ABOUT THE LIGHTHOUSE

When I began writing for it, exactly two years ago today, it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing. I felt oddly muted and distant, a relatively unfamiliar feeling for me. I wasn’t sure I had anything to say that was relevant enough to warrant being poured into song. But then, during a long walk, an image came into my head and I started telling myself a story. The story of an exhausted sailor, lost at sea. The air around him thick with fog, the likelihood of him ever reaching land again slight. Until suddenly he spots a light in the distance. As he draws closer, it reveals itself to be a lighthouse, set atop a cliff on an island. He doesn’t know it yet, but I imagined him to have accidentally arrived at the land of the dead. The villagers in this land out of time would be people that had lived, and had passed. I imagined an inn-keeper, a preacher, a farmer. A schoolteacher, a cowboy. I imagined what they might tell him, the stories they might have, the wisdom they could impart. And I imagined them discovering that the sailor was not yet ready to be here, and would hatch a plan to send him back to the land of the living. When I got back from my walk, I immediately picked up my guitar and started finding the chords that set the opening scene of this story. Before long I was up, up and away and “The Lighthouse” rolled out - the opening track of this album and the first to make land. I imagined the song ending with the sailors first steps on this other-wordly beach.

‘Guess this must be the place’

Initially, I thought I would write a concept album, inspired by Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown, but very quickly I let go of the idea. It felt too constrictive, the story I wanted to tell was my own - but the sailor’s tale still lingers subliminally throughout the songs. You can spot it if you know.

I took myself to a family home in France to continue writing in a more secluded, concentrated place - away from the cushy comfort of my home studio. Pleasingly, this family home happens to be right next to a village graveyard and the January air was foggy and crisp and brilliantly spooky.

All this imagery set off a series of thoughts and memories in my head. I was raised by two mothers and lost one of them when I was a young teenager, so the concept of death has always been a familiar presence in my life. It dawned on me how deeply I wanted to write about her, to her. Maybe in the past this would have felt too morbid and heavy but somehow it felt like the time was right for it. In “Gently Now”, I imagine the conversations we might have if she came back just for a day. In “Wild Geese” I imagine her as a beautiful bird, soaring over her beloved Lake Superior, which she used to speak about with a twinge of homesickness (she was from Minnesota). More broadly, this album allowed me to dig into my feelings about womanhood, growing older, the expectations and preconceptions of our society and yes - of course - how I feel about my own mortality.

With the writing process having been so different than ever before, it felt suitable for the recording process to have a similar intensity and freshness. In September, I invited my band to join me in a beautiful studio in the French Basque Country and record the whole thing in two weeks - as a unit. Far from our daily lives, near the ocean, fully focused and tuned into each other. Allowing them into my process and learning to resist polishing and perfecting the final recordings was a huge mission for me - and I’m immensely proud of what we’ve created together.