FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: The Anchoress (Catherine Anne Davies)
of my Modern Heroines feature, I am saluting a woman I have a tonne of respect for. Welsh producer, artist and all-round inspiration Catherine Anne Davies is otherwise known as The Anchoress. She released one of this year’s best albums., The Art of Losing, on 12th March. I would encourage anyone to get the album. Davies has been unable to tour the album, as she is clinically vulnerable and the pandemic means that tour dates have been pushed to next year. In fact, the first date – in my hometown of Guildford – comes almost a year to day after the release of The Art of Losing. On 11th March, 2022 you can go and see her at The Boileroom. The effect of Brexit has caused issue when it comes to the supplying and delivering the album to fans in Europe. I am referring to Davies as The Anchoress, as I am celebrating the artist and, therefore, her moniker is the one I am going to employ. As Catherine Anne Davies, she spoke with NME earlier in the year about some of the issues faced. Let’s hope that things improve in 2022 in terms of the supply chain and the pandemic. I know that many are looking forward to seeing The Anchoress perform. She is an amazing artist I have been following a while (and one whom I interviewed earlier in the year). Like I do with these features, it is a combination of interviews and reviews of the current album. I am ending with a playlist of the best tracks so far from The Anchoress.
The first interview that I want to highlight is from The Indiependent. Five years after the lauded debut album, Confessions of a Romance Novelist, The Art of Losing took The Anchoress to new heights. It is interesting reading her talk about the album:
“The Indiependent: That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? So, it’s been five years since your last album but you haven’t stopped. You’ve toured with Simple Minds. You’ve toured with the Manics obviously and collaborated with them, and also you released an album with Bernard Butler that came out last year. Do you feel you have to be writing music? Or do you just have to be working in general? Because you’ve said before that you came into music accidentally, it just sort of happened.
The Anchoress: Yeah, I mean, I finished The Art of Losing in the beginning of 2019. So it was due to come out the year before. And then it came out in 2021 so obviously, it was really exciting, even though for me obviously there wasn’t hardly any gap. I know I wasn’t sitting around twiddling my thumbs at any point but it feels like a really long time since the first record. It’s so strange, and then releasing a record when you’re not really engaging with the outside world is also very bizarre so obviously had like all these amazing reviews and pride but I’m not gonna go to a record shop and see it in a record shop, which is just weird. I think I do like to be busy, I like to be occupied. I’ve got quite a busy brain. I don’t like holidays, either. I’m not a fan of going on holiday. And I enjoy work, whatever that may be. And I’ve always been a bit like that. When I was at university I did two degrees at the same time because I didn’t feel occupied, and I did my PhD when I was making the first record as well. I think I like to be busy. And that’s been quite challenging, actually, during lockdown. Obviously, I’m super lucky that I’ve got the studio here to work in. But it is one kind of work only and obviously then you’re limited in terms of not being able to have people working here with. I’ve been forced to take a little bit of time out, which I think has been good for me.
The Indiependent: The thing that really struck me is that not only is it such a different sound from your debut, but even within the album itself, there are completely different sounds—’Moon Rise’, ‘Show Your Face’—is that a conscious decision? Is that deliberate? Or is it just what feels right at the time for you
The Anchoress: That’s just how music comes out of me. I do think this and Confessions of a Romance Novelist are similar in a way to that because obviously you’ve got tracks with slow piano, atmospheric kind of pieces, then ‘One for Sorrow’, which is almost like a pop-funk track. I think I’ve always wanted to make sure that I only do the kind of music that I enjoy, and because I love everything from Prince to Max Richter that’s going to come out in the music that I make.
I’m very lucky because I licence my albums to a label. So I’ve got no one breathing down my neck saying we want 10 radio friendly tracks, but we want 10 you know progressive rock tracks, I can just do precisely what I want. So the album’s just sound that various because I have that many different interests in music. I think I would be really bored to make an album of 10 songs that sounded very similar. So I’m just indulging my own musical tastes really. It’s not conscious. I just think of each track as an individual world. So like with ‘Moon Rise’, for instance, it was just like, I really want to do this, and I’m just gonna do this, I don’t think about the other track at the same time. And then when I was doing ‘Show Your Face’, I was really obsessed with the OB six synthesiser that I just bought, so I just became super focused on the single track. I’m autistic so I think that that’s partly to do with the way that my brain works — I have this just hyperfocus. I’m unable to shut everything out and maybe that is why I don’t consider whether one track relates to another. Somehow it does hang together as a finished piece.
