CELLAR DARLING Interview transcript.

Transcript of interview with Anna Murphy of CELLAR DARLING. 25/02/2019.
​Full article here.

CELLAR DARLING Interview (Anna Murphy)
​
MAL-
On the line with me right now Anna Murphy. We're going to talk about CELLAR DARLING. Anna, thanks for taking my call.
ANNA-
Thanks for having me. 
MAL-
It's a great pleasure. Now, you were in a musical family from a very young age. Tell us quickly about that.
ANNA-
Yeah, I basically grew up in the opera. Both my parents are opera singers. My stepdad is an opera director. So yeah, we always had different kinds of music blasting out of each person's room. It was pretty crazy. I was just surrounded by music and art all the time. And I actually wanted to take the academic path because I was sick and tired of all this art and I wanted to study philosophy. I gave up playing all of the instruments that were kind of, well not forced upon me, that sounds very harsh, but it's kind of just evident that you're going to play something as a child. And so I decided to go to gymnasium and I had Latin as my main subject and all of that crazy stuff. And then I just left school when I was 16 to join a metal band, so the whole academic thing didn't really work out. 
MAL-
You mentioned music blasting from everyone's room. What sort of music was blasting from your room? 
ANNA-
And it depends when, like, what point in my musical (?) As a teenager, angry teenager, I listened to a lot of black metal. I had that face for quite a long time. And I've always listened to heavy music, but I've also always loved classical music. So I wasn't, you know, rebellious in the sense that I wouldn't listen to the same things as my parents.
Apart from the black metal phase I've always been very open for music. I've always listened to music and not genres. So it could really be anything from pop to metal to classical stuff, religious, anything. 
MAL-
The band we're going to be talking about is CELLAR DARLING. Now you're in that with Merlin, and Evo. Now tell us about how you three came together. 
ANNA-
Well, CELLAR DARLING was born out of a split with our former band, ELUVEITIE, which we were all part of for over 10 years. And the three of us always had kind of a special connection. We've been friends for a very long time and we had the idea to do a side project of some sort at some point anyways, and that side project turned into the main project very unexpectedly and very fast.
Yeah, so that's how the band came about. It wasn't planned in any way. But yeah. 
MAL-
Did you all leave it at the same time? Or did one leave and the others followed? How did it come about? 
ANNA-
Basically, to put it very bluntly, Merlin was kicked out of the band and Evo and I left in in unison with Merlin.
MAL-
Now you mentioned this project came about very quickly. It certainly did seem that way from over here. How did the name come about? 
ANNA-
As you maybe might know, I released a solo album in 2013 which was called CELLAR DARLING and that that kind of caused a lot of confusion understandably because then we created a band with that name. And the thing was that it's always had a special ring for me, these two words combined. I don't know why and but the you know the guys obviously agreed with me so there has to be something there. We had a long list of band names and just to add to it it's incredibly hard to come up with a good band these days because just you know everything's taken. So we really didn't know what to do honestly and CELLAR DARLING was there from the beginning on and it just stuck with us until the end and it it developed into a special meaning CELLAR is something dark, DARLING is something beautiful and light and we just think that is what our music sounds like. 
MAL-
I certainly agree with you. Tell us about the first album 'This Is The Sound', which came out June 2017. That must have come about pretty quickly as well.
ANNA-
Yeah, we're just very creative people. We have a lot of ideas. And I don't know, the album is very eclectic, even though it carries the very confident name, 'This Is The Sound'. I think we're still kind of searching for our sound on there. But we were just happy that we came up with our own sound that is very unique. And we didn't decide on a genre. We didn't decide that we, we didn't want to sound like ELUVEITIE, we just did our own thing. And it developed completely, naturally, completely organically in a very collaborative effort in writing songs. I think that that's also how our storytelling concept developed. We at some point we had to ask ourselves, 'Okay, what is the image of the band? What message are we sending the people?' and I knew from the start that I didn't want to write too personal lyrics, you know, from my perspective, kind of the singer songwriter thing, I want it to be stories. 
MAL-
Well, the new album, 'The Spell' certainly takes you away. I've heard it. I like it. Congratulations to you on that. Tell us about the concept behind that
ANNA-
The concept of 'The Spell' is actually based on a very old motif that has been around for very long. I don't know if it's going to ring a bell with you, but 'Death And The Maiden'. It is a classical motif that has been around since the Renaissance art times. It has been used in music and poetry, really just about everything concerning art and I wanted to take this motif and create my own story with it and this story being of a girl that falls in love with the personification of death. And we wrote the music according to this lyrical concept, and the track list was even there before we wrote the songs. So the approach on this album was very different and a very new one for us. 
MAL-
Now, you mentioned art. I remember reading online about the involvement of the artist, Costin. I'm not gonna try and pronounce his last name because I'll screw it up. Tell us about tell us about the role he played in all of this. 
ANNA-
He played a huge role and because we made the deliberate decision to not have the band in any of the artwork. We're not in the booklet, we're not in the videos because we feel it would it would take the importance of the concept away because what we want to do with this story is we want to take the listener into a different world and having us there would destroy it because we don't want to bring you back to this world and so it was all the more important that the visuals are just done well and done by a real artist that Costin just is. The great thing about working with him is that you know he doesn't need a lot of guidelines you can just send him the lyrics and the songs and he's going to create something absolutely amazing which he did and it's as if he was in my head while I worked on the story.
MAL-
Is that scary or not?
ANNA-
I think it's just amazing how, you know, artists can connect in that way. 
MAL-
Yes. What's in store for CELLAR DARLING when this album comes out? Are you touring? Where are you touring? What's the deal? 
ANNA-
Our first tour is going to be in the UK starting in March, so that's going to be the first chance for people to witness 'The Spell' live. And we just got a tour offer in now that we confirmed with KATATONIA, which is in May, a few European shows. And that's really exciting for us. 
MAL-
That's going to be big isn't it?. 
ANNA-
Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's so great to tour with a band that we that we've been listening to for so long.
So that's that. Then we have some European headline shows as well. Some summer festivals and about the rest, that's actually still a work in progress. We're still trying to, you know, cover as many areas as possible. So I really hope that we will come back to Australia as well. 
MAL-
Let's hope so. Where are you basing yourselves? Based in Switzerland or we based somewhere else? 
ANNA-
Yeah. Evo and I are based in Switzerland and Merlin, he doesn't really have a home he kind of just travels and, you know, does the air b&b thing and yeah
MAL-
What a great life, hey?
ANNA-
Yeah
MAL-
Anna from CELLAR DARLING. Fantastic to talk to you today. Good luck with the new album 'The Spell' which is out on March 22ND. As I mentioned, I've heard it through the record company I really like it a really wish you the best of luck with it. And thanks for talking to me today. 
ANNA-
Thank you so much.