annacalvi-no-more-words

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

By Maisie Cousins

Styled by Emma Wyman

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

Rough Trade East, London - 05 SEPT 18

Full interview + performance

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

Full Pitchfork review here

Hunter’s lead single, “Don’t Beat the Girl Out of My Boy,” is the perfect encapsulation of Calvi’s new songwriting focus. In her sustained notes and androgynous vibrato, she channels the patron saint of rock‘n’roll gender benders, David Bowie. The song has a sexy swagger, its beat heavy and swaying, until the bridge, when she lets out a long, fierce primal wail, the culmination of her pent-up patriarchal angst. For an artist so controlled, it’s a thrilling moment of abandon, and you wonder if this reckless version of Calvi has always existed under the placid surface.

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

Full Guardian review here

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

The genius and her masterpiece 

source: Instagram.com

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

ANNA CALVI INTERVIEW: QUEER ENERGY 

Words: Em Burfitt / Photography: Mathew Parri Thomas / 04 SEPTEMBER 2018

Anna Calvi's Hunter is an invigorating album, one which has a narrative and a purpose and a form to it. On it, she succeeds in doing what she set out to do, and in doing so—to quote Ginsberg a second time—opens her supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul to everybody to listen.

Full article here

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

Anna Calvi - HUNTER

Watch the full video here 

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

Matt Lambert on the Hunter video

‘Hunter’ follows an ongoing theme in my work that looks to humanise LGBTQ+ narratives through authentic portrayals of intimacy. After creating my first X-rated film last year, FLOWER, and its sister film, ‘RELEASE ME’, I’m trying to reverse the often overly-performative, disconnected and objectifying portrayals of queer sexuality on screen. This film is an honest celebration of self-love and that highlights the importance of intimacy and play as the beginnings of a queer human’s journey toward intimate comfort with others.” - Matt Lambert

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

Anna Calvi on the Hunter video

I wanted simplicity, I wanted something quietly brave, and quietly defiant. I wanted true intimacy. It’s so rare to see people, especially queer people, exploring their bodies and their pleasure in such an intimate and playful way. Matt Lambert and I wanted to express these moments, when something beautiful and transcendent can happen. I have such respect for these performers, and what they have given, with an open heart. - Anna Calvi 

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

HUNTER PREMIERED IN DAZED

FUll article here

Anna Calvi’s new video is an exploration of queer intimacy and self-love

“I loved Matt’s idea of filming two separate people, who are just exploring themselves in the most intimate and playful way,” she continues. “I was so moved by their performance, it feels so honest, and true. In ‘Hunter’ I wanted simplicity, I wanted something quietly brave, and quietly defiant. I wanted true intimacy. And I really feel Matt’s video has captured that.”

28August 2018Text

Selim Bulut

Anna Calvi’s upcoming third album, Hunter, sees the twice Mercury Prize-nominated artist more creatively galvanised and personally honest than ever before. It was written after Calvi ended an eight-year relationship and moved to France with her new partner, who encouraged her to overtly explore themes of pleasure, gender, and sexuality on the record. Its title track, the album’s latest single, is about exploring pleasure and the body in all possible ways, free from any shame.

“I wanted to write about intimate moments, when something playful, messy, and transcendent can happen,” Calvi tells Dazed. “I’m tired of seeing women depicted as being hunted by men. In this song, I am the hunter. I go out into the world and see it as mine. I’m not simply responding to a man’s story. The song is about finding a safe place where this is welcomed and supported.”

In the Matt Lambert-directed video for “Hunter”, the ideas Calvi explores on the album are brought out through its stars, River Wilson and River Disgrace. “I’ve always felt drawn to the rawness and intimacy of Matt’s work,” Calvi of working with Lambert. “I really loved the video he did for Evvol’s ‘RELEASE ME’. It’s such a beautiful account of queer women’s sexuality. For ‘Hunter’, Matt and I wanted to explore the relationship you have to your body as a queer person. It feels incredibly defiant to explore pleasure and the body from a queer perspective, when it’s so rare to see yourself represented in the mainstream.”

“I loved Matt’s idea of filming two separate people, who are just exploring themselves in the most intimate and playful way,” she continues. “I was so moved by their performance, it feels so honest, and true. In ‘Hunter’ I wanted simplicity, I wanted something quietly brave, and quietly defiant. I wanted true intimacy. And I really feel Matt’s video has captured that.”

Lambert adds: “The video for ‘Hunter’ follows an ongoing theme in my work that looks to humanise LGBTQ+ narratives through authentic portrayals of intimacy. After creating my first X-rated film last year, FLOWER, and its sister film, ‘RELEASE ME’, I’m to try and reverse the often overly-performative, disconnected and objectifying portrayals of queer sexuality in porn. This film is an honest celebration of self-love and that highlights the importance of intimacy and play as the beginnings of a queer human’s journey toward intimate comfort with others.”

