ANOTHER WOMAN: WHO IS SHE AND WHERE DID SHE COME FROM?
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 22 hours ago
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
There's a specific kind of love that never gets a proper name, because it never properly happened – no relationship, no first date, no mutual acknowledgment of what was between you, just the prolonged agony of feeling something enormous for someone who either didn't feel it back or, if they did, gave no indication that they ever would. I spent the better part of my early twenties in the grip of exactly that, and almost everything on this EP is either a direct product of that period or, in the case of the title track, its long-delayed aftermath.
I should say upfront that this isn't a breakup record, because there was nothing to break up from, and I think that's precisely what makes it lonelier than a breakup record would be. Breakups at least carry the implicit validation of the relationship that preceded them; what I'm documenting here is something that had no such proof of concept, a feeling that left a mark entirely out of proportion to what actually happened between two people. These songs are what that looks like when you turn it into music – laid bare, unresolved, occasionally furious and, by now, finally finished.
One summer, now many moons ago, I fell in love – completely unrequited, as it turned out, and as it would keep being for years – and the only way I could find to process it was to write. Sporadic notes desperately trying to be poetic first, then lyrics, then music. My friend Anastasia, professionally known as Saya Siiang, who was also my vocal teacher at the time and had become one of the most important people in my creative (and personal) life, heard what I was making and told me it deserved to be heard. So, in 2021, I released my first song, Mirror, which, to be honest, could very well be part of Another Woman, for it tells the same story and follows the same main character. Most of what's on this EP was already written by then, or close to it, and it has taken me until now to finally put it out.
THE MAKING OF THE RECORD
The production of this EP wasn't clean or linear, and I think that's worth acknowledging. He's Earthquakes alone went through so many iterations across so many different versions that I began to lose faith in it altogether at certain points, and there were moments when I genuinely considered abandoning it completely and never releasing it. The whole EP was a drawn-out process of recording, scrapping, re-recording, being unhappy, starting again – the kind of creative journey that is only comprehensible in retrospect, once you can hear the thing that all of that back-and-forth was eventually trying to arrive at.
The producer who finally made this EP see light of day is Iona Catherine, who is also a violinist and whose understanding of where my sound is going has been invaluable throughout this whole process. She produced and mixed the final iterations of three out of five tracks – Introduction, Night Thoughts and He's Earthquakes – and mastered the entire record. The strings on Another Woman – which I had always dreamed of having but didn't think were logistically possible without delaying the release – came about because Iona found the time and inspiration to record and layer them onto the existing mix by Zak Michaud, and the difference they made was immediate and enormous. That chamber rock element elevated everything, made it feel more visceral, more gut-wrenching, closer to what I'd always heard in my head.
INTRODUCTION
The EP opens with a short orchestral piece that I'm calling simply Introduction, and which functions less as a song in its own right and more as an establishing shot – a way of setting the emotional coordinates for everything that follows before a single lyric has been sung. It came about during production when I was fleshing out the EP with another producer rather than coming from the same personal history as the four songs that follow it, and I think of it as a frame rather than a confession, the way a film score can tell you exactly what kind of story you're about to watch without yet revealing a single plot point. Strings, atmosphere, something that feels like the beginning of something, or perhaps like something already well underway.
SONG CREDITS
double bass DAN CLEAVE
cello GI HAMILTON
electric guitar HARRY HOUSEAGO
arranger, mastering engineer,
mixing engineer, producer,
sound engineer, violin IONA CATHERINE
author, composer LIYA SHAPIRO
drums LUAN MOURÃO SILVA
composer NIKITA KOLBASOV
assistant engineer SHARON OKOI
ANOTHER WOMAN
Another Woman is not the original wound – the years of unrequited feeling, the slow accumulation of hoping and not being met – but its echo, the specific ugliness of discovering that someone you once loved has moved on to someone else when you never even got to begin. Knowing it's irrational, that you don't even love them anymore (if you ever truly did), not really, but feeling it anyway, with a ferocity that makes no sense and that you're not proud of.
The lyrics don't reach for resolution or poetic softening; they state the contradiction as plainly as it felt. There is no making peace with it in this song, no closing of a door, just the reality of a feeling that refuses to behave the way you've told it to.
Sonically, I was heavily influenced by Lana Del Rey's Ultraviolence when writing it – that quality of soft, almost hazy verses giving way to explosive rock in the chorus, with a smudged, cinematic atmosphere running through the whole thing. The chamber rock element comes from the violins woven through the track quietly at first, present but restrained. And then there's the outro, which is the moment the whole song has been building towards – explosive drums, electric guitars, the violins going crazy and, underneath it all, me screaming, run through an analogue guitar compressor in real time and then layered further in post. The result is deliberately ambiguous, a sound that catches you off guard because it could be a guitar solo but isn't, and I think that ambiguity says something about the song as a whole: the line between what's controlled and what's completely falling apart isn't always clear.
In a way, writing this song was the ending of the whole story – this track finally allowed me to close the door on that chapter and leave it behind. The duality in the title only occurred to me later, when I'd already decided on it for the EP: another woman in the love story, yes, but also myself, having become someone different on the other side of it all.
