Clara Engel – "Anubeth's Song" (2017)

Inner world, outer world

All the same to me 

Clara Engel’s 2017 album, Songs for Leonora Carrington, was released by Wist Rec, an independent record label dealing in “handmade” music.  

Leonora Carrington

The album was inspired by a 20th-century surrealist artist and author who was born in England but spent most of her adult life in Mexico.  “Leonora Carrington was not very well known to me at the outset of the project.  I chose her largely because I wanted an excuse to explore her work more in depth,” Clara told me.  “I was particularly drawn to her sculptures and her 1976 novel, The Hearing Trumpet.” 

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Leonora Carrington was born into a wealthy English family.  She met the surrealist artist Max Ernst at a party when she was 20, and the two hit it off – and then some.  Ernst was married, but left his wife tout de suite after meeting Carrington.

The couple set up housekeeping in the south of France.  Life was good until World War II broke out and the Nazis arrested Ernst on the grounds that his art was “degenerate.”

Carrington’s “Portrait of Max Ernst” (1939)

Ernst managed to escape to the United States, leaving the devastated Carrington behind.  She fled from France to Spain, then had a nervous breakdown.  Her parents had her put in an asylum, where doctors put her in restraints and administered powerful psychotropic drugs.  

Carrington eventually escaped from the asylum and made her way to Lisbon, where she entered into a marriage of convenience with the Mexican ambassador, which enabled her to move to Mexico.  

She later married Emerico Weisz, a Hungarian who had worked with famed Spanish Civil War photographer Robert Capa.  The couple had two sons.

Carrington died in 2011, when she was 94.  I’ll tell you more about her life in the next 2 or 3 lines.

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I first heard today’s featured song when I heard Clara Engel perform in Washington, DC, last December.  It’s the final track of the Songs for Leonora Carrington album.

Clara Engel

“Anubeth’s Song” was inspired by one of the characters in Carrington’s novel, The Hearing Trumpet.  According to Clara, 

Anubeth is a very magnificent wolf-headed woman who appears at the end of The Hearing Trumpet, which is a surreal novel with many twists and turns that left a very strong atmospheric impression on me.  While it has humorous and ridiculous elements, it also deals with serious topics such as the destruction of the environment and the failure of patriarchal power structures.  It’s quite a subversive book in its own way.  

“Anubeth’s Song” has a simple structure and doesn’t utilize a lot of musical tricks, but it manages to cast a spell nonetheless.  Clara Engel has learned that speaking softly is sometimes the best way to get people to listen to you.  

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In 2016, Beyoncé was the highest-paid musician in the world.  But only about 10% of her income came from the sale and streaming of her music.  The remaining 90% came from touring, merchandising, and endorsements.

If you’re an independent musician, you’re not selling out 20,000-seat arenas at $100-plus per ticket.  So how do you make money?  

Not from streaming.  Streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are great for consumers, who pay only a few bucks a month for an almost infinite supply of music.  But when you divide that money up among the thousands of musicians who are supplying that music, there’s not a lot to go around.

Musicians like Clara Engel have to scramble to make enough from their music to support themselves.  Some of them turn to crowdfunding websites like Ulele to raise money for new albums.  Click here and you’ll be taken to Clara’s Ulele page, where Clara is hoping to raise $1500 to fund the production of a pressed CD of the forthcoming album, Where a City Once Drowned.  

Clara’s very close to attaining that goal, so I’d suggest you visit Clara’s Patreon page instead.

 Patreon is a website that allows musicians, artists, writers, and other creative types to provide exclusive  content to their followers – or “patrons.”

A drawing from Clara’s Patreon webpage 

You can become a patron of Clara Engel, have access to exclusive blog posts, and have the satisfaction of knowing that you are helping to support her music and art for only $1 per month. If you spring for $7 a month, you will also receive a copy of each new album that Clara releases.  Just click here and you’ll be taken to Clara’s Patreon page.

If you’re afraid of commitment, I understand – believe you me, I’ve been there.  In that case, just click here to be taken to Clara’s Bandcamp site, where you can download Clara’s digital albums for just a few bucks each.

By the way, Bandcamp allows you to stream Clara’s music without paying.  I don’t mind if you dip your toe into the waters of Clara Engel’s music for free from time to time.  BUT FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, LET’S NOT ABUSE THAT PRIVILEGE!

Click here to listen to “Anubeth’s Song” and the rest of Songs for Leonora Carrington.