When I first wrote about FKA twigs’ new mixtape, CAPRISONGS, I called it “music made for healing.” The problem with journalists, though, is we can sometimes project things onto the songs we hear from the artists whose work we’re attempting to probe. So a week later, while talking to FKA twigs over Zoom, I asked her if that take was correct, if the 17-track project really was an encapsulation of her healing process.
“For me, it’s music made for sharing and music made for laughing,” she answered. “And I think inherently, sharing and laughing feels really good, so it can contribute to healing. But I wasn’t thinking about it in that way.”
In fact, the British artist, born Tahliah Debrett Barnett, wasn’t thinking too hard about it at all. Yes, she’s always approached her work with maximal diligence and earnestness, but the magic of CAPRISONGS rests in its casual and unbothered energy: two words you’d probably never have associated with an artist like twigs before now.
It’s a far cry from the woman who, just three years ago, crafted an entire album inspired by the tragic story of the biblical world’s most maligned broad, Mary Magdalene. That project, Magdalene, and its predecessor, 2014’s LP1, were micro-focused on twigs’ life; CAPRISONGS, on the other hand, was made with everyone else in mind. “I’m putting something out there that doesn’t belong to me in the same way that maybe some of my other projects have so strongly just belonged to me and what I’m going through,” she says.
“A lot of the responses I’ve been seeing is that people immediately have an ‘in’ to the record. I think traditionally in my career, it’s been more like delayed gratification, where you sort of fall in love with the project over time, whereas this is more like immediate gratification. It’s fun to be able to show that I can do things that are lighter and fun and a little more easy.”
But it took a while to arrive at such placidness. Like a lot of us, twigs reevaluated her world in a major way when the pandemic hit. Her Magdalene Tour was abruptly cut short—a cancellation that still stings because she has bigger dreams for that project that remain unfulfilled. She had just gotten out of an abusive relationship with actor Shia LaBeouf, whom she filed a lawsuit against last year accusing him of sexual battery, assault, and emotional distress. And, she was just plain uninspired.
“Behind every artist that you love there really, genuinely is a whole village, and you’re constantly trying to drive that village towards a north star,” she explains. “And I think I just became very self-conscious of like, I’m hurling everybody towards this direction, and in the whole of my career I’ve always known what the direction is. And then at the beginning of the pandemic, I was just kind of a bit like, ‘Well, I don’t know, and I also don’t wanna make work unless it’s brilliant.’
“I think it would be selfish of any artist to take up space unless you know what you want to do,” she continues. “I just kind of felt like unless I’m gonna be my best self and unless I’m gonna [make] an impact, I’d rather just not.” She pauses. “But then luckily I got inspired and I managed to pull everybody onto my crazy little bandwagon again.”
Part of that energization came from the simple itch to be part of the cultural zeitgeist. Most people can relate to the frustration of feeling out of the loop, even when it comes to seemingly trivial things in the world, but for twigs, it was more than just FOMO that pulled her back into a creative space. It was the belief that she could contribute to culture; that new music could not only be additive, but necessary.
“I was even comforted when Kanye released Donda, and then Drake dropped his album the same week, and then J.Lo and Ben Affleck kept getting photographed together,” she recalls. “It just felt like there were other things to talk about and it was like, culture was happening. It’s nice when there’s lots of art around to remind us that we’re alive.”
It was an especially poignant reminder for twigs amid the turbulence in her personal and professional life, and you can hear it on the first two songs she wrote for CAPRISONGS, “meta angel” and “thank you song”—the former a wrenching plea for “help from a darker force” who can “whisper all the answers” she needs, and the latter an appreciation for the people who helped her weather those storms with life-saving “love in motion.” That sense of connection and community is felt everywhere on CAPRISONGS, from the copious giggly interludes featuring the voices of her real-life best friends shooting the shit, gassing her up, and laughing with her, to the guest-heavy tracklist. Although she made the entire project while isolating alone for months in her London apartment, it ironically boasts her longest list of collaborators to date—the result of needing to connect with people in order to add some sanity and structure to those otherwise banal days.
“At some points I felt like I was calling writers to write with them just for the company, rather than even the necessity,” she admits. “I’d just be like, ‘OK, I’ve got some melodies, I could sit here and write these lyrics by myself. But guess what, it’s a Friday night and I’ve been by myself a week, so I’m just gonna FaceTime someone and have some fun and see what we can create together.’
“I think that’s just an exercise in kind of letting go of my traditional process, which can be a lot more precious and a lot more isolated,” she continues. “Usually I tend to buckle down just with one person towards the end of a project and get it done. But this time I was lucky enough to have so many people willing to blow up my phone, which is exactly what I needed.”
