Clare Cronin on Childbirth, Horror, and the End of the World

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

OK, today's installment: I love Clare Cronin's shadowy and foreboding approach to folk music, it's stuff that sounds literally haunted (which makes sense, given that she wrote a damn book on horror movies). I took to her 2021 record Bloodless quite easily, and her long-awaited follow-up The Bruise, which is out now on Owen Ashworth's more-essential-with-every-release Orindal label, is just as good to my ears. I was very happy to get on a call with Clare last month to chat through all things this excellent new record and what's been going on in her life during the half-decade in between releases, check it out:

The birth of your second child took place in the five-year span between your last record and this one. Walk me through how everything came together.
I started slowly writing the songs for it after the last one was released, messing around with different ways to play them. I didn't start recording it at home until the winter of 2023, and I just kept running into bad luck. Suddenly, three people on our street decided to replace their roofs, so every time I'd set up all my stuff to record, there'd be a jackhammer. It was very disheartening. I finally paid to do some studio time—a handful of hours at a place in L.A. and a place in Oakland—and I'd finished most of the tracking for my parts before I got pregnant with my my daughter through most of 2024. She was born on Christmas Day—an insane experience—and the months leading up to that, I couldn't really do anything. I was really sick and having a hard time. [Husband and collaborator Ezra Buchla] was adding a lot of parts with other musician friends, piecing things together in a very slow way—which was the only way we could do it. It was a lesson in perseverance, because at an earlier time in my life—before I had kids, a lot of responsibilities, and limited time—I could record a whole album in a week and stay up as long as I wanted. I had to set the bar really low for myself in terms of how much I had to get done in a week.

How's it like having two children now?
I feel more fully in the role of being a mother than I did with my first, when I could still pretend that I had my old life and identity. I'm still interested in all the same things and making work as an artist, but I feel really transformed by being a mother now, having done it twice. A lot of my mind is just with [my children], and it's made certain things matter less. In other ways, it's very radicalizing, and it feels like everything is at stake. I'm much more worried about the world. There's a real heaviness, and my music has always been heavy—but there's another level to it now. I still think making art is still so important, and it can be hard for parents to do it the way it's hard for people with a full-time job to do it—but, also, you're with them at night too. I'm trying to figure out how can I be a present, good mother while also giving myself over to my art practice, which can be dark and disturbing and not always aligned with the mood I need to be in to be a good parent.

Julia Holter contributed some stuff to this record, and I previously talked to her for the newsletter about how she found it personally very difficult to create after becoming a parent. I've also talked to Laura Marling about it, who had almost the exact opposite experience. Talk to me more about weathering those changes when it comes to making time for your creative practice.
Ezra and I have joked that the whole project is nocturnal, because we've had to shift so much of our working time for after the kids are asleep. When I think back to before I had kids, especially the years when I was in grad school and had a lot of free time, it's amazing to me how precious I'd be about the conditions I needed to be creative in—because now it's just whatever hours of time that you have to focus on your own thoughts, and a lot of that is at night. It's really about time and space. I'm with my daughter all day—we don't have any other childcare for her at this age—and then I'm with my son after school. It's helpful to do a little bit of work frequently, and then the ideas sift around in your mind and you can write down notes throughout the day. But to get stuff done, I do really need a few hours at night, or a block of time on the weekend.

In a way, it's very purifying, because you have to believe in it enough to do it, despite how tired you are and how difficult it is to find the time. It has to be not about your own ego anymore, or these fantasies of how cool you're going to be once you finish this thing, which is maybe how I felt in my 20s. It's more about believing in this artwork as a vocation that's important for me to do for who I am—almost like a spiritual practice—and to set little achievable goals along the way.

Do you feel like that shifting point of view has made your relationship to creating healthier?
I think so. There's still the real frustration of needing to make a living. Ezra works a full-time job—sometimes even more than regular hours—so he's fitting in his contributions to this album and other creative work in very small margins. I'm basically a full-time mom until my daughter's ready for preschool, and then I'll have to do some paid work. So there's the ambition of wishing I could make money on my art, because then I could justify spending more time on it during the day. But everyone is really struggling with that in our current environment, so it has to be meaningful for itself and as a form of communication with other people.

How did it feel sending your son to kindergarten? I know it's a big milestone for parents.
It's been so hard for me. He's doing pretty well, but it was a really big change. I felt really sad about not being as big of a part of his days, and wanting him to be free for a little longer to go play in the woods and hang out with me. For him, the adjustment has been up and down. He goes to a really good school, but he's also only five years old. He's still trying to make friends, and he's a very sensitive and dramatic person, like his parents.

"Black Water" is about having a harrowing experience during childbirth with regards to your second child. Talk to me about what you went through there.
I was very afraid of the birth, as you often are. My biggest fear, besides something catastrophic happening, was the timing of it not working out so that I'd be alone, because we needed someone to watch our son. I was due around Christmas, all our friends were out of town, and we were trying to figure out if any relatives could come help. I'm trying not to name too many names, because it was a traumatic family story, but one of the grandparents really let us down, and there was a big blowout fight. During the fight, I started going into labor, and then I went to the hospital—and they told me it was false labor and sent me home, but it wasn't. So then I was at home and reaching the point where I was basically about to give birth, but doubting myself because of what the doctors had told me.

