Click Image to Download!

There are songwriters who write constantly, plucking at their guitars in every spare moment,  turning every overheard conversation, experience, thought and feeling into songs as a daily practice. Then there are the songwriters who wait until something seismic and life-changing happens, before disappearing to inject their entire soul into their work. The America-born, London-based singer-songwriter, musician, actress and video director Alison Sudol is from the latter camp.

“I shy away from writing until I feel something needs to be written,” Alison says. “It’s almost impossible to force myself to sit down at the piano or pick up a guitar if I don’t have anything to communicate. It’s maddening, feels like I’m never going to write anything again every time I’m between records.  But then it’s as if a tank fills up and overflows with feeling and suddenly I need an instrument, anything I can get my hands on. I can’t control it, I just have to go along for the ride and try not to get in the way.”

This was especially the case with Alison’s exquisite new album ‘Still Come the Night’. 

On Valentine’s Day 2020, Alison found out that she was pregnant. Five weeks later, she was jamming as much toilet paper, canned goods and prenatal vitamins as she could fit into a rental car, leaving just enough room for her partner and their dog. Filming on Fantastic Beasts had been indefinitely suspended, the tour with Goldfrapp that was meant to start in a matter of days postponed, and for some reason she couldn’t taste or smell anything. The mood in London was strange, tense. No one knew how long this thing would last, or what the risks were if you were pregnant. Friends with a farm had told them to come stay. There was a cottage there for them. There wasn’t any wifi, but there was fresh air, a fireplace. They could stay as long as they liked.

They stopped to get more supplies on the way. The giant Tesco shelves were empty, bewildered people roaming the aisles at 8pm trying to work out what they could live on for the foreseeable, the energy apocalyptic. But they arrived to calm, quiet, stars at the farm. Soon after, London went into lockdown. Days later, they lost the baby.

“I have always struggled with processing big emotions,” says Alison. “I have met grief with resistance at best, pushing down feelings, cutting the pain off as much as I could. But this I couldn’t fight. It was too big, too physical, too overwhelming. It was a tidal wave and it demanded that I feel it. There was nowhere to hide”.

The days, weeks and months that followed are chronicled in songs from Alison's fourth full-length album, ‘Still Come the Night’. “I needed to do something with all the grief pouring out or I would drown in it. Needed to name it, to give it a shape to hold onto. I found a little shitty guitar that belonged to my friends’ son and started writing”.

In the difficult early days, Alison sought songs that spoke of what she was going through, yet found none. In their absence, she turned to bittersweet music which resonated emotionally but more abstractly, finding herself drawn to instrumental and folk / traditional music from all around the world -  Africa, South America, Ireland. “Languages  I couldn't understand, but felt drawn from lived experience, either current or passed down through generations,” she recalls. “Honest music, unselfconscious and raw, that felt like it was made by people who would have made it whether anyone was listening or not - that was what gave me comfort”.

Set with the changing seasons and the quiet solitude of their borrowed cottage as the backdrop, the first songs of her intimate and introspective yet powerful, poetic record, came quickly and quietly. 

The quietly haunting ‘Still Come the Night’, with its vulnerable vocals against spare, aching guitar, was the first song that she wrote, in the heavy days immediately following the loss. 

“I very nearly didn’t put it on the album because of how painful it was. It’s hard to sing in front of anyone. But I needed to sing it, needed to try and find something to hold onto. I tried to bring as much light as I could to it, to find the beauty in a moment where it was really hard to move through the day.” 

It was recorded in one take, “so sensitively that everything felt like it was vibrating. When the last note on the guitar rang out I cried for a long time. It’s the quietest song on the album, but a pivotal one. My partner still has trouble listening to it, although he was the one who convinced me to name the album after it. It’s still very raw for him.”

‘Mary of the Willows’, inspired by one of her favourite poets, Mary Oliver, was one of the first songs she wrote. Immersed in a new slow pace of life, Alison found herself looking outside the window and going out every day to just watch buds grow and blossom from the leaves. 

“I felt a kinship with her that I hadn't before because I hadn't walked that kind of life,” Alison explains. “I’d never been patient enough to observe something as subtle as a season changing. Grief and the physical recovery brought me to a standstill, and I was able to notice things I would have otherwise missed. As I stepped through into that song, it pulled me to the next. It was a way of getting through the days as much as anything else”.

‘Still Come the Night’ and ‘Mary of the Willows’ weave imagery from the budding world outside with the barren one within. “Grief is a hawk flying over in circles / keeping her eyes on the ground / swift as an arrow she’s pinned to my breast / she rises. I am empty now.”

