FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
Part Twenty-Two: FKA twigs
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I have not put out one of these features...
for a long time now, so I wanted to revisit it. The artist I am including in Modern Heroines today is the fantastic FKA twigs. I have so much love and respect for FKA twigs, as she is an artist who is so utterly compelling and inspiring! I discovered her, like so many people, through her debut album, LP1, of 2014. That was a hugely acclaimed debut, but it took five years for her second album, MAGDALENE, to arrive. She was not idle in that time and, I think, to follow an album as accomplished and personal as that she needed time to create! I am not going to gloss over her debut, but I think her most recent album is her finest release to date and it was, to me, one of the very best albums of 2019. At just nine tracks, there is an experimentation and sense of concision but, when you listen to the songs, they are so evocative and nuanced – one needs to go back time and time again to fully appreciate them. I am going to highlight that album and bring in a fascinating spotlight that The New York Times published recently. It seems, pleasingly, that FKA twigs has been working on new music during lockdown:
“FKA twigs sat down for a virtual chat on the Grammy Museum’s Programs at Home series with moderator Scott Goldman. At the beginning of the interview, twigs revealed that she’s made an entirely new album during the months of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I ended up, in actual fact, making a whole album in quarantine,” she said. “I just decided one day. It was kind of, maybe one-third of the way through and I just said, ‘you know what, I’m just going to make an album,’ and I just went and did it. And it was really amazing because I worked predominantly with an amazing artist and producer called El Guincho, and I did the whole thing with pretty much all of the collaborators over FaceTime.” Watch the full interview here.
FKA twigs said that she is “just finishing” the new record; she did not mention a title or release date. She also discussed the remote collaboration process. “I was working with people I’d never met in real life and we were doing the whole thing over FaceTime and it was great because I couldn’t go in the studio at the beginning,” she said. “So I was getting beats and having to work from MP3s, and then I would writing melodies in the day with [El Guincho] and then in the night I would call some of my friends in America who made music and I would have a glass of wine and chill and write lyrics and talk about what the song’s about.”
FKA twigs also mentioned that during quarantine she started learning to play piano and read sheet music. Elsewhere in the interview she discussed her interest in wushu martial arts, her latest album MAGDALENE, and more”.
I am still listening to tracks from MAGDALENE like sad day, and cellophane. There is a richness and real sense of reward listening to the album as a whole. I want to bring in a couple of interviews from FKA twigs, as we learn more about an extraordinary Gloucestershire-born artist. I think she is one of these artists who could headline huge festivals and has that sense of pull and power. I hope that festival organisers have her near the top of their list for headliners next year because, after two studio albums – and a few E.P.s -, here is an artist who has the potential to be an icon! At just thirty-two, she has many years ahead of her, but I find it remarkable how fast she came out of the blocks with LP1 and what a tremendous album that was! Despite a bit of a gap, few were expecting something even stronger and more resonant than that album. MAGDALENE is a staggering work that received enormous praise.
Here is what AllMusic wrote in their review:
“As she hones Magdalene's themes, Barnett broadens her music. Handling most of the production herself, she uses her signature bone-rattling beats more sparingly to clear space for melody and, especially, her classically trained voice. There's a dewdrop purity when she sings "Would you make a wish on my love?" on "Sad Day," one of several songs where she evokes Kate Bush's poignant magical realism. On the aching "Mirrored Heart," she stretches to her highest and lowest ranges to encompass the magnitude of her loss. Barnett matches the directness of the album's music with impressively naked -- and often uncomfortable -- emotions. "Apples/cherries/pain" she growls on "Home with You," where her physical and emotional suffering merge in seething distortion and throbbing beats that isolate her from someone dear until she realizes they're lonely together. Inadequacy, whether it's in the eyes of a lover or the world, is a major motif: The beautifully nightmarish "Thousand Eyes" is steeped in anxiety that churns in its spiraling pianos and when Barnett sings "It's gonna be cold out there with all those eyes" in an anguished soprano that could cut glass. Later, she plays with these feelings on "Cellophane," whispering "Why don't I do it for you?" with equal amounts of melodramatic flair and heartbreaking realness. This complexity extends to "Daybed," a slow spin of feelings -- sorrow, weariness, peace -- that are equally soothing and suffocating. At once more delicate and more concentrated than any of her previous work, Magdalene is a testament to the strength and skill it takes to make music this fragile and revealing. Like the dancer she is, Barnett pushes through pain in pursuit of beauty and truth, and the leaps she makes are breathtaking”.
I am going to wrap up soon but, before then, I want to bring in a couple of other pieces. I was not aware that The New York Times had highlighted FKA twigs in the same way as me for a feature last month. They went deep with a staggering and highly accomplished artist. I wanted to quote a few passages from that article:
“Breakup aside, Twigs created “Magdalene,” her second full-length album, the first record she had released in three years and the most widely acclaimed of her career, in the midst of another personal crisis: her diagnosis with uterine fibroids — what she has called her “fruit bowl of pain.” Pole dancing is an unlikely discipline for someone recovering from uterine surgery, as it’s dependent on intense core strength and often expressive of sexual confidence. Yet Twigs’s Los Angeles-based pole choreographer and instructor, Kelly Yvonne, who worked with her on “Cellophane” and on her earlier pole routine for the rapper ASAP Rocky’s 2018 video for “Fukk Sleep,” explains that the art form is not simply a tool of male gratification centered in strip clubs; pole classes have helped women to “regain their bodies, to regain their sexuality, to take that power back.” Viewed in this light, Twigs’s use of the pole tempers the song’s story of loss and rejection with a vision of strength and prowess. At the same time, her use of oddness and artifice (the theatrical setting, the phoenix, the mud) subverts the cultural expectation that a Black woman’s performance will be simple and transparent — a straightforward narrative of recovery, a diary, an open book.