The Indiependent: You’ve mentioned before that this album draws on a lot of the recent trauma that you’ve had in the last few years. So did you find this a cathartic experience or an escape from that? Or was it both?
The Anchoress: It was a little bit of both, maybe, but I think ultimately it wasn’t cathartic. I think therapy is for that. As usual, work is a distraction for me, and it just was the only answer in the moment of experiencing all these really difficult things. But it also became a working through of past trauma as well. Interestingly, and I don’t think I had consciously realised that until I was kind of up to the point where I’m thinking about putting ‘5am’ on the record. So it became more than just a record of what I’ve been going through in those couple of years. I really shy away from the idea of songwriting as cathartic, because I think I’m always trying to serve the listener, it’s not about me serving myself — as I say, therapy is the space for your catharsis and not a public arena. I guess I was still very conscious of only wanting to share as much as I wanted to within the songs and still having those boundaries. They’re safe boundaries for yourself, you know, not wanting everybody to know every detail about your life. It’s a really strange dance, I think, between catharsis and distraction.
The Indiependent: One thing this album does is that whilst of course, no one can relate directly to your experiences and what it is you’re singing about, the album conveys those emotions and those raw feelings so brilliantly. I’m just wondering, where do you tend to draw your inspiration from? Is it entirely personal?
The Anchoress: I’m a bit like a sponge and I really do believe that you’ve got to inhale enough stuff to have things of interest to then exhale. You know, it’s literature, it’s music, it’s films, it’s conversations that I overhear, or documentaries or podcasts. It’s everything, but not in a kind of conscious magpie sense. It’s just they’ll all inform how I’m processing a particular theme or concept or idea. But I think this album obviously was much more personally inspired than anything that I’ve done before. It’s interesting, having started out my career as The Anchoress with quite a conscious intention to avoid the confessional, hence the title of the first album [Confessions of a Romance Novelist], I really didn’t want to write confessional, autobiographical work and obviously, I couldn’t have foreseen that I would end up writing this record. I had actually started a completely different album beforehand but you’ve got to follow where the muse takes you. You’ve got to be led by where the art takes you and also to do something that’s uncomfortable. I think it was always super uncomfortable for me to talk about myself and so that feels enormously satisfying to have to have done that over a whole album’s worth of work, and for it to have been so well received. I think it’s especially difficult for women to do that in a songwriting arena, because often diaristic autobiographically-led work can tend to be evaluated in a more pejorative way than perhaps men. We look at the difference between the way that we talk about Bob Dylan’s lyricism versus Tori Amos or Alanis Morissett. There’s such a lot of subtle misogyny that goes on there and I think that really informed me when I was starting out in not wanting to be autobiographical. So it’s nice to get to that point where I’ve recognised that there’s a lot of skill, and there was a lot of difficulty in creating good autobiographical work and throwing off those shackles of “Oh god, what if people say that it’s diaristic? Or like, Tori Amos or something like that?”. So I’ve been on a kind of journey with myself with that. Maybe I got rid of a little bit of my own internalised misogyny about what women can write about and be respected for”.
There is another quite detailed and deep interview that I learnt a lot from. Under the Radar Mag spoke with The Anchoress to get to the bottom and into the heart of a remarkable album:
“When did you first start writing the songs that would go on to become The Art of Losing? Was it always intended to be a record that dealt with personal trauma and grief?
