Embracing restlessness, finding home anywhere, bringing together music and visual art – Clara Mann is a person of well-formed contradictions. With a background which included visual artistry, time spent in rural France and southwest England, and training as a classical pianist, Mann has deep wells of creativity to draw on. But, as Mann was growing up, it did not seem inevitable that music would be the way forward for Mann.
“I’ve drawn for much much longer than I’ve been writing songs – I’ve only been writing songs for the last five years – and I’ve been drawing since I was tiny; it’s the thing I love most,” she explains.
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Although Mann still makes visual art for herself and as part of her holistic creative process (with some of this finding its way into the visuals for her upcoming debut album), it is music which is now her focus. Although she grew up hearing songs all around her (including American singer-songwriters such as Paul Simon, Iris DeMent and Aimee Mann, as well as a plethora of French singers of the 50s and 60s), music as a means of her own creative expression came to Mann gradually and as a result of teenage restlessness. Aged 17 and feeling bored at school, and unhappy with the form of socialisation it offered, she began venturing further afield.
“I would get the bus from Cheddar Gorge into Bristol… called The Falcon, which makes it sound mystical. You never quite know when the Falcon’s going to come – is it going to show up? Maybe not,” she reflects. “Anyway, I’d get on this bus and go to whatever was on. I went with a good friend and we just loved live music.”
It was that friend (now working as Watch Paint Dry) who began making music and inspired Mann to follow suit.
“I went home and picked up a guitar that was in the house and thought, ‘I’m going to write a song now.’ And that was it!” she says.
Her early songs were recorded on an old laptop’s built-in speakers and uploaded to Bandcamp; the innate skill clearly shone through, as it wasn’t long before Mann was noticed via the networks she was building at gigs and she was signed by indie-label Sad Club Records, taking things to the next level.
“It really wasn’t serious for me for quite a long time. A bit like a relationship where you’re holding back…and then a year later you’re like, ‘OMG we’re going to get married forever and move to a cabin in the woods and this is my great love!’ That’s how I felt about songs. I felt like something arrived in my life that I hadn’t predicted.”
Mann’s ethos is strongly and vehemently independent, and rooted in the now; a sense of intense reflection on the present moment shines through her “almost-folk” music, including in her evocative debut album ‘Rift’, but this is coupled with a desire to share the intense emotions she experiences.
“I can’t write about anything that’s not mine… it’s basically a communication. You’re staying ‘I feel this. Do you feel this? Witness me, understand me!’ I think you want to be understood,” she explains. “My urge to express these things is because I want people to hear it and get it. It is about that exchange, and in that way I’m writing for an audience because I know the songs will be heard… but it is very personal.
“You have to acknowledge, as a maker, that the need in you to express is because of the other person receiving.”
In her live performances, Mann seeks to find a balance between the personal nature of her work and that urge to connect, as she explains through a beautiful metaphor.
“It’s like when you’re in a swimming pool, going underwater, and you’re lying just under the surface of the water and looking up at the lights. You’re aware of the rest of the world but you’re in your bubble.”
“It’s a way of finding a state of aloneness on stage which is completely internal,” she continues. “I think music is to be shared and I want energy back off a crowd, and that energy comes from us all feeling together. I think that’s really beautiful and that’s what music is about.”
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In the way she writes, Mann strives to protect her very personal craft.
“Fundamentally for me, my project is a very solitary process. I write on my own,” she explains. “Songwriting is such a personal thing. Especially as a young woman, I think you want to be careful about protecting your songwriting practice.”
Mann uses other aspects of her creativity, too, in order to inspire and assist the musical process.
“I try to establish a practice where I’m playing a lot, I’m writing words and I’m drawing, so I’m in the right mindset to receive stuff when it comes in and then I can express that in songwriting,” Mann says with care. “I think it’s really important to be receptive and if you’re torn up emotionally or you’re too busy or too stressed, or you’re preoccupied, you’re not receptive. So I try to clear my mind with the drawing and writing.”
This careful and deeply reflective process has led Mann to create ‘Rift’, her first full-length collection of songs. The concept behind the album was inspired, says Mann, by the discovery of a mysterious and instinctual kind of hope.
“This place called ‘the rift’ for me is a very dark valley, a place where you have nothing that you recognise and nothing that remains from your old life… And in that place there is something in us which makes us keep going,” she says. “I have to get out of this place but I don’t know what I’m going towards. I can’t see a light, no one’s telling me there’s something beyond this. All I can do is keep moving. I find that a very beautiful instinct. It’s faith in a lot of senses.”
“I don’t try to predict what’s going to happen, ever – I just live very much day to day. I’ve learnt you can’t ever know what’s round the corner, so there’s no point trying to guess,” she continues.
That hopefulness, it seems, leads to a sense of restlessness, and also an ability to find comfort in the midst of movement – that serves Mann well when living life on the road as a touring musician.
“Being on the road really enables those parts of me. I love adventure and the possibility that comes with travel and movement and restlessness… I learnt you can make a little world wherever you are. It’s within you. So there’s a sense that home is with me, it’s wherever I go.”
In the early summer, after a run of her own headline shows in the UK, Mann embarks on a European tour supporting Youth Lagoon, the project of Trevor Powers. There’s a clear affinity between these two different but equally unique artists that Mann says brought them together.
“I played a show with them a year and half ago in Dublin and it was the best time ever. We had a fantastic show … and really saw something in each other’s music. I remember sitting with him in the green room and talking about our songs and thinking, ‘We get it. We’re trying to do the same things in different ways,’” Mann says. “It was amazing meeting a songwriter like that who’s also doing something in a different genre and is very inspiring.”
As for what Mann expects from the experience, she’s characteristically open.
“No expectations – never any expectations… It will be an adventure.”
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Clara Mann’s new album ‘Rift’ will be released on March 7th.
Words: Phil Taylor
Photo Credit: Louise Mason
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