“I don’t think I could have possibly imagined how devastated I would be,” she says. “I had friends that had been through it and had been brave enough to share with me their journey. I had witnessed their pain and had done my best to comfort them, but nothing really prepared me for how much it would hurt until I went through it. It’s a difficult thing to process, because you are grieving the loss of someone you haven’t met yet. Often, we don’t even tell people we’re pregnant because there is that three-month safety zone you have to clear. Everyone has the right to either communicate or not about their pregnancy journey and I don’t know if everyone struggles with it but we found it really difficult to navigate. How do I tell someone that I’ve lost a baby when they didn’t know I was pregnant to begin with? It’s something so many couples experience - apparently one out of five pregnancies end in miscarriage in the first trimester - but how common it is doesn’t change how shattering it feels when it happens to you. It’s a loss of so much life - both the life within you and the one you and your partner had envisioned. Your dreams, the path you’re walking on, they’re gone in an instant, with nothing to replace them. My partner and I needed time to process what had happened, to rebuild and let my body recover, and so I had to sit with the pain and the uncertainty without the distraction of immediately trying again. If I didn’t have the record to motivate me, I think I would have fallen into a deep depression”.

Several months later back in East London, in a friend’s local studio Sudol played ‘Mary of the Willows’ for one of her partner’s best friends, London-based multi-instrumentalist producer Chris Hyson, who is also half of experimental duo Snowpoet. 

“We’d never worked together before, but I think both of us had a feeling we could make something good together. We were there for maybe a couple of hours and I played Mary down a few timesI didn’t know what to expect but Chris came back a few days later with a beautifully produced version, with guitar and drums by Welsh musician twin brothers Alex and Lloyd Haines, which ultimately ended up being on the album”.

Alison only had four songs - including ‘Come on Baby’ - but she asked Chris if he would be up for making an album with her. They booked a week in Giant Wafer studios in early August, three days of which were set aside to finish a previous record that she had been working on. “So four days to make a record, having never worked together before. Seemed reasonable enough…” Alison laughs.

Giant Wafer studios, nestled between sheep fields in the Welsh countryside not far from where her partner grew up, turned out to be the perfect place to make the record. There they worked together to retain a hushed intimacy and space among, even, the many layers of songs with their subtle harmonies and intricate instrumentation. 

“The moment I met Alex and Lloyd, I loved them. They are so funny, wiry and energetic like a pair of muso-meerkats, and their musicianship was unreal. I kept having to tell both of them to play worse. Alex Killpatrick (engineer) is a total audio-nerd weirdo and made everything sound insane. There were mics and amps everywhere, including the kitchen so you had to pay attention if you were on cooking duty. There was a heatwave that week and we were all sweating and laughing and writing song after song, all so different in tone but connected to the different colours and stages of grief that I had gone through. ‘Bone Tired’, ‘Peaches’, ‘Meteor Shower’, ‘Wasteland’, ‘The Clearing’, ‘No Other’”. 

The meditative energy of ‘Wasteland’ is bolstered by slow, cyclical finger-picked guitar and soothing French horn - mirroring the methodical working of the earth by women tending to their seeds.

“Women’s bodies and the way we approach the earth have always been intertwined. My body felt defective after the loss, contaminated, desolate… I kept finding myself seeing images of barren fields. Dry, scorched, crumbling soil which could no longer bear fruit. I imagined women - distant ancestors - kneeling, digging their hands in the hard soil, planting, watering, carefully tending the seeds, no guarantee whether they would grow again. Women who understood death in their bones and still leaned in, nurtured, waited. I felt the spirit of these women tending to my body in the same way, helping her recover as they would the land. I imagined my belly in that soil, tender shoots growing beneath me.” 

‘Wasteland’ was the first song they wrote at Giant Wafer, with Sudol writing the lyrics and melody (except the evocative “Come with me my darling / listen to your body” mantra which came months later in the bath) on the spot - something that rarely happens. “The song came so quickly it was like it had always been there, like we had been playing together forever.. Everything flowed.”

The single ‘Playground’, about loving somebody so much that you want to start a family with them, is a summery burst of exhilaration, full of acoustic strumming, driving percussion and dreamy vocals that captures the carefree joy of a loved-up couple. It’s as close to a love song as you’ll get from Alison. 

“‘Playground’ had us all dancing, and reminded me of the place that my partner and I had been in in our early days, pre-pandemic, pre-miscarriage. So much joy. We worked from 10am until midnight, taking turns cooking because there was nothing around us but a petrol station with some ginger cake and crisps in stock. Even though I cried at least five times a day, it was one of the best weeks of my life. The guys were so kind and held space so gently for whatever I needed to go through. Each of them brought so much creativity and thoughtfulness to what we were doing. It was so healing.”

The night they recorded the melancholic ‘Come on Baby’, which Alison had written, not long after leaving the farm, on a severely out of tune guitar (incidentally they tuned the song to the demo recording which was a nightmare for adding synths later), there was an electrical storm of the likes that Alison had never experienced. 

“We could see the sky lighting up through the windows and after we finished a take we went outside to look. It was a completely silent lightning storm, no thunder at all. I’ve never experienced anything like it. We were all completely awestruck. Singing ‘thunderstruck by the lightning that I swallowed’ after that had my heart in my throat”.

Fittingly, the lyrics of ‘Come on Baby’ powerfully capture nature’s visceral impact: "Nothing quite prepares you for the earth splitting you open / hunger without reason without warning.” It also has the most achingly beautiful outro, as yearning vocals, drums and synths build anguished emotion, reflective of the song's subject matter.

