Anna Calvi didn’t land on the stage in the typical singer-songwriter fashion so much as stomp her way onto it. The former London-based guitar instructor immediately gained notoriety with her self-titled 2011 debut, which was nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize in addition to a slew of other award nominations. In an unprecedented achievement, Calvi repeated those nominations for both her subsequent albums.
Her third full-length record to garner this attention was the critically lauded 2018 album Hunter, which saw Calvi unfurl her talents towards a more explicit conversation about her lived experience as a gay woman. She used the visceral, primal themes of the hunter to explore issues of the feminist experience beyond gender.
In addition to a number of collaborative projects between then and now, she was most notably brought on as composer for season five of the hit UK television series Peaky Blinders. Talks for future seasons are in the works.
Among all these projects, this past week we saw the release of Hunted, a musical response to Hunter formed out of the songs’ earliest incarnations. On it, Calvi explores the initial impulses of her songs in their sparsest forms, and the paths they might have taken by way of collaborations with the likes of Courtney Barnett, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Julia Holter.
OMG.BLOG spoke with Anna to find out what she was looking to find on these new versions on Hunted, as well as how the non-stop pace of the last few years has informed her work as a multi-faceted artist at large in complex personal times.
Read the full Q&A after the jump!