Anna from Heaven: Interview with Anna Calvi

In Dublin for the first leg of a two-month tour, Anna Calvi is remarkably relaxed, particularly since she’s running late for sound-check. Rough seas meant Calvi and band arrived hours behind schedule. If she’s stressed, it ain’t showing. Seeing Calvi in combats is a bit of a shock. You almost expect the 33-year-old to live permanently in the gothic stage attire she’s famed for: part fl amenco dancer, part vamp.

For the girl who growled her way through ‘Desire’ and ‘Suddenly’, she’s also remarkably soft-spoken. Indeed, it transpires that there was a chance Calvi may never have found her musical voice at all. Singing wasn’t something that came naturally to her. She took up the guitar at the age of eight but didn’t start singing until she was 23. Not even at drunken parties as a teenager? “No, not ever,” she avows.

So was it strange for her to fi nd a voice in her twenties? “It wasn’t like I suddenly found it,” she confesses.

“I just had to work really hard. I didn’t know if I was going to get it. I guess when you start from scratch with something, you have to sound really bad before you sound good. So I defi nitely went through a few years of not really knowing how to do it, not knowing how to project myself and not actually liking my voice at all. I think part of it is learning how to write songs that suit the kind of voice that you want to have. I guess that’s partly why I didn’t use any old songs on my first record. I was trying to write in a way that had the tones that I wanted to get.”

Does this mean she has squirreled away a massive back catalogue of songs that she could lash out every six months if the mortgage depended on it? “Well, I’ve got lots of really bad songs,” she chuckles.

Calvi feels that songwriting is as much about perspiration as inspiration. “I think it’s important to put effort in, even when it feels like it’s not happening,” she admits, “because sometimes you can start off feeling really uninspired, but going through a load of things that aren’t really working can lead you to the spark of an idea. And if you don’t really try, you’ll never get to that place.”

Writing the songs that make up One Breath, her second album, was a different process from her 2011 debut, she confesses, “because you know people are gonna hear it, so more effort needs to be put in to shutting out those voices asking ‘what will people think?’ With the fi rst record, I had another problem, which was ‘no-one’s ever gonna hear this: I’m wasting my life’,” she laughs. “So I don’t know which is better, really.”

Any self-doubts were quelled pretty quickly, it must be said, when artists of the calibre of Nick Cave and Brian Eno publicly admitted their admiration for Calvi: “It was amazing. It was totally unexpected. It gave me a lot of confi dence and it’s helped me, having the support of people who are so impressive and well-respected.” “It didn’t add pressure,” she stresses. “It was just a nice thing that happened.”

Indeed, the only pressure she admits to feeling when it came to the creation of One Breath was “How do I keep feeling satisfi ed doing what I love?”

“I felt the pressure to make sure I made something that I could stand behind and feel proud of,” she states. “Because you just can’t predict what’s going to connect with people and what isn’t. It’s actually a losing game to try and find out what that is. The only way of winning is to make something that you like and then hopefully some other people will like it.”

For this listener, One Breath was an improvement on her scintillating debut. Upon its release last October, I wrote in these very pages that it was the sound of Calvi broadening her palette, with devastating effect.

She agrees: “I wanted there to be a wider spectrum of colour and emotion. There are certain things that really interest me about music: things like beauty and ugliness and how they can coexist; the idea of tension and release; my interest in classical music; my interest in guitar. And I just wanted to step out a little further in all of these areas and explore them a little bit.”

She is also growing as a vocalist. “On the first record, I was still learning how to be a singer. I can hear my development through the record,” she says. “I can hear me realising that I can sing loud and wanting to sing loud all the time. I think this record, the second one, is more about how you can create extreme emotion from singling softly as well. You don’t have to be scream to be powerful. Singing is an ‘ongoing thing’. It’s not a case of ‘now I’ve got it’. I’d like to explore it further on the next record – maybe in a different way.”

Calvi was reasonably late coming to the business. Having studied music in university, she spent a few years teaching guitar and doing session work before carving out her own niche: “For me, it worked out alright because I spent many years just being a guitarist, and I think if I’d started singing earlier, I wouldn’t have dedicated so much time to the guitar. So I think it’s been good for me.”

Both of her parents, Veronica and Claudio, are psychotherapists, with a keen interest in hypnotherapy. I wondered what they think of what she does now?

“They’re proud of me,” she insists “I guess they were worried initially, because it’s diffi cult with this and there’s no security. They’re proud to see I’ve got somewhere with it.”

Do they recognise the Anna that walks out on stage? “They think it’s kind of hilarious,” she grins sheepishly. “It’s a bit weird, like you were an actor and your parents come to see a fi lm of you making love with someone. You kind of feel like you don’t really want them to see you like that. It’s a bit icky. But they are really supportive.”

Her sister, Nuala Calvi, is a successful author. Anna has no aspirations to go down the literary road, however. “I think I’m more visual than I am literary. I find writing lyrics probably the hardest part of songwriting. It’s not something that comes easy to me,” she shrugs. “Sometimes I think it would be so much easier if I made instrumental music.”

A lot of Calvi’s song titles are also people’s names. I wondered if, given the intense nature of her songs and particularly her live performances of them, she has had letters from Elizas, Tristans etc who feel she is writing directly to them...

“I haven’t,” she says with a cheeky grin. “I’m quite disappointed by that. I hope that will happen at some point.”