Faith, hope and clarity
Every song on Faith Eliott’s debut album is inspired by a different animal and the resulting aural adventure riffs on cosmic order, gender identity, fabulous beasts and ancient folklore, writes Fiona Shepherd
Lately, Faith Eliott has been drawing a lot of dogs. Turns out there’s a fair old business to be had in pet portraits for the penniless artist. But this Us-born, Scotland-based visual artist and musician, who goes by genderneutral pronouns, generally has a far less conventional artistic relationship with animals – in drawings, sculptures and now on a beautifully wrought debut album, Impossible Bodies, a nine track compendium of poetic creature features exploring cosmic order, gender identity, fabulous beasts, ancient folklore and modern parables of reptile liberation on the M8.
The journey that led to this impressive, fully formed debut is a transatlantic voyage of personal, recreational and aesthetic discovery. Eliott was brought up in Minneapolis but moved to the UK in their early teens when their parents split up, eventually pitching up in Edinburgh aged 16 where they found a homefrom-home volunteering at the Forest Café on Bristo Street.
“That was my life for ages,” says Eliott. “Because I was quite young at that point, it was a place I could go that wasn’t a pub. It was a really
accessible, great artistic community so that’s why I stayed. The little venues in the city are constantly under threat. If you do get a space you have to cling to it.”
After a subsequent period of living back in the US, Eliott moved to Glasgow last year but it was that initial decade in Edinburgh which helped shape the artist. As well as plugging into the visual arts scene in the city, Eliott sang with a number of Edinburgh bands including Withered Hand, The Sea Is Salt and, more recently, Meursault, as well as striking out solo at open mic nights where Eliott began to finesse their “angsty teenage poetry” into nascent songs.
“I used to pack way too many words into songs and over the course of writing more, I’ve learned how to strip out the unnecessary bits. I think it’s important to have a clear message.”
Working with Meursault brought Eliott into the orbit of the now sadly defunct independent label Song, By Toad, who released their Insects EP, an idiosyncratic set written on an arts residency in rural Nebraska.
“It was quite an intense time,” says Eliott. “You are just surrounded by wildlife – you’re getting eaten alive by bugs and you fall asleep to raccoons screaming, so I just naturally wrote about things like that. It’s just one of those inherent things – everything I draw has a face too so a lot of the descriptions I was using were animalrelated.”
Eliott has now advanced from insects to animals, both real and imaginary. Impossible Bodies isa lo-fi but sophisticated carnival of the animals, reminiscent of the folkloric storytelling of Laura Marling and inspired by medieval bestiaries, illustrated accounts of animals by authors who had often never seen the beasts they were writing about.
“I like nerding out about that
“With these animals I found stories that resonated with me and then I project a lot of my own emotions into them”
stuff,” says Eliott. “My parents are historians and my sister works for the Oxford English Dictionary so maybe it’s a genetic thing where we’re just interested in the way that human beings organise things. These days we think of encyclopedias as a scientific system of classification but in medieval times and even before that it was much more allegorical and word of mouth so a lot of the animals are just bizarre. There’s one entry about bears that says they give birth to these shapeless blobs and then lick them into shape, so it’s all very visceral. I just love the imagery.”
Every song on Impossible Bodies is inspired by a different animal, be it Laika, the celebrated first dog in space, or the humble ancient sea sponge.
“There’s so much out there that is confessional songwriting but when I try and write something that’s just about how I feel I end up writing a load of garbled emotive words that
don’t feel satisfying because they don’t have a structure. With these animals I found stories that resonated with me and then I project a lot of my own emotions into them. They give you a kind of scaffolding to build your own feelings on top of.”
Lilith is one such example, dipping into the legend of Adam’s first wife, who came back as a serpent to tempt Eve in the Garden of Eden – a wry modern fable about releasing the reptiles from a petting zoo along the M8.
“That one does relate more specifically to gender identity,” says Eliott, who identifies as gender nonbinary. “It was a way of being angry, a way of expressing feeling trapped or captive in your identity, which I’m sure everyone experiences to some extent. But when it comes to songwriting I’m aware of not wanting to be too on the nose about it.
“I feel that I’ve processed a lot and am on more of an even keel now. But it comes and goes. In my mid-20s, I was reckoning with it, trying to work out where I stood with it. But I think with that comes a lot of talking about it and it can be quite exhausting sometimes to have to explain yourself all the time. It’s a really important discussion that we’re having as a society but it means that sometimes people who identify as queer end up having to play the advocate or the ambassador.”
Eliott is arguably more comfortable in the land of fabulism, creating fantasmagoric sculptures and grotesque puppets, producing detailed, nature-inspired illustrations, shooting their own DIY videos with homemade costumes and props – or singing about fantastical creatures such as the Jungftak, a Persian bird with one wing which can only fly when conjoined with another.
“You can’t not write a song about that!” says Eliott, who explains that the word and the definition were actually invented by Webster’s dictionary as a trap term to guard against copyright infringement. “It’s a little bit of poetry in the dictionary. Apparently they do it with maps too. They just put in fake towns, called paper towns. But I always think, what if you’re lost and it’s dangerous?”