Cerys Matthews is set to release her new album, ‘We Come From The Sun’, this week.
The 51-year-old Welsh singer – who was the founding member of popular rock band Catatonia – worked remotely with field recordists and musicians across the globe and Hidden Orchestra, the solo project of Joe Acheson, on the upcoming collection, which documents the “sound journey” of poetry about “Genesis: birth, heritage, a journey about to begin”.
Last year, 10 UK poets – MA.MOYO, Raymond Antrobus, Lemn Sissay, Liz Berry, Anthony Anaxagorou, Adam Horovitz, Cia Mangat, Imtiaz Dharker, Kim Moore and Kayo Chingonyi – recorded pieces from their own works at the legendary Abbey Road studios in London for the project, which is released on January 15 via Decca Records.
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And the singer-songwriter and broadcaster has revealed she hopes to create a series of albums in the same vein.
Cerys said: “I’ve always been in awe of the power of a great turn of phrase; in poems, songs and prose. There are some exceptional poems being added to the world right now.
So I invited poets whose work I admired and had championed for years to join me in this project. I selected poems which worked across and with each other to become a journey, an aural adventure.
I’m hoping it’ll be the first in a series of ‘poem song’ albums on Decca, with life on earth as inspiration. As simple and complex as that.
The theme for this then, as the first, had to begin at the beginning: Genesis.”
The ‘Caught In the Middle’ singer released the official National Poetry Day anthology ‘Tell Me The Truth About Life’ in 2019, and has judged the likes of the Forward Prizes for Poetry and the Dylan Thomas Prize.
