Virginia MacNaughton

Virginia McNaughton’s extraordinary new album is a passionate song suite that, through flowing vocal melodies, piano, and rich orchestration, charts the story of a destructive relationship and the salvation of new love. Reminiscent of Lorde, Carole King, and Aerial-era Kate Bush, it is an album of clarity and beauty, yet also cut through with wry wordplay and humour.

Work on Virginia’s third album began in October 2020, after the end of a brief affair that had a profound impact. “I’d had a fallow period musically and not had a relationship for years but was quite happy in my 40s, doing my work, pottering in the garden, baking, I thought that was it” she says. “Then I reached 50, met a person online, and it was like someone reached into the dial in my brain and shifted it.”

Virginia thought the woman she met was The One, but after weeks of romance she was cruelly rejected and left devastated. In an attempt to make sense of it all, she sat at the piano, “and the songs were there.” Virginia rang long-term collaborator William Jackson (The Cribs, Kaiser Chiefs, Wiz Khalifa) and booked studio time. “I was writing so quickly, the songs were pouring out of me. I’d write one day and two days later be recording in the studio. That’s never happened to me before. The writing was a necessity. It became about surviving the ordeal.”

One of the first songs she wrote was lead single and opening track ‘Gravity’, which captures the power and pull of Virginia’s doomed relationship. “The lovely piano theme is based on an iPhone default tone on WhatsApp. Every time she texted me that noise went off, triggering excitement and desire, connection” recalls Virginia.

The song is about the gravitational pull of the moon, an idea closely aligned with the obsession that was devouring her. “Friends referred to this woman as a black hole that would swallow me up. According to astronomer Dr Ed Bloomer, should a person approach a black hole there’s an intense gravitational force. Your feet are drawn to the centre faster than your head and your body stretches until it breaks up. This is called spaghettification. That’s what was happening to me. I was being sucked in, and there was no going back.”

Even though The Thread is a painful document of Virginia’s experience, the process of creating it with Will was joyous. “The fact I was writing again after a such long break was the best gift of all.”

Lincolnshire-born Virginia has been playing piano and writing songs since she was seven years old, and her father, a classical music enthusiast, would blast Bach through the house on a Sunday morning. As well as absorbing his love of music, she also inherited his anxiety. “There’s always been a lot of fear for me around relationships and falling in love. I grew up knowing I was gay. In the 1980s that was a difficult thing, there was fear in coping with strong feelings and emotions, and the sense of managing that weaves through all my songwriting.”

After studying music at Leeds University, a chance meeting with Pete Brown (Cream) and work with bassist John Michael MacKenzie led to a record deal with independent label Mi7. Early recordings with Cameron Jenkins (Everything But The Girl, Badly Drawn Boy, Lana Del Rey), resulted in Virginia’s full debut album The Music in 1997. Produced by Phil Saatchi, it was a poised set of songs featuring string arrangements by Oscar-winning composer and Art of Noise founder, Anne Dudley, and recorded at London’s AIR studios.

Virginia’s self-released second album Levers, Pulleys & Engines followed in 2003 to widespread critical acclaim. Recorded at the former Soundworks Studios, Leeds with multi-platinum producer William Jackson, its driving cinematic folk pop showed her growing depth and dynamic range. MOJO described it as: “an immaculately produced example of the singer-songwriter’s art”, while UNCUT lauded her as “a powerful narrative writer”, and Radio 2’s Bob Harris enthused: “It’s a wonderful, wonderful album.”

Despite the fulsome praise, for a while Virginia’s musical inspiration dried up – until, 20 years later, driven by “a necessity to unburden myself, find meaning, and get out of a weird hole,” she began furiously writing again. Each track details a different moment in the affair and its aftermath. Felix Burling’s sonorous flugelhorn of the title track, for instance, underlines the persuasiveness of desire, the sense of Virginia’s new lover “imbuing everything”, whilst in abrupt contrast ‘The Morning’ deals with the pain of being dumped the morning after. Propelled by Carole King-style confessional songwriting, this track has a raw, emotional feel. Its throwback pop soul is anchored in the use of a vintage 1970s Vistalite drum kit (a model, incidentally, that Karen Carpenter frequently used). “We wanted that 70s sound,” says Virginia, “The way the chords shift and don’t quite go where you think they should.”

That feeling of unease is compounded by ‘The Kestrel’ – based on the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem Windhover – where Virginia uses birdsong samples to explore the metaphor of predator and prey, hammering out the melody on “a knackered old upright piano in the studio which I loved.”

‘The Taking’, meanwhile pieces together fragments of physical evidence (“You even took the free coffee/and I kept the card receipt”) to make sense of how she became “the prey.” ‘Spellbound’ and ‘Red Flag’ cover the dizzying obsessive back and forth meetings, her ex-lover’s fickle attention creating a disorientating “kaleidoscope of desire”. With the song ‘Swipe’ Virginia maps out with dark humour the elaborate dance of online dating, and new words in her lexicon like “gaslighting” and “breadcrumbing”. “I couldn’t swipe her away, no matter how dangerous I knew it was,” she says.

The jazz feel of ‘Wolf Moon’, featuring expressive sax and the flourish of grand piano, marks a turning point, a loosening of the taut connection. And with the sardonic, tongue-in-cheek flow of ‘Glorious’, Virginia is beginning to heal. ‘New Moon Landing’ marks the flowering of new love with Jo, the woman who becomes her wife. “She represented everything the other person was not. Something whole, healthy, warm and grounded,” recalls Virginia. Jo was a ceramic artist based in Cornwall, near St Ives, and before long Virginia moved down to be with her.

By 2021 The Thread was nearly finished, but before Virginia could complete the album life intervened. Her beloved father died, and then, after four and a half glorious years together, tragically Jo died of breast cancer in spring 2025. The album had been shelved for a while - life became about survival – but Jo, forever encouraging, kept saying, “make sure you release that record.”

Now The Thread is due out on February 27th. “I’ve completed the circle,” says Virginia. “Jo was adamant I get on with it and let people hear it. She had huge faith in it. The Bach prelude at the end of the album is for my dad – he’s been playing that since I was born, and he taught me to play it.” He passed down to her a love of melody and musical knowledge – a well of experience she drew from to create this song suite about moving from destructive obsession to enduring love and its roots in family and memory. The photograph on the album cover is of Virginia aged two, with her Dad and older sister. “I love the colours in that image, they are warm, like old vinyl. It says - that was us then, look where we’ve ended up, how far we’ve come.”