“Chris, Alex and Lloyd lifted the song and crushed my heart with it and I cried quite a few times recording it,” she recalls. “This is the song that tells what happened - in as direct a way as I could muster - the night we lost the baby… My partner trying to reach me as I slid into the darkness. I remember feeling desperately alone yet hearing him from miles away trying to tell me I wasn’t. I remember feeling like it was bigger than me, far far outside my control.”

Alison and Chris finished the record at Chris’s home studio in South London in the coming months, finishing just before filming was to resume for ‘Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore’. One of the final songs that remained unfinished was her affecting lead single ‘Peaches’, a deeply personal paean to motherhood. While the stripped-back ‘Peaches’ - hushed vocals, and delicate arrangement comprising sparse guitars, drums, bass and synths - was composed in the Wafer days, Alison struggled to write the lyrics of a song that was initially inspired by her dog. The lyrics followed months later. 

“Great as she is, I couldn’t write a song about Gertie.” Alison laughs.. “Wasn’t really on topic. But as my partner and I were starting to consider trying again, I started having these recurring dreams about a baby girl. The dreams were so vivid and they both kicked in an intense longing and a huge amount of fear. I didn’t want to leave the dreamscape because that’s where I knew I could find her. I didn’t know if I could bring a healthy baby into the world. I didn't know if I could bear to lose another. I wrote the lyrics to try to process what I was feeling. It was after our daughter was born that I realised the lyrics were written two weeks before she was conceived”.

“Meteor Shower” is the album’s poetic finale, book ending the equally hypnotic opener, “Bone Tired”. “It also felt like the beginning of something else. ‘Now we are here / And now it is now’ is the ending of the record, like ‘this is where we go from’”. 

Driven by a gently propulsive groove, the hypnotic and beguiling alt-pop track “Meteor Shower” takes the early morning light to capture perfectly a distinctive mood of a specific moment in time: the morning after the loss. 

“There’s a particular mood of emptied-out exhaustion,” she recalls, “but the farm was so beautiful when we left to go to the hospital. The light was so powdery and because we hadn't  slept, there was a surreal and dreamlike quality to everything. There was something particularly  beautiful about the ache and the extent of the pain that we could feel even in the moment. Even when Meteor Shower was just a skeleton the feeling of that morning was in the bones of it and the lyrics poured out as a piece”.

The resulting album is surprisingly light on its feet for such a heavy topic. Light, love and hope are interwoven into every song. Alison points to the vast weight of grief that people have carried these past two years: isolation, fear, sadness, illness, loss, and the ensuing rush to resume normal life, without the opportunity to process it all. This is an album for us all  to listen to and connect with, one that’s open, giving and full of emotion. 

“It was important for me to make a record that someone actively grieving could listen to. I wanted to hold space for emotion, not impress my experience upon someone else. I wanted to hold the listener close to me and sing to them, to be balm rather than purely confrontational. Still, my partner has trouble listening to ‘Still Come the Night’. This is his story too.”

Released under her name, the first music she has put out since her two EPs in 2018 (‘Moon’ and its follow up, ‘Moonlite’), this album is Alison’s most autobiographical, although she had always believed she was writing from the heart. “Actually, I think I've been really guarded,” she admits. “I’ve hid a lot behind metaphor. And maybe I thought I was being more vulnerable and open than I was. So this album feels to me like it's the first time I'm just standing there in my own skin…just being with it.”

This is also her first LP since the three acclaimed albums she released under the moniker A Fine Frenzy, when she was signed to Virgin Records and toured with Rufus Wainwright and opened for The Stooges at SXSW. It’s a project she abruptly put to bed in her late 20s, when she “destroyed” her former project, never to be reunited to the surprise of her fans. Now, from her maturer perspective as a mother, she can reflect on her younger self trying to process things. It’s the reason behind the re-imagining of A Fine Frenzy hit ‘Almost Lover’ as well as a cover of Drake’s ‘Passionfruit’. 

“I sort of split that part of myself off and I wanted to re-integrate her into what I do moving forward to not feel so fragmented,” she reveals. “I also want to honour the people that supported me for a long time. A lot of people don't know that I make music anymore, because they followed A Fine Frenzy, and then I disappeared into the ether, and came back with my own name. I wanted to explore what A Fine Frenzy might have evolved into if I hadn’t left it behind.”

After A Fine Frenzy, Alison made her television debut in the twice Golden Globe-winning Amazon series ‘Transparent’ in 2014 with Elle Magazine hailing her as one of "The Seven Most Exciting Newcomers on TV”. In 2016, Alison co-starred in ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’, the first of five ‘Harry Potter’ prequel films, playing Queenie Goldstein, a role she reprised in the 2018 sequel ‘Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald’, and in the April-released third instalment ‘Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore’. The day before the latest film’s UK release, she supported Goldfrapp at London’s Royal Festival Hall; both music and acting are key parts of her creative identity.  

“I think that art informs art,” Alison says. “One of the most important things for me as a writer is to have perspective and I find that having different interests gives me more tools and colours to work with. Music is my most personal form of storytelling and when I have something to tell it’s magic, but it’s collaboration and the connection with other people making things that I find most fulfilling. I need the people as much as I need the art. Every  person that has been a part of this has helped me heal.“