Award-winning singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Michele Stodart recently released her third album, Invitation via Keepsake Recordings.

Recorded at Echo Zoo Studios, Invitation is Michele’s third Solo album alongside her band The Magic Numbers. It’s been 7 years since Stodart’s last solo release and the album is written, arranged and produced by Michele, with additional production from long-standing collaborator Dave Izumi Lynch.

The album features Michele on vocals, guitars, bass and percussion, and has appearances from her brother and fellow member of The Magic Numbers, Romeo Stodart (piano), Andy Bruce (piano), Alice Phelps (harp), Will Harvey (violin and viola), CJ Jones (drums), Nick Pini (double bass), Joe Harvey-Whyte (pedal steel), Dave Izumi Lynch (synths).

The album artwork and illustrations of the crow, drawn by Joni Belaruski, symbolise some of the key themes of the album: the crow represents transformation, change and freedom.

We caught up with Michele to talk about Invitation and the meaning behind some of the songs. Our conversation took us to the struggles of the stigma that surrounds touring musicians who are also parents.

Michele was an absolute joy to talk to, it felt so relaxed and I could have happily chatted all day about her career and motherhood as I am a mother herself who struggles with the balance of work and motherhood. We aren’t unique to those struggles of course, just its rarely spoken of!

Invitation is a therapeutic, serene and captivating album. It takes you on a scenic route throughout Michele’s personal life over the years and is one of those albums that we will learn from the more we hear it and will mean more the more we hear it!

Catch Michele on tour over the next few months. Buy tickets here

Hi Michele – how are you?

Yeah, I’m ok!

Are you ready for album release day?

Yes excited! It feels like Christmas in a way, it’s that kind of anticipation.

This week the video for These Bones came out…

Yes! It’s been nice hearing everyone’s comments about that! There has been really nice comments – people saying it’s moving and really matched the song. The intention was to go deeper with the story in a visual way to tell more about it!

Tell us about the video, filming it….

The opening line of the song says “in our double bed you lie” so it’s like at night. I had this vision that kept coming back to me, this image of “what if we were to get a double bed in the middle of the forest?”. The forest to me is just this wild abandoned kind of place. There’s a freeness to nature and I wanted to capture that kind of rescue of a difficult situation into that freeness and finding yourself, connecting back to who you are basically. That’s kind of what I feel with nature and just being able to go to those places and ‘These Bones’ has so much of that to it. It’s that sort of self rescue, that self discovery, that realisation of a situation in the relationship in this particular time in your life is not working and you need to get out of there as soon as possible before it makes you disappear in some ways. For me, it was like a personal experience of being less and less who I was over a long period of time and I wanted to kind of talk about that within the song. Make a cool song out of it and a cool video too haha!

I love the video and the song but all I could think of at one point was the amount of bugs and leaves that must have been stuck in your hair…how long did it take to get all of that out?

Yeah… a long time haha! Once I had shared the idea with my friends Emma and Niamh who filmed the video, they didn’t laugh at me or make me feel like I was crazy or anything which was a good thing. So the ideas were all like encouraged. They wanted to go with it and make it happen which was already the beauty of the project. Once we did that we would find the location and realised we would have to shoot a lot of it at night time because of the track but we wanted to have a lot of the band scenes in the daytime. So we ended up shooting throughout the day really early to 2 in the morning. We had some people walking past wondering what we were doing haha. It took about six of us to get the piano out of the van. It was a little bit dangerous but we made it happen. Then the double bed as well, we found a cool spot for it to go down. I was crawling on the ground so I had a lot of scratches in the morning and different insect bites and things like that. But it was all worth it haha! We woke up the next day with slugs all in our snack bags.

Gross! I would be sick!

This is your 3rd solo album, which has taken 7 years in between the last and now?

Yes! So obviously Covid added an extra 2 or 3 years. I had these songs for a while as well. I went into the studio and I recorded about 20 or so songs and then I sort of sat with what songs were going to be on the record. Also at the same time I was touring with the band (The Magic Numbers) and doing different things as well on different projects. It took me seven years to release it which was seven years from the last record and then three years to actually release this one from when it first started recording so it was a long kind of process of actually wanting to put out another solo record. I think in the interim as well, I sort of loved putting out Pieces, my last record , I loved touring it. It had difficult times of touring and I didn’t know whether I wanted to do another solo album but it always comes back to the songs for me because I am always writing. I have to put a record out to get these songs out there really and so it was a nice kind of way to put this album out and it definitely needed to be released.

