Candice Night is beaming, her smile reaching across the Atlantic from her home in New York State, which she shares with her husband, Ritchie Blackmore, and their family. She has very good reason to be in such a buoyant mood, as her new solo album Sea Glass is already receiving very positive press. The satisfaction of a very personal labour of love coming to fruition after a decade’s work is enough to lift anyone’s spirits.
With a natural warmth and spark that comes through the songs on this latest release, there is also an honesty and openness that can be rare amongst a lot of artists during interviews. But here, there is no pretence.
Deftly dealing with momentary interruptions by her son and the occasional suitably spectral glimpse of her legendary guitarist husband, Candice sat down with MetalTalk to talk about the journey that has brought her to this point.
Sea Glass is a very varied album. “Usually, that’s how my albums are,” Candice Night says. “I don’t really do the concept album or theme album. It’s just those moments that make up your life, the moments that hit you so emotionally hard, whether they’re joyous or melancholy.
“Whatever makes impressions on your life makes us who we are today. It’s those journeys, and I think anytime there is something poignant in my life that lends itself to becoming a song, I take these songs and accumulate them over the months or over the years.
“Then, by the time I get to a certain amount of them, I say, now it’s time to release the album. There are so many of them that are ready to go out there for the rest of the world. These albums always wind up a scrapbook of my life.”
There are various themes that run through Sea Glass. There’s rock, there’s Americana, and there are some beautiful, very ethereal passages. When Candice Night writes lyrics, does the music come at the same time, or does the music come when she looks back and thinks, yes, this particular style will sort this particular theme?
“It’s a strange thing,” she says. “When I write with Blackmore’s Knight, the music always comes first. He writes the music first, and then he approaches me and says, I came up with this idea. Can you hum along here and make sure it’s in the right key or how the melody line should go?
“Then I kind of just disappear, walk through the woods or go on a drive. I always find if you’re forcing the idea of lyrics, it doesn’t come. It sounds forced. Those stars have to align. Somehow, you have to channel from somewhere else. Luckily, when he comes up with the music, I’m able to just channel that music.
“But it is very different when I write my own music and lyrics. Everything floods out at once. So it’s completely different. It’s like everything just aligns perfectly. Honestly, when I’m coming up with lyrical lines, I wind up already singing the melody that’s supposed to be there. So it somehow all fits in perfectly together. So, the songs write themselves in this way. Channelling the emotion, the emotional journey of it all, it all just comes at it as one.”
That is the key, I say. There are certain key moments in your life, and each one has its own individual flavour to it emotionally. So certain styles of music can pop into your head before that. You can feel pensive, you can feel down, and everything flows through that.
“It’s funny you say that about the flavours,” Candice says. “If I’m not mentioning the flavours, I’m talking about the different colours or the different textures. That’s what paints the pictures. We’re never one emotion all the time or never one way all the time, and that’s what creates us as humans.
“It’s the wonderful dichotomy of everything that’s happening. The differences that occur in our lives. Those are the things that are most inspirational, I think, as far as writing is concerned. The ones that hit you the deepest.”
Sea Glass is a very, very personal album, isn’t it?
“Very personal,” Candice says. “I’ve experienced a lot within the last few years, as I’m sure we all have. It’s the mixture between love and loss and children, oh my goodness, so many things that happened to us along life’s path. But I think there’s a little touch of every one of those avenues on this album.”
Candice Night has a rich musical life. She has sung with Helloween on Keeper Of The Seven Keys and with Avanstasia on Moonglow.
“And recently, D’Artanyan,” she says. “They’re a German band that put something out called We’re Gonna Be Drinking. So, I finally got to use the pub of our home we have here at Minstrel Hall. We have a very European or English-oriented pub downstairs.
“It has very dark walls. The wood is dark, and medieval torture devices are on the walls. So my children will never have fear of anything in life because once you’re brought up in that environment, there’s really nothing to be afraid of [laughs].
