‘I said, I don’t ever want to go into a studio again’
Paloma Faith tackles both romance and terminal illness on her ‘lockdown’ album. By
PALOMA Faith has been busy during lockdown. The free-spirited east Londoner has built a home studio, recorded an album, grown tomatoes in her garden and filmed a second series of the DC Comics drama Pennyworth — all while pregnant.
To top it all off Faith, who turns 40 next July, is on a mission to dispel the myths that linger around motherhood.
“I have decided as a little project to use myself as an example and burst the bubble,” she explains over the phone.
In September she did just that, posting a picture to Instagram of her baby bump and announcing she was pregnant after a “struggle” involving six rounds of IVF treatment.
Faith already shares a daughter, born in December 2016, with her long-term boyfriend, the French artist Leyman Lahcine.
But she says her approach to her pregnancy will be very different this time around.
“The first time I did it I hid away from the public eye and this time I have made a conscious effort to just say: ‘This is what is happening and this is what it looks like and feels like’.”
As if to prove a point about her workaholic tendencies, we speak as Faith jumps into a taxi after a day of filming the second season of Batman prequel Pennyworth, where she plays the villainous Bet Sykes.
Infinite Things, her fifth album, started out sounding very different indeed. Pre-pandemic, it featured a selection of upbeat tunes, but as the reality of lockdown hit home, Faith rewrote and rerecorded the album from her home.
Faith hired some equipment, spent a week building a makeshift home studio and taught herself production techniques — using a rail of her “posh coats” to deaden the sound.
“It ended up l i ke a l ot of things,” she says. “Society makes us think that a lot of jobs that men do are really difficult.
“But the reality is that it is really easy,” she cackles loudly. “It turns out you just hit record. I said to my label that I don’t ever want to go to the studio again!”
Lyrically, the album is a volteface, tackling sickness, loss and the complicated, often banal, reality of romantic relationships.
“When we think about music we know, love always seems to always be either talked about at the beginning or the end.
“I notice that because I can’t really relate to any of these love songs because I’m genuinely committed to my partner and I do love him a lot, but those first encounter songs don’t really ring true to me, and neither do the heartbreak ones, because we are there together working on it.
“So I decided to write a collection of songs about that very thing, about enduring love.”
Better Than This and Last Night On Earth tackle the pressures that inevitably arise in long-standing romances — and have been amplified by lockdown. “We have had our ups and downs,” she admits of her own relationship.
“I do think having a child with someone puts an unbelievable amount of pressure on the relationship because you don’t sleep and you get irritable and also it is really hard to psychologically learn how to divide yourself between the new love of your child and your partner.
“When you have gone through quite a lot of things with someone and come out the other side, what you are left with is something really quite special because you just look at each other and think, ‘We did that’.”
On Infinite Things, her personal is also the universal. Take the faintly Bond theme-like If This Is Goodbye, where she sings: “If this is goodbye / No regrets, the sadness / Try not to let it in.”
The song movingly addresses a friend’s terminal illness but relates it back to a now everyday fear — that our recent meeting with a loved one might have been the last.
“It’s potentially the best song I have written in my career as it is the most honest,” she asserts.
“It is about a very good friend of mine who I love very dearly who unfortunately, at the beginning of the first lockdown, was diagnosed with a terminal illness.
“It’s about that feeling of not knowing when you are with that person or talking to them, whether that is the last time.
“So then you start looking at everything a bit differently and maybe not expecting so much from life and just appreciating the finer moments.”