AVICE CARO

Interview by Jane Dabate, Anjali Larsen, Rebecca Bourriaud-Kumar

Illustration by Scarlett Pollard

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Avice Caro is the spellbinding folk project of a 26-year-old singer-songwriter who spent her childhood between the Latvian countryside and her native North London. Earlier this summer, she released a stripped-down album that bridges the gap between folk tradition and the confirmation of a new voice on the folk scene. The wistful, bittersweet Home Demos, recorded with guitarist Alfie Jones on a 1950s tape recording machine and a 1940s ribbon mic, opens with The Wishing Tree, which sets the tone for the album: ‘She is so solemn/Her season is dying’.

The singers whose lilting voices she pays tribute to without imitating (e.g. Lowlands) that come to mind are Anne Briggs, Sybille Baier, Molly Drake, Vashti Bunyan, and Jean Ritchie; Also Hope Sandoval, Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Ed Askew, and Leonard Cohen. Her voice seems to hold the lineage and trace the history of folk singers and traditions. The sparkling guitar, with its languid and lingering melodies that wind like staircases, are juxtaposed with an intimate vocal performance with a warm, soft, and hazy timbre. The album’s single, Lullaby for the Night, could be the haunting reintegration of a Victorian children’s ballad. In the interview, Avice Caro mentions her fondness for cyclicality in art, and a penchant for repetition and litanies in both literature and music: Oh Well, Oh Well sounds like a brooding and ominous refrain. Her songwriting carries a timeless quality, as each song could be a classic plucked from the repertoire of English folk ballads, as much as an entirely fresh creation reimagining a fantastical tale (Bird Song).

Personally, I fell under her spell last September, at the East London institution that is the George Tavern. She was headlining Where Winds Rest’s Folk Night, accompanied by her band, composed of various string instruments, guitars, and cellos that framed and carried her warm, grainy voice. What is fascinating about Avice Caro is her love of telling stories; her ability to completely transport her audience through her songs. She is now making her mark on a whole new continent, lulling the United States with her siren-like vocals, where she is touring with Indie rock band Sorry. In between writing or embroidering sessions, recording, and rehearsals, we met Avice Caro at writer Jane Dabate’s Dalston flat. With Pierre the cat purring at our feet, and lulled by Mazzy Star and Leonard Cohen CDs, we discussed everything from the state of romantic relationships in 2025 to femininity, fairies, meme songs, literature, history, and the power of folk music. Nostalgic yet eschewing mere imitation of the past, Avice Caro draws on the traditional English folk repertoire as well as her love of literature to produce disturbing and strange lyrics and a soundscape that are as unsettling as they are comforting, as if the product of an encounter with an antique treasure chest. We started with a question on the literary origins behind her name.

Illustration by Scarlett Pollard

Anjali: Maybe six months ago, I came across Thomas Hardy and The Well Beloved, and realised this is where your name comes from! It comes from a 19th century novel.

Avice Caro: It does. And it's about a fuck boy. The reason why this fuck boy is so crazy is not that he just fucks around, it's that he fucks with three generations of the same family. He falls for three women. That's where the name comes from, because the first woman in it is Avice Caro, and he falls in love with her, and he's like, ‘I love you, you're my forever wife’. And then she has some sort of love affair, gets pregnant and runs away. And then 20 years later, he's 40 and meets her daughter, and she's like ‘Mommy's dead.’ He's like ‘Let me get some of this.’ (laughs) She's like, ‘Who are you?’ And then I think she runs away and also gets pregnant, and then 20 years later this sixty year old man falls in love with her daughter. And it's three generations of the same woman.

Anjali: I swear the mother keeps naming the baby Avice Caro.

Avice Caro: I mean, it's a really interesting novel, because when you think about Thomas Hardy's other works, a lot of his other books are quite realistic and set in the real world. And that's not to say the pursuit of the Well Beloved isn't, it is as well. But it's also got these Pygmalion type narratives, and there's elements of ghosts that creep in here and there, and it's almost a gothic novel, I would say, which kind of contrasts his other literature.

Jane: What spoke to you about that character or series of characters?

Avice Caro: I was reading it when I was teenager and it was winter time, and I just found it really haunting. I've always been drawn to gothic literature, but that specific character I just thought had a nice name. I mean, Avice means bird, and Caro means deer, so you've got all of these roots and ‘dear darling bird’, but also Caro means flesh, so it's kind of a bit weird.

