Clara Mann announces new album "Wishbone", and releases lead single

South London-based artist Clara Mann has revealed plans for her upcoming album, Wishbone, and shared lead single, "News From Home".

Wishbone follows Mann's debut album Rift, released last year. The album's concept came to surface when Mann was watching Leos Carax's 1991 film Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge), with his depiction of contrasts in love resonating with the singer-songwriter. "News From Home" arrives as the first taster, with Mann describing the track as "a thread between a once-home landscape and my real, adult life."

 

 

"It’s about visiting and looking at my hometown, knowing that, whilst this used to be everything, my whole life, now I have a big wide life of my own, and things to get back to - and holding both of those next to each other, and seeing how they make each other more beautiful, and also more strange," she continues. "The instrumentation is supposed to have a feeling of an old country song, slightly haunting percussion and the shimmery synth…. I thought about big wide open skies and walking over the hills at golden hour.”

Wishbone was produced by 4AD resident Fabian Prynn, who assisted Mann with pooling together her demos and voice notes at Norfolk’s Bam Bam Studios, with some sessions reaching up to fourteen hours. Mann also recruited a series of musicians to play on the album, including guitarist Kit Mosely, double bass player Marianne Schofield, alongside trusted friends Owen Spafford on viola, Martin Egidi on cello, and Tennessee Woodiel on banjo.

Discussing the album, Mann says: “I felt very bare writing a lot of this album. I wasn’t interested in hiding behind the songs anymore, or being elusive or oblique. Throughout the record, there’s this sense of wanting to be witnessed, and recognised - and in order for those things to happen, you yourself have to be fully present, and willing to be seen. I wanted to live, and to write, from that feeling.

Wishbone is released on 23 October via state51