Unfolding Ailsa Tully’s sound map

These are the parting words on Ailsa Tully’s debut album. It’s a happy shrug punctuated with a chuckle. A moment of levity courtesy of her dad, Colin Tully. After an arrestingly beautiful, time-stands-still capstone called “He’s Leaving”, Colin’s voice gently nudges you back into your body, makes everything feel okay. The younger Tully calls the track a “collaboration from the grave,” her lilting, mournful cello following after her dad’s feathery piano lead, bright and light.

“Oh well, that was easy enough” is an understatement and then some. The words Ailsa Tully mutters at the start of the track – “Oh dear, I’m not ready” – more aptly sum up the last few years. Even though she meant I’m not ready to start the song, this sentence has taken on a double meaning. “That bit, for me, works on lots of levels, because I’m not ready for him to die,” Tully tells me a few weeks ahead of the album’s release. “That’s what it felt like. And he’s like, oh well, that was easy. Just two very different voices in that.” She couldn’t remove either voice if she wanted. Both are on the original piano track. But I’d like to see anyone try to script a more perfect call and response, one that you sense is emblematic of their relationship.

“He’s Leaving” – a piece of music her dad composed, a recording made years ago – wasn’t how Tully originally planned to close the album. “I wrote a song about him dying and it was so painful, and also it didn’t really feel quite like him somehow,” she says. “Then I found this recording and realised I could actually just play with him and this could be his song, kind of playing himself out in a way.” She added a new cello line after the fact, preserving his original performance. “We played so much together. That was how I started playing music. It felt the right way to end.”

Colin’s easy-enough shrug gives such a poignant sense of closure to the album and the previous four years of Tully’s life, absorbing the pain with a smile into the sunset, an ear-hug. It has not been easy to get here – for Tully to extricate herself from a body of work that’s been essentially ten years in the making. If you’ve been following her work, you’ll know that this debut full-length is overdue. She launched her career back in 2015, towards the end of her Goldsmiths studies, and has been leaving a breadcrumb trail of standalone singles for almost as long. There are nine on Bandcamp, released between 2019 and 2022, plus a four-song EP, Holy Isle.

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Around the time her dad died, Tully was dropped by her label and had to take a cinematically depressing job as a bauble sorter – it’s a thing. “It was where Christmas came to die,” she groans of the factory, which took her two hours across London and required her to colour-match lorry loads of baubles from the city’s corporate offices. She’d clock out at the end of each back-breaking day caked in sparkles and glitter, then ride the Piccadilly Line the two hours back east. (The cost of your office’s Christmas piss-up!)

“I was having a really shit time,” Tully elaborates. “It was a rough four years. I was writing a lot but it felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. I was very lost. It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted.” She didn’t release any music for four years – her last single was “Mothering” in 2022 – instead “trying to deal with life more than anything else.” She and her partner moved a million times, every six months, she says. Her music career had always been London-based, but they needed a change, heading first to her grandma’s house in Wales, where she immersed herself in the Cardiff scene, and then onwards to a commune of higgledy-piggledy houses on a nature reserve in Bristol. Curiously enough, Colin Tully had lived nearby – one street over – decades before his daughter arrived.

“It’s that thing where you can’t talk to someone anymore and say, ‘I went to your old house, this happened to me,’” Tully says. “It was like, where is home now? Now that you’ve lost this huge pillar of your life. Like, what do you do? Where do you go? I think it’s something that we don’t talk about at all with grief. This sense of, where is home? – where the hell is it? – I’ve fucking looked everywhere. I felt like I needed it more than ever to feel stability after my life had changed so much, and trying to make sense of what that looked like.” Womb Room, the title of this album, is as much about grief as it is her search for home – really, they are one and the same.

Tully has always written at the convergence of place, sound, and memory – a quest written in the stars when she was named Ailsa, after the Ailsa Craig island in Scotland. Her process involves collecting auditory evidence from places, then moulding those snapshots into sound maps that chart the there-and-then: a tornado of bees in an underground hive, a ceiling of birdsong, a percolating river, the dribble of reposed chatter lining the canals of East London. This is the defining feature of her otherwise uncategorisable, singular sound: field recordings. That and her unconventional approach to bass guitar; having started out on cello, she leads most songs with intriguing, inverted bass chords, often climbing high up the neck. Yet her music is melodic, unpretentious, concise – her fluency as a pop composer dovetailing seamlessly with her blue-sky archival method.

Tully’s search for home is currently paused in Yorkshire, in a flat above a honey shop. “I grew up in a really green and remote place, and I think I needed to be back somewhere I could go for a walk and there’s trees. Not having to be in such an intense place – not having to work so intensely to make everything make sense,” she explains. Though she’s settled and happy in her small town, she concedes that “it could be anywhere, really. A lesson from the album and from my life around that has been, you can’t really find home apart from in yourself.”

