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29 July 2021

What was the inspiration behind the album?
Postcard Songs does what it says on the tin. Every song on the album uses a postcard (sometimes two postcards) as a starting point. This was a songwriting project I first set myself in Autumn 2016. It was a way to overcome writer’s block, and to literally, physically narrow my focus onto a single postcard – both the image on the front and the message on the back – as a starting point for a song.

I have always loved writing in response to other art forms. As a teenager I wrote songs about novels, films, and paintings, and one day in 2013 I found myself writing a song about a postcard of a David Hockney painting I had bought at a gallery. This postcard idea returned to me in 2016 when I attended an Arvon residential songwriting course (I would recommend these courses to anyone!). I had a fantastic week in the West Yorkshire countryside, meeting interesting people, immersing myself in music, and being made to write something new every day, usually in collaboration with another songwriter. Course tutors (and musical heroes of mine) Kathryn Williams and Samantha Parton gave me invaluable guidance on songwriting. There was also a guest speaker: Boo Hewerdine. Boo treated us to an intimate gig and gave us songwriting advice. He recalled a time when he had been writing songs with Duke Special about a set of photographs (for the album ‘Under the Dark Cloth’). This reminded me of my postcard song and gave me an idea for a project.

I started my ‘Postcard Project’ as soon as I got home from the retreat. At first, I wrote a song about a postcard every week. Then, of course, weeks were missed and my focus on the project came and went, but it never disappeared entirely. People sent me postcards; I picked up postcards in Berlin, Lisbon, Vienna; I found old postcards in my childhood bedroom; I bought postcards after visiting The Barbican and The Tate Modern. By late 2019 I had more than enough postcard songs for an album.

Did the pandemic have an impact when recording the album?
Yes, very much so. I recorded the album with the brilliant producer and singer-songwriter Dan Wilde at Gladeside Recordings. Our first week of recording was 9th-13th March 2020. I will always be grateful to Dan for suggesting we start by arranging all of the songs. This essentially means creating a full draft version of the recording, by laying down guide parts for every instrument and layer, often using temporary digital instruments in place of live session musicians. I loved this process: making (at least provisional) decisions about the overall arrangement at the very beginning of the process. We were due to return to the studio on Tuesday 24th March, the day after lockdown was announced. Instead we went on hiatus for 6 months. It eventually became apparent that musicians were allowed to meet in person at a recording studio, and then it was so good to get back to recording again. Because of the guide tracks we created, it was fairly easy just to start from where we left off.

Although this delay was a negative effect of the pandemic, there was also a silver lining. One song, ‘A Line’, was always planned as a stripped-down acoustic track, and was already finished in March 2020. Dan persuaded me to release it as a single, because of the resonance its lyrics had with the time we were going through. Two friends and collaborators of mine then set to work on an ingenious lockdown project: producing a stop-motion music video to accompany the single. I was so impressed with and moved by the final result. I don’t think that this single release or video would have happened without the pandemic – A Line is a very vulnerable, personal song, that I might have been tempted to hide away at the end of the album.

How long did the album take to create from start to finish?
There are different ways of answering this question. If I start from when I wrote the first song and consider the album finished at the point of release, it has taken just under 5 years. However, if I start from the point of recording in the studio to holding the CD in my hands, it took just over one year – not bad considering we were put on hold for 6 months!

Which track was written first?
I think it was Café Sacher – but Alone in Glasgow was written quite early on too.

Do you have any personal favourite tracks?
That’s very hard to say! It changes daily. I am particularly happy with how In the Pink turned out, as it nearly didn’t make it onto the album, and because my words and melody were so beautifully enhanced by the talented session musicians: Maddy Hamilton on cello, John Parker on double bass, and Jamie Welsted on drums. Dan Wilde also plays guitar on the track and of course he brought so many ideas to the arrangement, and Rachel Agard arranged the backing vocals, even though she couldn’t be there to sing them (one day Rach!). What can I say… they make me sound good.

Were any tracks difficult to write?
A Line was both the most difficult and the easiest. It came out all at once, but was very emotionally draining.

What do you have coming up in the next 12 months?
For now I want to continue exploring Postcard Songs as fully as possible. I’m having a very small launch party (which will also be livestreamed on Facebook and YouTube) on Friday 6th August. But I would love for this album to have the live-gig, full-band launch it deserves, so that’s one of my plans for 2022. I’d also like to do a series of livestreams in order to tell the story of each postcard song more fully. I hope to be back to more regular gigging very soon, but I’m also looking forward to writing some completely new songs. I haven’t quite decided yet whether I’ll set myself a project this time, or whether I’ll just see what happens.

Genre: Folk; Singer-Songwriter; Acoustic Pop; Alternative; Indie

Released: 6th August 2021

You can find out more about Anna on her website or via Amazon Music, Apple Music, Bandcamp, Deezer, Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, Twitter or YouTube.

You can read my Independent Music Monday interview with Anna here, and you can read my interview with her about her EP “Towards Today” here.