Agnes Obel: "We need a community. We need each other. We need a village for one child"

Western art has produced countless images of motherhood, yet remarkably few representations of pregnancy itself. The dominant image is the Madonna and Child – but that is motherhood after birth, sanctified and safely completed. The pregnant body, by contrast is unstable, sexual, vulnerable, changing – resisting idealisation.

In music, Tori Amos’ ‘Spark’ and ‘Playboy Mommy’ deal with miscarriage and grief, while Kate Bush’s ‘This Woman’s Work’ is written around a childbirth emergency, confronting the terror of possible loss and the helplessness of the waiting partner. These works expose what western art so often avoids – pregnancy not as symbol, but as bodily experience, fear, transformation and creation.

Pregnancy brought Agnes Obel a profound physical and neurological transformation. Her carefully mapped musical plans fell away, replaced by an unexpected sense of connection with all living things. From that upheaval emerged an album shaped by renewal and a newly altered understanding of the world.

Ahead of her sold-out show in the great expanse of the National Concert Hall’s Kevin Barry Room, Obel sits beneath its high ceiling and we speak about pregnancy, creation and The Meaning Of Flowers.

“We talk so much about death,” Agnes opines, “which is of course important, but birth is universal. It's not just something pregnant people go through. We have all been born.”

A major influence on the album is the philosopher Hannah Arendt, particularly The Human Condition and its idea of natality – the capacity of every new life to begin something entirely new.

“I got into the whole Hannah Arendt thing,” Agnes explains, “because she came from this Hegel school where he was very focused on death and finality, and she was like, ‘Hey, wait a second!’ We could use this thing that we've all been born as a political idea, to be aware of the potential of something new. If you're really aware of birth as something central, then you can't have fascism and totalitarianism, because it's completely removed from the physical reality of how fragile we all are when we are born. We need a community. We need each other. We need a village for one child.”

Another major influence is the Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia, whose books The Life of Plants and Metamorphoses explore the interconnectedness of all living things and the continual transformation of life from one form into another.

“I got into him from my mother-in-law, who's a very interesting artist, and always gets me into cool books,” Agnes outlines. “I was searching for something where I could find a language for what I was experiencing. Coccia talked about everything being interconnected – plants make our oxygen; we are breathing in each other's DNA. These plants are part of us all time, so maybe we shouldn't understand time as so final, but much more circular. In the sense that when we are dead, we are actually still here, just in another form.”

Pregnancy granted Agnes an overwhelming sense of life continuing through generations. During a scan, she saw her unborn daughter already forming within her – a child carrying the possibility of future life. The experience made beginnings feel mysterious and interconnected, heightening her awareness of the grass, ocean, air and every living thing around her. That sense of continuity and interconnectedness became the emotional foundation of The Meaning Of Flowers.

“I always work alone,” Agnes details, “and often I end up writing and almost producing the whole thing in one go. It's not like I don't want to work with a producer, but it's just because I'm doing it myself in the moment. And then I have wonderful musician friends that I play it to. Then I'm like, ‘Ah, we could have something here' or 'Should we try to develop that?’”

The album begins with the title track from which the entire project first grew. From there, Agnes approaches its central subject from a series of shifting angles – the mysterious energy of life, the current that seems to move through bodies, generations and the natural world; onto the question of how such a force might be understood at all.

However, straight after deep explanation, Agnes laughs, puncturing the grandeur of the thought – this love for everything, she admits, is fleeting. Songs such as ‘Faustian Deal’ and ‘Don’t Look Down’ turn back towards doubt, self-consciousness and the private anxieties that complicate any feeling of transcendence. However, her daughter proved a good teacher there too.

"‘Faustian Deal’", she explains, “is really about perfectionism and mistakes. It's a song I could only have written because of my daughter. She’s just so beyond anything with mistakes and perfectionism, so I can see how ridiculous it is. Because of her, I didn't want any click tracks. I didn't want anything safe like that, I wanted it to be as alive as possible, and fallible.”

Another inspiration is Enheduanna, the ancient Mesopotamian priestess often described as history’s earliest named author. Her hymns to the goddess Inanna unite the personal, spiritual and political, presenting feminine creative power as both nurturing and destructive.

“It's about really powerful imagery of earth shaking,” Agnes outlines. “And it's my experience too. It felt like some kind of earthquake happening in the body. So, I felt like it was really spot on, and for some reason, I kept on seeing it linked to Hannah Arendt’s idea of the potentiality of this power within birth.”

For all the openness of The Meaning Of Flowers, Agnes informs me that she still struggles with the visibility that accompanies making music. She wants intensely to create, she says, while some part of her would prefer that nobody knew she had done it. The contradiction has followed her throughout her career – the private composer compelled into the public role of performer.

I joke that the ideal arrangement might be to write the songs and send somebody else onstage with them – the Brian Wilson solution. Or she suggests disappearing into a band behind a natural showman – “because some people are really performers, like Elvis Presley" – though she senses herself gradually becoming less troubled by it.

Indeed, that night, no nervousness is visible. From high in the eaves of the National Concert Hall, I watch rapt as Obel holds the sold-out room in a state of almost complete stillness. There are no backing tracks to provide a safety net – every note, pulse and spectral layer is created onstage through piano, cello, percussion, synthesisers and live electronics, the musicians building and dismantling the songs with astonishing precision.

Behind them, the concert becomes a visual performance too. The band's figures emerge and dissolve across a vast screen; shadows lengthen, faces blur and bodies appear suspended in space, moving with a precarious grace. The projections never simply illustrate the songs, but seem to extend their dream logic, creating a shadow world in which the music can briefly reside.

The new album begins to take physical form through ‘The Meaning Of Flowers’, the enigmatic ‘Laymelli’, ‘Faustian Deal’ and ‘Gemini’, their strange inner worlds opening out within the great hall. And all of it is happening only a stone’s throw from The Sugar Club, where Agnes first played in Ireland 15 years ago. What a journey it’s been.

The Meaning Of Flowers is out now.