The Anchoress is learning to re-read herself

But events, as we inevitably learn, almost never come with such a generous appraisal, no real air of their eventual significance. To borrow from T.S. Eliot, who put it much more cleverly, meaning has always been a retrospective art, and happiness is no great exception. Newspapers write of the “good old days” as though they had declared themselves in real time, but life just isn’t all that theatrical, not for most of us at least. Happiness doesn’t fail to announce itself because it lags below some threshold of detection necessarily, it’s just that our attention is so exhaustively divided. We’re all so busy becoming the people who’ll remember, to paraphrase others before me, not what has been said or done but how it made us feel.

Literature has always known this to some degree. Some of the most enduring novels are grounded in recognition instead of revelation, stories where happiness stops being something we supposedly arrive at but a background hum that drifts in and out of earshot. Happiness in this view rarely comes with a climax, even less often with a chorus. It asks so little of plot and almost everything of attention, the kind that can eternalise even the smallest domestic scene, just because it somehow stayed alive in the mind.

It's through a similar lens that we first encounter As We Once Were, the third studio album by multi-instrumentalist and producer The Anchoress, aka Catherine Anne Davies. Here, the curtain raises on a living room in 1990s suburban Buckinghamshire, with two young girls, their grandma, and a mother who busies in and out of the space, picking up stray socks perhaps, or sweeping away crumbs. The older of the children holds a wired microphone, its cable leading down to a shoebox-style cassette tape recorder, reading from a sheet of her school homework. “How have women’s roles changed in the twentieth century?” she asks, and her grandmother leans forward, takes a deep breath, and speaks.

“I have such a vivid memory of it, so I knew the tape had always existed,” says Davies, explaining how her grandmother’s voice came to form not only part of the album’s sound but also its spine, its “conceptual language.” “She was a deeply intelligent woman, but I didn’t have a sense of her as such a political person until I listened back to what she was saying,” she adds. “I’d forgotten how atypical she was for her time. She didn’t have access to every opportunity for education, as a working-class woman, but she was like, ‘Yes, I can answer this question,’ and did so in great detail.”

Coming from The Anchoress, As We Once Were is in some ways atypical too. Not in the sense that it’s any great musical departure from 2021’s The Art of Losing (“My autism likes repetition and comfort, I hate it when artists suddenly do something totally different,” she says, laughing) but especially in the way that it finally collapses one of her earliest songwriting rules. “My first album, Confessions of a Romance Novelist, was about refusing the idea that you have to be confessional to be a singer/songwriter,” she reminds me. “So what surprised me deeply with As We Once Were is that I even wanted to go there, to even have that conversation in the first place.” 

There’s no question that songs like the title track and the woundedly compassionate “Stop the World” are expressly personal, but, still, confession as a verb doesn’t really land when it comes to what Davies is doing. What interests her, she says, is not disclosure for its own sake but how much can be offered without narrowing the space left free for others’ emotional investment, how not to tip the unspoken balance. The “confession” in this case has less to do with divulgence and more to do with writing in the margins, leaving annotations that don’t expose the raw text of her person but hint at just enough of it to feel relatably real. “Something I learned a long time ago is that if you share openly and willingly, people won’t actually notice what you don’t share,” she says. “Offering honesty doesn’t have to mean that you’re being fully honest.”

It's a balance she’s perhaps more conscious of than ever with this album, digging as it does into the Davies family chest of skeletons and stories. But the deeper complication of As We Once Were is that returning to the past is never just an act purely of retrieval. It may start with her grandmother’s voice but inheriting a person’s thoughts is quite a different thing from possessing them, and not every story she felt was hers to share. Contrary to popular belief, an artist’s private life doesn’t become valuable only when exposed; often the things we choose not to say are the very same things that allow us to share in the first place.

“It’s such a difficult call to make, and I’m not sure I have the answers,” she explains, reiterating what she’s said before on only caring to make work that resonates more broadly. Confession is not an interesting enough end in itself, she implies. The point isn’t really to document pain but to make sense of what survives it.

Davies may not be an entirely open book in that sense but at one point in our chat she does declare herself “a library,” kind of as a joke, kind of as shorthand for a lifelong habit of reading. “If you take the books away, maybe it all collapses,” she adds, laughing at the thought of dissolving like the Wicked Witch of the West, not into a puddle of green goo but a pile of crumpled pages. 

It’s a cute aside in the moment, but the library comment is not too far from the truth, from what I understand of how Davies thinks – sort of the same way a librarian thinks, not hierarchically so much as an engine of association. A warehouse of books is also a collection, but a library is a library because of all the conversations it can start, and the same can be said for an album, especially in the tradition of progressive rock, to which The Anchoress naturally belongs.

