Singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Jo Beth Young is back with a third album, which she describes as art-pop or experimental folk. She tells Prog about the inspiration and process behind the thought-provoking Broken Spells.
“I sang before I spoke,” singer-songwriter Jo Beth Young says. “Anyone in my family will tell you I preferred singing to speaking. It’s been a passion for as long as I can remember.” Her love for her craft means creating and performing isn’t simply about being a musician, but accepting that intrinsic part of herself.
“I can’t imagine not being a musician,” she muses. “If I didn’t make records, I’d still be a musician, even if I went and sang to the seals! Music is one of the biggest healing arts in the world. It intrinsically makes us who we are – whether we think we are musical or not.”
Music has been both a refuge and a form of release for Young, who recalls joining a church choir to escape physical bullying at school. “It was the one place I was safe, where it felt like I had a place in the world,” she says. Her music teacher encouraged her to explore her interests; and at secondary school her guitar teacher prompted her to develop her singing talent.
“I became a backing singer as a joke, just to get out of classes at school,” Young laughs. “But when the lead singer fainted with fear, I ended up taking over. My teacher told me I should focus on singing.”
Two decades later, in 2018, she released her debut album An Abandoned Orchid House under the name Talitha Rise – and it received international acclaim. “I’d been playing my own music live since I was 17; I was 40 when Abandoned happened,” she says. “That’s a lot of years to be wondering if you really are a musician or not. When the vinyl arrived, it was a life-changing moment.”
Five years she’s celebrating the recent release of her third album – and the first under her own name. Broken Spells was inspired by her thinking on the enchantments people weave into their lives and the lives of others, and how people also have the power to break them.
“We’re all subject to spells,” she explains. “It might be a word someone has said throughout your life, or something someone tells you when you’re a kid; and years later, you still believe it. It’s like casting a spell on someone to give them an identity that might be untruthful for them. It happens on a major scale with governments and media too.”
She uses her songs to explore the dark and the light in us and our world, while exposing her own vulnerabilities. Each track carries its own atmosphere and showcases a different kind of broken spell. For Young, the album’s real power lies in the layers of sound created by the musicians who play with her: Peter Yates (ex-Fields Of The Nephilim) on guitar, Jules Bangs (Herija) on bass and Ben Roberts (Silver Moth) on cello. “It’s like having a skeleton – it doesn’t look impressive by itself,” she reflects. “Our collective sound brings the album together.”
Broken Spells deals with issues such as abuse, warfare and guilt; but hope is never far away. Young’s ethereal vocals create a dreamlike state, hypnotising listeners to distance them from the emotional intensity of the lyrics and harmonies.
She names Burning – the first song she wrote for the record – as her current favourites. “It’s one of the more progressive tracks; it offers a Book Of Revelation-style warning that if we, as a collective on this Earth, don’t start to appreciate what we have, we’re in danger of losing it through our own greed. I love it because I know what a raw moment of true self-exploration it was.”
I joke that you shouldn’t write an album about breaking spells, or every spell in your own life will get broken!
The songs also trace her gradual spiritual transformation from pagan to a born-again Christian. “During lockdown, I started to rethink my non-duality approach,” she says of her former believe in the interconnectedness of all things. “I had this moment at the kitchen sink of looking at my whole life and realising that evil does exist – but that I was terrified to admit it. I think you can hear me coming to that realisation in my songs.”
As she worked through her change she looked for a church, and on visiting for the first time she was surprised to recognise the pastor. “Abut 15 years before I’d been training to be a bioenergy therapist with this qigong master. He’d come to Jesus half way through the training and left. He’d prayed for me on the pavement in the rain next to my car – and I was so embarrassed. Then there I was in the church and he was the pastor. That was it: my life changed from the inside out.”
Given the album’s personal nature, as it subtly reveals the spells woven into Young’s own life, it’s perhaps unsurprising that it’s also the first project on which she’s been the writer, multi-instrumentalist and producer – which naturally proved challenging. “I joke that you shouldn’t write an album about breaking spells, or every spell in your own life will get broken!” she says.
I think other people can hear your music better than you can yourself. It’s like being inside a snow globe
From recording on her laptop in her attic and having five funding applications rejected, along with lockdown delays and her spiritual changes, she admits: “Sometimes it felt like everything was against me. The funding rejection was really disheartening – I had the album ready but I couldn’t afford to finish it. You’ve got to really love what you do because there are times when you’re doing it for nothing or less than nothing. If you don’t really love it, it’s pretty destroying.”
Young enjoys about the solitary joy of writing and of wrapping herself up in her own small world, but her greatest sense of achievement comes from live performances. “Every time I go out live and someone is moved to tears or feels something is shifted for them, the sense of achievement is far greater than anything I could get from an award,” she explains.
But she remains wary of trying to guess how listeners might react to the album. “When you listen to a song and get the lyrics wrong in your head, and then realise they are different to what you thought, it changes the meaning. I think other people can hear your music better than you can yourself. It’s like being inside a snow globe and you can’t see what it looks like from the outside.
“If I could have any power, I would want people to feel seen. People feel so isolated; it’s part of our modern culture. I hope listeners will feel comforted and feel able to ask themselves the difficult questions that none of us really want to ask. If you can do that, you can be free.”