So, the record was made in the latter part of 2018 and finished in the spring of 2019. It was originally meant to come out then but we’ve had this long delay so its nearly two years since it’s been finished. There’s a couple of songs on the record that had a prior genesis to that 2018/2019 period, but they were ones I felt fitted thematically and wanted to be resurrected and rethought. “The Heart Is a Lonesome Hunter” is a much older song. People that are familiar with my Catherine A.D. hand stitched, self-released CDs may be aware of the demo version of that. “With the Boys” was also something I started writing around the same time as that. It’s a 14-track record so obviously there’s a huge amount of new stuff that was written as well. But it also felt there were old songs that made themselves known they wanted to be finished and to be a part of that collection. So, it was all tied together. Those two songs—“With the Boys” especially—detailed my experiences with the misogynistic and patriarchal dynamics of the industry. Which is so interesting to see nearly a decade on how not much has changed from my earliest experiences. My intuition and gut feeling when writing that song aged 22 or 23 was spot on. “You gotta know what bruises are for if you want to play with the boys.” It’s still a boys club, very much so. Isn’t that frightening? Ten years on and nothing’s changed.
It’s really frightening, especially as the #metoo movement has identified and highlighted a lot of unacceptable and inappropriate behaviors throughout the music and entertainment industries. Yet for some reason, these people seem to be given a perennial free pass? Why do you think that is?
Money. When people are making money out of a situation, they’re much more likely to turn a blind eye. I think people delude themselves as well within the industry that they’re not being complicit with or enabling it. So, it ends up being nothing to do with them, or none of their business. Money makes people turn a blind eye. I think it’s as simple as that. Society is changing—albeit slowly—and more women are being encouraged to take up prominent roles in many industries yet within music nothing moves forwards.
There are small shifts. One of the things I think is really important is getting more women into studios. Where music is made, in these intimate and quite vulnerable environments. At the moment it’s 2% and rising, the number of women who are audio engineers in the UK. There’s a huge number of women who are feeling this is a safe space for them to be able to occupy and are also really interested in the technical side behind the scenes. That will have a huge impact on the safety of the environment, and the way women as artists will thrive as well. I get so many bands and artists who are women or have women as their main songwriter that want to work with me as a producer because they’re not getting the service, I’m offering them anywhere else. Not just a safe space, but also a different dynamic as well because it’s not about me and my ego. I’m not saying all producers who are men operate in that way but there can be a tendency to impress yourself at the center of it. Whereas I think women understand the relationship dynamics better. To me, being a producer is as much about being a therapist and understanding the dynamics of the people in the room as it is about understanding how to operate a mixing desk. As women, we are fundamentally very good at managing relationships and managing a room full of people. I actually think our gender is an advantage when it comes to being a producer.
One of the most startling aspects of the album is the range of sonics, styles and moods. It doesn’t follow any one specific sound or pattern. Was that always your intention, to disrupt the flow even rather than create something predictable or obvious?
I think that’s just naturally what I do as The Anchoress. The first album was very much a jukebox record as well, although I think it’s much less coherent or realized than this one. I love so many different kinds of music so it’s going to come through naturally. Also, I don’t have that record company pressure, or other band members, or another producer trying to push something into their expected format. A lot of albums are just expected to have one sound or one shape, one color or one pallet. That’s just never been something that interests me. I just make the records that I love, which by their very nature are multiplicitous. Taking in all of the things I love. Deftones, the Manics to Max Richter. They are a record of what I love and I always use them as a sonic playground. It was me setting out my stall with this album too, because I’d experienced that annoying misogynistic attitude towards the last record. Where assumptions were made about my workload, and my work skills. So, I wanted people to listen to it and know this is on me, this is what I can do. I wanted it to be ambitious. I wanted it to take in a huge, wide range of sounds, instruments and arrangements. It really is like a sonic CV. Come hire me as your producer because this is what I can do! Ultimately, I would be happiest in my studio producing records for other people. I’m not a natural performer.
Is that something you see yourself doing more of in the future, producing other artists?
Absolutely, it really is. But I’m still coming up against that glass ceiling. It’s amazing, even when other female artists have said to me privately, they’re desperate to work with a woman in the studio yet, ultimately, they end up going back to that male producer that people know or they’ve worked with before. It’s quite difficult to break the pattern, so I’m hoping this record sets out my stall and acts as a bit of a calling card. It’s really hard to break through when you’re spending other people’s budgets and they’re making the call about who’s going to produce their next record. Are they going to come to me or will those cultural presumptions prevail so they end up going with the guy who made that band’s record 10 years ago? You need that cultural authority, that stamp of approval from working with a big-name artist. Otherwise, it’s very difficult to make that leap from artist/producer to producer for others. I’m fighting. I’m fighting the good fight here!