Anjali: I was gonna ask about the passage of time and the fact that there's this kind of cyclical thing going on in the novel. The background is quite strange, it's set in the English countryside on this island, and there's something kind of Gothic as you said. Did that resonate with your musical project?

“I think my character exists in this other plane, somewhere else beyond
the real world.”

Avice Caro: Well, definitely. I love cyclical structures of songs and things that repeat themselves. So not just in terms of narrative cycles, but also in terms of sonic universes, the circle really does appeal to me. Also, I grew up in England, and I suppose the setting of the novel is this mystical island that Thomas Hardy had created for his literary universe. I think my character exists in this other plane, somewhere else beyond the real world. Maybe it helps to have a place to go to, I guess. It kind of makes the music a little bit less rigid.

Jane: Is that strictly through your waking imagination, or do dreams play a part in this?

Avice Caro: That's a really good question. I've always been a daydreamer and a dreamer in general. Ever since I was a kid, I used to wake up and I would have written a song in my dream, and I'd be singing it at school throughout the day. Or even at school, I'd be looking out of the window and daydreaming. So daydreaming and dreams play a really important role in my life on a day to day basis.

Jane: Do you have a recurring daydream? People talk about recurring dreams, but in daydreams, is there something you like to be wistful about?

Avice Caro: Oh, honestly, my biggest dream, and the thing that I think about most is my future life. I live in the city at the moment, but I would love to have a house in the countryside with a bunch of chickens, making bread, having a vegetable patch and a rose garden. That is the thing I think about most every day, I wake up and think: ‘Oh, my God. That’s where I want to be’. Also, when I'm looking out of the window and looking at a big sunset, I think: ‘Wouldn't this look really nice over a hill?’

Phase: I actually daydream about love all the time.

Avice Caro: Me too. Love as well.

Phase: Just being cherished… (laughs)

Avice Caro: I can't believe that love has become such an ideal that we are now daydreaming about it, it should be there…

Anjali: I read this article yesterday that really depressed me. It was about how hand holding has become more intimate than sex, and all of these women were testifying saying it was true.

Avice Caro: I daydream about handholding all the time. A kiss on the cheek or on the forehead…That is my biggest fantasy. If somebody holds my hand, or if I hold somebody's hand I'm like ‘I don't need anything else’. (laughs)

Avice Caro: Men in this world make you feel like you’re Carrie Bradshaw at their door. I'm never gonna hold anybody's hand ever again. I belong to myself.

Anjali: In the novel, the protagonist is a sculptor, and he's pursuing this woman who’s not really a woman. It's the ideal of a woman, the eternal feminine, the feminine mystique. He sees the main character Avice Caro as this ideal of purity and virtue. Is the theme of this endless search for an artistic and romantic ideal, and the idea of the eternal feminine something that you play with in your music as well?

Avice Caro: Definitely, because it goes back to being a young girl. I've always been extremely feminine. I was always into fairy tales and fairies growing up. When you're aware of that world as you grow older, a lot of the things that you used to find really pure and wonderful and beautiful start almost suffocating you and crushing you down. I remember my first experience of being sexualised, or even living in this world as a woman. Something that I used to find really liberating and fun to play with, and a pure thing such as dressing up, makeup, hair, and clothes started to become something that I was really, really conscious about. Being able to create a character who is almost not penetrated by the real world, and all of the sexualisation and idealisation that people tend to experience… It's been really fun to just put on a wedding dress!

Jane: It's like the Island in the novel. You've got your own beautiful bubble.

“I guess the songs do also explore women's issues. (…) Women who experience idealisation and loss of love as a result of becoming too real.”

Avice Caro: Yeah, it's a little bubble. I guess the songs do also explore women's issues. In some of my older works there are women who get abandoned by sailors, or who get forsaken, women who experience in some ways idealisation and loss of love as a result of becoming too real. So even though part of that world isn't penetrated by these things, it does seep into the songs somehow.

Anjali: I got the sense that stories, fairy tales and myths hold a very important place for you, especially in the new songwriting. Do you have a favorite fairy tale or myth at the moment or in general?

