Victoria Hume – songs of the psyche

Folk singer Victoria Hume releases new single inspired by OCD

For many a musician the day-job comes with the territory, the pursuit of vital interests often deferred until the end of another day’s work.

For Victoria Hume, however, this is a false distinction. From her Hackney base, Hume writes hypnotic and emotionally complex folk songs that recall the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. By day she works for the NHS as an arts manager. “I’ve been doing this job for quite a long time and it’s become a big part of what I think about the arts and how they should be involved in society,” she tells me.

Hume’s latest single ‘Numbers’  is a case in point. The song is a representation of her struggle to break with and overcome compulsive behavioural patterns.

She says: “I’m not diagnosed as having OCD [Obsessive Compulsive Disorder], but find it’s a useful way of describing the process of having to do things repeatedly. OCD often manifests itself in hand washing, which I don’t have.

“For me it’s to do with numbers and repeating things. It always comes out in times of stress then disappears when I’m feeling more balanced. The song is about trying to escape that and being constantly trapped in a loop where you feel like you’ve moved ahead of yourself in some way that isn’t right.”

In a new project, Hume builds on the idea of depicting complex psychological states through music, only this time focusing on delirium in intensive care units. She explains: “It’s not something people know much about and it struck me as interesting.”

After pitching her idea to the PRS for Music Foundation, Hume was given funding for the project, which will be performed at the Old Operating Theatre in June 2013.  “People’s brains turn to what looks like metaphor when they’re going through a traumatic circumstance,” she says, “and what they say is more like poetry than a normal conversation – full of these really complicated visual images.”

In ‘Numbers’, Hume’s voice is ghostly and atonal. “Gotta snap out of it”, she sings, a lyric that lies mid way between determination and desperation, sung over an off-kilter drum pattern as her conscious will attempts to engage with a deeper subconscious self – a psychological limbo that’s fit subject matter for Hume’s most recent musical goal of breaking free from the security of neat forms and set structures.

“It’s trying to find a way of experimenting with ideas by not pinning things down too much and still coming up with something that’s coherent,” she says. “I was trying to get less careful and not be too stymied by the idea of making this neat object. If you’ve been doing it for a while you can get trapped in a way of writing and you end up dwelling on the same kind of emotional tropes again and again, which is not very healthy – or interesting.”

The ability to do this is really a question of confidence, she admits: “I think I’ve always wanted to write songs that were a bit different, but perhaps I didn’t have the experience or the mechanisms to do so before – but you get more confident as you go on.” Judging by Hume’s recent output – including the album Landing, released earlier this year – this certainly seems to be the case. With a new album in the offing, we await eagerly to hear the fruits of her new-found approach.

For more go to Victoria Hume on Soundcloud.