SONG CREDITS
electric guitar CLARRIE MACKLIN
mastering engineer, mixing engineer,
violin IONA CATHERINE
author, backing vocals, composer,
lead vocals, lyricist, piano LIYA SHAPIRO
drums LUAN MOURÃO SILVA
bass guitar, mixing engineer, producer,
sound engineer ZAK MICHAUD
NIGHT THOUGHTS
I am almost exclusively a night writer. I don't think I've ever written anything during the day – it's always late evenings and the deep hours after midnight, when something about that specific quality of darkness and quiet opens everything up and whatever I've managed to hold at bay during the day comes flooding in. Night Thoughts is named after exactly that hour, and it was written in it.
The song lives in a very particular atmosphere – chamber rock with the texture of French chanson running through it, melodion alongside double bass rather than bass guitar, which gives the whole thing a quality that I can only describe as bohemian in the best possible sense: candlelit, intimate, a little Parisian, the kind of 3am that feels more honest than any conversation you'd have in daylight. Jacques Brel's ghost is explicitly in the bridge – Ne me quitte pas – because the whole song is essentially a conversation with that same feeling of not being able to let go, and Brel understood that particular emotional predicament especially well.
The lyrics are about the specific torture of having someone live in your head long after any logical reason for them to be there has expired. By the final verse the roses are gone and you're alone in the room and there's nothing left but the bare fact of the feeling, stripped of any of the romantic softening it might once have carried. It doesn't resolve, just like most of these songs.
SONG CREDITS
melodion BEN PROUT
double bass DAN CLEAVE
cello GI HAMILTON
electric guitar HARRY HOUSEAGO
arranger, mastering engineer,
mixing engineer, producer,
sound engineer, violin IONA CATHERINE
author, backing vocals, composer,
lead vocals, lyricist, piano LIYA SHAPIRO
drums LUAN MOURÃO SILVA
assistant engineer SHARON OKOI
HOLD ME TIGHT
This is the record's hinge point, the only song here that contains two very different versions of myself within the same four minutes, and because of that it's probably the most emotionally complex thing on the EP despite being its most musically euphoric and, one might argue, simple.
The verses and pre-chorus were written roughly seven years ago, during that same summer at the centre of everything, when I was stuck in the full weight of unrequited feeling and couldn't see past it (and at the same time as Mirror). I always knew there was something in those lyrics, something worth finishing, but I had no chorus, and without a chorus it was just a fragment, a poem rather than a song, and it sat like that for years.
The chorus came in autumn 2024. I was at my piano, just messing around with harmonies, and my tobacco pouch was lying on top of it, and I looked at it and the whole thing arrived in a single freestyle rush. The choice of 'silhouette' is very deliberate, it's an admission that I don't know who I'm singing to – this person is still just an idea, a shape without a face, someone I haven't met yet, and I'm already pleading with them not to leave. That chorus pulled the song into a completely different space from the verses: more sensual, more self-aware, no longer purely about the one person the verses were written for but about the deeper longing underneath that, the desire for closeness and warmth and the particular terror of never being allowed to have it.
Musically, Hold Me Tight is the most upbeat and groove-driven thing on the record – pop-rock, AM-era Arctic Monkeys in its swagger, it features none of the chamber and art rock present in the rest of the record – and the contrast between that and the emotional weight of the lyrics was entirely intentional. The girl who wrote those verses couldn't have imagined standing on a stage. The woman singing them now does it with conviction, and I think you can hear both of them in the same song.
SONG CREDITS
mastering engineer IONA CATHERINE
author, backing vocals, composer,
lead vocals, lyricist LIYA SHAPIRO
mixing & sound engineer RUSLAN PERU
arranger, backing vocals,
producer SAYA SIIANG
HE'S EARTHQUAKES
I have a complicated relationship with this song, mostly because of how many times I had to take it apart and put it back together before it became what it needed to be. It went through more versions, more re-recordings, more moments of near-abandonment than anything else on the record, and there were periods when I genuinely wasn't sure it would make the final cut at all. The fact that it closes the EP now, and that it does so with what I think is real power, still surprises me a little.
The song is about someone who lives in your nervous system long after they've left your life – not in the romantic, softened sense that a lot of music about this subject reaches for, but in the more unsettling, involuntary sense of someone whose presence has become structural, whose absence still sends tremors through everything. When we were recording it with Iona, I kept referencing J.M.W. Turner's storm seascapes – those paintings of ships in extremity, of waves that don't acknowledge the people in them, of natural force that simply moves through you regardless of consent – because that's the quality I was trying to get into the production: something cinematic and genuinely unsettling, string-heavy and relentless, that doesn't offer comfort or resolution, and isn't trying to.
The record ends here, not with culmination or a clean arc toward healing but with the weather simply changing, and I think that's the most honest ending I could have given it. These songs were never about recovery, they were about the experience itself, documented as faithfully as I knew how, and by the time the strings fade out on He's Earthquakes, I am already somewhere else entirely.
SONG CREDITS
arranger, mixing & mastering,
sound engineer, producer,
violin IONA CATHERINE
author, backing & lead vocals,
composer, lyricist, piano LIYA SHAPIRO
drums LUAN MOURÃO SILVA
guitar LUKASZ SOLTYSIAK
assistant engineer SHARON OKOI
cello TALIA HUNTER
A NOTE ON WHAT COMES NEXT
I'm already working on my second EP, which will be something quite different – more harmonically ambitious, drawing on influences I haven't fully explored yet, and with a different emotional centre of gravity. Another Woman was the oldest and most necessary record I had to make, the one that had to come first before anything else was possible. Now that it's out of my hands, I find I'm more interested in what I don't know yet than in what I do, and that feels, if not quite like freedom, then at least like a beginning.
Yours truly,