Avice Caro: It's really hard to choose one fairy tale, but I would say my favorite one is this Russian fairy tale about a pair of siblings. It's about this girl who ventures out into the forest with her brother who then gets turned into a goat because he drinks from a puddle. I think that it's such a cool story because I have a sister, and she's so important to me. I just love a tale that explores the love of a sibling bond, because I am the oldest sibling, so I've spent a lot of my life protecting her and looking after her. So it's really nice to have a fairy tale that explores this to the grandest, most insane magnitude.

Anjali: In your latest album, you lent more towards the haunting aspects of folk music. There's this ominous undercurrent running through the songs, something kind of threatening going on in Oh, well, oh, well. In fairy tales in general, there's a big juxtaposition of the fantastical elements with the more dark and scary. And I definitely felt that throughout the whole album. Because of the presence of death running through the album, what mindset were you in at the time of writing? It doesn't have to be literal death, it can also be more metaphorical.

“A lot of the ways that I write music are not necessarily conscious.”

Avice Caro: That's a really good question, and it would be really hard to answer it in simple terms, because a lot of the ways that I write music are not necessarily conscious. So it taps into the back of my mind, in terms of using words and textures that I love, but I think I'm really drawn to the uncanny. And a huge part of the uncanny is something that is kind of real, but then not quite, and really plays upon this idea of making light of darkness, and making darkness of light, and this idea that darkness can be beautiful. I mean, you see it in the films of David Lynch, and again, also in fairy tales. And a lot of the fairy tales that we read nowadays have dulled down versions of extremely dark terrifying stories. Even folk songs, a lot of them, you realise when you read the lyrics, ‘Oh, this is really dark’.

One of my favorite folk songs, Polly Vaughn, is about a guy who shoots his true love because she's got her white apron rolled over her head, and he thinks she's a swan. And when he shoots he finds out: ‘Oh, my God, that's my true love’. And then she comes back to haunt him in the court and say ‘Well, he never shot me. He thought I was a swan or whatever’. But as a story, it’s quite terrifying and intense, but I think that they're beautiful. When you think about the real world, it's terrifying, it's extremely heavy and dark, and there's so much suffering and so much intense horror that surrounds us. The only thing you can really do to alleviate an element of that is to make it beautiful. And that's why I make my art, because whenever I make songs, I go to a happy place, where I’m able to make light of all of the pain and all of the sorrow that we experience on a day to day basis.

Anjali: Do you find it therapeutic in a way?

Avice Caro: Oh yeah, it's the biggest pleasure. It's the biggest joy writing music and writing songs, making characters and building these worlds. I really love it, it's so immersive, and it's also extremely therapeutic, and it's not something I can turn off. It's not something that I really sit down and think ‘Okay, right? I'm gonna do this.’ I'll be walking down the street, or I'll be on the bus, or I'll be just cooking or looking at something, and it will just happen. And then being able to let that feeling wash through, write it down and put it in a song and work on it is really, really fun.

Phase: Are you Libra rising?

Avice Caro: No, I don't know that much about it, but somebody told me I'm a Gemini sun, Aries moon, Virgo rising.

Phase: Do you see your music as more of a form of escape, or more a return to something, or is there a difference?

Avice Caro: Beautiful question. I think both. Just because you're escaping from something doesn't mean you're not returning to something at the same time, if that makes sense?

Jane: You process, don't you? It's when you’re on the bus, when you're cooking. It's the therapeutic element of it, the finding beauty in the pain that's everywhere, like shooting your love. I feel like you're processing something, yeah. It's like a system.

“Songwriting is almost like a process of excavation (…) It requires dusting things away, and it’s almost like finding this ancient artifact, then being able to hold it and see it in its completeness.”

Avice Caro: Absolutely, I've had this conversation with a good friend of mine, Ethan, who's a brilliant, amazing soul but also an extremely talented music producer. And we were saying songwriting is almost like a process of excavation, whereby you've got this thing that is embedded within yourself or somewhere out there that you're trying to grasp. And sometimes you can get it out, all in one big go, but sometimes it requires some dusting things away, and it’s like finding this ancient artifact, being able to hold it and see it in its completeness.

Anjali: I love what you just said about this archeological process. The album feels like it could have been a long lost sonic artifact, a forgotten archive that has been buried and recovered. There's a ghostliness to your recordings. Do you think of the recording medium, the tape or the voice or the echo as carrying traces of the past, like the object could have been haunted by previous lives?