“I sang with William Shatner [The Thrill Is Gone] and Tarja from Nightwish. I’ve had a very varied background besides obviously doing things with Rainbow and Deep Purple and Ritchie, of course, which brought me into this whole crazy wonderland life of the music industry.
“There’s been a lot of different avenues as far as that … actually Helloween, as far as I know, the only duet they ever did was with me, which is a huge honour and so much fun to do with them. It’s very varied, my musical and professional background, for sure. I do have a little bit of everything from country on Sea Glass to instrumentals to ballads, all sorts of walks of life.”
That must be so fulfilling as a musician that you are not restricted. Obviously, Ritchie is well known for session work, then with Deep Purple and Rainbow, and then obviously Blackmore’s Night. So there has been that variety for him. Both Candice and Ritchie, as musicians, have had that ‘let’s just take things where the muse leads us’.
“Absolutely,” Candice Night smiles. “It’s funny because a lot of people in our interviews have said, well, what direction are you going in? We’re saying we’re not leading the direction. The music leads the direction.
“Honestly, on our Blackmore’s Night songs, I’ve known Ritchie to come up with an incredible guitar instrumental passage in the middle, or some amazing solo. Then he will listen back, and it happens often, where he will say, you know what, it doesn’t call for a guitar. There, it calls for a hurdy-gurdy or a string ensemble.
“I’m like, but people would have loved to hear that, though. They want to hear your name with the guitar. He will say, no, I can hear something else here, and he will take himself out. Many people think he’s probably very ego-driven. It’s interesting to see that he’s actually driven 100% by the music.
“We’ve always said, as far as the music is concerned, that it leads where we’re going. But also as artists or people who are creative, whenever someone asks what genre of music you are in, I’ve always said, well, isn’t the whole point of being an artist to kick down the boxes of genres?
“When you’re creative, when you’re having that creative flow, you shouldn’t be put in a box. That’s restrictive, right? That’s your limitations. So we’re kicking down the boxes and allowing the music to lead us wherever it wants us to go. Being part of that amazing journey.
“So we don’t like the label, the limitations, or those box walls. We don’t fit into any genre. But by not fitting in any genre, you kind of fit into every genre cause it is strictly good melodic music. It’s not limited.”
Candice is right. A good song or good music is good music. If you like it, then it’s good music for you.
There are songs that have lasted for centuries. Some classical music that was written over 200 years ago is as popular today as it has ever been. There may be some music written today that will have that resonance in a few decade’s time. But who knows?
“Exactly,” Candice Night says. “You just never know. We found that when we were doing Blackmore’s Knight songs there are so many incredible melodies. There are purist bands doing those songs exactly, we think, the way that they were done hundreds of years ago.
“The ones that we do [are from the] 1200s to the 1500s. We try to keep the airs and the spirits of those songs alive. But we still update everything, and we add new lyrics, new instrumentation, and new arrangements so people today won’t instantly get turned off by the fact that this song is a couple of hundred years old.
“Some people instantly have a curtain that comes down, and they’re just not interested if they hear the song is old. But if they hear the song as a new entity and they don’t even realize where it came from originally, it becomes new for them. So, they get to appreciate it in a brand-new form.
“Sometimes, we say this was a hidden history lesson because that actually was from the 1200s [laughs]. Every once in a while, people will go back, and they’ll realize where those songs came from, and they’ll say, oh my God, I can hear it. I can hear the remnants of that song in your song. Yet the song that you’re doing today, I still can relate to it. 100%. Then it just transcends time. These songs are timeless, they’re beautiful.”
Sea Glass is so beautiful, shimmering, and timeless, with the folk of Unsung Hero. For the rocking Angel And Jezebel, it is interesting why Candice chose to do two different versions of that.
“The original version was more of that country, what I call the back porch, version,” she says. “We have a deck here with a little bonfire pit. We often invite our friends over with acoustic instruments, and we sit around, pass the acoustic instruments around and listen to things that they play. That’s how we rediscover music that we haven’t heard in ages.