You said you had 20 plus songs recorded for it, so how do you narrow it down?

I wanted to tell a story with this album. I wanted to have an arc that on the record it goes from one situation to another and there’s a sort of transformation as such that happens to me. I hope people can hear that within the songs as well and take in their own journey with it as well. It was choosing the songs that work together really well and that told that story and told that journey! There’s loads of other ones to come out in another record haha!

As the album tells as story does that mean that when you play it live, it will be in tracklisting order?

I will be yeah, for the album launch and for the album tour that is coming up. I will be playing it together in its order which will be a first for me because I haven’t ever done that really!

I am going to come and catch that tour in Stroud. You have played here many times over the years. First time that I saw you here was at The Convent for a songwriters event which also featured Kathryn Williams and you both got the giggles on stage so badly that you both had to walk off stage.

Hahahaha! Yeah we still talk about that actually because when we play together, haha we look at each other, well it happens to me and I feel like it happens to her as well, I think there’s a reflection, a solid memory of that night that when we look at each other on stage now we are like “not again, not again” it’s almost like that night had to happen for us to kind of be on guard that this could happen! I love playing with Kath and we do get in some serious giggle fits together, like properly laughing, in pain laughter. We are really good friends and our journey of friendship has kind of built throughout the years which has been amazing! We’ve written a whole album together, we just need to get it out. The songs are so good, it’s a proper song record. We are excited about it and we talk about it all the time but we are just busy doing other records you know?

Of course and you are still with The Magic Numbers so schedules must get very busy indeed.

Yeah, we are still touring together and we are actually about to write the next record. We are going into the studio to do some writing and we have some shows maybe in December.

I saw you years ago but more recently at Nibley Festival in Stroud. That was great!

That’s a lovely festival! It was a lot of fun! The guy who was running it, he was lovely, really kind guy!

Back to the album, I know that you have said some bits touch on motherhood. It’s always such an interesting subject for me because at times I really struggle with the balance of doing what I do and being a stay at home mum. Touring artists often get frowned upon for being away and I wondered how you deal with the balance, and everything that comes with being a touring musician?

I instantly want to ask you questions about your motherhood haha

Please do ha

Working as a mum, a single mum with my daughter who is now 15 – we are in this little flat together which is lovely and we have learned each others ways. It’s almost like we are room mates now which is cool. I have always found this and being a musician and a mum, I think Laura Veirs does an amazing podcast on this, it’s called Midnight Lightning. She talks about artists and musicians, a lot of it, people don’t consider the arts as actual work, as a real career. It’s almost considered as a hobby in a sense in some ways. I feel that there’s that balance of trying to fight that, especially as a woman as well, to fight that barrier of being a mum, being 100 per cent a mum but also wanting a career and wanting to do the thing that you love and essentially makes you part of who you are and that you want to portray to your kids. There’s a lot of stigma around it and I found it a lot when I would drop my daughter to school and people would say “how can you leave your daughter alone, I could never do that”. I found that really tricky, and growing up with that, also, I was quite a young mum so I was probably the only one in my circle that had a kid. On the song, ‘Push and Pull’, it talks about the relationship between finding out and being at peace with the fact that I can have two loves, the other being music, that I passionately love and have been doing since I was 16 and also the fact that I can be a mum and love that too! Both worlds sometimes doesn’t always collide together, it doesn’t always work easily because music takes me away from my daughter sometimes and sometimes she comes with me. Ultimately, that understanding that both things can exist.

Well people shouldn’t judge you because everybody who has a job, are spending time away from their children for a certain amount of time one way or another. If you work a 9 – 5 and your children are in nursery for example all week during those hours, then those hours accumulate to probably the same amount of time an artist may be away on tour and that tour won’t be throughout the year which likely means a large portion of your time is actually spent at home. But people judge for that one week you may be away! It doesn’t really make sense as every parent who works has to work and will be at work for a large portion of time and home for a large portion whether that’s the mornings and evenings every week day or all the time apart from on tour!

I know! It’s a really strange one because you end up justifying. Just like you said, this week I have been home all week, last week too. Then I will have months where I am at home and then I will have times when I have a week away or something. You end up kind of going through these weird details of “sometimes I am here” I think if it was a man it would be different.