“We used this old tape recorder from the 50s (...) It definitely had its own organism that we could not control and felt like another member, a third being”

Avice Caro: Most definitely. I mean, obviously the goal was to get a studio recording, because I play live with strings players, but that isn't accessible to me at present because I'm unsigned and I don't have a label. So we used this old tape recorder from the 50s, and there were times where we'd get the perfect tape recording, and then we'd listen back, and it would overheat and eat it. And it's kind of weird, because you would think that that would be the perfect recording, and then the next one was even better. But it definitely had its own organism that we could not control and felt like another member, a third being.

Jane: Where’d you find it?

Avice Caro: It belongs to my guitarist, Alfie. He had it lying around, and then he had all of this old tape that we recorded on to. It definitely felt haunted. The sound was really warm and spooky and eerie. Recording with old equipment, I wouldn't take it back. I feel grateful that it happened that way.

Anjali: You used to play some of the songs on Home Demos, like Mine Own, with the omnichord. After Myth Weaving, there's a sense that you returned to your folk roots, and folk music's oral traditions, just using your voice and your guitar. How did this change of approach affect your relationship to the songs or to songwriting itself?

Avice Caro: Originally I bought the omnichord just to compose songs on, and I always imagined them being fleshed out in a studio with different instruments, but when I got the Omnichord, it sounded really nice. So in a way, it was a return to the sound that I wanted to make when I was writing those songs. But also, I wrote them with the intention of them being a bit more acoustic, but I didn't have a guitarist. And then Alfie came into my life, and he came up with all of the guitar arrangements. His grandfather was Wizz Jones, who was a really instrumental figure in the 50s and 60s trad folk movement, with Bert Jansch and Sandy Denny. It's really, really cool. And I feel really grateful to be able to collaborate with him, because he's got that in his soul. (laughs)

Jane: Tell me about the saw. I've never seen something like that.

Avice Caro: Oh, my God. The saw originated in America. It comes from blues music. I saw Andrew, a good friend of mine, playing live with October and the eyes. It has the most incredible sound, it just sounded like it was weeping, like a woman's wailing voice.

“I think being an interpreter of music is just as artistic as being somebody who writes a song”

Anjali: A lot of folk music is about reinterpretation; people like Jean Richie and Joan Baez took old English ballads and reinterpreted them in the tradition of Appalachian folk music. How did you transpose that into your own songwriting with Home Demos?

Avice Caro: It's something I've been thinking about a lot: I started off songwriting because I loved literature and poetry, specifically classical poetry. So you look at the ancient origins of love writing. You look at people like Catullus and Sappho: one of Catullus’s most famous poems is a rewriting of Sappho's poem. I think this idea of rewriting stories or writing tales about love is a bit lost in the modern day and age. Because people have this idea that in order to be a compelling songwriter, you have to come up with something completely original. There really is no such thing as complete originality. Looking at the folk tradition, somebody like Anne Briggs: she made a record of old folk ballads that’s just completely stripped back, with just folk, no other instrumentation. And I think that as an artistic choice is just as compelling as creating a completely new song. People like Nina Simone, even Billie Holiday, most of their famous songs weren't written by them, but I think being an interpreter of music is just as artistic as being somebody who writes a song. Being an interpreter of music is so cool, that's what folk musicians do, and it's organic.

Anjali: That term is used almost in a demeaning way, as if it's like, ‘oh, she's just an interpreter’, but it's actually extremely powerful to be able to take a song and make it your own.

Jane: Breathe into it in your own way. I think when I saw you live, you opened with something old, didn't you?

Avice Caro: Yes, Lowlands of Holland, which is a traditional folk song from the 1600s. We've got cellos and a musical saw. And the musical saw probably wasn't on that song in the 1600s, but bringing that into that song makes you feel the creaking ship and it's really fun to play with all of these things.

Anjali: What's the story behind that song?

Avice Caro: So originally, it was written during one of the wars, and it's written from the perspective of a woman who loses her true love. He's on a ship and he dies, and there's a war, but essentially, I strip it back to this narrative about these two people who are really in love. In my version, she dies in the sea because she returns to her true love. It's a really old folk ballad.

