The HURTING
It’s been a long time coming but Catherine Anne Davies has finally released her second album as The Anchoress. The Art Of Losing takes listeners through some of the toughest periods of the musician’s life as she explores grief, trauma and loss with raw emotion. Davies tells Prog how it’s helped her to heal and why she now feels more confident than ever.
Words: Rob Hughes Portrait: Roberto Foddai
Catherine Anne Davies reframes pain and grief on The Anchoress’ powerful new album.
For Catherine Anne Davies, the writing and recording of her new album presented a distinct challenge: how much of herself to reveal. “I’ve always been an incredibly private person,” the singer and multiinstrumentalist tells
Prog.
“I never would’ve chosen to share any of these details publicly or even to write songs about them, so it’s strange to me that I’ve made a record about it all. But when things accumulate to such a level, it becomes impossible for it not to spill out.”
The Art Of Losing, her second album as The Anchoress, is a richly intense work, rooted in Davies’ personal experience of grief, trauma and loss. It’s also often extraordinarily beautiful. Her lyrical eloquence and raw emotive power are measured in vivid arrangements that shift between whispers and tempests, carrying with them gusts of prog, folk, experimental rock and semi-classical music. Like all the best albums, this one feels like it maps out its own unique world.
“I want to explode the myth that going through something awful makes you write great records. It’s bullshit, because when I was at my worst I couldn’t even get out of fucking bed.”
“It’s kind of bookended, at the beginning, by my dad’s death,” Davies explains of the album’s subject matter and chronology. “That would be the prologue. He was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour [her father died during the recording of her 2016 debut, Confessions Of A Romance Novelist]. Not long after that I began my journey through baby loss, with the first of many miscarriages. And I guess the other bookend was very unexpectedly being told that I had cervical cancer a couple of days before Christmas. That really was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’d just lost another baby and had another operation – because it was a very complicated loss – and it was just too much. I was so angry, just railing against the unfairness of it all.”