Written over six months and recorded in six days, In Blood Memory was recorded live, which certainly gives the record its sense of immediacy. She’s aided immeasurably by her fantastic band – Courtney Barnett on guitars, Jen Sholakis from Endless Sea on drums, and the awesomely named Bones Sloane on bass – and Cloher could not be happier about the advantages of recording live.
“Yeah! [Recording live] has its limitations in that you don’t get that perfect vocal sound,” she admits. “But what you do get is wonderful performances! I think Name In Lights is a great example of a band playing really well together. And that’s what we went out to achieve. Bones manages at The Tote, so we would go in on days when it was closed and rehearse.”
Cloher had already amassed an album’s worth of material by the beginning of 2012, but decided to scrap it all following the deaths of both of her parents, who had been suffering from degenerative diseases for years, at the end of 2011. In fact, Cloher’s second album, 2009’s Hidden Hands, was a harrowing study of loss and her relationship with her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s. Was that material she scrapped cutting a little close to the bone, and was she weary of writing about loss?
“To be honest, Hidden Hands had covered that territory,” Cloher says. “Because both of my parents had degenerative diseases it’s a really long process watching someone slowly disappearing. I’d done a lot of grieving, and Hidden Hands was very much about that process.”
Cloher did a lot of soul-searching through the next few years, writing songs, engaging in poetry, doing a series of duets with artists such as Kieran Ryan – “but I just couldn’t seem to find something that truly intrigued me,” Cloher recalls. “It’s a song, usually, a moment when you write a song and it informs the body of work that you’re going to do, based on that song.”
And then Cloher answers my unspoken question regarding the scrapped material. “The songs that I’d written, I definitely will be recording down the track. And I’ve already earmarked a couple of those songs for a different project later this year – they won’t be wasted!” she says with a laugh.
Which brings us back to In Blood Memory. Sick of writing about grief and loss and sorrow, Cloher’s new songs evoke a real feeling of liveliness and vitality. She’d mentioned before that she wanted to focus on what was “alive in her” – so I ask her if she discovered any aspects of herself that were surprising.
“It’s funny,” she says, smiling, “because when I said that, I wasn’t in deep mourning. I didn’t have a deep mourning process, because when they died, it was such a relief. And that was interesting! I always imagined that when you lose your parents, you’re devastated. But I was relieved, and I felt a lightness. I was also falling in love as I wrote this album, and a lot of the songs are …” She pauses, trying to find the right word. “Humour. There’s a real sense of humour underneath it all. Also falling in love with someone who’s younger than me!” She laughs, and her eyes shine.
“So I guess I was enjoying things! I was enjoying playing songs again,” she continues. “I felt like I was in a new phase of my life because now I was very much alone in the world, but there’s a lot of freedom. My life just seemed to open up again – I’ve been holding a lot of responsibility taking care of my parents over the last five years, so it was a very different experience being … free, I guess.”
Essentially, then, you were ready to kick your shoes off and have a little bit of fun?
“Exactly!” she agrees. “That’s exactly it – I wanted this album to be fun. I wanted it to be fun to play, fun to record, and fun to listen to! There needed to be a real lightness to this work for me to survive it! Hidden Hands was an intense album, and we played it live for many years, and I had to relive those stories and experiences again and again and again.
“I knew,” she says with triumph, “this time I wanted to write an album and enjoy it – and deliver these songs that are going to be fun played live!”
BY THOMAS BAILEY
