Tracey Thorn called her 2018 solo album Record, and like most things with Thorn, the title carried more weight than it let on. “It’s deliberately ambiguous,” she explained. “I tend to say record, but it’s also record. Because I don’t play live anymore, what I do is I record. And I’ve made a record.”
Her withdrawal from the stage isn’t about laziness—it’s about focus. “Working in the studio is where I feel I give of my best. I feel confident, I feel in control. I can come up with loads of ideas. So to me, it feels like a positive thing.”
That confidence barrels right into Record’s opening track, “Queen,” which begins with the sly line, “Here I go again, down that road again.” Thorn laughed: “There’s almost an element of me sounding slightly surprised. Two years earlier, I didn’t know I was on my way to making another album. Suddenly the songs came very fast.”
The catalyst, unsurprisingly, was the world unraveling in real time. “I was getting depressed about politics, about everything feeling extreme. Constant news alerts on my phone, social media screaming at me—it was driving me mad,” she said. Her solution: make something instead of doomscrolling. “Maybe those feelings of helplessness would be best addressed by making something, offering something positive into the world.”
As always, Thorn’s songs zero in on women’s stories, but suddenly the world caught up. “I’ve written songs with a feminist edge for a very long time, and sometimes it made me feel out of sync, like no one wanted to hear it,” she said. “Now people are choosing to listen. Women are being taken seriously. The timing of this record feels accidental but in sync.”
She also made sure no one could miss the point this time. “I’ve written songs in the past where I thought I was being overt and literally no one noticed. Maybe I was too subtle. On this record, there are at least two or three lyrics where you can’t miss the point. At this moment, I didn’t want to feel like I hadn’t said what I thought.”
The pop side is intact, though, with producer Ewan Pearson encouraged to lean into synths and beats. “We both love Pet Shop Boys, New Order, Grace Jones. I said, let’s make that obvious. I wanted to make an upbeat record, something that lifted your mood. Put it on, and you feel better.”
She pulled in Stella Mozgawa and Jenny Lee Lindberg from Warpaint (“my dream rhythm section”), who ended up on half the album, and Corinne Bailey Rae, who elevated one track with her own arrangement of layered vocals. “I thought the song was sounding good, but when Corinne sent it back, it was amazing.”
One of the record’s centerpieces, the eight-minute “Sister,” came alive when the players wouldn’t stop. “They had this groove going and we just waved at them through the glass—keep going! We recorded 11 minutes straight before they looked up asking if they could stop. We cut it down, but it was virtually all live.”
Then there’s “Guitar,” a memory of a boy teaching her three chords and playing Leonard Cohen records. It sounds like a teenage love song until the twist: the boy was forgettable, the guitar was the star. “That was the thing that changed my life,” Thorn said. “From that point on, I started writing songs. The boy was incidental.”
Even the existential “Do I ever find love?” tucked into “Queen” folds back into the same theme: lives built on chance encounters, sliding doors. “Meeting Ben changed everything—career, life, everything. But you think, what if we hadn’t met? Would I have formed a band with someone else? Would I have done music at all?”
Of course, for Thorn, the “will Everything But the Girl reunite?” question never dies. “People say, ‘Will you ever get back together with Ben?’ And I’m like, we just had breakfast,” she said, dry as ever. “Living together and working together isn’t easy. We managed to make it work. But now we’re older, with three kids, and I think the independence is healthy. Going back to doing everything together would be scary.”
Still, she isn’t closing any doors. “We talk about it sometimes. But I’m happy where I am.” Another book was on the way, new experiments already percolating. And Record, in the meantime, stood as proof that staying in the studio doesn’t mean slowing down.
Listen to the interview above and then check out "Queen" below!