“I couldn’t write an album of just ten pop songs, it wouldn’t be satisfying to me,” she says, wrinkling her nose at the thought. “I need the conceptual framework of prog because it’s expansive enough to accommodate a journey, a story that has epilogues and prologues, nuance and complexity.”

The little interludes and “runways” aren’t just nice-to-haves, then. They’re also part of what makes the album, conceived as a conversation across four generations of women, feel so refreshingly anti-nostalgic. Davies is interested in something much more alive than a pickled, idealised past. On As We Once Were, the past re-enters the chat, unspooling new threads as it goes. “I’m not really interested in looking backwards, I’m much more interested in probing the nature of how the past can teach us something,” she says. “But there’s no big takeaway on this album. We come back to the beginning as we are at the end.”

I’d argue that we don’t though, not really. In music, as with any great book, a circle is never a perfect repeat. Every listen, every reading carries us back to the start a little different, incrementally upgraded. Few writers have understood that better than Virginia Woolf (co-star of the gloriously queer “Throw Over Your Man”), who often wrote about returns in all her unerring precision. You only have to look at To the Lighthouse, which ends with Lily Briscoe finally completing the painting she began hundreds of pages earlier, not because the subject has changed but because she had. In its own circularity, As We Once Were stages something similar, I think: the idea that meaning doesn’t come from rewriting our past but from learning how to read it in new ways.

Marcel Proust, another one of Davies’ literary touchstones, makes for a useful companion here too. The madeleine isn’t magical because the taste throws him back into his boyhood. It’s magical because it lays bare a significance that went beyond his reach at the time, prompting his whole story to be interpreted anew. Our childhood memories aren’t an archive, like a tape, but undergo continual, often unconscious revision. Davies had only seen certain layers of her grandmother as a child, but behind those was the story of a woman who made brave and difficult choices, ran her own business, and was clearly very aware of how women were (and still are) squashed down, as if that alone could trap them into useful little boxes. 

“I was surprised by how similar we were in terms of not fitting into our expected roles as women,” she explains. “There’s something she says on the tape about how women give so much and ask for not much in return, and that we’re very underutilised. Obviously as a child and you’re around your grandparents, you don’t pick up on these kinds of subtle political signals. They must run in the genes, I think.”

When Davies talks about her grandmother’s voice, it’s not just the physical qualities of her speech she means but also “the thrust of her personality through the world.” As the leopard-print-clad The Anchoress, she’s spent the past decade or so tracing the implications of voice seen in a similar way. If Confessions of a Romance Novelist was largely about discovering a voice that could cut through expectations, and The Art of Losing about preserving that voice through devastating loss and all manner of betrayals, As We Once Were asks where that voice comes from in the first place, and how it echoes down the line. 

In “diving backwards to go forwards” as she puts it, Davies connects the dots between inherited emotional histories and the ones we write for ourselves – and it started with a feeling of panic. “Finding out that I was having a baby girl was very triggering for me,” she explains. “It brought up a lot of stuff that felt quite emotionally risky, and part of the process for the album was to take that risk to destabilise myself in terms of picking at scabs that I maybe didn’t want to, in order for them to heal properly.”

Having embarked on a “quite intense” period of therapy during pregnancy to “sort of programmatically address the idea of changing the future by looking at the past,” when Davies eventually came back to songwriting two years later she was in a different and “quite disorientating” headspace. Where once she’d been quite rigid in terms of not letting herself sit too much in her feelings, motherhood had done what motherhood evolutionarily must and made her “softer, more alert, and more empathetic,” thinking less as an individual and more as a continuation, drastically rewriting her sense of self and time. 

“If you’re someone who has always tried to keep really strong barriers between your private and public facing life, that shit is going to fuck you up,” she says with a slightly hollow laugh. Was it ultimately healing though? “I guess so,” she shrugs. “I wouldn’t want to impose a false sense of Aristotelian unity on top of it, but I certainly slayed a few emotional demons along the way. I don’t have advice for anybody else navigating generational trauma, unfortunately, but I do think the making the record was helpful, because it forced me to confront some things that a lot of people would try to bury or forget about.”

It's an altogether less romantic view than you might expect of an album titled As We Once Were, though romance is in any case a poor reader of its own experience. We laugh about her early, pre-Anchoress EP, Songs for the Boy Who Wouldn’t Read Rilke, with its mooning, but-daddy-I-love-him-itis, but it’s not a stretch to see how her younger self saw poems as a place where she could feel more intensely. The Davies who made As We Once Were, though, seems closer to Rilke’s deeper lesson, that meaning can’t be forced, it has to ripen of its own accord. “The point is, to live everything,” he wrote in the fourth of his Letters to a Young Poet. “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

I don’t think Davies would claim to have lived her way into an answer exactly, but, with motherhood as her madeleine, she’s found a new vocabulary with which to re-read the past and what still survives in the present. From the My Brightest Diamond-like “She Knows Her Place” to Davies’ own contemporary story in “All I Really Want is Peace”, there’s a recurring theme in the album of women who recover their voice, reclaiming authorship over lives that had been narrated or infringed upon by men. 

