More about: Anna Leone

For a musician whose output has been characterised by a stark vulnerability and cleansing quality, Anna Leone’s debut record couldn’t come at a better time. On Zoom, the 26-year-old Swede sits in a cap and grey hoodie, musing in her quiet, contemplative manner about the recent death of her grandmother. “I was very close to my grandmother, so it's a difficult time,” she explains. “It's strange too, to accept that someone's gone and not here anymore. It's a tough thing to go through.”

Music, for Anna, is a tool for healing, which shines through on her brand-new, just-announced album, I’ve Felt All These Things. Anna’s signature style of intricate guitar lines, candid lyricism and her trademark croon interweave with each other to create an ode to introspection through adversity. The timing of this is not lost on Anna, either. “I also thought I was gonna have to write new songs about everything new that I'm going through, but what I've realised is that all my songs still feel very relevant to me – even the first EP that I did which was a few years ago now. It kind of feels like those things still apply, and that I can still use them to process things that I'm going through now, which is nice. They always feel very relevant to me.”

Writing a debut album is a daunting task for any musician, and Anna certainly wasn’t immune to the pressure at first. “In the beginning, I was like, ’I don't know how to write an album!’ Things are supposed to be cohesive and it felt kind of intimidating, thinking of it in terms of: ‘This is my offering to the world, and it's supposed to be perfect.’ So I just approached it in terms of I want these individual songs to be the best they can be, and as we went along, it all took shape and it felt very cohesive, it felt like they were all in the same universe.”

Although it’s not a huge change from her previous material (including her 2018 critically acclaimed EP Wandered Away), you might note a more subtle, majestic undercurrent on her new album, credited to producer Paul Butler (Devendra Banhart, Michael Kiwanuka). ‘Remember’, for instance, uses quiet string synths to gently balloon to its climax, as Anna demands, ‘Did you lie to me in your sleep?’ “I always had in mind a bigger picture when I was writing these songs, that I wanted it to feel a bit more grand,” she says. However, I’ve Felt All These Things isn’t a total abandonment of her intimate, acoustic style, but rather an elevation: “I didn't want it to feel too ethereal; I wanted to make sure the core of the song was still there. And for me, the guitar is a big part of the songs itself because that's how they are made and that's the first impression of them that I have.”

If there’s anything that ties the record together, it’s Anna’s handmade, heartfelt songwriting, each track steeped in a range of moods from melancholy to the tentatively hopeful. Inspired by musicians such as Laura Marling and Cat Stevens, Anna’s protective of her writing (“I’m pretty bad at taking feedback on stuff like lyrics”, she laughs). For her, writing is a process of trial and error intended to communicate an emotion at its fullest: “I can tell when something hits me, or when something is like, ‘okay, this is exactly what I was trying to communicate’. Like, a line that can make me cry, so it's like, ‘okay, I really hit a nerve within myself with this string of words’.” Whilst she doesn’t have a favourite lyric (“I never look at that objectively, like: ‘this is great songwriting!’”), Anna cites ‘All That I Ever Did’ as the most emotional. 

“It just captured a moment in my life where I was feeling very down and thinking about a lot of things,” she explains. “Somehow, I think it's like a time machine for me, and whenever I hear it, I hear the pain that I felt, so I think that's true for a lot of the songs on the album. It's still painful to go back to because it recaptures the emotions that I felt.” Whilst Anna can’t pinpoint a specific set of issues or time period, she admits that she struggles with depression and anxiety. “I think I've always felt kind of like not an outsider, per se, but like I'm hiding away from life, like a self-inflicted isolation. And I think a lot of that informs the lyrics. I think dealing with realising that I was gay - that was a big thing also, and that has surely contributed to a lot of confusion and feelings of there's a lot of self-doubt that goes into that – for me, at least.”

The realities of living as queer and a Person of Colour have been “mainly separate” for Anna. Nevertheless, they’ve still shaped how she’s gone through the world. “I haven’t seen myself represented in media and in my close environment… it affects the way that you carry yourself.” Half-Guadalupian, living in the majority-white Sweden had negative impacts on how Anna viewed herself: “When I grew up, I was the only Person of Colour in my school. I've always had my siblings, but I kind of wanted to look like everyone else, so I straightened my curls and all that. I think I always felt othered in that sense.” She cites her time living with her uncle in Paris as helping to retain her culture. As a musician now, Anna says that whilst representation is important, she wants people to focus on her music: “I want people to know that I'm gay - it's not something that I'm trying to hide - but I don't want that to be the first or only thing that comes to mind when people think of my music. I want them to take in the whole picture.”

The ‘whole picture’, for Anna, is using music as a vessel for catharsis. Whilst she is hesitant to use the word ‘therapy’, I’ve Felt All These Things is a crystallisation of Anna’s psyche intent on providing catharsis, both for her and her listeners. “It's a really difficult thing to describe, but I wanted to be moved by my songs, and I wanted to feel like they were true, or honest, and that they took me on a journey, and that they mirrored my own feelings,” she explains. “And it’s hard to put into words because it's just a strong feeling and you know it when you hear it, and you just have to work out what that is.”

I’ve Felt All These Things arrives 10 September via All Points, Half Awake.

More about: Anna Leone