“This is how Blackmore’s Night actually wound up re-recording Diamonds And Rust and Celluloid Heroes just from our friends playing it around a bonfire. It’s very interesting to be able to rediscover some of these old songs that we kind of lost in our memory.”
Candice says that when they pass the guitars around, they all get back to the old-fashioned form of communication through music, “as opposed to this communication that is so rampant today, where everybody’s looking at their phones and their screens. So it’s nice to be able to have conversations.
“After I put out the back porch version, which is very country-based, I kind of looked back over the different songs that I had, and I thought, you know, we don’t really have a lot of the rocky edgy songs. That’s obviously a part that’s within me as well. So I just wanted to go back in cause I felt like that would translate well into more of an edgier version.
“So I went back into the studio and added some more elements that would be edgy. Ironically, that’s the first track from the album that the record company decided they wanted to put out as a single. So that’s a good thing we did that.
“I love the visual between the dark and the light. It’s always that yin yang balance. The angel and the jezebel… the sun and the moon… the night and the day. I actually have a sister who is the dark-haired, doe-eyed girl. I’m not saying I’m the angel.
“I’m certainly no angel, and hopefully she’s no Jezebel… I have to ask her husband about that one. But my sister is seven years younger than me and about five inches taller than me. I always used to joke and say she’s got the youth and the height and that’s not fair to be able to stack the cards that way.
“But I love that visual of the darkness and the light. So, in writing Angel And Jezebel, I took the elements of that and jumped off into the deep. I made a whole story about this poor guy who is torn between those two worlds like a tug of war in his soul. Do you go for the good girl, or do you go for the girl who intrigues you, maybe a little bit more on the dark side?
“How many guys get pulled into that dark side? It was just a fun one to write, and the melody was so catchy. I’ve been singing that one for years, just around the house to myself. So it was nice to breathe life into that and paint it with the colour like we were saying before. It had that texture and that flavour to it, so it came to life.”
Thinking of how the song is the thing, it is lovely how Candice has Ritchie playing on Last Goodbye and, of course, their kids on Promise Me. Did it take a little bit of arm twisting to get them to perform?
“I was lucky enough to catch them before my son’s voice dropped,” Candice smiles. “Now that he’s 13.. [laughs].. No, they love doing it. They are around music all the time and always have been, which is wonderful. I think music is just this universal language and it’s love. I think it’s so important whether you can sing or play an instrument, or if you just play CDs or streaming around the house, just to have family time where everybody enjoys music.
“We were at the point where we were just singing, making up songs, ridiculous songs about what people wanted for breakfast in the morning, or why they’re not getting out of bed. Just breaking into a song like we live a musical, which is completely bizarre. But so much fun.
“My son is a great drummer. My daughter sings all the time. She’s in all of these incredible music ensembles, so to get them when they knew that mommy was going to the studio and was requesting for them to be part of it, they were right there for it. They love it, and I think they love being part of the bigger picture, also.
“Of course hearing themselves on on a record, they love that. But at the same time, they don’t go out of their way to mention to anybody that they’re on this stuff. I guess now that they’ve hit teenager-dom, the parents are not cool. So that’s OK. I told them I’m here to embarrass them for the rest of their lives anyway, so whatever phase we’re in, I’m here for it.
“Ritchie played not only on The Last Goodbye, but he played on Sea Glass as well. That amazing, beautiful rolling guitar. It’s so nice and so wonderful to be able to sit there with someone who is obviously as incredibly talented as my husband when I can’t get the ideas out of my head cause I’m not proficient enough on any instrument.
“I can plunk it out in a very skeletal way on a keyboard or a piano. That’s basically how I send my demos over to the producer. I say this is what I have, but it’s easier for me to hum it to you or to sing it to you. This is the kind of instrumentation that I’m going for. Then we go into the studio and take things out, put things in and work with the whole process until I finally get out what I hear in my head.