Finally, I was like, "We need to go." I couldn't even speak anymore. Ezra drove me and Cal to the hospital, but he had to find parking, and there was no one to watch our kid, so I basically stumbled into the Oakland Kaiser close to midnight on Christmas Eve, and there was no one around. I was screaming, my water broke in the hallway, and someone had to help me in. I gave birth really quickly, there weres no pain meds, and Ezra wasn't there. It sounds really rough, but it was one of those things that was traumatic and empowering at the same time. I didn't know I could make those kinds of screams. I was literally growling. I felt like I was purely an animal, fighting for my life and bringing a new life into the world—and then we did it. There was a moment where something happened that was really dangerous, but I wasn't really hooked up to anything. The whole thing happened so quickly that it was just me just doing it. But we made it through, and then we were fine. I don't know if I was literally about to die, but I felt like I was facing my own death.

I want to talk more about the notion of feeling more acutely about the state of the world as a parent. There's a few songs in this record that are directly inspired by that. Joe Casey from Protomartyr recently spoke to me about feeling something similar.
I thought about the end of the world a lot for this album. It's something I've thought about before, but more in the way of people thinking about apocalypse throughout time, and what that means. Are we so narcissistic that we can't imagine dying without the whole world dying with us? We can't conceptualize time and human history. I grew up with a mom who was—and kind of still is—a conspiracy theorist, always interested in the end times and religious rapture. Because of that, I was always suspicious of ideas about the end of the world.

But now we're living in a completely psychotic moment—certainly in America, and it seems like in other parts of the world too—where there's real climate change and ecological destruction that is going to hurt and kill a lot of people and animals. We have these leaders, some of whom do believe in a religious rapture—which is really frightening—and want some kind of armageddon to bring that about more quickly. We have these headlines about AI causing human extinction. Most days, I just don't know what to make of it—and if I consume too much news, which I know is being produced in order to inspire my despair and outrage, then I just can't function or think anymore. My anxiety gets too high. But it's also confusing, because my day-to-day life is very beautiful. We spend a lot of time outside, my kids are saying funny things, we read books together and make things, and the world seems like it's fine.

I don't know what it felt like to be a parent in other moments in history. There are a lot of bad moments in history, and we're in a really privileged position. We're not in the middle of being bombed or something. But I don't know what to expect for the future, and I feel like everything's been shaken up. I can't say, "We're going to live in this place for a long time, and I know you're going to go to college and have a stable career." It does feel like everything is on the verge of falling apart. I'm just trying to be vigilant and flexible and protect my family in an immediate way. But I also just wonder, what can I do to try to help the world? Usually, the answer is that I feel like I can't do anything except take care of my very immediate community. All I know how to do is communicate as an artist. I don't have any other strings of power to pull.

You and Ezra are releasing this record on cassette through the Moth Object label you guys have. Talk to me about what goes into that for you.
Orindal is still putting out the vinyl and digital release, because I love working with Owen and I'm always happy to do more music with Orindal. [Moth Object] was really Ezra's project. He'd been talking about doing it for a long time as an umbrella for different creative and entrepreneurial things he was thinking of. He'd already released one of his own recordings on it as a Bandcamp thing, but he hadn't really promoted it. We've been around long enough and seen people do all these different DIY projects that we wanted to try it ourselves. We're just doing a small round of tapes that I did all the art for, and I'm physically putting together these boxes because we wanted to have something that wasn't just the plastic cases—so I'm folding and taping those up at night in my box factory while I listen to podcasts. I'll be doing a lot of post office runs once we're ready to send them out. I designed a shirt, so we're doing some merch stuff.

I like cassettes. They're less expensive, and they sound cool for projects that are supposed to have texture and homemade feel, because it doesn't have to be super pristine. We have some music from friends we're thinking of putting out, and Ezra has a music-related software project that he's working on too. The dream is to make this the side job that we can have to be creative in and to support our family a little bit.

Let's talk about the role horror plays in your music.
I've been into horror since I was a kid. I was always like, Unlike my children so far, who are always like, "Mom, stop showing me spooky things," I was always really into ghost stories. I'd get genuinely scared, but then I'd go back for more. If I ever caught a little snippet of something scary on TV, I wanted to put it back on. We moved around a lot, but we lived in one house in Connecticut that I thought was haunted. It was just in the atmosphere. As I got older, I watched more and more horror movies. It was an escape, and weirdly comforting. It was more extreme than anything I was afraid of in real life, and a way to experiment with different fears. I liked the mystery of the stories, especially supernatural horror movies.

I didn't really think about horror critically until grad school ,when I was taking some film classes and I started writing about it. Eventually, I realized I had a lot to say about it, which became a book that talked about horror with bits of memoir about depression and growing up in a very religious family with a really superstitious mom—trauma small and large—and thinking about the supernatural in a religious way, as well as the way that it shows up in horror movies.

Do you remember the first horror movie you ever watched?
I don't, but I know that I found Gremlins too scary. There's something about werewolves that I saw that made a huge impression on me, and I've never been able to figure out what it was. Werewolves can be scary as a kid, because the night is alreadythis unknowable thing. When you add something that can appear there, you're like, "Oh, shit." The person can transform, you can't trust them.

What have you watched lately that you really liked?
I liked Weapons. I like Widow's Bay. I don't normally like horror-comedy, but this time it worked for me. I saw a really strange movie that came out a few years ago called All You Need Is Death—an Irish folk horror movie about folk songs. I'd recommend it, except for the last 20 minutes—it like goes off the rails in a way that I didn't like. Ian Lynch from Lankum did the soundtrack for it, which is why I watched it.