The result is a lively and genre-hopping (though still glowingly theatrical and idiosyncratic; this is FKA twigs after all) batch of songs that speak to her willingness to lift the veil on her previously untouchable mystique. (Hell, that laxness even accidentally seeped into the mixtape’s release; she only finished CAPRISONGS a week before its release date, not because she was being a perfectionist, but because she got the dates confused and thought it was supposed to come out in March: a mix-up she laughs about now because it allowed her to “embody the full spirit of the project and have a good time without laboring over it too much.”) She still describes herself as “notoriously quite a private person,” but it’s amazing the things you can distill about someone’s personality from the way they interact with their closest friends—and that’s all laid bare on CAPRISONGS, which is why she considers this music, however light it may seem, as intensely intimate.
“The people on the mixtape, they are my best friends, they are people that I see all the time, they’re people that make me laugh. I’m not, like, posting where I am or my friends or stuff like that all the time, but for me to be able to share that was why this project was so important,” she explains. “Because maybe on the surface, I guess it is a lot lighter and more fun than my usual work, but at the same time for me, it’s incredibly deep and it’s incredibly personal and meaningful to be able to share with the world what’s made me smile over the past two years and what’s helped me grow again.”
So as much as she says CAPRISONGS was not necessarily made with healing in mind, you do get the sense while listening to it that some skin over her scars is growing back. It’s what makes for the fascinating duality of hearing her brazenly coo lyrics like, “I’m a boss in my life, do I really have to boss in the sheets?” on opening track “ride the dragon” before quietly telling her friends minutes later in a conversation snippet, “I wanna be more confident, I really do.”
“It’s no secret what I’ve been through over the past few years, and that’s going to have an effect on anybody,” twigs says. “And yeah, I did lose an incredible amount of confidence and self-worth and rooting in everything that I’ve gone through, with surviving an abusive relationship. For me, the music was a part of—not me getting my confidence back, because I don’t think it really works like that—but I think it was a part of me being able to know who I was again and maybe reclaiming certain things that I felt had been taken away from me.”
That sense of hard-won optimism bleeds through on songs like “Lightbeamers,” a lullaby for the burnt out on which she sings, “Are you running from your life? / Beat down ‘cause there ain’t nobody on your side / Tell yourself you love you so / Lay down your fears, baby, ain't nobody die from a no.”
“That thing of like, ‘ain’t nobody die from a no,’ it’s to be used when you need [to be] reminded that you deserve that seat at the table and you can work really hard and it’s OK to get shut down a couple times,” she says. “You’re gonna make it, you’re gonna find your rhythm and you’re gonna make your dreams come true, you just need to keep at it.”
It’s a powerful message from a woman who, over the past couple years, has proven herself capable of working through heartache, trauma, staleness, and isolation. Maybe that’s because she keeps wanting to evolve: a quality that puts her in a class above your average pop star. She’s constantly expanding her artistry by learning new dances and movements that are integral to her work, as anyone who marveled at her arresting pole dancing routines during her Magdalene era can attest to. For that live tour, she learned martial arts and sword play that she worked into her stage performances. She even recently learned archery for her “meta angel” video (and got a bullseye the first time she did it, thanks very much). She’s a staunch believer in bettering oneself and taking ownership over your life instead of, for instance, looking to the stars for answers: a theme she plays around with on CAPRISONGS. The mixtape’s name is a play on her astrological sign, Capricorn, and the songs are peppered with zodiac references, including an entire spoken-word interlude of a chart reading. And yet, she’s casting her own fate, stars and planetary alignments be damned.
“Maybe I made CAPRISONGS at a really difficult time in my life because I’m a Capricorn and because I am a workaholic, and that means that I am stubborn and I am a fighter—these things that are attributed to a Capricorn,” she muses. “Or, maybe I made CAPRISONGS because otherwise I literally wouldn’t have been able to get through the past two years, and maybe I made it out of desperation or a need for connection or to find myself again through my art. Maybe I made it because it felt like the only desperate option in finding happiness and content during this time. I don’t know, but I can attribute it to both, honestly.”
And maybe, she made it because of that pull to keep evolving and keep unlocking the newest, most potent parts of herself.
“My best self as an artist is, like, a disruptor,” she says. “Somebody who [is] not afraid to be completely different to everyone else. Even if it feels mad at the time, to push myself, to think outside of the box and not to just deliver the same thing over and over again. To keep on growing, to remain a craftswoman. To be part of the cultural DNA, and sometimes even changing the cultural DNA.
“That’s who my best self is. On a good day.”
