Or, conversely, The Anchoress is Catherine Anne Davies, a Welsh-born talented songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, singer, producer, engineer, mixer, and more. Her debut album, Confessions of a Romance Novelist, came out in 2016, but it was 2021’s The Art of Losing that received many awards and climbed the UK charts. She’s had an interesting career, touring as a member of Simple Minds as well as teaching Songwriting and Creative Music Production programs at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance in London. We knew she was a true studio dweller and found out she loves Tape Op, so it was a treat to drop her a line.
Hello!
Is it morning there for you?
It’s 11am. Not too bad.
Morning. That’s early for studio time.
I’ve started booking attended sessions to begin at 10 a.m. so that I can say, “I’ll work until 8 p.m.” That way I can maintain a healthy work/life balance. With that end time, it’s more likely that I can maybe see a movie or have dinner with my wife.
I’m a big fan of that now. I worked with Bernard Butler on a collab [album, In Memory of My Feelings]. He only works from 12 until 3:30 p.m. because he’s got kids. It was such a nice, civilized way of working. You reclaim so much of your life. I try and do the same. I try and finish by six and be a human being.
Three and a half hours is a short day!
We worked incredibly quickly. That had its own intensity. You don’t waste time when you’ve only got that window to get something done.
I was listening to that album yesterday. Was it more his song form, with you working lyrics into that?
Yeah, it’s totally different from how I work normally. It weirdly predates me making the first Anchoress record [Confessions of a Romance Novelist]. The very last sessions [for In Memory of My Feelings] were in 2015. It took that long [2020] for it to come out. A lot of people got confused and were thinking we did it in lockdown. We’d been sitting on this record for a decade, and no one wanted to put it out. It’s an odd timeline, and it’s strange because it came out about six months before The Art of Losing. It was so weird to have to do interviews about something I didn’t even really remember recording. I met Bernard when I was still at university. I was not even sure if I was ever going to be able to do anything in music. It’s quite a different dynamic, obviously, to be the complete control freak I’ve become since. I’m not sure if it would work now.
Are you careful about that now, when thinking of working on a project? We’re obviously not dissing on Bernard; that’s just what that project was.
I definitely feel it brought out something different in me, because it almost felt like a holiday working on that project. But that was how I approached it, because I am such a control freak in the rest of the ways that I work. Even when people come to me, I think they’re expecting a certain style of production and a certain way of working. I was having this conversation with some girlfriends recently, after the whole Taylor Swift debacle with Damon Albarn and all the rubbish he was talking. [In January 2022, Albarn said in an interview with the LA Times that Swift doesn’t write her own songs, claiming that co-writing doesn’t count. He has since apologized. –ed.] I don’t want to be a spokesperson for all women, but it is a different situation for women. The implications of collaboration are so much more when they reflect back on your skill set. It’s weird. I worked a fair bit with Mario McNulty [Tape Op #142] who worked with David Bowie a lot. He always says he never second-guessed the idea of collaborating with someone. Mario would always encourage me to think of it as taking me into a different area and strengthening my team. But, as a woman, it is tricky. Often people will question, “Are you working with that person because you can’t do it?” It’s hard to negotiate that, which is why I have ended up working on my own a lot. I’m trying to be more open to collaboration in the future, thinking, “I’ve proven myself now.” People come to me for mixing. It’s like, “Okay, maybe I can bring other people to the table and not worry about what people might think.”
The expanded 2022 version of The Art of Losing has some extra mixes by Dave Eringa.
Dave did the singles on the original record. That’s all...