Jane: There’s something so cool about having that continuity; like you're carrying something. These feelings are so human, no matter when you were born or when you died, you can make art that will transcend time. Also, hearing the Tom Waits cover you did was amazing, because these original artists are from such different eras and backgrounds. And the way that you performed them, with your band, all sounded like you. You have this thread, and it fortifies your style in a way.

Anjali: When I saw you at the George, you did a cover of ‘Better Off Alone’ [90s Eurodance Hit by Alice Deejay].

Avice Caro: The Club Classic!

(We all sing: ‘Do you think you're better off alone’ and laugh)

Anjali: I was genuinely impressed because you made it into your own thing, and to pull that off is… (laugh)

Avice Caro: I don’t know if I pulled it off, but I just love that song… I work with this amazing violinist called Everen. And the way that it came about was, I was in my kitchen and we were rehearsing. I said, ‘Look, I've got a really funny idea to propose to you. You can say no’. I started playing it on my phone and we both were cracking up laughing. But I was like, ‘There’s something in this! Imagine this, but with an orchestra of strings, and really slow.’ And as we started playing it, she realised ‘Wow, this is in such a weird key.’ When it was just the strings, stripping it back in that way was so powerful; I just fell in love when I heard it. I love that song, the melody and the way that it loops over: ‘Do you think you're better off alone, Talk to me’ is really haunting. Being able to deconstruct a piece of music in that way and transport it into something else is really fun and exciting. It's like reconstructing a dress…

Jane: Time for your next pick Avice Caro; Mazzy Star has ended. We’ve got John Martyn’s Solid Air…

Avice Caro: I love him, but I think we're gonna have to do Songs of Leonard Cohen. ‘A Singer Must Die’ is a really beautiful song. I love songs that talk about the art of songwriting and being a singer, so we're gonna go for this one.

(We all sing ‘Do you think you're better off alone’)

Avice Caro: That song is so sad… I guess because it's a bit memey, it's a bit funny, but it's really sad. It's more than a meme.

(Leonard Cohen’s Is This What You Wanted plays in the background)

Anjali: Lyrically you remind me of Leonard Cohen, also of romantic and Victorian era English poetry. What poems have influenced your song writing, specifically in Home Demos? It doesn't have to be poets. It could be your favorite park or garden, or places that are important to you.

“One of my all time favorites would be William Blake, whose poems are extremely sensitive and almost otherworldly. (...) For him, it wasn't just about poetry, it was also about world making.”

Avice Caro: I mentioned that my love of songwriting came from my love of reading and poetry. One of my all time favorites would be William Blake, whose poems are extremely sensitive and almost otherworldly. But what's special about Blake is that when you read the poems alongside the visuals that he put them with, it's truly extraordinary. Because for him, it wasn't just about poetry, it was also about world making. That's quite an interesting thing to play with when you're a songwriter, thinking about the textures and colours that you would associate with words and the worlds that you're building.

Anjali: Visually it seems like you have quite a strong cinematic and artistic references and vision. Even in terms of aesthetics, for your past EPs and albums you were using photography, and then for Home Demos you used a drawing. I wanted to ask about the cover and the visual identity of the album.

Avice Caro: That's a lovely question, because I am most grateful to have been able to collaborate with my dear friend Faye Wei Wei who is an extraordinary painter. She's studying at Yale at the moment, doing a degree and painting. In her artistic universe, she's got these gorgeous blush colors and textures, flowers and horses and illustrations of amazing women reclining. She is the one who put together the artwork, and I just love her. She's really amazing and so inspiring.

Home Demos, Avice Caro, Artwork by Faye Wei Wei

Anjali: There's something quite theatrical about your shows. Is there a cinematic universe that you're inspired by?

Avice Caro: Definitely. Right now music isn't my full time career, so it helps to really build this cinematic universe. I hope that one day, if music was my full time profession, I'd be able to be a bit more chill about it and just be like ‘Well, this is what I'm doing’, or ‘This is what my day is’. But I find it really motivating to be able to push everything to its extremes. So to think about the kinds of dresses that I would wear, the kinds of textures I would associate. Right now, I find it really helpful to compartmentalise my day to day existence as opposed to my artistic existence, because otherwise, I find it really easy to get burnt out. So being able to put one hat on and then take it off, and switch between them, if that makes sense…

(Pierre the cat hops on the table)

Anjali: What eras in history are you most fascinated by, and specifically maybe aspects or areas of British culture and history?

