Forty-three years into her life, Gwenno Saunders has been many people. The disaffected Cardiff schoolgirl; the teenage Las Vegas dancer; the singer in indie pop group The Pipettes. There was a turn in a Bollywood film, a nightclub tour, a stint cleaning floors in an East London pub. Long before she would become an acclaimed solo songwriter in both Welsh and Cornish, a winner of the Welsh Music Prize, a nominee for the Mercury, a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedh, there were the days of Nevada, London, Brighton; of Irish dancing, techno clubs, messiness and chaos.
Utopia, Saunders’ fourth solo album, is an extraordinary exploration of all of these selves. If the singer regards her first three solo records — 2014’s Y Dydd Olaf, 2018’s Le Kov and 2022’s Tresor as “childhood records”, rooted in her upbringing, her parents, her formative identity, then Utopia captures a time of self-determination and experimentation. These are songs of discovery, of the years between being someone’s daughter and becoming someone’s wife and someone’s mother. They range from floor-fillers to piano ballads, via contributions from Cate Le Bon and H. Hawkline, and encompass William Blake, a favourite Edrica Huws poem, and the Number 73 bus. It is her finest work to date.
There is a sense of revelation to Utopia, a feeling markedly different to that of previous records. Having released three albums in Welsh and Cornish, ‘Utopia’ is Gwenno Saunders’ first album recorded predominantly in English, and presents a very different side to her life and songwriting.
To look back over this period of her life has been a strange sensation for Saunders. “I feel compelled as a songwriter to keep digging it all up,” she says. “Everything’s a diary entry for me. And in writing about all of this I’ve remembered the chaos of myself.”
It is an album that spans 25 years. “All of adulthood,” she points out. “You get to this point and you go ‘God, that quarter of a century went fast.’ But I want to acknowledge it, and respect it and say, for better or worse, all of that happened.”
Gwenno will also be a support act for Alanis Morissette on 2nd July at Black Weir Live.
