Last month saw the release of The Knife, The Needle (order it here), the debut album from Elanor Moss, which I’m still playing on heavy rotation. In his review, Thomas Blake said one of Moss’s many prodigious gifts is her ability to balance a quiet, subtle mode of expression with a searing intensity of feeling. He later adds that, compared to her two previous EPs, the lyrics of The Knife, The Needle are more refined and the emotional hit is harder. He concludes: “There is a bit of a boom in loosely confessional, mildly psychedelic songwriters and folk singers in the UK at the moment, but Elanor Moss is a degree of magnitude above most of them…Here and right across the album, Moss forms her hauntingly beautiful songs with a scalpel blade, exposing the soft tissue of human emotion with unerring accuracy. “
With the excellent reception this album has rightly received, we’re over-the-moon to be able to share this track-by-track guide that Elanor Moss wrote exclusively for KLOF Mag. She offers real depth on how the album was created, along with deep insights into the album’s themes and her own songwriting.
Don’t miss her upcoming tour dates (see end of article for details).
Track by Track by Elanor Moss: The Knife, The Needle
Fixer
I wrote this at my kitchen table in one go. This is very unusual for me – it normally takes longer! Perhaps this is because this was a follow-up song to an earlier song I wrote called “The Knife”, which used the same metaphor but didn’t – I felt – take it as far as it could go, or to an interesting enough conclusion. It felt too predictable to be satisfying for me. Writing “Fixer”, the knife metaphor became the needle, and the metaphor at the heart of the song transformed to something more hopeful, and more “true”-feeling. It totally changed the essence of the song, and in the end provided me with a throughline in the record. By the time I wrote this song, I could see a theme emerging – I’d already done a similar thing in “Secrets of the Universe”, which I wrote earlier, and again in “Sarah”, where one thing can become another through a simple shift. Those earlier songs gave me a framework to dig deeper with the songs that came later, and emboldened me to experiment a bit more with the layers available in the language that was coming up as I was writing. “What depths might a simple thing have” was a guiding principle, I can see in retrospect.
Then, once Matthew Herd’s arrangements came together, I really felt that it took this song to another level. He arranged it with such care towards the lyrics and the story, always making sure that the motifs are serving the essence of everything. It was a revelation hearing his arrangements for the first time.
Like all the songs on this record (apart from the last track), we recorded this live to tape with everyone in the same room at the same time. We did it in a short space of time – everything in two and a half days. The uncompromising nature of that recording method means all our imperfections are laid bare – for a song like this, that is a plea towards vulnerability, this medium works very well on a conceptual level. That made it easier for me to forgive the flaws I could hear coming through the speakers! Instead, I had to treat them like another welcome member of the band.
Again, My Love
This was a much more protracted process. I messed around with that chord progression for quite some time before landing on that sequence and picking pattern. Once that locked in, though, I quite quickly found the “verse” melody. Then I was stuck for a few more months and couldn’t figure out where to take it next. One day, the “doo do doo” refrain came to me and unlocked the rest of the song, and gave me a pathway forward into the next part. How can I find a way of relating to the first verse that I haven’t thought of yet? What does it mean to let something go, to watch it go? This is not a song about a relationship with someone, although it’s often interpreted as a break-up song or love song. I’m happy for it to be taken that way, although it was never meant that way! For me, it was about loss in the broader sense. Loss of past selves, loss of identity, loss of opportunity, loss of a life you thought you’d have – loss more generally, I guess. To me it feels related to the seasons – how autumn and winter clear the way for new life in Spring, and how loss is part of the natural cycle of things, and something a little mysterious. You don’t always know what’s going to happen next.
Sarah Waiting in the Car
This was another song that had a protracted process. The first verse came together very quickly, then I sat with it a long time, waiting for what felt right in terms of its development. It felt like a short story exercise more than anything else. The lines I’m proudest of in the song are: “and we fight until the morning sun/ chases off the moon/ and the worst of what was said and done/ is chased out of the room.” I wanted to capture how these cycles can work in relationships that are not good for us. People often wonder what keeps people in violent or hurtful relationships, and I think it’s something like that. The light chases off the dark, and we see what we want to. So it was a song about that in the end. I wanted to be careful not to insert my own moralising into it too much, and leave it to the listener, putting them in the position of the speaker as much as I could. It’s uncomfortable not to have the answers, and not to know where we stand within something.
Improvisation
I had some chords and one melodic line. I sang the melodic line to the saxophone player (Matthew Herd) and asked if he could riff off of that. The rest of the players followed suit, and in the end we had this wonky, living, strange little thing. It felt cyclical and equal shades of light and dark, and although without any words, it felt like it fit in the record well. We recorded the whole album live to tape, all in the same space, which made the recording process feel quite charged. Once we got a take we were happy with for this track, we went into the control room to listen back, only to realise that there had been an error in the tape machine that had corrupted and warped the tape! The machine was pulling unevenly on the tape, which as a result was slowing down and speeding up the music in a way that we could not correct. That is why you can hear these microtonal key changes, where the music slides up and down into different keys. By some incredible stroke of luck, the effect this had on the recording really worked with the piece, and I felt it actually enhanced it. We were very fortunate!