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

ANNA CALVI - HUNTER 

Dir. Matt Lambert

‘Hunter’ follows an ongoing theme in my work that looks to humanise LGBTQ+ narratives through authentic portrayals of intimacy. After creating my first X-rated film last year, FLOWER, and its sister film, ‘RELEASE ME’, I’m trying to reverse the often overly-performative, disconnected and objectifying portrayals of queer sexuality on screen. This film is an honest celebration of self-love and that highlights the importance of intimacy and play as the beginnings of a queer human’s journey toward intimate comfort with others.” 

Matt Lambert

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

One person asked me how I felt playing a ‘phallic instrument’. It might be phallic for you! Don’t project that onto me! That’s not how I see a guitar at all.

Anna Calvi (via universal-soleil)

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

Full interview here x

MBTI & Musicians (x) Anna Calvi: INFP

“The lyrics just came out as I was singing. I always like when that happens, because I feel that it’s indicative of it being truthful. Something truthful is happening.”

See also: Christine and the Queens, Perfume Genius

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

ANNA CALVI INTERVIEW: ‘Rock ‘n’ roll isn’t over – male rockers are’ - 12.08.2018

DAILY TELEGRAPH - Text By Neil McCormick - Photos by Rii Schroer

Five years after the 37-year-old British singer-songwriter’s second album of noirish art rock earned her a second successive Mercury Prize nomination, Anna Calvi is back with a third album.“I have long felt frustrated at the limitations of what a woman is allowed to be, on a very basic level,” says Calvi. 

“Perfect, smiling, accommodating. Why do I have to live up to these ideals because of my anatomy?” Fierce and sensual, timely in its grappling with gender stereotypes and female visibility, it is her most striking work to date. She called it Hunter, she tells me, because “I like the idea of a woman going into the world and just taking what she wants”.

The evening before we meet, Calvi is onstage in the West End nightclub Heaven, dressed in a black designer suit, wielding a red Stratocaster guitar, goading and provoking the audience.She sinks to her knees as she plays, then on to her back, abandoning herself to the strange sounds erupting from her instrument.Anna Calvi: ‘It just has to come out like this hurricane’

During a virtuoso rendition of gender-bending anthem Don’t Beat the Girl Out of My Boy, she releases an operatic wail that convulses her whole body. It is the mesmerising, powerful performance of a woman in her rock’n’roll element.

The next day, in the shabby south London offices of independent record company Domino, Calvi seems an entirely different creature: petite, demure and self-contained. Her speaking voice is high and soft. “I was very quiet as a child,” she says “and I really liked that the guitar could be my voice instead of me.” 

When I ask if her raucous performance style has helped banish her essential shyness, she laughs. “I’ve been waiting for years for that to happen,” she says. “But maybe that’s a good thing. Being introverted means that you have all this energy that’s building and building, like it’s a ball of fire and you don’t know how to release it. Then it just has to come out like this hurricane. For me, that is what being creative is.”

Calvi was obsessed with music from a very young age, yet struggled to identify any female role models. “If you are a woman wanting to find yourself in music, you have to project yourself on to the male story,” she says. “It’s the same for films, books, art, the same for any kind of culture. Women have been made invisible.” 

While writing her latest set of songs, Calvi imagined that her listener was her younger self, being confronted “with a more realistic depiction of the multifaceted woman, the animalistic, primal woman, the messy woman, the queer woman, the woman seeking pleasure without any shame.”

Calvi talks quietly but passionately, in long, carefully articulated sentences. She says that the period since her last album – One Breath, in 2013 – involved a lengthy process of self-examination. “So much of our gender is performed, I feel, it’s very limiting for both sexes,” she says. “As a woman, you’re made to feel your appearance is what you are. It’s what you look like [that counts] and not what you do.

 “And for men, to always be strong, to not be vulnerable or show emotions or talk about how you feel, is such an unrealistic expectation of a human being. It’s literally the opposite of what being human is.”

Calvi’s self-titled 2011 debut contained a track titled I’ll Be Your Man. Her new album opens with As a Man, in which she sings “If I was a man in all but my body/ Oh would I now understand you completely?/ If I was walking and talking as a man.”

“I never felt completely comfortable with being a girl,” she admits. “I found puberty really hard, having a woman’s body suddenly impose itself. As I grew up I came to accept it – I don’t feel trans – but at different times I feel more masculine or more feminine. My sense of identity is quite fluid. Maybe the answer is just not to have labels.”

