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Anna Calvi: "I was hoping to reimagine my identity and start again"

Anna Calvi uses her striking new album 'Hunter' to explore ideas of sexuality and gender conformity.

'Hunter''s arrival is heralded by a stalking, patient guitar riff slinking out of the speakers. Then, Anna Calvi’s full, rich voice; "If I was a man in all but my body..." It’s an uncompromising opening that leaves no doubt about the extent of its power. This record is a predatory beast.

Anna’s first two albums – her self-titled 2011 debut, and ‘One Breath' in 2014 – earned her all kinds of praise, with comparisons ranging from Patti Smith, to PJ Harvey, to Nick Cave. The latter was said to be a fan, as was Brian Eno. So it’s no small thing that her third record sounds like it could devour both previous releases for breakfast. 'Hunter' is a staunchly feminist, unflinchingly queer album, powerful and bold but also intimate, tender. It has come from a period of reckoning and re-evaluation, and as a result is possibly Anna Calvi’s most open work to date.

There are no accusations of shying away here. 'Hunter' rejects the patriarchal notion of women as prey and recasts them as the "alpha’, the driving force. The hunters, if you will.

"Partly I was feeling very frustrated at the depictions of women that I see in culture and the way that these false stereotypes are drilled into everyone of what a man or woman is meant to be," Anna says of the album’s genesis.

For Anna, this limitation is not only frustrating a feminist standpoint. Her irritation also springs from the relationship between her body and identity, and the ways that the two chafe up against each other.

"I s’pose for me I never really completely identified as female, from when I was little. Although I never felt that my body was so wrong that I felt I needed to change it, I did feel a disconnect. And I found it really hard going through puberty, and getting this female body felt quite alien to me," she considers.

The alpha figure throughout the record’s narrative has become an outlet for these concerns, while also serving 'Hunter'’s story independently of such themes.

The alpha’s story is not the only character study that 'Hunter' made space for. Although that sense of disconnect has been ever-present, the process of writing and recording the album allowed Anna to view her identity and her gender from other angles.

" enabled me to question myself in a way that I haven’t before, and I guess there’s a lot of suppressed thoughts and feelings about my gender that I never really explored before making this record," she says.

Feeling so passionately about the issues the record addresses can make a musician uniquely vulnerable. To put so much of yourself into an album is essentially like walking out into a battlefield; it’d be devastating to turn around and find that you were alone out there.

"When I was writing it, and when I was thinking about it, sometimes I did wonder like, ‘Does anybody feel the same way that I feel?’ I did feel a bit alone in it," Anna says.

She explains, "it’s just reimagining that beautiful first time where you really like someone, and you’re with someone, and taking away all that negativity and seeing it as this pure Eden-like experience."

The dream of paradise found forms the backbone of the album’s more tender side. Along with ‘Eden’, there is the fluid, lush ‘Swimming Pool’, inspired by the defiant pleasure of David Hockney’s homoerotic painting of the same name. Anna’s interest in the painting, she says, comes from an appreciation not only of the art itself, but also of the shamelessness with which Hockney expressed gay themes in his work in a time when that was a much greater risk than it is today.

This sense of shamelessness comes out right through the record, but is probably best summed up by the title track. 'Hunter' is about the joy of finding a community in gay clubs and queer scenes, safe in the knowledge that you are among your people.

"There’s a sense of transcendence and beauty about being with somebody without any kind of worry or outside negative force, similar to ‘Eden’. In my own experience of when I was a teenager I didn’t know anyone gay, and the first times when you’re with other people like you, it’s such an incredible feeling. It’s really really exciting, and very powerful.

For some, that’s precisely the way 'Hunter' will feel. Like a home in which strength, shamelessness, feminism, and queerness are utopian and true.

Taken from the September issue of Dork. Anna Calvi's album 'Hunter' is out now.

Words: Liam Konemann

This shared openness is particularly crucial when the album’s softer side comes into play. On 'Hunter', everything has a flip side – the alpha’s bravado meets insecurity, power begets vulnerability. In some cases, Anna Calvi has taken these contrasts further, to present alternative versions of common narratives. ‘Eden’, for example, presents a teenager’s first queer experience in a softer light, shielding the characters from the social stigma that so often can lead to the fear or shame that taints or tinges these moments.

For some, that’s precisely the way 'Hunter' will feel. Like a home in which strength, shamelessness, feminism, and queerness are utopian and true.

Taken from the September issue of Dork. Anna Calvi's album 'Hunter' is out now.

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