You Are Coming Home Tonight
For the longest time, I only had the very first line of this song in both lyric and melody. I sat with it for months before I finished it. Luckily, when I finally did, it all came out at once. I didn’t know what it was about at the time, but looking back, it has a clear throughline to my life and things that were going on at the time. Fiction is truer than fact sometimes! My favourite thing about this track is how it gives so much space to my voice, and how much fun I have embodying the song when I sing. It’s so plaintive, and has so much pain in it.
Secrets of the Universe
I was reading a lot of poems at the time and writing without music much more. This started as a poem. Later, I wrote the simple guitar part to it. Because it started as just words, adding guitar actually made it quite faltering and uneven, which in the end suited it quite well. It gave it a sense of hesitation, and doubt or tentativeness, that is present in the words, too. It’s a song about carrying on towards love despite fear and reservation. The resolution at the end, the last line, “what I thought was a wall was a door / that you open more and more / if you go could you leave it open / behind you?” was not premeditated – it came to me through writing the song. That’s what I love about writing – it helps me learn things I didn’t know already about how I am feeling or how I experience the world. I was able to name something there of my experience, which is always a very powerful experience when it happens. It’s the most directly autobiographical song on the album – when it was done, I played it to the subject, my now partner. He cried! Success.
Clothes in a Hotel Sink
This song nearly got axed from the record. It is the song on the album that has been through the most changes. In the end, I had the pleasure of working with Christian Lee Hutson and Maya Hawke on the song itself – I played them the original version in New York a few summers ago, and told them I wasn’t happy with it yet. They suggested I reharmonise it – give it different chords underneath the melody – to make the chords more simple. That’s what I did, and it really worked. It made it more immediate and more country. They also helped me iron out a couple of lyrical moments that I didn’t feel were working. I also got the courage from them both to be brutal with my editing. I got rid of a whole verse because I felt it wasn’t adding anything new. I always like to try and make sure that every line has earned its place – if it isn’t moving things along in some way, then it goes. After its time with the three of us, this song shaped up to feel much sharper and to work a lot better to my ear. In the studio, we didn’t have an arrangement for it, so the players improvised around it. We had Reid Jenkins on fiddle, who is an incredible and very versatile player, and he gives it that bluegrass/country flavour and real sense of character. I wanted it to really feel to the listener that they are listening in on an internal monologue from a hotel room, or looking over the speaker’s shoulder at the letter they’re writing their lover that they might not actually send.
Louise
I wrote this at Middle Farm Studios for a retreat that Peter Miles runs there called Middle Farm Sessions. He invites 8-10 musicians/ songwriters to the studio for three days; each songwriter takes a song with them that they’ve never recorded, then each participant is given two hours to record their song live to tape with the other members as their band and producers. It’s an amazing experience that aims to give artists an exercise in complete surrender and trust in the creative process. It’s so easy normally to get paralysed in the creative process, worrying about how it will sound when it’s done, how it will be received. The beauty of working to tape and working quickly is that it functions as a documentation of work – like a photograph. It’s less gruelling to capture something as it is – not endlessly adding layers and taking things away. However, this can be unbearable if you don’t like what you see – but for the kind of music I want to make, the uncompromising nature of it is perfect. This experience really shaped how I ended up approaching the recording of the album, which was done live to tape at this studio in just a 2/3 day session.
I came to this retreat empty-handed, and after dinner one night went into the live room to come up with something to record the next day. In the spirit of the retreat, I tried to write quickly and unselfconsciously. We’d been speaking among ourselves a lot about family and generational trauma. I wrote it to my grandmother, from my own perspective. It’s a song about forgiveness and trying to understand.
I recorded a version for that retreat, then again for the first version of the album, then finally for the version of the album that has been released, with Matthew Herd’s arrangements.
The Way That it Feels
This was the last song I wrote for the album. In some ways, it captures the themes of the album as a whole, and does so with a broader brush instead of with small details. Much like You Are Coming Home Tonight, the first two lines and melody dropped on me out of nowhere and were the foundations on which the rest of the song could be built. “Oh and the way that it feels / to know you / Oh and the way it reveals / I don’t know you.” Once that was there, the rest came very naturally.
There’s a book I love by George Saunders called “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain”, which is about short story writing. He says in the book that he writes by intuition, writing until a voice emerges, then following that voice wherever it goes. I feel like I wrote the majority of the album that way. Waiting for someone to reveal themselves in the words I was putting down and the music I was finding, and following that voice wherever it takes me.
The Knife, The Needle (August 21st, 2026) Merge Records
Tour Dates
Thu. Oct. 1 – Glasgow, UK @ The Poetry Club
Fri. Oct. 2 – Leeds, UK @ The Attic
Sat. Oct. 3 – Manchester, UK @ Low Four Studio
Sun. Oct. 4 – Stroud, UK @ The Prince Albert
Tue. Oct. 6 – Birmingham, UK @ Hare & Hounds
Wed. Oct. 7 – Bristol, UK @ The Jam Jar
Thu. Oct. 8 – Cardiff, UK @ Chapter Arts Centre
Fri. Oct. 9 – Oxford, UK @ Common Ground
Sat. Oct. 10 – Ashburton, UK @ Field System
Sun. Oct. 11 – Brighton, UK @ The Folklore Rooms
Thu. Dec. 3 – London, UK @ Cecil Sharp House
Tickets: https://www.elanormoss.com/live