‘Desire’: How Anna Calvi sonically captured lust
For those in the know, Anna Calvi is one of the most evocative and powerful artists the UK has to offer. She has always been as, even back in 2011, on her self-titled debut album, ‘Desire’ offered a perfect example of her talent. It’s not just that her voice and guitar playing are incredible, but it’s Calvi’s mind for composition that has earned her accolades, including three Mercury Prize nominations. It’s her ability to use all of the skill and technicality at her disposal and use it to serve the emotion of a song. In this case, everything worked to harness the energy of lust.
It’s a specific and singular feeling. It’s not love, not as light or pure or innocent. It’s closer to longing but without the sombre edge that comes with yearning for something that you may not get. Instead, it’s the electric midground where desire, attraction, and animalistic need combine into something empowered or even somewhat menacing.
There’s a dark edge, but it’s still glowing red, a colour that seems to wash over all of Calvi’s music. When witnessing her perform live, her backing screen is nothing but a solid block of vibrant red. Every one of her album covers features bright scarlet. As the colour of energy, passion, danger, and seduction, it’s the ultimate shade of lust and desire.
So when it came to making the track ‘Desire’, it feels like Calvi’s magnum opus on the feeling and energy that powers so much of her work. But while other songs are sung through this lens, here, she turned her full attention to attempting to capture exactly what the feeling is and put it to tape like a soundtrack to the sensation.
Singing of fire, heaven, devils and the racing beat of a heart, the lyrics capture the feeling perfectly through a mix of good and evil imagery that leads to a repeated refrain of “desire” as if concluding that this one feeling exists as its own unique thing.
But what’s so captivating about Calvi is that it’s not just her lyrics that tell a story. Every element and every instrument on her tracks tells it, too. On ‘Desire’, in fact, she thinks it’s the instrumentation that is perhaps the most evocative of what she’s trying to say.
“I wanted to have a melodic motif that just keeps building and building, and it’s kind of like a metaphor for desire,” she told NPC. Always treating her songs with a big-picture mindset, wanting each element to serve the story, it’s important to her that the way the different instruments work together is also imbued with the feeling at hand. In this case, her crafting of the song’s various builds and climaxes was all done with the experience of lust in mind: the tension, the recklessness, the joy and the thrill of it all.
She did that through the repetition of the same motif over and over. “So you hear it on the harmonium, and then you hear it in the guitar, the same melodic refrain, and it just grows throughout the song as the desire grows stronger,” she explained, “This melody is heard in more and more instruments until at the end, it’s almost just bursting.”
Not only does it make ‘Desire’ an incredible and visceral song, but it’s truly representative of Calvi’s artistic ethos and talent. As she explained, “For me, it’s really important that the music is telling you half the story; it’s telling you as much about what the song is about as the lyrics are.”