That’s what the album’s warm, waltzing centrepiece, “Choosing”, is all about. “If we were one and I believed / then all of that would fall away / I wouldn’t waste my life away,” she hums kindly in the verse as brushes flutter on the snare and the bass loops a satisfying carousel of notes. It has a little more forward momentum than her usual stuff, she thinks, drawing a comparison to her 2020 single “Edge”, which was similarly bouncy as it sought to overcome learnt behaviours that trail you from childhood.

“Choosing”’s home-is-within-you epiphany was sparked by a “hippy-dippy” therapy technique, Tully tells me. It followed a panic attack she experienced during a weekend of solitude. “I had to go into the room and imagine that my child self was there and my old-woman self was there,” she says. That’s what the “if we were one” lyric means. It isn’t about love. Though on second thoughts, it totally is.

“It was so weird,” she continues. “We all held hands and I was no longer alone because it was my past self and my future self with me. It’s such a nice feeling. I have been through all this stuff and I have so much stuff – hopefully – left to come from my life. You meet those people again – who were you, who are you gonna be, who are you now – context for your life and this shared experience that you have with yourself. Since then I haven’t felt so bad about being alone.”

The album fades up inside a more literal home. “Hendre” means winter residence, Tully explains, from the tradition where farmers would come down from the mountains for the cold months. She grew up in one, in a remote Welsh valley. “Hendre” is the first of two wordless piano tracks that bookend the album, the other being the “He’s Leaving” epilogue. She recorded on a venerable baby grand passed down through generations of Tullys. “When we got it down from Glasgow it had all these little toys in it from the ’50s,” she recalls. “My great great aunt was a teacher and all these kids would have left plastic toys in it. It was amazing. It has quite a specific sound.”

You’d assume “Hendre” and “He’s Leaving” featured the same pianist, Colin Tully. They are such a neat pair. But in “Hendre”, it’s Ailsa’s playing that refracts off the walls, the frequencies pooling together due to the natural reverb and leave-as-is production. It evokes an idle weekend morning in a room washed with sunshine, the window open to welcome in the birdsong choir. “That wasn’t my dad playing, but it’s a song I’ve had going around for a while on the piano and it felt reminiscent of the way he played,” Tully says, adding that she wanted to create “a dreamy space. All the recordings are from the river at the end of the garden, so it’s very much that sleepy, hazy, am-I-a-child thing.”

Tully’s longest collection of songs before this was the Holy Isle EP, released in 2021. Even within that quarter-hour, she expertly toyed with dynamics, shifting through moods, but otherwise, she hasn’t been able to explore the longform freedom an album allows. She’s always wanted to trim the fat. Not because she wants radio-friendly singles, but because she hates self indulgence. She writes deliberately, and that’s echoed by the directness of her titles. “Greedy”, “Edge”, “Drive”, “Hendre”, “Again”, “Choosing”, “See” – every word counts.

“I always feel this pressure to be clearer about the intention of the song,” she says. “My songs always get shorter and shorter as I try to streamline them. [The album] was our chance to explore these little pockets of world” – to spend time in each rockpool, turning over more stones than usual, before moving on. “It was indulging my history. Rather than making a little ship-shape package of a song.”

Tully surveyed ten years of field recordings for the record, her laptop overflowing with files such as ‘best birdsong #1’ and ‘best birdsong #2’. The inclusion of other people, wildlife, auditory artifacts harvested from formative locations, contributes to the album feeling lived in and alive, like the buzzing circus of a wildflower meadow. It’s a hugely comforting, enveloping record throughout. Each piece seems to build an orb around you, easing life’s urgency, reminding you to be patient and curious and creative. “St Cuckoo” is one of the sparser instrumental interludes and features a special guest star: “a very loud bird.” She made the recording at a church near where she grew up and sang as a child.

“My dad was doing a saxophone lesson in there with his student, and I was just in the graveyard,” she remembers. “At the time I was really enjoying phonography and getting obsessed with sounds of places and history and how it’s all intermingled in our lives, what places really mean, and memory. I thought it was funny because the place is called St Paddock, and I was like, it can be St Cuckoo. It’s there, why not, he’s making a noise” – the cuckoo, that is – “he’s kind of involved in the music.”

Then there’s a recording she made on the canal walk in Hackney – someone in front of her pulling along one of those old-lady bags with the wheels, she recalls. Fascinated by the staccato chick-a-dunk rhythm, she threads it throughout “See”, the final track before “He’s Leaving”. “See” is the album’s one traditional love song, and despite the out-and-about inspiration, it’s where the album winds down for sleep, the hard work completed.