Coming from an artist who was once “so embedded in the idea of revenge pop and karmic retribution,” “All I Really Want is Peace” feels like an unexpected signing off, and no one’s more surprised at that than Davies is herself. Struggling to force the song into the bitter, familiar shape of a reprisal, she came to realise that the melody knew something that she didn’t. “I ended up discovering that, actually, I didn’t feel angry at this person who had done me great harm, I just wanted to take that pain and let it go,” she explains. “Who knew there was a secret Buddhist in me? I’m quite an angry person by default, but apparently not anymore. I’ve been ruined!”

When anger does bubble up later, on the cautionary, chiming “What You Did”, it again feels like a re-evaluation, a sober recognition of patterns that held for far too long and cut so deeply. Davies doesn’t excuse the damage, as well she shouldn’t, but where “I’m onto you now” might in an earlier album have felt like a threat, here it feels like evidence of living her way into clarity, taking steps towards the self-same peace. 

As Davies explains, it’s a companion song of sorts to “As We Once Were”, two different reckonings under the same relationship ensign, a flag so cartoon poison apple red that it baffles her still to this day that she didn’t get out sooner. “I mean, how can one be held up by your neck against a wall or be punched and not recognise that you’re in a situation that is one of domestic violence?” she asks in disbelief. “It’s so crazy to me now that this was a huge part of my life for a decade plus, from my early teens into my twenties, and I guess I didn’t really realise how much it still impacted me.”

True to Davies’ form as a pretty broad-church writer, you could miss this context entirely just by listening to the song, which filters bittersweet reflections on first love through a sugar rush of ‘80s synth-pop – I can’t be the only one who hears a hint of Madonna – and leaves much for the listener to add up on their own. As the song implies, we can’t go back to “a tabula rasa,” but we can recognise a pattern and try to change it. “I used to think love was this wild, unsettling catastrophe of extreme emotions meant to make you feel bad,” she says. “So I had to go back to the beginning and ask why. Why have I kept on choosing this feeling?” 

More than once in our time together, Davies halts herself mid-flow, worried she might sound too therapy-driven, “too psychobabbly,” perhaps aware of how women are often praised for their emotional honesty but just as often criticised when that honesty becomes too complex, too analytical, as if that makes it somehow less artistically valid. Again it’s this idea that a woman looking too openly inwards must be confessing rather than creating, but surely Davies has laid more than enough groundwork by now to sidestep such nonsense. If anything, the tools she’s earned through motherhood and self-work has given her more artistic perspective, not less. “There’s a profound rewiring that’s happened,” she says, “and it’s still a work in progress.”

Undoubtedly the worst possible read of As We Once Were, particularly coming from The Art of Losing, would be to think that Davies is somehow perfectly okay now she has her daughter, as if joy and devastation are mutually exclusive and cannot cohabit. Trauma doesn’t conveniently evaporate the moment happiness shows up or becomes legible. “Those babies that I lost were fucking real,” she says, bristling at others’ suggestion that her daughter has in some way closed the book on all the other children whose place in her story remains.

Davies cites Joan Didion’s “I write to find out what I’m thinking” as a sort of tagline for the album overall, and it’s an idea she returns to often throughout our conversation. There’s an unspoken parallel, too, with Didion’s own meditations on grief in The Year of Magical Thinking, an essential text, in my opinion, on how the dead continue to busy the living in stubborn, unpredictable ways, even if contentment settles back in. 

Just as Davies thought as a child that her grandma was “a very jolly person,” unaware of the “multiple, unfathomable” losses that lay beneath her cheerfulness, the happiness she’s found in her daughter is not proof that her pain has been neatly shelved away, only that it didn’t get the last word. “What we call resilience is the ability to find small pockets of joy amidst what is, in the mosaic of life, an unfathomable shit show,” she says laughing, “and I like to think it’s genetic.”

If “I write to find out what I’m thinking” sums up As We Once Were as a whole, it’s Davies’ reflections on “Happiness Don’t Show Up Like it Should” that resonate the most for me after it ends. Coming back to her earlier metaphor, the album represents a different kind of library from ones she’s steered us through before, and it’s messy in the way that an archivist’s own bookshelves at home can be messy, not arranged neatly from damage to recovery but heaped with overlapping histories and drafts of former selves, with writing in the margins that redirects us where to look. 

It feels fittingly Proustian, in the sense that Davies explores the idea that memory doesn’t reward us with a second chance to live our lives but a chance to pay the past a new attention, and that sometimes in re-reading it happiness in some form does show up, if not exactly as we’re taught to expect then exactly where we needed it to be, where it had been all along.