Death, birth and being dumped – we have lost count of the number of songwriters who have used such grist-to-the-mill events for material. The processes involved to engage with all of the facts, and to then gain perspective, takes time.
There has been a lot of that recently for The Staves – not just evaluating unwelcome and joyful facts but also time passing ever so slowly over several lockdowns, not all of which were Covid-19-induced. The three sisters from Watford, just north of London, released their debut studio album, Dead & Born & Grown, nine years ago, and have now returned with their fourth. Good Woman is their first studio work in six years, and if ever an album tells sorry and celebratory tales of aspects of womanhood, then this one surely does.
It is impossible not to talk about what delayed the release of Good Woman, and also the inspirations behind it – the deaths of their mother and grandmother in 2018, and in 2019 the birth of a baby girl.
Jessica and Camilla Staveley-Taylor are in separate parts of the UK. The third sister, Emily, is otherwise engaged with her toddler daughter Maggie and will not be joining us. During the Zoom call, the two sisters display their respect and love for each other – they finish and start each other’s sentences, they mutually, visibly sympathise, they laugh in unison. And they are quiet together when certain subjects are broached.
Managing grief
“Grieving doesn’t resolve itself quickly,” says Jessica of the sudden death of her mother. “That is something you have to live with and shape your life around. Since it happened, we have found ways to manage it, but at the time we definitely knew we needed to stop what we were doing. We were fortunate to have a job that allowed us to do that – many people aren’t able to take extended time off work. It didn’t feel like a luxury, of course, but I’m aware that it was for us and that we were very lucky to be able to do that. You find ways to carry on.”
The new album is the boldest we have been, lyrically and sonically, and when you go through bad things... you end up feeling that the worst has happened
They admit that grieving highlighted a level of self-doubt they never thought they would have. “As songwriters,” continues Jessica, “uncertainty never really goes away, but you learn to be more confident. The new album is the boldest we have been, lyrically and sonically, and when you go through bad things – and for us it was a myriad of things, not just the death of our mum – you end up feeling that the worst has happened.
“By the end of it all, we had a f**k-it mentality – life really is too short, so our approach was: don’t mess around, say what you feel. Seriously, what’s the worst that could happen when what has already happened has been so bad?”
“There’s a fearlessness that is a byproduct of such a dreadful experience, and I didn’t realise it would be there,” adds Camilla. “It forces you to take stock of everything, to get some perspective on matters that usually stress you out or worry you. Suddenly, they can seem so minuscule by comparison. That was actually a positive thing to have, and it did help to embolden us when it came to the new songs, and the sound of them.”
Before resilience took hold, however, there arrived a troubling sense of gloom-induced imposter syndrome. Pausing their career lasted much longer than they had initially presumed, the shock waves from such a decision firm and unsettling.
“You can lose perspective when you’re in hibernation for a long time,” says Camilla, “and you start to think how you ever actually did your job. That can spiral, and so you ask yourself: ‘Am I actually any good? Why am I doing this’, and so on.”
Lockdown before the lockdown
Jessica says that when their mother died, they went into “lockdown before the real lockdown came into our lives. By the time we came out of a year of what was crippling self-doubt, we just lost the plot and wondered whether we should just throw the new songs out the window and start again.” Their initial thoughts of self-producing went by the wayside. “Self-producing means you have to be quite confident that you’re making the right choices and decisions, because you can’t really defer to anyone else.”
We wanted to be bold, use different sonic spaces, explore field recordings and so on
Aligned with these undercurrents of uncertainty, they had severed ties with their manager and were running out of money. When Emily had her baby, says Jessica, there were rumblings of her leaving the group. “Everything,” she says with a mock air of embarrassment, “had gone tits-up. We were totally adrift, yet by the time we felt like we wanted to go back into the studio there was a return of resolve and resilience. Thankfully, we were all still present.”
Producer John Congleton (who has worked with St Vincent and Sharon Van Etten) sided with the sisters’ ideas of experimenting with their recognised harmonic sound.
“We wanted to be bold, use different sonic spaces, explore field recordings and so on,” says Jessica. “John injected the much-needed energy we had lost but which we knew was on the way back. We felt that he recalibrated us a little bit – he told us we had something to say and that he would like to help us say it. That alone was a comforting, strengthening thing to hear.”
Isolation
“The album feels like a very necessary chapter being closed,” says Camilla. She should know. Veering between subliminal and clear-cut, candid excerpts of her five-year relationship found their way into songs. Even though these songs were written before the end of the relationship, she says, they were telling her to run before she had even thought to pack her bags.
My isolation was far more felt because I was living in America, for the first time separated from my sisters, with whom I'm extremely close
“A lot of the songs I wrote for the album now come across as how I was feeling back then. It was not healthy, not right, not kind and not good for me. In hindsight, it’s ‘Ah, you’re an idiot, you should have left long before’. It was heightened in this situation, though. My isolation was far more felt because I was living in America, for the first time separated from my sisters, with whom I’m extremely close – as well as with my dad, my mum at the time, my friends and the familiarity of home.
“I was out there in a failing relationship and far away from things I knew were my comforts, so my own writing then was harsher and more upfront. I needed to do that as therapy or to emote something, so yes, it’s far more evident than it has ever been in those songs that I’m predicting something for myself.”
Jessica delicately returns to the conversation. “I remember that. We were an ocean apart and you sent those song ideas, email phone notes and rough demos. They were deeper, diary-like entries and even across such a distance I could see what she was going through.”
Several seconds of silence are broken by Jessica, who wraps up with a cliche that isn’t as much of a platitude as it might sound. “I think we really found ourselves again with this album – as people and as a unit. With all that has happened in our lives over the past few years, it felt that we had almost lost the latter and possibly the former too. But we found it again.”
‘The small things that make up the person’: The Staves on losing their mother
Jessica: “Most of the record was written before our mum died, and there are songs that were written after she died, so I’m not sure which are specifically about her, as these things take time to process. Having said this, the song Sparks is about that – it’s here in the now, missing someone you love, trying to understand how they’re not around anymore and trying to make sense of that absence. You think of the small, tangible things, don’t you? Hearing a key in the door, stuff like that. It’s the small things that make up the person.”
Camilla: “It’s their scent, the distinctive sound of their footsteps. Sparks is the only love song on the album, and although it’s about something very sad, I think of it as happy and triumphant. It’s about love, for sure, yet it’s also about a magnified sense of how much you love them, even though you’re grieving. There’s a protective glow to it, in many ways.”
Good Woman, is out on February 5th on Nonesuch/Warner Music. The Staves present Good Woman: an exclusive livestream performance from Lafayette in London on Friday, February 5th. Tickets from thestaves.com
