The Cassette, The Grandmother, and the Album About the Past

On the making of As We Once Were, and the voice I thought I'd lost forever

There’s a particular kind of grief that only a child can feel: the pure, uncomplicated devastation of losing something you love with your whole heart, before you’ve learned to temper loss with any kind of perspective.

I was somewhere on a rainy stretch of British coastline, face pressed against a car window as rain lashed the glass, when I first heard it. That horrible, mechanical whirring. The sound of a cassette deck eating itself. More specifically, eating my beloved Kylie Minogue album. My most treasured possession. Gone. Ribbons of brown magnetic tape, a ruined childhood afternoon when there was little else to do, and tears that no amount of sticky seaside rock could fix.

I didn’t know then that the humble cassette tape and I were far from finished with each other…

As We Once Were, my forthcoming third studio album, is a record about the past. About memory and the way it shifts and softens and sometimes ambushes you completely without warning. It felt right, then, that the past would reach back into the making of it in the most unexpected of ways.

I’d been circling early ideas for songs for a while, feeling the outline of something without quite being able to name it. I had fragments: melodies, half-finished lyrics, a mood, but I was missing the thread that would pull it all together into something coherent and true. Then my sister mentioned in passing that she remembered a particular cassette tape. A recording she’d made of our grandmother’s voice for a middle school history project. An ordinary homework assignment, the kind that gets a sticker and a grade and then gets forgotten.

Except she hadn’t forgotten it. She’d lost it. Buried somewhere in the overflowing detritus of memory and objects and loss that make up my Mum’s loft space in our childhood home. For years we couldn’t find it. Methodical searching yielded no results.

And then, one day, it suddenly appeared in the doorway of the spare room, as if someone had placed it there, deliberately and quietly. I don’t believe in ghosts as such but this is the closest I’ve come to not being able to explain just how it suddenly appeared there, after all that fruitless searching. Click.

When I finally listened to it, it was heartbreaking. Mostly chewed up and garbled. This tape too had been the victim of the mechanical munch. Was it truly lost forever when I had just found it?

I had to put my audio engineering skills to work to painstakingly restore it over a nail-biting week. And then suddenly, there she was: our grandmother’s voice, warm and unhurried, talking about her own past childhood in Wales: Being a tomboy, climbing trees. Being hit with the Welsh Not for speaking in her mother tongue. Here was a life I thought I only half-knew, suddenly speaking directly to me. Something unlocked. That was the key. That was the centre of the record. And she was here with me as I made it. That familiar and comforting voice when I thought I had lost the thread or couldn’t quite make a song cohere. Always there with her words of wisdom.

It struck me afterwards that of course the past arrived on this particular format, with its gentle hiss and its fallibility and its stubborn insistence on being physical, being held. There’s something about a cassette that refuses the clean, lossless permanence of a digital file. It degrades. It warps. It carries time in its texture. For a record about memory, which does exactly the same things, it felt less like a format choice and more like a fact.

So I’m genuinely thrilled to tell you that for the very first time, one of my albums will be released on this humble format. Not to follow some hipster trend but because it genuinely means something to me, something to this record and its central message.

As We Once Were will be available as a limited run of cassettes alongside the 2LP, standard CD, deluxe 2CD media book, and download.

It’s my first time releasing on this format, and given everything the cassette means to this particular album and how it came together, I couldn’t imagine it any other way. I also cannot wait for you to see the back cover artwork: it pays its own quiet homage to this humble, important little object.

All formats are available to preorder now through my new label home, Last Night From Glasgow.

PREORDER THE ALBUM HERE

Listen to the new single and read all about the album here: NME INTERVIEW

Catherine x

P.S. The first album I ever bought was Björk’s Debut. On cassette, naturally. What was yours?