MODERN KOSMONAUT
FOR the last decade, Jane Weaver’s currency has been the conceptual. Whether that’s the haunted fairy tale of 2010’s The Fallen By Watch Bird, or the kosmische preoccupations of The Silver Globe, the sublime record that brought her to the attention of many in 2014, she’s a musician who’s strived for something beyond herself.
“There are all these themes that are quite easy to grab on to, and to explore their world,” says Weaver from her home outside Manchester. “As an artist it’s easy to go off on a big tangent – and it’s lovely. My last two albums, Modern Kosmology and the Fenella album Fehérlófia, were about [pioneering abstract painter] Hilma af Klint, and a Hungarian animation film where a horse gives birth to a boy.”
Weaver is not a musician who takes the easy option, though, so those broader frameworks that have served her well over the last decade are absent from her forthcoming ninth album, Flock. “I thought to myself, ‘You know what, I should try and do something which is more personal, about me, and something that’s basically 10 pop songs, just to challenge myself.”
As with most of her work, this change in direction was as a reaction to events – the impact of the global pandemic and lockdowns as well as a doomed lyric-writing trip abroad.
“It seems stupid and luxurious now,” she says, “but I went to France at the end of 2019, to a place I normally go to in Brittany, just to work on my lyrics. I thought I’d go and have a nice time, drink wine in the sunset, but I didn’t realise everything would be so closed. It was completely dead. Really, it was awful. But it was perfect too…”
Some of took shape on those empty
