Rebecca Voorn-Knight always knew her home life was unusual. “I grew up in a very unpredictable household where my mother was often emotionally unavailable,” the Piperlain singer recalls. “While I knew something was wrong with [her] from a young age, I was never told she was mentally ill until I worked it out myself.”

Voorn-Knight’s mother had schizophrenia. The mental illness made her unpredictable, emotional and vulnerable, so she relied upon her daughter to keep her grounded and safe. As a result, Voorn-Knight lived a life full of the kind of struggles that other young carers will recognise instantly: she often felt alone and disconnected, and struggled to reach out to others when she needed to. She couldn’t talk to friends about her situation for fear they might judge her, or, perhaps more devastatingly, that they might simply fail to process what it’s like to look out for the person who is meant to be looking out for you.

“I was not allowed to talk about [my mother’s illness] outside the family due to stigma,” Voorn-Knight explains. “It made it difficult for me to open up to others and to trust people at face value. I was also often drawn into my mother’s emotional drama, making it very difficult to live my own life freely.”

Now that fraught emotional context has been channelled into a record: Mother Mourned, a devastating, tragically beautiful concept album. Yet although the music draws strongly on Voorn-Knight’s own personal experience, it is not simply a blow-by-blow recount of her childhood – it also touches on the life of Benjamin Knight, the band’s other half and a young carer like Rebecca.

“When Ben and I started collaborating on music projects, we discovered that we both grew up caring for seriously ill mothers,” Voorn-Knight says. “Ben’s mother had multiple sclerosis … She was diagnosed with MS when he was just seven years old and she passed away just before his 21st birthday, so he watched her deteriorate before his eyes. When [we talked] we realised that while our experiences were different, they were both highly emotional. We decided to express that emotional journey through music by writing the concept album.”

Of course, that thematic weight makes Mother Mourned nothing if not an emotional listen – the record is clearly born of pain, full of confessional lyrics and understated, quietly devastating instrumentation. But the album isn’t merely some long emotional slog, or one unending series of gut punches – there is something inherently cathartic about it too. Something is gained by the time the record comes to a close; something is resolved.

“My mother passed away in 2013 and the album was recorded at The Grove Studios on the anniversary of her passing away in 2014,” Voorn-Knight says. “So for me the emotion was very raw but the experience was very cathartic and continues to be so.”

Voorn-Knight did feel some trepidation about releasing such a personal album, and was concerned that those close to her might find it a difficult listen. “There are emotions in the album that we’ve never spoken to our families about, which they may find hard to hear. I’ve had friends say to me how shocked they were by the album, as I don’t come across as someone who has that amount of anger.”

Yet more than anything, Voorn-Knight hopes that the record will do some good for the other young carers out there – that they might connect with it; that it might help them feel even a little bit less alone.

“I hope we can provide some insight into the range of emotions that young carers can experience but may be afraid to share openly,” she says. “We want to teach young carers that they’re not alone.”

Mother Mourned is out now independently through Bandcamp.

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