“All Farewells Should Be Sudden” is one of the most harrowing but also moving pieces on the record, particularly with the church bells ringing at the end. Was it especially difficult to write and perform
Absolutely. It was written in the wake of my father’s death, thinking about what happens to us when we die. I wanted to explore the different religious constructions of the afterlife. What happens? Do you fold and do it all again? Are we reincarnated? I was obsessively watching the Denis Villeneuve film Arrival and thinking about that central conundrum it poses. If we know what suffering and loss we’re in for, do we make those decisions again? I don’t want to give away any spoilers for anyone that’s not seen the film but it sets that up as a kind of fundamental human question. Do we pursue suffering? Or if the price of love is suffering do we still pursue it? So, it was really exploring that in the two years after my dad died where I was deeply grief stricken. He was very young. He was only 59. He didn’t retire or get to do any of the things that he’d planned and it just felt so cruel.
It was so sudden. Just 16 weeks after we were standing in the queue at Greenwich Maritime Museum, and he couldn’t get the word for coffee. I knew something wasn’t right, then three weeks later he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. So, it was 12 weeks after that he dropped dead very suddenly at home. Which is where the title comes from, “All Farewells Should Be Sudden.” The trauma in that; it wasn’t a prolonged illness. We barely had time to absorb the information before he was gone. He actually died when I was recording guitar for “My Confessor.” The very moment he passed away. That is memorialized in the record itself. I kept that original take and put it on the record because that felt important when I was finally able to return to it. My dad is deeply woven throughout the album. But it was less about writing a song specifically about him, and more about how do we process death. How do we process this kind of compulsion to think about what happens when we die? Do people come back? Will we see them again? Does religion help us? I guess I’m always in the mindset of what would the Manics do if they were writing a song about this. It is that piecing over of all of the different ideas around death then reincarnation and the afterlife that I wanted to look at in “All Farewells…”.
Another song which stands out for me as one of the most instantly touching pieces on the album is “Unravel.” What inspired you to write that song?
It’s about trying to unravel everything. The way that things we love drag us down. I never really think about what my songs are about. But I do think about which ones are the most difficult to produce and arrange and for this album, that was “Unravel.” I almost pulled it off the record because I wasn’t pleased with it, but now I’m glad I didn’t because its one of my favorite tracks on the album. I really wrestled with the arrangement. It wasn’t working and had too many synths on it so I stripped it right back down to just strings and piano. At one point it became this really dense, Cure-esque piece”.
Because The Art of Losing is one of the truly great albums of this year, it helps to prove that with some critical reviews. The Line of Best Fit were in no short supply of compliments when it came to The Anchoress’ stunning second album:
“With her debut, Davies took the place of a modern-day Kate Bush, which can feel like a lazy comparison but it should be held with high esteem given Confessions Of A Romance Novelist perfectly depicted being, and embracing, yourself. Following that up, after a fully booked diary not only supporting her album but hitting the road with Simple Minds, came before she knew it.
Recently, Davies has stated: “I found myself in the midst of such deep grief and sadness that I had more material, emotionally speaking, than any one person could need to draw on for a lifetime of songwriting.” It’s these depths that squarely erupt in a dedicated outpouring, appearing in various forms on The Art of Losing, but indeed wallowing isn’t one of them.
Instrumental opener “Moon Rise (Prelude)” holds that crystallising moment of grief first rearing its bittersweet head; where the world freezes, holding onto the last remnants of lives that are hell-bent on adapting and changing even when nothing could feel less natural.
A concept album this is not, but the with the veins running deep with recurring themes, as a second album, Davies has managed to construct a weighty signifier of impassable change. Certainly, when deep into the throes of a sun-kissed summer, this isn’t an album that can offer any further escape - it’s purposeful, it isn’t supposed to retain - this is an album for healing.