Avice Caro: It's really hard to answer that question, because England is so old, it's amazing that we have so many ancient Neolithic rocks and things. We have the medieval period, and then also, the Pre Raphaelite paintings that play with medieval ideas. Also, Victorian clothes and dresses, the Victoria and Albert Museum and all of its curiosities, and Edwardian clothes…

Jane: What about your other roots? In terms of Russian language and Latvian, how does that come into it?

Avice Caro: It all definitely does come into it. Because my father was the one who introduced me to my love of History. When I was a kid, he would take me to all of the museums in London, and I got to know a lot about England's past through him, because he was really into English History. Also the Russian folk side of things, he told me all the stories. And my love of nature comes from spending lots of time in the Latvian countryside with my mum and my sister, playing make believe and being completely isolated from my friends for months on end, because we spent our summers there, and we had nothing more to do than just play with frogs! (We all laugh). And we would make juice from the berries in my grandmother's garden, and fairy soup.

Jane: Did you have imaginary friends or were the frogs and your sister enough?

Avice Caro: My mom tells me this really painful story, but I remember it as a happy thing. When I was a kid in school, my mom said I used to play with my shadow in the playground, because I had no friends… She picked me up once, and asked ‘Why are you so sad?’ And I replied ‘Because it was an overcast day, and I couldn't play with my friend.’ My mom asked ‘What friend? What do you mean?’ And I answered ‘My shadow!’ After that, she moved me to a different school, because I was being bullied.

Anjali: I spoke to trees.

Avice Caro: Trees are the best. I don’t know why people think that playing make believe is a bad thing.

Jane: I was a fairy girl as well. I would make acorn hats for their soup, I’d take a woodchip and do two strings on either side and put it on a tree, and that was the fairy swing. I had a whole fairy residence in my garden. My mom was just crazy enough that she would play along with it. You guys all have sisters and I just have one gay big brother, I really needed my mom to encourage my divine feminine whimsy…

Avice Caro: Whimsy is so important.

Jane: A lot of the world has a whimsy deficit.

Anjali: The whimsy deficit. That's what the next Phase issue is gonna be about, basically. I'm creating a tableau with things that are kind of related to each other, and then from that, seeing what comes up. And one of those things was William Blake, because I want to talk a little bit about alchemy as well. Songs Of Innocence and of Experience is one of the most beautiful collections. Do you have any kind of visual arts practice?

Avice Caro: I like making flower presses and embroidery. Again, it's that element of time: putting something away and leaving it to do its thing, returning to it and building something from that. I think it is important.

Anjali: Nature and landscapes seem like it plays a big role in Home Demos. What are your favorite parks or gardens and places?

Avice Caro: Hampstead Heath, because I grew up near there. I remember being a teenager and putting my shoes on and walking for miles, listening just to Nick Drake. And it's weird, I was so drawn to listening to just him. Did you know that he lived near Hampstead Heath? I only found that out now. I saw a picture taken of him walking down a certain road, which I saw when I was a teenager. I came across it again, and I recognised it from visiting that place.

Nick Drake, December 1971, Hampstead Heath, London, by Keith Morris

Anjali: I was just talking about Hampstead with Jane. We went there once on a Pisces full moon, we went camping and had some fucking weird esoteric experiences.

Jane: There was a lady in the woods who came out of nowhere. It was like a fairy just emerged.

Anjali: And she had nothing in her eyes. It was really weird.

Jane: I don't think she was real. We were a small group of about six of us. She told us ‘I want to introduce you to my grandfather.’ We were about 19 years old and we were like ‘For sure’. (laughter)

Anjali: On the way, she showed us this ring of mushrooms. And she said: (in a diabolical voice) ‘This is where the fairies play!’ (laughter)

Jane: So we got to the grandfather: and it was this magnificent tree. (We shriek with excitement). It was like the hoof of a hound, with so many fat roots at the end, and hollow in the middle. There were all these people, like Sven, that one Swedish guy, hugging the tree and then dancing around it.

Anjali: We did a whole ceremony. We didn't know what we were getting into. It was crazy.

Jane: She just plucked us from oblivion, it's like she was waiting for us because she was alone, but she had company, back with her grandpa.

