Virginia MacNaughton: 'I went to the piano and the songs were just there'
Virginia MacNaughton’s first album in more than 20 years is aptly named. Called The Thread, it’s the Lincolnshire-born singer-songwriter’s attempt to “make sense” of a series of inter-connected events in her life that entailed romantic heartbreak, finding new love and two bereavements.
It was a record that also brought her back to Leeds, the city where she was an undergraduate, worked at The Yorkshire Post, and made her name in bands in the 1990s before going solo. As with her 2003 album Levers, Pulleys & Engines, at its helm was Will Jackson, the producer and engineer renowned for his work with Kaiser Chiefs, The Pigeon Detectives and Embrace.
For 17 years after Levers, Pulleys & Engines, MacNaughton had thought she was “done with” writing her own songs and got a job in music PR. But in October 2020, as she was turning turn 50, she had the urge to “jump on a dating site as everybody else was doing in lockdown when they weren’t making sourdough” which led to a “very brief” relationship.
“It was an online thing that gained a bit of traction and we met twice,” she says. “She was a disaster zone but because it was the first thing that had happened for me for some time, I put all my eggs in one basket.
“It plunged me into not a meltdown but I questioned everything – my reaction to it, why I was finding it so difficult – and very quickly the first thing I seemed to gravitate towards was writing. I went to the piano and the songs were just there.”
She describes the end of her writer’s block as like “someone reaching into my brain and shifting the dial a little bit”, adding: “Wherever I was at as a woman turning 50, as somebody who had previously written and recorded lots of music and hadn’t for a long time, and somebody who hadn’t been in a relationship for a long time, it was as though there was shift and everything came back to life.”
At the same time as she began work on the album with Jackson she met another woman, Jo, who “became a great friend”; the pair would later marry.
Of the recording process, MacNaughton recalls: “During lockdown I would leave the village and go to Eiger Studios with Will. Also floating around were students from Leeds Conservatoire and they were all in their early 20s but incredible musicians, lovely people and they were chomping at the bit to get involved.”
While the album was finished “incredibly quickly”, its release was delayed when MacNaughton’s father died and Jo was treated for breast cancer. For nine months, MacNaughton took a regular job to pay the bills. All the while the album “sat on the shelf” because she “didn’t want to face” all the time-consuming money-raising and admin involved in self-releasing it. It was only last year, after she lost her wife, that she felt compelled to return to it.
“I found that it was the only thing that was giving me a little bit of life energy, so I put things in motion to release the album,” she says.
Fittingly, the album includes Bach’s Prelude in C, in honour of MacNaughton’s classical music-loving father, and the song called New Moon Landing, which was inspired by Jo and also interpolates Bach. “I always get in a pickle about the title, I was never sure whether to hyphenate it, because what I meant it to reflect is the new moon-landing in the way that lovers in new relationships think that they’re the only ones feeling like that: this is the moon landing all over again, this has never happened before to anybody except us and I suppose the ripple and flow of the Bach just helps that song move along. The song was about the flow and things coming together.”
The Thread is out now. https://virginiamacnaughton.bandcamp.com/album/the-thread