Sally Potter Internationally Acclaimed Filmmaker & Musician Announces New Album, ANATOMY

Internationally acclaimed filmmaker Sally Potter today announces the release of her new album ANATOMY due out May 2 via Bella Union and available to pre-order here. To accompany the announcement Sally has shared “Coming Home“, a track that weaves a story of grief and desolation around an arpeggiated piano melody and an upright bass groove punctuated with skittering drums, as Sally tells the story of the relationship between a lonely person and a beloved tree in emotional detail.

Listen / Share: “Coming Home”

“I wrote ‘Coming Home’ as a song of loss about an ancient tree that has been cut down to make way for a trainline,” explains Sally. “I found myself contemplating trees and the profound interdependent relationship we have with them, personally and globally. I wanted to evoke the relentless sound of an approaching train with rolling drums and a wailing guitar, to express a state of furious mourning for destroyed forests – ‘the ones that breathe for you and me’. But ‘Coming Home’ is also a song of private grief for loved ones cut down before their time, whether human or of any species.”

Sally Potter has been exploring themes of human connectedness, morality, and mortality in a career that has spanned four decades, encompassing works as varied as the speculative historical epic Orlando and the acerbically witty comedy-drama The Party. In addition to her film work, Sally is a musician and singer-songwriter, a parallel vocation that began with improvised performances and concerts in the 1970s and 1980s and continued through composing music for the soundtracks of many of her critically lauded films. Her second album, ANATOMY is an entirely new affair for the multi-disciplinary artist—an eclectic and boldly visionary collection of songs that seek to tackle our species’ symbiotic relationship with the Earth, all while reflecting on the emotional threads that intertwine us all as people who share this planet.

The album contains shimmers of Billie Holiday’s empathy and wisdom, Patti Smith’s poetry and Laurie Anderson’s meticulous euphoria: all artists that have inspired Sally’s music in one way or another. After working with the Roma band Taraf de Haidouks and the legendary string ensemble the Kronos Quartet on her film The Man Who CriedSally was taken by both groups’ approaches to music, which have also found their way onto ANATOMY.

ANATOMY leaves us not with a sense of impending doom, but a reinvigorated mandate to search for answers within ourselves. “I don’t think there is, at the moment, a more urgent theme to tackle, poetically or lyrically, than the fate of the earth itself for future generations,” says Sally. But these songs are not about making people feel guilty, or afraid—but rather, calling us to wake up to where we are, look each other in the eye, grieve together for what’s already lost and somehow find the ground on which we can start to be hopeful.”

ANATOMY tracklist:

1. Anatomy
2. Coming Home
3. Words
4. My Earth
5. Carmegeddon
6. Walk Away
7. Time To Go
8. Come Back
9. Honey
10. Oh Daughter
11. Elegy
12. The Fall

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