In Blood Memory, the long-awaited third album from local legend Jen Cloher, has finally seen the light of day and let me tell you, it’s worth the wait. Rollicking, heartfelt and raw, this work is a corker, brimming with light, atmosphere, and warmth.
Written over six months and recorded in six days, In Blood Memory was done live, which gives the album its sense of immediacy. Cloher was aided immeasurably by her fantastic band, and she could not be happier about the advantages of recording live.
“It 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.”
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. 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 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.”
Cloher did a lot of soul-searching through the next few years, “but I just couldn’t seem to find something that truly intrigued me,” she recalls. Which brings us 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. 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!”
Cloher launches ‘In Blood Memory’ at Oxford Art Factory on Friday July 12, support comes from Melodie Nelson and Courtney Barnett. ‘In Blood Memory’ is out now through Milk! Records/Remote Control.
