Everyone has been moved to tears by music at some point in their lives, but rarely in circumstances as raw and personal as those experienced by Catherine Anne Davies, known professionally as The Anchoress, at a recent playback of her new album for fans.
The floodgates opened, she says, during the track Hand to the Tide, a roiling ballad about the drowning of three close family members. Even thinking about it, the Welsh songwriter and producer says over Zoom, is making her well up all over again.
“I had a little kind of preview listening party with a very small group of fans last week. I just started crying talking about the song. It’s still very raw for me to speak about this loss in our family.”
She herself almost drowned during her christening, while another aunt drowned in a separate, earlier incident. “Even as I talk to you now, I can feel it, and that’s the generational trauma that I want to write about on the record. I was a very young child when this happened [the deaths that provide the backdrop to Hand to the Tide], and yet I feel the weight of it so much still. It’s unresolved trauma.”
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Unresolved grief is not an outlier in Davies’ work – it is the unifying theme for much of her writing. Her previous album, The Art of Losing, was composed in the shadow of the death of her father, her experiences of several lost pregnancies and a cervical cancer diagnosis.
The Art of Losing created a bit of a sensation on its release in the late Covid days of March 2021. “A special record. They don’t come along very often,” gushed the Quietus, which compared Davies’s songwriting swagger to Berlin-era Bowie. “Raw and unfiltered,” agrees the NME of the LP, which was nominated for the Welsh Music Prize, the equivalent of Ireland’s Choice award.
Her latest record, As We Once Were, released on August 7th, is just as personal – having been recorded after she became a mother. This was, of course, an occasion of joy, but it also prompted her to re-engage with her own family history and reflect on how grief and trauma are not fleeting experiences but ones that are passed down through the generations.
If the new album is about anything, it is that we are all shaped by the past – not just our own, but that of our families. That point brings her back to the drownings that are so bound up in her story and which she knew she had to reflect upon in As We Once Were.
“I don’t think the wounds have ever healed from that,” she says of the drownings. “And I was very interested to probe that as soon as I knew I was having a girl and I was pregnant, because I had this fixation that I was not going to f**k up my daughter. It took me on this journey of researching generational trauma, looking at epigenetics and the way that trauma is encoded into our DNA. I found that really fascinating because it helped me to let go of the idea that you could completely erase it.”
Not everything on the record is so stark. Jangling single I Had a Baby Not a Lobotomy is a funny riposte to her experience of being judged as a mother who wishes to maintain a professional life. Just how fast people are to draw conclusions was made clear to her after she descided not to advertise that she had become a parent during the early years of her daughter’s life. It was only when people found out that she’d had a baby that she noticed a shift in attitudes.
“I’d never worked so much in my life. I had work offers in the wake of how well The Art of Losing had done. I was so busy.”
But when word got out that she was a mother, everything changed. “It was quite interesting: the moment I did share that with people, the different way I was treated by the industry, but by other people too. And, to be honest, a lot of that came from other women, actually. The expectation that I would stop touring. That I was suddenly a very different person. Quite a lot of judgment as well.”
She is one of many artists to talk about motherhood and the expectations it places on musicians in recent years. Florence Welch’s Everybody Scream was informed by her experience of miscarriage while Lucy Rose’s This Ain’t the Way You Go Out addressed her struggles with a rare form of post-partum osteoporosis after the birth of her son. Davies, for her part, cites Bat for Lashes’ The Dream of Delphi – a record about a mother’s journey of self-discovery in the wake of her daughter’s birth.
“Before, it was just completely taboo to talk about it. To some extent, you’re still told that your career is over if you have a child. I guess there’s been an opening up to talking about motherhood in all of its complexities, which makes for much better subject matter.”
She brings up the book Matrescence by her friend, the author Lucy Jones, which argues that during pregnancy, childbirth and early motherhood women experience a profound physiological and psychological metamorphosis. “We’re not talking about something that we just feel differently. There are things that happen to the brain and the body.”
If the record resists cliches about motherhood, it does contain a moment of sweet and undiluted vulnerability in the voice of Davies’ Welsh grandmother, taken from a recording made by Davies’ sister for a long-forgotten school project. Davies feels there was an obvious connection between having a child of her own and her fascination with her grandmother’s life, who we hear reflecting on her childhood and the scrapes she got into as a kid.
“I became very interested in tracing some kind of genetic lineage, I guess, and joining the dots between what had happened to her in her quite eventful life, and to some extent trying to make sure that history didn’t repeat itself,” she says.
She is releasing the new album mindful that her daughter may one day listen to it – and that she will encounter her voice from across the decades, much as she had with her grandmother.
“I think having a girl ... when you come from a long line of women who have been through a lot, [it] brings up a lot of shit. So there was a lot of work on the record trying to figure that out, like a roadmap of sorts, both for me as a parent, but also for her to listen back to. The beauty of being a musician is that enormous gift that it gave to me, to get them [her daughter and her grandmother] to meet in a sonic universe. I mean, who else gets to meet their great-grandmother and have a conversation with [her]?”
The same impulse that drives Davies to delve into her family’s past – the belief that what came before shapes what is possible now – informs her work beyond the studio. As a lecturer at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance in London and a patron of the UK’s Music Venue Trust charity, she wants future generations of musicians to have the same opportunities as those afforded to her. She worries greed in the music industry poses an existential threat to the fragile ecosystem of small venues and affordable ticket prices.
“We’ve let it get into a horrendous state. We’ve let it get to a state where only really the privileged can afford to pursue a music career. We’ve let it get to a state where mid-career artists who have had successful careers can no longer tour because of losing so much money. And we’ve let it get to a state where it’s no longer a viable option for any kid from a working-class background. We shouldn’t have ever let the ecosystem collapse, and I think we’re sticking fingers in the dam here.”
There has been some progress – such as the UK government acceding to the Music Venue Trust’s campaign for a voluntary £1 levy on all tickets sold for larger-scale venues. Still, she wonders if we are raising a generation of music fans who see their favourite artists not as living people to be engaged with, but as idols on a pedestal – accessible only to the rich and privileged. “Your Taylor Swift ticket is £300. That’s your budget wiped. You’re not going to go and see that other band for £20 or £25 at your grassroots music venue.”
The skyrocketing cost of seeing big artists has filtered down to independent music, she says.
“I have definitely seen a shift in attendance at my shows because of that, and also because people want that Instagrammable moment – the big event, the thing that they can film, this experiential kind of bang for your buck. Though, to counter that, I had someone who brought their daughter [to an Anchoress gig], and the only show she’d been to was an arena show with Taylor Swift. And she was just agog the whole time. She came up to the merch stall afterwards, and she was like, ‘I can meet you! I didn’t realise you could be that’.”
She says this with a smile – a reminder that while music can drive us to tears, it can also fill us with happiness. The joy of Davies’ new album is that it finds a way to do both.
