Do you ever wonder what happens to musicians when they seemingly stop making music – what they’re doing instead? How come they’re not releasing new material? More often than not, they’re simply busy with life, their time filled with stuff that pays the rent and puts food on the table, because the sad fact is that to make a living from, making music as a full-time pursuit is rare, and the effort involved in recording, releasing, and promoting music can be time-consuming, costly, and exhausting.
In Virginia MacNaughton’s case, she simply fell out of creative ways: “I’d had a fallow period musically and not had a relationship for years but was quite happy in my 40s, doing my work, pottering in the garden, baking, I thought that was it” she says. “Then I reached 50, met a person online, and it was like someone reached into the dial in my brain and shifted it.”
As her bio details, ‘Virginia thought the woman she met was The One, but after weeks of romance she was cruelly rejected and left devastated’. This kick-started her creative instinct once more as she strove to make sense of it all, and thus, ‘The Thread’ – her first album since ‘Levers Pulleys & Engines’ in 2003 evolved.
The material featured on ‘The Thread’ was written and recorded between October 2020 and March 2021, but a series of personal setbacks – specifically the loss of her father, and then her wife to breast cancer – stalled its release. Art and creativity can be, if not necessarily therapeutic, a much-needed distraction, and so it is that the release of ‘The Thread’ is as much about honouring those she’s lost as anything else: “Jo was adamant I get on with it and let people hear it. She had huge faith in it. The Bach prelude at the end of the album is for my dad – he’s been playing that since I was born, and he taught me to play it.”
‘The Thread’ is pitched as sitting alongside Lorde, Carole King, and ‘Aerial’-era Kate Bush, and I’d add to this All About Eve for the magical folk leanings which are woven throughout.
The thematic connections between the songs gives the album a strong cohesion, and Virginia works through the different phases of the brief and ultimately painful relationship experience with an openness and directness which emanates sincere emotion in every line. ‘I’m keeping up the pace, and I’ve fallen for this face, and I am spellbound’, she sings on ‘Spellbound’, capturing succinctly the way the arrival of a new love can be utterly captivating and consuming, while placing a personal spin on the adage that love is blind.
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‘The Morning’ is a wonderful piano-led work which is very much narrative-focused in the lyrics, while the softly rolling ‘Swipe’ finds her lamenting ‘the dangers of talking with strangers’ and how ‘I can’t swipe you away’. ‘Red Flag’ forges a narrative arc across a vaguely jazzy, slightly bluesy stroll. There’s some self-blame unravelling of the complexities as she asks ‘was I so easily swayed?’
‘The Thread’ is one of those albums which brims with contemplations and reflections and conflicting, complex emotions. This is creativity as therapy, a process by which to understand the world and yourself. Lyrically, it is, at times, a bit of a challenge – because for all of the talk of how we should open up, when anyone does, we – as a society – aren’t emotionally equipped to handle it. Musically, this is a magnificently accessible work, with stylistic variety and a clear attention to detail. And so it that that from personal difficulties, from trauma, so often emerges the strongest art.
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