Blame it on “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree,” then “Suddenly I See”: songs off KT Tunstall’s 2004 debut album, Eye to the Telescope, that made her the pop star she never intended to be.

Recorded live on England’s Later with … Jules Holland with the Scottish singer-songwriter singing, playing guitar, tambourine, and a loop pedal, “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” triggered Tunstall’s 2005 nomination for the Mercury Prize, England’s highest musical award. The song was also named Track of the Year by Q magazine.

With “Suddenly I See” heading up the U.K. and U.S. charts, and “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” earning a Grammy nomination, Eye to the Telescope became a global smash, selling more than 2 million albums.

“I’m just a terrible pop star,” Tunstall said in an phone interview. “I’m a pretty good indie musician, but I’m really not built to be a pop star. Pop meaning popular. Maybe the difference is in the desire, the thing that gets you up in the morning wanting to do it. Mine was never fame and making money. Mine was playing and making stuff.

“Then I have this wildly successful album that pushes me into being a pop star,” she said. “I’m eternally grateful for it. It gave me an amazing adventure. But it wasn’t me.”

Another artist who knows about sudden fame is Shawn Colvin, who shot up the charts with “Sunny Came Home” off her 1996 album, A Few Small Repairs. Although she already had a Grammy in hand for her 1989 album Steady On, her fame spread like wildfire when “Sunny Came Home” dominated airwaves, leading to two Grammys.

The pair are currently on a co-headlining tour that stops at The Clyde Theatre on Thursday, May 2.

Pulling back

For Tunstall, the grind of touring, playing the same songs night after night in venues that look the same, and never getting a chance to experience the places where she would play, began to take its toll. When it reached that point, she began scaling back — releasing albums every three or four years, touring behind them, then taking time off to pursue other interests.

Moving from Los Angeles to Santa Fe, New Mexico, Tunstall has written musicals and contributed to children’s records and movie soundtracks. And now doing solo acoustic tours, such as An Evening with Shawn Colvin & KT Tunstall Together on Stage.

“It’s wonderful,” she said. “You feel like you’re going to die with so much happiness. You get to find your creativity and your craft in so many things.”

Loss of musician’s tool

Tunstall was slowed by gradual hearing loss in her left ear, which began in 2008. A decade later, she went deaf in the ear.

“I went deaf halfway through a tour and ended up holed up in the meatpacking district of New York for two weeks, thankfully with a view of the Hudson (River),” she said. “That helped with my tremendous vertigo. That was the worst part of it. I basically felt I’d drank two bottles of tequila all the time.”

It was shocking, Tunstall said, when she learned her hearing wouldn’t come back. But she said she took her doctor’s advice to “get out and live your life.”

“I nearly got run over five times for not hearing something from my left side,” she said. “After two or three weeks, I did my first show. It was the Killington Women’s Downhill Ski Championships. It went fine. It was good.”

Another show in Nashville, Tennessee, proved to Tunstall that she could continue to have a musical career.

“The fact I knew in my mind I was able to play a show as well as ever gave me hope and confidence,” she said. “I can do everything anybody else can do, only in mono. And, as musician friends tell me, all the best records are in mono.”

Completing trilogy

Prior to her 2023 Face to Face dual album with Suzi Quartro, Tunstall’s latest solo album is 2022’s Nut, which is not in mono. It’s a finely wrought stereo conclusion to an album trilogy based on soul, body, and mind. 

She introduced this latest chapter in her career with a tour of the United Kingdom and Europe with a band where she played the album in its entirety, along with about 10 of her best-known songs.

“It was interesting playing Nut with the band,” she said. “Nut is about the mind. I thought it might be the most nerdy of the three (which includes 2016’s Kin and 2018’s Wax) and it turned out to be the most touching and emotional of all. That was a real surprise. People were emotionally engaging with the songs.

“We played ‘Out of Touch’ as the first encore, it’s my positive pandemic song, people were on their feet and clapping in the same way as for ‘Black Horse and the Cherry Tree,’ ” Tunstall said. “I was flabbergasted.”

Alone on stage

She won’t be playing all the songs from Nut on her current tour. But some will likely be in the setlist.

“I’ve got to choose carefully,” she said. “One of my great prides in life is I’ve never put anything out that I didn’t think was good. But some songs are built to come alive in the studio and some are more fitted to acoustic, solo.”

Regardless of the songs she chooses, she said she’s found that playing solo acoustic is more fun than a band performance.

“It’s funny, people often think it’s harder to do a solo show,” she said. “But it’s easier. You’re not tied to anything. You can make mistakes and work them into the show. I’ve been thinking recently about how good it would be to go out on a tour with just a guitar. When you have a band, loops and all that, there’s a chance they will become a crutch. I want to go out where it’s my voice and the song.”