The Art Of Losing

2 years on..

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” 

Joan Didion

It’s the two year anniversary of the release of The Art of Losing, so I thought I would share with you a deep-dive into the making of each of the 14 songs on the album, my influences, references and the stories behind how they got made.

As with everything I make, there’s always a reading list, and I hope you find some interest in reading about what was on my cultural playlist at the time of making the album and I hope it leads you to some pastures new...

Dive in!

Catherine x

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1. MOON RISE (PRELUDE)

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.” 

― Edna St. Vincent Millay

The two instrumental orchestral pieces that “bookend” the album were always a part of the plan for how it would sound. I was listening to a lot of Max Richter and just exploring the potential of composing without using my voice. I grew up playing in orchestras so it wasn’t entirely unnatural to return to the idea of conjuring huge emotion without any lyrical content. You’ll hear the first of many instances of the Leslie cabinet (a rotating speaker) on the album used to re-amp the piano in the opening section here. It gives it an underwater, other-worldy feeling: we are descending here into Hades, the underworld. The whole string section was, unusually, composed in ProTools as I chopped up, layered and looped pieces of cello that I had sung to cellist Tim Bowen to play in the single day session we had to record strings. Not your average method of composing a classical piece but it worked, nonetheless!

2. LET IT HURT

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” 

― C.S. Lewis

This was quite a late-comer to the album and one of those rare songs that came to me almost fully-formed. I wrote it on the upright Challen piano in my hallway (as famously used by the Beatles at Abbey Road). I was on the way out to catch a train to London. Needless to say, I missed that train and caught this song instead. It addresses the central themes of the album; about allowing yourself to fully feel the experience of loss and grief. Too often we distract ourselves with work or defer the pain through other means. “Stop arguing with yourself” is me telling myself to stop, and feel the pain. The choruses are a homage to my ongoing obsession with John Grant’s ability to shoehorn polysyllables into alternative pop ballads. I’m quite proud of myself for managing to rhyme “monopoly” with “existential melancholy” and “misogyny”. I ended up adding in the drums after the entire song had been recorded, which is not only an unusual order to do things when you’re making a record but also the absolute worst idea when you subsequently decide you want to speed the song up slightly... But when I’m producing an album, I don’t like obeying the rules.

3. THE EXCHANGE (feat. James Dean Bradfield)

“He had never regarded other men as anything but puppets of a sort, created to fill up an empty world” ― Guy de Maupassant

I was so lucky that James Dean Bradfield from the Manics agreed to lend his vocal to this track. It was always written as a kind of duet - exploring the unhealthy ties between two people. It was not only a repaying of the favour from me singing on the Manics’ song ‘Dylan & Caitlin’ but also a twenty-first century updating of that story of a toxic creative partnership. When I first pulled James’ vocal into the finished track I had one of those goosebump moments where you pinch yourself that one of your idols is on your record. The power and emotion in his voice is what makes him one of my all-time favourite singers. He asked a lot of great questions before we even started recording about what the song was about to try and get into the head of the character who’s singing - he’s a very inquisitive and intelligent musician. We argued a bit about the pronunciation of certain words and I reminded him of the time he asked me to sing a bit “less Welsh” on ‘Dylan & Caitlin’ - hah! The legend that is Sterling Campell also very kindly agreed to play drums on the song. He’s a dream to work with and he nailed it first time in his studio in New York. We first met while I was touring in Australia and Sterling was playing with the mighty B-52s. We struck up a friendship through Mario McNulty (who also mixed on the album). Then I managed to persuade the mighty Dave Eringa to mix it. All in all a dream multi-collaboration on this song.

4. SHOW YOUR FACE

“Abuse of power comes as no surprise” - Jenny Holzer

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression” - Anon.

After we’d duetted on ‘The Exchange’, I  was fortunate enough to also have James agree to add his signature angular guitar to ‘Show Your Face’ while I was in the middle of Italy somewhere on a very long Simple Minds tour. I wrote the song in a mad last-minute flurry before the final drum sessions (along with the album’s title track). Both started as demos on the Oberheim OB6 synthesizer when I was listening to a lot of Depeche Mode and, unusually, I kept the original demo keyboards in the final track (mostly because the synth had swung dangerously out of tune and I couldn’t replicate the pitching). The title came from the idea of wanting someone to show their true character to the world. The news was full of Weinstein and Trump at the time and I was thinking a lot about toxic masculinity and how hard it is for women to call-out men in power. In terms of the album’s themes, it’s about the loss of friendship, the loss of faith in humanity. There is a real loss there - your memories of someone are now tainted - but the loss is a productive one of standing by your beliefs and values. The phrase “you’ve got a nerve” just kept cycling around my head and I wrote a lot of it angrily marching to and from the supermarket, humming into my iPhone probably looking a little bit like a lunatic talking to myself... The title is an allusion to Psalm 102 - the prayer of the afflicted - a text that is deeply woven throughout the album’s lyrical themes.