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'I didn't know what I was about to live through': The Anchoress on The Art Of Losing

It’s been an unusual few years for most, but for Catherine Anne Davies, aka The Anchoress, it truly has been the strangest of times. Over the past three years, she has endured what she describes as the “multiplicity of life”. She has experienced profound personal loss, released an intensely intimate record reflecting and processing the turmoil of those times in the form of The Art Of Losing, and has seen that record hailed as one of the finest releases of the past year, topping multiple end of year lists and being described as the best album of 2021 by, among others, a certain Elton John.

All of this has played out to the backdrop of Covid, which, due to health issues, has meant Davies has been in a state of almost total isolation since the pandemic struck in early 2020. And now, almost a year to the day since its release, a new expanded edition of The Art Of Losing has been made available, complete with reworkings of several of the album’s tracks.

“It’s been utterly surreal,” she says as she joins us over Zoom from the home studio she has been holed up in for so long. She’s in a bright, talkative mood, evidently overjoyed and genuinely taken aback at the reception The Art Of Losing has been met with. “I’ve been shielding the whole time, I haven’t even been to the supermarket since February 2020, so for me the entirety of the release and promotion and people’s responses has all happened in this online world, which is utterly bizarre. The last 10 months have been like The Truman Show. People were telling me Elton John has been talking about my record and Caitlin Moran is talking about it, and it feels like some weird dream I might wake up from as I don’t experience any of it in the real world. It’s wonderful and lovely and I can’t think of a better way to have been locked up for 10 months. It’s been a farcical rollercoaster!”

In the two years preceding the release of The Art Of Losing, Davies was confronted with the loss not only of her father, but also multiple miscarriages. Given the nature of these devastating losses, the sheer existence of The Art Of Losing is a remarkable feat. That it manages to explore grief and the tumult of emotions with which it can come entangled with such a deft blend of nuance and unflinching candor is frankly astonishing.

While the lyrics often address these themes very directly, the music that accompanies them is disarmingly vibrant. There are towering guitars, some courtesy of Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield, who also lends his vocals to the song The Exchange, returning the favor after Davies featured on the band’s 2018 single Dylan & Caitlin. There are also plenty of up-tempo, electronic moments that provide a pulsating ebb and flow. These are punctuated by softer, at times starkly sombre vignettes, but while an album dominated by such subject matter could potentially make for an overwhelming, impenetrable listen for all but the most committed fans, The Art Of Losing is a constantly compelling body of work that embraces, rather than confronts the listener. This, Davies explains, was always the intention.

“It’s something that happens with my creative process,” she explains. “I write music and melody first, so it’s important to have that strong melody and underlying chord progression. And I didn’t know what I was about to live through, so I wasn’t writing sombre or melancholy music. I didn’t set out to write an autobiographical piece. But when I did understand what I was making, I wanted to emulate bands like Depeche Mode who address dark subject matter but with anthemic, uplifting melodies. That’s more challenging. It would have been easier to write something more somber. And I wanted to set out my stall in terms of arrangement and production. I wanted to do something sonically big and impressive, and that wasn’t going to be a meek, mournful collection of songs.”

In addition to her ambition to create those memorable melodies and anthemic arrangements, Davies also explored a variety of production techniques that embody the album’s themes sonically as well as lyrically.

This wasn't going to be a mournful, meek collection of songs. Catherine Anne Davies

“It was about exploring ideas of loss and bodily trauma through the processes I was using on the record,” she elaborates. “Even down to the Leslie cabinet that I used. I did a lot of post-production processing and that sense of disorientation you get with those spinning speakers was all about trying to replicate that bodily sense of disorientation you get when you’re in the midst of extreme trauma. And there were things like running synths and guitars back out through old speakers for that sense of degradation. And I used the Watkins Copicat as well, which was about looping and repeating memories. So rather than it all being about minor chords and sad lyrics, it was about mimicking trauma loss and grief through the gear and the production processes. When you’re in the middle of trauma, you’re not always feeling sad. It’s very disorientating and you feel many different emotions. For me it was about capturing that multiplicity of emotions. And the fastness of life when it feels like you’re going at 1,000 miles per hour. By necessity that meant there were a lot of fast tempo songs on the record. I wanted to replicate authentically what it felt like to live inside my head at that point.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the album’s writing and production was every inch a solo affair.

“The very nature of the album and the material meant I couldn’t envision myself sitting in a room with other people working on this,” she says. “And I very much felt the need to prove myself. My first album had done really well in terms of critical acclaim, but there was a sense in which people didn’t realize how much of that record I had made. I was credited as a co-producer, but as is so often the case with women, people seem to think it’s a vanity credit. I’d spent four years of my life making it with a great deal of effort. And at some point in the gestation period of this album, I felt that for people to truly realize what I could do, I needed to set up my stall and do it alone.

“It was written and produced by myself and it wasn’t a task I necessarily felt I was up to at the beginning, which is awful and was testament to the fact my self-esteem was in the gutter at that point. It’s been enormously gratifying to see the response it’s had, because it’s such a journey I’ve been on with regard to my belief in my own skills as a record producer. And I think it’s important for the industry to see more women self-producing at a commercial level.”

Though the album itself was completed almost a year before the Covid outbreak, it wasn’t released until March 2021. Confined to the studio in isolation, was Davies ever tempted to go back and tamper with any elements of the record or temper some of its more candid lyrical moments?

“I didn’t touch it at all,” she states. “I went through a plethora of emotions: pissed off, angry, frustrated, and like going through the stages of grief, you come to acceptance. And in hindsight it was a gift to come out when it did. There was a much bigger appetite for talking about difficult things. And the cultural conversation around some of the themes and topics had moved on to a point where people were talking about them in the media. That made it less scary for reviews and interviews, where people may have tiptoed around them. So, of course it was frustrating, but it came out at precisely the moment it was supposed to. It captured a moment in time. It would have been inauthentic to have revisited it. There is one track called 5am that I wasn’t 100% comfortable about going into the public domain and did consider taking it off, but it was a really important part of the record and I’m really glad I followed my gut and kept it on.”

So what does the new expanded edition have to offer?

“It has five brand new acoustic tracks on, so it’s really me sat here in my studio stripping the songs back to their roots,” she says. “They are completely re-recorded versions, not just the demos. So it’s really the all bells and whistles edition. It does what it says on the tin. The record has done so well; it reached way more people than I ever could have thought. So, if you’re up for diving into that pool of death disco melancholia... I hope it takes people on a journey to the core of the songs. And when I say acoustic, they really are alternative versions of the songs, it’s not just me and an acoustic guitar. Expect the unexpected.”

From an artist this adventurous and courageous, we’d expect little else.