Calvi was born in Twickenham, to an English mother and Italian father, both of whom are therapists. Her first instrument was violin, and she graduated in 2003 from the University of Southampton with a degree in music. Her inner rocker, though, had been unleashed years earlier when, at the age of eight, she saw footage of Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, giving a performance that just “looked and sounded like freedom”. She also cites the Belgian-born jazz composer Django Reinhardt – “who taught me about arpeggios” – and West African music, “which taught me about sweet picking”. 

Anna Calvi: 'Maybe the answer is just not to have labels.’

Until recently, there have been few prominent female guitarists in popular music, something Calvi blames on cultural stereotypes. “I don’t think the guitar is a gendered instrument,” she says. “It’s like cooking – it’s about taste. It’s not like you need giant muscles to whip an egg.” Indeed, she goes so far as to propose that the future of rock will be female. “There is all this talk about the death of rock and the end of the guitar. What I think is dead is this kind of very one-toned thing of straight white men in bands singing about f—ing girls. “A lot of the guitarists making waves now are female and that may be partly because there isn’t a history of the female guitar hero, so there is something fresh that twists and subverts the story. I like to see women playing guitar. Courtney Barnett and St Vincent are doing really interesting things.”

 The real watershed moment will only come, she says, “when we don’t use the term ‘female artist’ anymore. Because women are a gender, they’re not a genre.”

In pop terms, Calvi was a late developer – she didn’t release a solo record until her 30s. She had “a phobia” about her voice and didn’t sing at all until her 20s when a fascination with Maria Callas helped her to develop a powerful, almost operatic, range. “Now, my guitar and my voice both speak for me, and on Hunter they are trying to express a sense of freedom and wildness and something visceral, this idea of breaking through any kind of restraint.”

At school, she wondered whether she was gay, but thought perhaps her feelings related to “having no boys around”. Then, at university in Southampton she had “a few boyfriends” followed by her “first experience with a woman”. It was a confusing time. “We were literally the only queer people that I had ever seen, just me and my partner in the whole college, that was it. I wish I could have experienced those feelings without questioning what it means. And worrying that it [was] wrong, and feeling shame, and dealing with all these external forces that aren’t actually to do with the relationship.” 

She has never hidden her sexuality but admits to “feeling nervous” before her first album came out. “I felt it was incredibly queer and I just didn’t want to be defined in that way. But to my surprise, no one seemed to pick up that all my songs were about women.” 

One Breath was written just as an eight-year relationship was coming to an end. “I was hiding behind the lyrics a little, I didn’t want to talk about our break-up, which isn’t really the best thing when you are trying to write songs. But this time I was like: have it all!”

 While working on Hunter, Calvi began a new relationship with a French woman, living in Paris and Strasbourg. (They are now in Clapham, south London.) “It was a new beginning, in all kinds of ways. After a really long relationship, you have to kind of rebuild yourself. The music came through that.”

The album is peppered with images of Eden and Paradise. “I was trying to find a way of being happy after a trauma,” says Calvi. “Eden represents the idea of utopian love.” She laughs, as if she finds this thought inherently ridiculous. “In a way, belief in love is belief in God. It’s very optimistic to imagine that somebody can save you from yourself, but we all believe it and I find that tragically beautiful, because I believe it too. When I see my girlfriend, just seeing her makes me feel more hopeful about things, but the truth is, everything gets worse and we die.”

Calvi’s best songs strike an unusual balance between opposing qualities, plucking something life-affirming out of cynicism, nihilism and fatalism. Those opposites are also evident in Calvi herself; so quiet and intense offstage, so wild and free onstage. 

“Maybe this is a bit fatalistic but I always think ‘if this is the last thing I ever do, the last record I ever make, the last performance I ever play, how do I want to go out? How do I want to leave it?’” she says. “There is a bit in Don’t Beat the Girl Out of My Boy that I have to sing very high and very loud and I can’t do that without completely surrendering myself, where there is absolutely no space left to think or be anything other than that note.

 “And that is what I want music to be. It is really liberating and exhausting. And a bit worrying. After I sang it the first time, I thought, ‘S—, now I have to do that every night. What will be left of my body and mind by the end of this?’”

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

NEW SINGLE

Anna Calvi - Hunter

YES! Hunter drops on August 31 and I cannot wait.

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

Anna Calvi in DIY Magazine, August 2018 📷Eva Pentel @annacalvi

[annacalvi-no-more-words]

About the title track Hunter

I wanted simplicity, I wanted something quietly brave, quietly defiant. I wanted there to be intimacy. I wanted to find a place between beauty and ugliness. I’m tired of seeing women depicted as being hunted by men in our culture. This woman is the hunter. She goes out into the world and sees it as hers - she wants something from it. [It] is about exploring one’s pleasure in all possible ways, free from any shame. It’s about finding a safe space where this is welcomed and supported.