Chelsea Wolfe
After a decade of writing and touring, Chelsea Wolfe began to break down. While making new album Birth Of Violence, she found herself in the middle of a spiritual awakening.
The Californian art rocker digs deep inside herself.
After a six-week stint of touring last summer, Chelsea Wolfe got on the floor and lay down for 20 minutes. Drained and spent, the lines for new song The Mother Road came into her mind: ‘Guess I needed something to break me/ Guess I needed something to shake me up.’ “I felt very broken at the end of that particular six weeks,” she recalls. “If my life was just easy and boring, I wouldn’t have anything to write about. But when I keep pushing myself to do more and do better, I reach a breaking point, and when I get past that breaking point I make work that’s halfway decent or that people can connect to.”
It’s not the most sustainable of philosophies. To counteract the energy she was expending and the intensity of the music she was playing onstage that year, she’d turned to her acoustic guitar (“I was always seeking out places like home on the road, and I think one of those places is just playing my acoustic guitar,” she explains). Backstage or in the back of the bus, she started piecing together fragments of quiet, intimate songs.
Nonetheless, the pressure of the lifestyle drove her to drink too much and numb herself with codeine, and she began to recognise that things had to change. It was the conclusion of something that had been building up inside her for a while.
“I think I was starting to break down a bit, just physically, mentally and spiritually,” she confesses. “I turned 35 at the end of last year; all of a sudden, you wake up and 10 years have passed. Obviously I’m proud of what I’ve done, but
I also realised I didn’t have a lot of chance to create personal, healthy rituals or habits, because I was around other people so much of the time.”
After finishing a European run in December supporting A Perfect Circle, Wolfe retreated to her home in a remote part of northern California, where we’re speaking to her today, and started shaping that acoustic material into her sixth album, Birth Of Violence. Over the last decade, she’s made a career creating dark songs that blur the lines between prog, folk, rock, metal and alternative. While fifth album Hiss Spun was a discordant outpouring of emotion that erred on the metal side, leading to support slots with Ministry and A Perfect Circle, its follow-up is stripped-back, downbeat, lonesome Americana.
The songs weave together recurring themes, like touring and the reality of womanhood, thick with symbolism drawn from nature. There is poetic violence in lines such as ‘The poppies were like fire on the mountain’ (American Darkness), and the aftermath of violence in Little Grave, about school shootings. The one she began to write while lying down, The Mother Road, speaks of women knowing ‘what it is to endure’, and offers the image of ‘building a broken but precious web/like a spider in Chernobyl’.
“In my old dictionary that I always refer to, one of the definitions of violence was ‘strength of emotion’, and that definitely made me think of being a woman and navigating the world as a woman, and using that strength of emotion to speak up for myself – for ourselves,” she says. “I think of this album as a kind of awakening; the beginning of a journey, a new chapter, and a new era for me personally.”
“I think of this album as a kind of awakening; the beginning of a journey, a new chapter, and a new era for me personally.”
Wolfe’s awakening has taken her down some intriguing avenues. On tour, she always took tarot cards with her. Back home, she began thinking about why she connected to tarot cards, and then started reading books about witchcraft.
“People for years have asked me, ‘Are you a witch?’ And I never really said yes or no, because the things I did just came naturally to me, but I never really stopped to think about it or put it into any kind of terms,” she explains.
“It’s been an amazing time. I’m not the type to go sober or something, that’s not my way of dealing with it, but learning to meditate and learning to really focus on the spiritual path, that helps me feel grounded.”
She realised she’d long been doing things that were in the tradition of witchcraft, such as following the moon cycles, and generally getting fascinated by cycles, spirals and circular things – symbols that recur in her music. She ruminated on the way she saw herself as a woman, with cycles and moods connected to the cycles and moods of nature, and wanted to celebrate that instead of trying to “tamp it down”.
“I always really wanted to be androgynous and between gender, so I didn’t write specifically from the perspective of being a woman for a long time,” she confesses. “But on Hiss Spun I started opening up to that, and more so on Birth Of Violence, just connecting with being a woman more. I think a lot of women can relate to that, especially in the heavy music scene. You don’t connect to the traditional sense of femininity, but at the same time, it’s like you want to find your own definition of that. That’s basically what I’m focusing on. That’s not what the whole record is about, but there are definitely elements of that.”
In an interview just before the release of Hiss Spun in 2017, Wolfe opened up about a heavy family secret: her great-grandfather was a paedophile, which had a huge impact on the women in her family. It’s not something she’s keen to dwell on, especially as her relatives don’t like her talking about it.
“I think the reason I chose to finally talk about that was because I was exploring a bit of that in Hiss Spun,” she says. “Sometimes someone will be like, ‘Why are you so angry? Why are you so angry as a woman?’ And everyone has their own story, and obviously it’s a historical thing that women have been treated like dogs for a long time. In my personal life, I was really angry for my ancestors who dealt with some really dark shit at the hands of this man.”
With this awakening she had, is this something she’s had to think about more?
“Yeah I mean, of course… I don’t think about it that often. But I did start having therapy this year for the first time, which is something I said I’d never do. My musician friends who’d gone to therapy kept telling me that I should, and that they could see it would help me step into my own power.”
Wolfe says that it’s not just for family issues, and that she’s learning how to navigate the world as an empath – someone who overwhelmingly feels emotions. It’s taught her to be kinder to herself. She describes herself as a “work in progress” and today, sitting upstairs in her writing room, she sounds quite content. If she looks out of the window, there are trees as far as the eye can see, and lakes nearby. She’s surrounded by sculptures and pieces of jewellery from friends, and shelves of her favourite books. She and her band are already working on a new album, and she has ambitions to do film score work.
This morning, Wolfe drew the Seven Of Pentacles from her tarot deck. For her, it’s a sign that she needs to think about longterm sustainability, instead of acting in the moment. It’s relevant as she prepares to leave her sanctuary for a week of meetings in the buzzing city of LA, reflecting again on her last 10 years.
“That was something I really needed to hear. Just to keep that perspective of the long game, because that’s what my whole career has been – any sort of rise that I’ve had has been very slow,” she explains. “That’s how I am as a person in general, so it makes sense to keep that in mind. Even though it doesn’t always seem like things happen right away, right at the time you want them, slowly but surely, amazing opportunities will come.”
Birth Of Violence is out now via Sargent House. See www.chelseawolfe.net for more information.
“For years people have asked me if I’m a witch.”