend after a gig in Nashville five years ago, and they married in Malibu in March 2009, with the paparazzi circling above them in helicopters. “None of my other relationships have felt real compared to him,” she says. “All that soppy love stuff suddenly made sense to me. I’m doing all the bloke stuff with him – smoking cigars, playing golf. And he has to come shopping with me!“

She’s been through the kind of experiences we all do as we mature into adults: love, loss, pain, regret, trauma and recovery. “I’ve had some incredible things happen in the last few years, and some really hard things as well. So the album is about the stuff we all go through, how we all connect and relate to each other, about common desires and frustrations – and it’s a celebration of what makes each of us important and unique.”

Natasha’s lowest point came in 2008, at the end of yet another gruelling US tour. “I was really burned out,” she says. “I was exhausted, and I was having anxiety attacks. At times I didn’t want to leave the house. It’s happened to a lot of my female friends: I think women tend work harder to prove we’re as good as men, and we don’t want to show weakness.”

To recover, she learned to strike a better balance between work and play, which left her more creative – and productive – than ever.  “Before, I lived for my job. I wanted to make the most of every single opportunity, and perhaps I didn’t have as much fun as I could have. Matt has really helped me to just relax and enjoy life. I come from a line of women who work hard, but sometimes you end up being less effective if you keep at it. You need to breathe a bit.”

Growing up in South London, Natasha always felt like an outsider. “I didn’t quite belong, because my family was so different. My parents are from New Zealand so they tend to be more straight forward in the way they express themselves, and we are more outdoorsy and bohemian. As a kid, I didn’t think I’d amount to much. My school reports were terrible, and I was such a day-dreamer that my parents took me to the doctor because they thought I was deaf!”

This, and her older brother Daniel’s ADHD led Molly and John Bedingfield to decide to educate their four children themselves. Natasha was home-schooled for five years from the age of 11, so unlike most teenagers, most of her friends weren’t her own age. “I used to think it was weird, and I didn’t like to talk about it. But I now realise that we’ve all got things like that. When I write about things that are personal, often those are the songs people relate to the most. We all have much more in common than we think, so many insecurities that we share.”

It was in church that she found her voice. “I found I could lose myself in music, and it helped me overcome my shyness. I forgot to worry about what I looked like, or what people thought of me. I love singing – it makes me feel alive.”

In her teens she began making her own music for fun, messing around in a friend’s home studio, but it was her brother Daniel who was famous first, with his debut single rapidly rising to number one in the UK charts in 2001. Meanwhile Natasha went through different managers, was embroiled in a court battle over one of her songs, and finally released her own debut album Unwritten in 2004. When her second single These Words went to number one, she and Daniel entered the Guinness Book of Records as the only UK brother and sister to have separate chart-topping singles. More records were broken as America also took her to heart in an unprecedented way: Unwritten recently earned her a BMI award for notching up more than three million plays on US radio, and her success paved the way for a new generation of feisty, R&B-influenced British singer/songwriters in the US charts.

From the start, Natasha did it her way. At a time when everyone else was miming on TV, she always insisted on singing live. On ‘Strip Me’, she has gone a step further and recorded her voice raw and direct, without all the autotune effects that have become the norm.  “I took five songs off the album and sang them live at home, with a band. We put cameras all around the room and filmed it. It was a fun project for Matt and I to do together – we’ll probably release it at some point via our production company.”

She now lives in the hip Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, where Natalie Portman and Will.I.Am are amongst the neighbours and she frequently ends up apologising to next-door neighbour Casey Affleck for her noisy parties. She loves the sunshine in California, the shopping, the people-watching, and the healthy lifestyle. But most of all, she finds it a great place to write and record. “I’ve got a studio in my house, and I love being able to do my vocals, then go for a swim in our pool or lie in the hammock in the garden!”

[THIS PARA FOR UK RELEASE ONLY] She still has a home in London, too, and visits often. Some of the album was written in the UK, and the video for Strip Me was made in London with acclaimed photographer Rankin. There’s a lot she still misses: family and friends, of course, but also the buildings, the humour, the changing of the seasons, the cakes – and the fashion. “Here it’s more edgy, and I miss that. In London, and everyone seems to just have that sense of style.

All of the songs on Strip Me are written by Natasha, working with old friends like Steve Kipner, Andrew Frampton and Wayne Wilkins (whose other credits include Cheryl Cole, Pink, Christina Aguilera); with ace Swedish pop writer/producer Kleerup (Lady Gaga); and with Eg White (Adele, Duffy, James Morrison), who co-wrote Recover, a gorgeous meditation on pain and its aftermath which has already been adopted by Cancer Research UK as a theme song: “It’s about how we’ve all got scratches and scars, and they won’t go away, but they will fade.”

John Hill, the man behind the Santigold album, worked with her on the rockier anthems Little Too Much and Run Run Run, and also introduced Natasha to the alternative music scene in New York. “He showed me a lot of the amazing, quirky new stuff that’s been coming through, which really inspired me.”

The album was rush-released in the US at the end of 2010 after Nivea picked up on the infectiously catchy track Touch and used it for an ad there. Natasha toured US radio stations in the weeks leading up to its release, singing stripped-down versions of the songs live on air with just a guitarist to accompany her. This led to a call from rapper Nicki Minaj, asking Natasha to join Eminem, Drake and Kanye West as a guest on her debut album ‘Pink Friday’. “She sent me a song called ‘Last Chance’, and I got goosebumps all over listening to it. The next day I was due to be in Detroit, so we booked into Eminem’s studio that night and I did my own thing on the song, adding some lyrics and harmonies.”

Other collaborations, like the songs she recently wrote with Wyclef and John Legend, are likely to emerge later, and Natasha also contributes vocals on ‘Easy’, the forthcoming single by Ohio-based country kings Rascal Flatts. It’s hard to imagine another artist who could work simultaneously with one of America’s biggest country bands and its hippest new rap act, but it’s a sign of her broad appeal: her songs have appeared on a wide range of TV shows from EastEnders [OUTSIDE UK, PUT American Idol] to The Vampire Diaries, and on the soundtrack to over a dozen films.

With so much material to choose from, Natasha found it painful deciding what to finally include on Strip Me. “But I do feel it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.  There’s nothing on it I don’t love, that doesn’t fit together for me. “