Fragile Creatures- The Women Behind the Songs

Hannah, welcome to the podcast.

We're going to start with a question that we put to all of our guests, which is, if you could be present for any moment in the history of medicine, what would it be and why?

That's a gorgeous question.

And I think just given sort of the nature of the stories I've been looking at, I think it would have to be that moment when Sophia Jaxblake put the advertisement in The Scotsman.

uh looking for more women who wanted to train in medicine i just think there must have been something so sort of exciting to be there at that time when that shift happened um and i just kind of love the sort of a seemingly small quiet action on the surface that completely shifted things and shifted the attentions i think yeah i think that would be where i would choose to be actually exciting

I think that comes through in your music as well, which is so interesting, how you treat this history that relates to women.

But to start us off with, I mean, what drew you to the history of women and women's health as a foundation for your album Fragile Creatures?

Yeah, another great question.

So I had a book token.

I'm a big reader.

Book token from the college that I freelance for.

And I just walked down to this beautiful little independent bookshop where I live in Bristol.

And I did the classic thing.

of being drawn to the book by its cover which you're not supposed to do but it's quite hard not to sometimes and the book was Unwell Women by Eleanor Claghorn which is just an incredible read and it's just got this beautiful cover of a woman with an anatomical drawing on the back of her like a skeletal drawing and big flowers and it said Unwell Women a journey through myth and medicine And I just thought that sounds right up my street.

And as soon as I opened the book, I just couldn't put it down.

And the stories just sort of popped out of the page and into my brain.

And I just immediately thought, I really want to write a whole record about this and these stories.

And sort of, they just fascinated me and they devastated me.

And I found some of it quite empowering.

I've heard you talk before

about the texture of music or the texture of sound, which really resonated with me.

So listening to your music as well, There's something about the stories of these women which live outside of institutions in many places and the stories of so many marginalized people.

And the roots that you have in folk music really resonated there.

So that idea that folk music is passed down hand to hand and that the sort of texture of that, it just fits so well in so many ways with the stories that you're telling here.

Yeah, that makes so much sense, isn't it? It's that age-old tradition of this is how we pass along stories through song form and the legacy.