Avice Caro: That place is crazy. There's parts that are so secluded that, I remember once, I went there in the summertime. There was this guy, and he was like ‘come join our party!’. It was this huge, secluded bit that had been taken over, and they built a bonfire, and everybody was playing banjos. You meet the craziest people there, and they're like, ‘come join my thing’.

Anjali: As you said, England is old as fuck and in London specifically, there used to be all of these druidic sites, and London was built on all of these canals and rivers. One of the only ones that remained is Regent’s canal. There used to be wells, and they were actually ancient, sacred druidic wells. The one on the Strand, in St Clements, stayed, though, which is really cool. But Clerkenwell, Shadwell, and all these places that have ‘well’ in the end are called that because there used to be a well. Hampstead Heath was one of the main spots and apparently conserved that kind of mystical essence– it's charged. You can definitely tell.

Avice Caro: It's amazing. We're so lucky that it exists.

Anjali: Folk music to me carries memories of the commons: land, rituals and community that existed before enclosure. Do you see your music as reclaiming or reimagining that space of shared belonging?

Avice Caro: Definitely. I think that when you think about songs, especially folk songs, you can almost imagine them as these heirlooms, not physical objects that are passed down, but these non-material things. The way you would teach somebody a folk song: you’d be at a folk night, somebody would be singing something and you like the way it sounds. That person would make their own version of it. It's passed down, and this has happened for hundreds of years. It’s important, and it’s not just music, because these songs also carry stories: women’s stories, marginalised people’s stories. I think there’s something powerful about the fact that they still exist today, and they’re still being rewritten, reconstructed and passed along.

Anjali: I think that’s why I love Hares on the Mountain [English folk song, 1959 version by Shirley Collins], because it's written from a woman’s perspective. Or Silver Dagger [American Folk Ballad with potential origins in Britain, 1960 version by Joan Baez]: It'svery much women’s stories, and there's something quite dark about them. So it’s not just la la
la la, you know what I mean.

Avice Caro: It's really powerful to sing a song about being forsaken or abandonned, making light of something that’s really painful, and being like : ‘Fuck you!’ (laughter)

Anjali: Maybe that's what Taylor swift was trying to do and we just didn't realise.

Avice Caro: Maybe we don’t understand, maybe she’s so complicated and we don’t get it.

Anjali: Actually, are there any contemporary, folk or not, artists and musicians that you're listening to right now that you'd recommend?

Avice Caro: Being part of the London underground music scene is really exciting, because you have people like Sarah Meth who is amazing and whose songs are just so good. Also, The New Eves are so fun, and they play the cello in a punk way. Nina Winder-Lind, who's also in the New Eves, has a solo project that is really cool. I saw a solo performance, and she's got this amazing voice. It's almost 70s, 80s, post-punk, new wave. She's just incredible. They're real rock stars, they just live the art that they make. I just listen to so much classical music these days, like Tchaikovsky. It’s just so intense. I love how a lot of his music pieces are inspired by literature as well. There are really no boundaries when it comes to art and music making, and rewriting tales in the form of poetry or even in paintings. That's what the Pre-Raphaelites were doing, making visual poems from the characters that they've encountered. Shakespeare's rewritings of classical literature are so cool.

Anjali: It's all borrowed and rewritten.

Avice Caro: And it's extraordinary.

Anjali: That's why I started with the question about the Well Beloved, and the fact that it's inspired by a Greek myth and that nothing can start from nothing. Everyone has always borrowed.

Avice Caro: I think it's really important to remember that, because a lot of people are striving towards creating something that's completely original. But why? You can't ever make anything that's completely original, because something that you inevitably have heard will subconsciously seep into that.

Jane: It's nice to be in touch with your inspiration, your ancestors, creatively. It shows it's also a discipline. There's a respect to that, a reverence, I suppose.

Avice Caro: Also being conscious of that might be even more inspiring. Being consciously inspired by something allows you to understand what you like and also what you don't like: using a critique of something to create something that you would listen to. Thinking about why you don't like Taylor Swift is just as inspiring as thinking about why you do like William Blake, perhaps even more.

Jane: Watch out Taylor!

“Thinking about why you don't like Taylor Swift is just as
inspiring as thinking about why you do like William Blake”

Avice Caro has supported Sorry on their tour of the United States & Canada starting in Washington
D.C December 3rd, and released Home Demos in July 2025.

Follow her project @avicecaro

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