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.