It would be! A dad takes the kid to the park and they get celebrated!

Exactly hahaha! It’s standard surely that that should be happening?

Yep and then there’s me, school run, hair badly brushed, practically in pyjamas, moisturiser not properly rubbed in and grunting at people that I am absolutely fine when I am exhausted and muttering to myself that “I am a good mum” as I give my child a kit kat to stay calm on walk home from school.

Haha, honestly Hannah I have been there same and we have to tell ourselves we are good mums “I am a good mum honestly, I am here constantly”.

I feel guilty being on my phone sometimes and then I remember that I am with them 24/7.

Even that is a big one, self care. Especially when they are small, it’s hard to even give yourself that time. I always struggled with that, allowing myself the time to switch off, to watch the show that you want to watch, to have that long indulgent bath.

It’s funny because I read somewhere recently, it never occurred to me before but it was a meme that said “when you’re a mum, you finally understand why Mama Bear’s porridge went cold”

Yes!!! Yes!!! Hahahaha! Exactly!!! That is so true!

Honestly, I could talk motherhood all day as this is so refreshing!!! I have to move on though!

What song are most excited for people to hear off the album? Or is it all?

Obviously collectively the whole album, I think they all kind of work as a whole but one particular one I love is a song called ‘The House’. I don’t want to say that it’s one of my favourites because they are all like little kids really but because I haven’t played it much either, it’s kind of one of those ones that sort of, well it’s a special one about this house that kind of remains, stays there whilst everything/everyone leaves it in a way. All the photographs are still in the same place and the dust settles and there’s a sort of hauntingness about it. I guess it’s like a metaphor for mental health as well. The things that stay with us that we have to kind of learn to forget and move on from. That one I think, I am interested on what people think about it!

I am sure many people will connect/relate to it which must be lovely to hear?

Yeah, hope so. I think with this album, it was trying to make a deep connection. I wanted to make a deep connection with myself and with people who heard it. During lockdown I started a patron. I realised that that is the way that I connect, to actually have a proper conversation with someone. I love finding out about what is going on for someone. Someone’s stories, how their day was instead of just things that are on the surface. I think people are interesting. As you get older, we kind of crave a long lasting connection! I am a listener.

That’s nice! I am too open about how I feel most of the time haha!

It’s good that you can say how it is for you because for a long time I was like, I would always say “yeah I am cool” that was my default until a really good friend of mine said “hang on, you always say that you’re cool, but what’s actually going in with you?”

A lot of it is, we don’t want to take up space. Even doing this album and having that sort of attention I suppose or the highlight on these songs is hard as well. I have to remind myself that “you’re trying to say something here” those who want to listen will listen and will take what they want from it.

The kickstarter must have given you a boost because that did incredibly well and so quickly too,

I know! Oh my god, it really did, it really really did and I think I needed that in a way. Like you say, it gave me a boost of realising that there are people out there that actually want to hear the music. There are people out there that want a record, they want music and they want to connect with something. Also it was a lovely way to start it , the whole idea before like I said was to make a connection and with this album, invite people in to the whole process and so it gave me that kind of “Ok! This is ok what I am doing, this is good!”. I couldn’t believe how well it went!

Well it must be hard putting yourself out there!

It is definitely, it really is! It’s anything you put your heart into and time and attention. You’ve got a protection over it in a sense. You want to hold it and protect it and nurture it but then you have to set it free. There’s always that worry and that fear that it falls bad and that’s ok because obviously you’re not doing it for that but you’re doing it for the art of making music. A lot of songwriting for me is reflecting and processing through stuff and being able to then share it with someone else and them say to you “oh this made me think of this relationship” or “it’s got me through this really hard time” there’s nothing like it really and all the worry and the fear and the up late at night wondering how it’s going is worth it!

Well it’s a beautiful album so definitely worth it and I look forward to hearing it live in Stroud in January so thank you for still thinking of Stroud!

I love playing at The Prince Albert actually! I have played there with Kath (Williams) it’s lovely, it’s a really nice venue.

I still haven’t been despite it being down the road ish! Five mins drive!

Oh cool, it’s really cute. Lottie who owns it is lovely! We are playing lots of independent venues on the tour.

That’s great! Thank you so much for chatting today! It’s been so lovely!

Thank you, it’s been lovely chatting to you!