Sydney Morning Herald - March 27

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http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/music/song-sung-133-and-diana-krall-is-anything-but-blue/2009/03/26/1237657064553.html

Song sung … and Diana Krall is anything but blue
March 27, 2009


'It's one big happy gang in this house. Between Elvis and I and our kids, it's just tremendous. I'm loving life right now."

For a woman not known for being comfortable when a journalist sticks a microphone near her (her nickname on one Australian promotional visit, Diana Growl, was not entirely unfair), Diana Krall is doing a good impression of relaxed, comfortable and happy.

The Elvis is Elvis Costello, though at home she calls him by his real name, Declan. He is her first husband, she is his third long-time partner, and between them now in their relatively new home in Vancouver are twin two-year-old boys, Dexter and Frank.

Where once this 44-year-old was wary, if not downright hostile to intrusions of a personal nature, these days all three of the men in her life regularly come up in her conversation. As, for example, when she explains why she was late coming to the phone for this interview.

"So I was discussing [dinner] with Elvis. I'm still a mum and that's what I want to do, figure out what I'm making for dinner, whether we're going to the park - 'Dexter, don't eat the playdough'," she laughs. "Last night we had this salmon that Elvis made and I made mashed potatoes and snap peas and I was watching this beautiful film with my children and Elvis and it was just cosy and lovely in our family room and I was like, 'I can't imagine what I would be doing right now without this'."

Even if you didn't know of her domestic arrangements (or of Costello's hitherto unknown culinary prowess) there is a palpable sense of contentment flowing through Krall's new album, Quiet Nights. With both Brazilian and American standards it is steeped in bossa nova - Krall names the similarly themed 1967 album Frank Sinatra made with Antonio Carlos Jobim as one of the most influential records in her life - and suffused with an adult sensuality.

"This record is very much about a woman who has two children and has settled into a very committed deep love in her marriage and family," Krall says. "When my mum died [in 2002] it was very, very difficult, for years. I felt so devastated, beyond belief. Now I see my mother in myself and I do things that I loved to do with my mum and dad and it's more balanced, I think.

"I'm also busy as an artist and I don't have too much time on my hands, which is a wonderful thing." She chuckles. "I don't feel lonely anymore. I can go there, I can definitely get into that character, but definitely the lights got turned back on when I had my children. It's deepened everything for me, like my marriage."

Her mother's death inspired the songs she wrote with Costello for the 2004 album The Girl In The Other Room. To date, it is the only example of her songwriting, with Krall insisting: "I don't think I'm a writer, it doesn't come to me naturally. I'm a jazz musician, an improvising musician." However, playing happy families may be turning her in a Wiggles direction.

"I would really now like to do a children's album," she says enthusiastically. "Elvis and I have been throwing that around for the last little while. We've got something cooking up that would be really fun but it is trying to find the time. Now that I see what my kids like, everything from [Costello's] Pump It Up to [her recording of Nat King Cole's] Hit That Jive Jack to Harry Belafonte, maybe Elvis and I can come up with something that's really fun."