Packing a punch musically; twisting and turning; immersing with piano interludes branching elegantly from the albums introductory roots (“All Shall Be Well”), the softest nature is held for later cut “5am” which feels as vulnerable as it does honest.
The titular track, which Davies has referred to as the centrepiece of the album, comes packed with undulating synths and action-packed rattling drums to create a sense of befitting urgency. Manic Street Preachers' James Dean Bradfield comes in early doors on the whirring and raging, “The Exchange”, where the two’s voices find equal pegging in failed romance. “Unravel” concocts an eighties gift for all those ready to feast upon a buffet of delicate ethereal synths, tribal drums and emotional pleading “If you don’t want me / then I don’t want me”.
“My Confessor” is a reckoning which sees Davies bellowing “Is this love?”, leading nicely into the tapering off rear. There’s an air of exhaustion that echoes through the closing moments, where the fight, depending on the situation, finds a conclusion or leads back, ready for round one with the lunar bookend “Moon (An End)”, but not without a gentle, hopeful swell before a voice advises “For once in your life just let it go”.
Grief will always exist; in the truest of relationships, to the blood we wrenchingly say goodbye to. It’s as natural as the trees we watch wither and wilt on a yearly basis, but how we deal with it is up to us, and Davies’ fight back is well worth remembering in those times of grave need”.
To finish things off, one more review should prove what an inspiration artist The Anchoress is. I think that she will be a huge idol in the future. Catherine Anne Davies herself is one of our finest producers and musical voices. Someone always trying to make the industry better, The Anchoress is a wonderful artist we are very lucky to have! This is what CLASH observed about The Art of Losing:
“While ‘Confessions Of A Romance Novelist’ was by no means a shallow record, its odes to heartbreak and hardship were delivered with a theatrical, almost camp flair that complimented her novelistic way with words and love of drama. While ‘The Art of Losing’ hasn’t seen The Anchoress lose her taste for those big, Kate Bush flourishes to up the emotional stakes of her songs, there is a comparative sense of weight and seriousness given to the subject matter addressed here.
As its title suggests, this is a concept album about the sensation of loss - of reaching for something only to find it suddenly and irrevocably gone. For the first 20 minutes or so Davies largely embeds these feelings in radio-friendly, vaguely gothic bangers. ‘Show Your Face’ details the death of a friendship with someone who refuses to believe sexual assault victims, ‘The Exchange’ chronicles a loss of identity in a toxic relationship, while the title track confronts the societal taboo surrounding the discussion of miscarriages, a heavy and very personal subject to Davis that she nevertheless prevents from becoming too cutting by employing a bouncy melody and the hook from Depeche Mode’s ‘Shake The Disease’.
From ‘Paris’ onwards, however, the gloves are taken off. The production is stripped back to just piano and strings (which comes as a relief, as her Achilles’ heel when producing herself is a propensity for squeezing every cool instrument in her studio onto each track), and Davies allows her powerful voice to take centre stage. ‘5am’ is a true showstopper of a song that calmly revisits three of her most horrific memories, each of which Davies depicts with barbed-wire honesty: the hollow end of a love affair, the traumatic and non-consensual loss of her virginity, the truly distressing hospital trip that ends in a miscarriage.
This combination of poignancy and dull rage persists until the end of the record on an incredible run of tracks that ends with ‘With The Boys’, a savage indictment of her experience as a capable woman working in the patronising, testosterone-drenched world of music production (“Got to be good, got to be certain if she wants to play with the boys,” sneers the chorus).
Like it’s predecessor, ‘Art Of Losing’ is lent an air of grandiosity by the plethora of authors Dr Catherine Anne Davies (PhD Literature and Queer Theory) references throughout: Carson McCullers, Lord Byron, Julian of Norwich, etc. This time around, however, there is never any doubt in her authorial voice and ability to commandingly tell her own story, with all the tragedies and triumphs contained therein”.
One of this country’s very best artists, the incredible The Anchoress is someone who will continue to make such compelling and memorable music. Heading on tour next year, do go and see her if you can. The Art of Losing is in my top ten albums of this year. A top 40 hit that showcased her magnificent songwriting and production talent, The Anchoress is…
A national treasure.