Earlier in the album, we hear a woman’s voice reading a book about traits of the Cancer zodiac sign while another laughs in the background. That’s the basis for “Cancerian Mother”, a wink at us July-born folks’ overbearing, homebird tendencies – “I cry all the time, everyday, big crier, watery woman,” Tully says, the book outlining “these silly things like if you’re a Cancer you waddle more. And I definitely waddle, I’m a waddly person. Your face is like a moon. There’s all these really specific things that unfortunately do fit me.”

The Cancerian mother’s offspring “won’t get away without wearing a thick sweater on a cold night, his mittens and scarf in the snow, and his galoshes in the rain,” the friend recites through a smile alongside the tweeting of birds and multiple arpeggiated keyboard ostinatos that lattice together. “It feels like it’s tied into ‘Womb Room’,” Tully says of the book extract, “and the questions around kids and life and changes and home and progression.”

“Womb Room” is the title track, one of the headier, electronic-leaning cuts. “I am the age where people are getting married and having babies, and where am I? I’m still confused about where I’m supposed to be,” Tully says of the song’s origin. The “womb living room” she sings of is a limbo; “It’s kind of this foetal stage, and all the things that wombs represent: that time you have, and birth, and death,” she says. “Something about it was very evocative to the space I’ve been in.”

Tully stands in a similarly liminal space on the album cover, hiding in a red riding hood-esque coat, confronting a looming tree after dark. They did the shoot in Springfield Park in Hackney while a motorcycle gang made roaring loops around its perimeter. It’s not quite the city; definitely not the countryside. Tully says the shot speaks to the dichotomy, the tension of the two – two of her homes fighting for authority. Perhaps the red-hooded figure is her alter ego – the one leading her into/out of the woods; the one that simultaneously embodies the scared child, the learned elder, and the Ailsa Tully who is everywhere at once.

“It’s funny, how to marry your live self with your artist self,” Tully goes on, self-deprecatingly citing her just-a-jumper onstage attire and how it’s at odds with the album’s aesthetic. “When I’m doing live shows, I’m so casual to the point of being like, is this acceptable? It’s so incredibly mundane, but I kind of enjoy that side of it. It’s nice having a couple of dimensions to people. No one is ever that ethereal entity. Everyone does boring shit. Maybe that’s not true – maybe Kate Bush doesn’t do the dishes.”

Perhaps there’s enough novelty in her live shows though. The album launch – totally on-brand – will take place in a cave. You have to “go through a tunnel to get there,” she says, “but you don’t have to wear the mining outfit with the little torch.” It’ll be a full-circle moment among many, given her first show after university was in the same cave, over in the Forest of Dean. “Now I’m playing again ten years later. It’s a completion cycle, I hope,” she says. “Now that I’m coming back to music again, what were the things I loved? Why did I even do it at all? And I think it was so that I could play in a cave,” she laughs.

Besides cave concerts, Tully says her friends are at the heart of it, a reason to play on. We feel their influence across the album, and not only via the book readings. She’s been playing with Heledd Owen and Gillie Rowland for almost a decade, Vince Grande for nearly as long. Her partner, Jovis Lane, has a big role, co-producing, playing guitar, harmonising softly on “Choosing”. It was a friend who pointed out that Tully had been in a skin-shedding process these last four years, something that’s almost impossible to realise yourself, until a trusted confidant turns your head so you can see what you’ve stepped out of.

“My friend was talking about shedding the skin of the Chinese new year,” Tully says. “We’ve been in Snake, and then we’ve been shedding our skin, and now we’re in Horse. I didn’t really think about it until the day of ending the shed, but I do feel that a big shift in me happened. I do actually want to make something happen.”

By something, she means the album. She’s ready to set Womb Room free. Some of these sounds have fluttered around her head for ten years before she was able to rescue them, give them a permanent resting place. Many were captured by a person she used to be, in places to which she can no longer return, with people who are somewhere else. Womb Room recontextualises those memories, makes them more than once-upon-a-time vignettes, more than just The Past. The music embalms the family tree of fingers that have danced along the keys of that toy-filled piano, and the bardo duet between her and her father – the person who inspired her to make music in the first place. This is the end of a mammoth, years-in-the-making cartography project. Tully is ready this time.

“I’m shedding the album. In a good way,” she says. “I’m really glad it’s coming out. I could have released it at other times and found it really painful. But somehow I don’t at the moment. So I’m making the most of it.” In this fleeting acceptance of what-is, not what-was or what-will-be, she folds away her sound map, guided by its familiar creases. Its work is done. From here on, Ailsa Tully has got to lead the way. Sounds easy enough, right?