Afterlight is a real account of one woman’s journey from impressionable 16-year-old bound into a toxic working and romantic relationship with a man 23 years her senior, to a brand new artist and free woman finding her own beginning.
It's 25-years since Thea Gilmore embarked on a career in music.
For 23 of them, she made records that are treasured by loyal fans and mark her out as a singer-songwriter of searing talent.
But something wasn't right? behind the public image of the fearless singer songwriter, she was living a life contained.
Although she has an incredible 18 albums to her name it's only now that she has freed herself of that control that she has been able to complete a different kind of debut ? not so much a new artist as an artist renewed.
She says: "Now is a time to draw lines.
Now is a time for an end and a beginning.
There will be two releases.
The last Thea Gilmore album and the first Afterlight album.
Welcome back to the start?." Two records, released together, that share the same subject matter but stylistically are worlds apart.
Self-titled Afterlight was made in 2020; its companion piece The Emancipation of Eva Grey was imagined 100 years ago, at the height of the Jazz Age, with two tracks that feature on the soundtrack to the new film adaptation of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit (2020) starring Dan Stevens, Isla Fisher and Judi Dench.
For the first time since she was 16-years-old Thea Gilmore has been able to create music on her own terms, free to make her own choices, liberated from other people's fears and no longer hiding from her own in the name of her art.
At long last, she has been able to completely immerse herself in making her music exactly as she wants to.
And what music it is ? enough for two lifetimes.
The songs sprang from the end of Thea's 23-year relationship with her producer/husband, a collaboration mired in coercive control, mistreatment and infidelity that left her "hollowed out, mostly air, a lacework of a person held together by bones and the threads of a story." Gilmore goes onto say that "One of the things I have always loved and hated in equal measure about being a writer, is the capacity to hide and call it art?I am good at it ? creating a small beauty and blurring your vision just a little so you can't see the picture too clearly.
"It was my own sort of control I suppose.
There was a safety in it and it stopped anyone looking in too far.
I gave them a perfect picture of the headstrong, feisty artist because that was who I wanted to be.
"I won't aggrandise what happened to me (or perhaps reduce victims of far more extreme behaviour) by calling it abuse, but it took 23 years of my life.
It is a bereavement.
Time and self-lost at the hands of someone else.
It is theft.
"It seemed appropriate that the last album I make as Thea Gilmore amplifies the voice of someone else while the first Afterlight album is transparent and brutal and only me.
"There is always a story though.
We are all built from stories, it's how we make sense of the world.
As for my story, it's early days.
I am still mostly air, but for the first time in my life, I'm learning how to write myself back in".