“But it’s a lot easier if I could just sit with Ritchie and he can do whatever he does magically on that incredible guitar. I’ll say, yes, that’s it. He has already translated it from the madness that ensues within these walls [in my head] and makes it come out as this incredibly beautiful piece on that guitar. He hears what I’m saying and translates it so easily that it really helps the whole process.”
The instrumental Dark Carnival was an interesting move.
“Ironically, that’s my son’s favourite song,” Candice says. “He wants that as his ringtone. My daughter named it. She said it sounds like a dark carnival. I’m gonna take that title. Thank you for that. It’s kind of like a family thing. Years ago, Ritchie and I were looking for a piano for the house when we moved in.”
Candice talks of how they found an older couple who were looking to move on a piano, as by that stage in their lives, it was more like furniture, and as they were moving, they did not want to take it with them. “But they said they had so many incredible experiences with the whole family sitting around and singing and playing,” Candice says. “They said it’s not perfect, it’s got a cracked soundboard.
“Our heart was in it. We said we’ll give it a home. Ever since we brought that piano into the house, it has its own spirits, its own ghosts. Whenever I sit there and sort of channel whatever the piano wants to come out with, it always winds up being this Eastern European… These minor dark scales.”
Candice spoke of how In Time, Alone With Fate and Black Roses from her solo album Reflections, were inspired with the piano. “All those minor dark ominous sounding scales all came from that piano. Dark Carnival is another one where I just sat and tried to channel the whole thing, and that piano is giving me these incredible Eastern European, down-in-the-pub sort of songs and bringing its own ghosts with it.
“So I’m just channelling those ghosts. But it’s one of my favourite songs on the album. I think it just came out perfectly.”
Sea Glass includes Candice’s cover of the standard Nature Boy.
“I lost my dad in 2018 after a horrific year of him battling with cancer,” Candice says. “He finally succumbed in December of that year. It was terrible. He was born in 1937, so he liked all those really old classics. We used to play them around the kitchen. So I was brought up on big band sound and Nat King Cole. That was one of one of the areas of my musical upbringing.
“My dad’s two favourite songs were Nature Boy and Crazy [Patsy Cline]. When he was sick, and this was back in November of that year, my producer was here working on a Blackmore’s Night album. I said to the producer, I would like to go in, and for my dad’s birthday present, I wanted to record these two songs for him as a gift so he could just listen to them in his time.
“I did those two songs. I played Nature Boy for my father. I put the headphones on him. He listened to it, and he went, oh, that’s very nice, and then he walked out of the room. Then, about five minutes later, he came back in and went, wait, was that you singing that?
“So it was a bit of a delayed reaction. At first, he just walked out. I was like, oh, that’s not what I was expecting. But when he came back in, he was overwhelmed, teary-eyed and gushing. That’s the moment I was waiting for.
“So after I gave that to him as a present. Then he passed, so it stayed in that special area where I didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to touch it. It was personal. That personal connection was too emotional for me to even relisten.
“Then when we were going to put this album out, my mom actually said to me, what about putting out one of those songs? For a long time, I said no, I couldn’t do it. It just hit too hard, too deep.
“Then I finally listened back to Nature Boy, and I thought, you know, I really am very proud of the version of that. I love it and it’s really a great remembrance of my dad and of that moment. I’m really happy with the way it came out. I thought it would be a good way to end the album and give it to the rest of the world.
“I can’t do justice to the original. But it’s my version of an incredible song, and I think it was just done really beautifully. So it’s out there for everyone now.”
With the promise of yet more to come, it is reassuring that here is an artist who is not shaped by any trends but instead has the confidence to go with her instincts, wherever they may lead.
With the promise of fresh material from Blackmore’s Night on the way and new roads opening up all the time, Candice Night is certainly leaning into that spirit of a wandering minstrel.
Long may Candice Night continue travelling.
Candice Night – Sea Glass was released on 25 April 2025 via earMUSIC as a limited-edition LP, CD Digipak, and Digital and can be ordered from here.
