Circus of Desire

It’s been five years since Olivia Chaney’s last solo album, Shelter, which came between the stellar set of traditional balladry of 2017’s Offa Rex group and last year’s EP of French songs, but now she returns as ringmaster in her own Circus of Desire. Since Shelter, she’s moved to Yorkshire and become a mother. Recorded in New York with producer and multi-instrumentalist Thomas Bartlett of The Gloaming, Circus of Desire comprises ten new songs and a cover of Dory Previn’s heartbreaking ‘Lady with the Braid’. The delicate, pensive beauty of opening track ‘Art of Losing’ sets up the album’s deep, resonant tones of emotional, psychological chiaroscuro – self-probing, self-aware, self-doubting, but also turning away from the self to embrace a collective sense of being human, in lyrics whose surface simplicity belies the complexity of feeling and insight she brings to them, and the depths she reaches when she sings them.

The title-track evokes the worlds of pleasure, pain, spectacle and risk that open up when the circus of desire comes to our town. Tender songs to Chaney’s daughter, ‘Calliope’, and to her sister, ‘To the Lighthouse’, sit alongside questing, questioning self-interrogations such as ‘Mirror Mirror’. The music on Circus of Desire is spare, beautifully arranged and performed, and wrapped up in Nico Muhly’s string arrangements, while Olivia Chaney’s vocals are as stunning as ever.