THE ANCHORESS CONFIRMS FOLLOW UP TO HER AWARD-WINNING, CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED DEBUT ALBUM
The Art of Losing is the second album from Welsh producer and multi-instrumentalist The Anchoress (aka Catherine Anne Davies), following in the wake of her critically-acclaimed debut album and recent collaborations with Manic Street Preachers, Bernard Butler, and Simple Minds. Written and produced by Davies, The Art of Losing navigates the detritus of death. It’s an album made in the process of trying to climb out of grief and explores how we make something from the losses in our lives.
The record’s title is inspired by the opening line of the Elizabeth Bishop poem ‘One Art’ - perhaps unsurprising for someone with a PhD in Literature. It follows her debut, Confessions of A Romance Novelist, which was named amongst the Guardian critics’ Albums of the Year, won HMV’s Welsh Album of the Year, Best Newcomer at the PROG awards, and a nomination for the Welsh Music Prize. It was a record that also won Davies a legion of fans, from Peter Gabriel and David Gilmour, to Toyah Wilcox & Robert Fripp, comedian Al Murray, as well as The Cure’s Robert Smith, who personally invited Catherine to perform at his Meltdown festival.
The new album features the BBC 6 Music playlisted single ‘Show Your Face’, alongside guest performances from James Dean Bradfield (Manics) and Sterling Campbell (Bowie, Duran Duran) along with the mixing talents of Dave Eringa (Manic Street Preachers) and grammy-award winner Mario McNulty (David Bowie, Prince, Laurie Anderson).
Written in the aftermath of several years of huge personal loss, after the untimely death of her father from an aggressive brain tumour, undergoing treatment for cervical cancer, and navigating multiple miscarriages and surgeries, the album follows Dylan Thomas’ instruction to “rage against the dying of the light” - and there is nothing “gentle” about its enquiry. But despite the traumatic backdrop to its composition, it is a far from dour affair. Rather, all fourteen tracks create a technicolour eruption of emotions, firmly concerned with how to find purpose in the midst of grief: “Was there some purpose to losing my mind?”, she asks on the album’s title track: “What did you learn when life was unkind..?”
The new album was written and recorded during an unfeasibly busy few years as Davies found solace and purpose in a range of projects whilst navigating her griefs. Most recently this came via the release of her collaborative album In Memory of My Feelings with Bernard Butler (on Pete Paphides’ label Needle Mythology), duetting and touring with the Manic Street Preachers on Resistance Is Futile (which reached #2 in the UK charts). She also brought a new generation of ears to legendary Scottish rock band Simple Minds, where she spent much of the last five years touring the world on keyboards, guitar and additional vocals. She joined the line-up in 2014, appearing on the Big Music (2015) and Walk Between Worlds (2018) albums before departing in 2019 after playing over 400 shows with the band.
Available formats of 'The Art Of Losing'
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The Anchoress 'Confessions Of A Romance Novelist (2017)'
Multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, PhD and producer Catherine Anne Davies (aka The Anchoress) sums up the album’s overall concept as “deconstructing normative ideas of love and romance”, with each song sung by a different character – “what you might call a musical ghost writing of sorts”. You can hear this distilled in the Prince-inspired feminist manifesto ‘One For Sorrow’ that questions the concept of marriage. There’s a different take on obsessional love in the album’s title track, where the album’s narrator ironically references her “bedroom shrine to Margaret Thatcher”. Meanwhile, ‘You And Only You’ – an anthemic ode to being better off alone – features the distinctive operatic indie-wail of Mansun’s Paul Draper, who co-produced the album with Catherine.
Draper helped to capture the collection of songs on which Catherine played a variety of instruments, including piano, guitar, flute, omnichord, mellotron, wurlitzer, glockenspiel, and celeste, as well as multi-tracking up to 25 vocal harmonies on some of the songs. Yet, recording was interrupted by a series of events that threatened to derail the project completely, including Catherine injuring her hand so badly during a 48-hour recording session that she was told she might not play again and had to wear a metal cast for 6 months. She says: “This has been made on a wing and a prayer, lots of favours, one car crash, one death, one broken hand, and a lot of patience on so many parts. Stir in 3 jobs, 4 studios, 2 arrests, 3 pianos, 40 songs and 1 very patient engineer… and you get some way to understanding what a long road it has been.”
The album follows two sold-out singles, which were playlisted on both BBC 6Music and Xfm, and received plaudits across the globe, from America’s NPR, to Les Inrockuptibles in France, the NME, and influential websites like The Quietus and Line of Best Fit.