But in recent years, Twigs, now 32, has begun to harness her pursuit of avant-garde innovation and technical virtuosity toward a deeper exploration of pain and insecurity — to unite stage presence with soul. One can find analogues between her work and that of contemporary artists: the showmanship of Janelle Monáe, the introspection of Fiona Apple and Solange, the vocal drama of Lana Del Rey. But Twigs is less earnest and more shape-shifting than those artists. Perhaps no other pop star delves inside as deeply while stretching so far out — plumbing the interior, sometimes from a wry distance, while making of her own body a spectacular work of art.
PHOTO CREDIT: Liz Johnson Artur for The New York Times
BORN TAHLIAH BARNETT, FKA Twigs was raised in suburban Cheltenham; her mother had moved there from Birmingham, a city in western England, to give her daughter a better, or at least a more pastoral, life. They ran low on food and didn’t always have heat, but her mother worked to make life special for Twigs, her only child. Instead of decorating Twigs’s room with the glow-in-the-dark stickers her friends had, she had her daughter’s ceiling painted dark blue and speckled with stars. When Twigs was 17, she moved with her mother to study dance at the BRIT School, an institution whose alumna include Amy Winehouse and Adele, and which Twigs describes as “a bit of a hood performing-arts school in South London.” While there, she realized that her primary love was not dance but music, but she was rejected from the music program, so she left and went to nearby Croydon College to study fine art, literature and philosophy instead. For a time, she was a youth worker who helped traumatized kids create art, as well as a backup dancer in other artists’ music videos, but she lost her job when funding was cut for civic programs, and so she began to pursue her own music through the club and cabaret scenes. In her early 20s, she sang at the Box, a debauched though commercial London club where aerialists and fire-breathers performed for stars like George Clooney and Queen Latifah, she recalls, and where she says she felt “like a lamb to the slaughter” but developed “nerves of steel onstage.” When I suggest that the move from studious, working-class striver to underground it-girl was not an intuitive arc, she challenges the terms of the question: “But striving to do what? Striving to sing and dance?” Those aspirations were themselves odd where she came from; and, despite her academic achievements, middle-class security was never her aim. What she wanted above all was to make things and live an interesting life”.
I have taken quite a lot there, but it is a wonderful interview and feature that provides so much detail about an artist that I am very fond of. I wonder where she will go from here and, if reports suggest, we may get a third album pretty soon! It is evident that she has been inspired over the past few months - and many will be itching for another album after the immense MAGDALENE. It has been a very bleak year, and the possibility of more music from FKA twigs is a welcome balm – something to look forward to! It may seem premature calling FKA twigs an icon-in-waiting but I do feel that she is such an arresting and fascinating human being…as an artist, there is nobody like her. Not only is she one of the finest creatives in the world, but she is inspiring so many other artists and people around the world. I will finish off soon but, just now, I want to bring in an interview from The Guardian from last year that is well worth a read! There are many sections that moved and intrigued me. I have highlighted a few:
“It’s been a while since twigs has been asked to look so far back, and she is different now, she says. “I was a young woman, stepping into my sexuality and owning it. I was sassy! Coming from the outside and being alternative. Not like a Nubian queen, not a powerful goddess – but something just as powerful, but fractured. Like in Japan, where they smash the pots but join them up again with gold.”
Now, though less sassy, she still feels good. “People thought I was quite odd-looking, until a white male validated my beauty,” she says. (She means Pattinson.) “That’s frustrating and I still don’t accept it. But if I sing really well, you can’t question that.
PHOTO CREDIT: Campbell Addy/The Guardian
If I dance well, you can’t question that. If I express myself honestly, or if I’m pole dancing or wushu-ing excellently, you can’t question that. I’ve never felt more beautiful because I’ve never been more skilled. Everything else is ephemeral.”
She’s a mass of contractions, twigs: a homebody who sparkles in the limelight, a seeker of male approval who wants to own her sexuality, a willing apprentice who’s made for centre stage. And the next few years will be about her. She might be in a new relationship – “Don’t get me wrong, I’m completely open to love” – but she doesn’t want to compromise, to mould her life around someone else, man or child. “I’d like children in my late 30s,” she says, “because as a dancer, your body doesn’t come back.” She wants to enjoy her new strength. “It would be a shame if I didn’t question what it is to be in a relationship,” she says. “I think I need to do that, to grow. And to make sure when I meet someone wonderful, it can be on my own terms. I hesitate to talk to you about it, because I would love to have a piece written about me where my name is not attached to a man.”
But you were dating someone very famous, I say.
“But my work was so beautiful,” she says. “It was so much louder than my love life. It is so much louder”.
There is no stopping the sheerly amazing FKA twigs! I think she is going to keep getting better and grow stronger as the years pass. So far, we have learned so much about her and her music - but I think there are more chapters that are being written. I have put together a short playlist of her finest cuts to date but, in concluding, I think that FKA twigs is…
A legend of the future!